Finally: Donkey Punch, The Movie

I am laughing my ass off.

First of all, content warning on this clip, which plays like most R-Rated thriller trailers -- a hint of sex, a hint of violence, etc. Upgraded Content Warning: I'm told it contains nudity, which I missed completely.

A bigger content warning if you decide to google "donkey punch" to find out what it is. It's not explained in the trailer what it is, except it's "proper hardcore." Here are some definitions, which actually aren't the one I heard, exactly. But it's along these lines.

Bear in mind, this isn't a real sex act. This is a made-up thing for producing laughs.

This is the funniest thing I've seen in a year. This isn't a goof-- this is a real movie, yo, a thriller about a bunch of guys and gals who get together on a yacht for drinking, drugs, and yes, donkey punching, until, you guessed it, one of the girls is killed in a particularly hardcore donkey punch session.

Now, this being the trailer for a thriller, will you be treated at the end to insistent drums and rapid-fire cuts of mayhem and violence? You'll just have to watch to find out.

They really made a movie called Donkey Punch. About actual donkey punching. And also, apparently, about shotguns and chainsaws.

Again, content warning for the clip.

Thanks so much to MattM.

This shit premiered at Sundance, for crying out loud.

In the eighties and nineties, a lot of crappy, lame-ass "thrillers" usually written by Joe Ezterhaus featured allegedly titillating sexual weirdness as their selling points.

But here, they've made a movie about a deviant sexual act... which is itself a joke made up by teenage weisenheimers.

No one does the "donkey punch." They just giggle about it. The act wasn't invented to actually be performed, but to just to gain notoriety on Urban Dictionary.

Coming soon: Angry Pirate (Definition 3; content/taste warning) and of course Emeril's acting debut in Bam!: The Violation of Emily Caine (content/taste warning).

And soon, perhaps: Nasty Adolph.

This movie is going to be the next Snakes on a Plane. By which I mean it's going to be endlessly talked about on the internet, and then do zero box office.

Making it a bit like an actual donkey punch -- much mentioned, little witnessed.

But still.

Review: Four out of five stars. Huh?

Well. I guess I'm heading for Netflix.

It begins on an understated note, with three northern girls on holiday in Marbella, Spain. It's meant to be a no-guys event, but after a trip to a local bar they meet three cute English lads with a boat in the marina. They look harmless enough, so they accept an invitation to party, and before long they're out to sea, high on a mix of Ecstasy and Russian meth. The drugs heat things up, and during a fairly explicit five-way orgy, one of the boys gets a little over-excited and tries out the “donkey punch”, a sex tip they had been talking about earlier. It's a bad move: the intoxicated revellers soon sober up when it becomes clear that the girl on the receiving end is dead, killed by a broken neck.

So what do they do next? It's a conundrum that the film has a lot of fun with. The amount of drugs consumed on the boat implicates everyone, but for the boys the situation could look to a jury like a clear case of gang rape and murder, making honesty a risky policy. Despite fierce protests from the girls, they drive far out to sea with the intent of dumping the body and calling the emergency services a good 45 minutes later to register the victim missing. This might all seem a little extreme, but by this time the characters are vividly drawn: the girls are impulsive, reckless and easily scared, while the boys are largely middle-class, not-too-bright and have a lot to lose.

It takes a fair while to get to this point, so it seems - at first - that Olly Blackburn's film is simply going to be a moral maze, as the remaining six argue the finer points of perverting the cause of justice. Not so. Pretty soon, the film reveals itself as a very ambitious slasher movie, mixing the inventive gore of the Final Destination and Saw movies with the underlying humanity of Neil Marshall's excellent genre flick The Descent – a good reference point for Donkey Punch. Like The Descent, Donkey Punch has a respect for formula but, more importantly, a commitment to doing things differently, and properly.

Proper hardcore, I guess he means.

posted by Ace at 05:53 PM

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