Australian Penthouse

New Sensations merely sets up the action and allows it to unfold. Charlotte (Starr) comes to terms with her new-found nymphomania as she exhibits her deep-throat prowess, Miranda (Voss) satisfies her man’s need for a three-way, and Samantha (Paige) devours her well-built neighbour with genuine gusto.

Infinitely more watchable than the US original, this funny and sexy stick flick is the perfect movie to enjoy with your favourite female.

For example, what do the rightest of right-wing religious groups and the leftest of left-wing feminist collectives have in common? They are both virulently anti-porn. It’s a stand which bridges the most divergent of philosophies and factions, even within these polarised entities.

Sure, let’s bring out a line of G-strings and padded bras for tweens. Let’s have video games where 12-year-old boys blast the bejesus out of Taliban soldiers, but showing two people consensually pleasuring each other? That’s just plain wrong. Disgusting, even!

Such attitudes are the very definition of hypocrisy. Firstly, without porn, most of these naysayers wouldn’t be able to bolster their Andrea Dworkin/Germaine Greer/Betty Friedan collections via Amazon. In his new book, The Erotic Engine, author Patchen Barrs argues that porn was responsible for building the hidden infrastructure of the internet and that without it, cable television might not actually exist.

He also contends that had porn been legislated out of existence, e-commerce would be a shadow of its current status in terms of security and accessibility. What’s more, the video-streaming technology developed by and for porn has made cultural benchmarks such as YouTube and Skype reality.

Aside from the technical innovations it has fomented, porn has also exhibited a creativity which is routinely overlooked in the wider cultural landscape. Evidence is to be found in the humour and wordplay that litters X-rated catalogues. Sure, the net is teeming with compilations to cater to your every erotic whim, but with minimal effort you can also find chuckle-worthy titles with punning artistry that wouldn’t be out of place on The Simpsons. (A show which nodded in porn’s direction with its own Sperms Of Endearment spoof movie title.)

Operating on the premise of giving an established film title a sexual twist—for example, Eat Pray Love might become Eat Spray Love—porn producers have long pumped out gems worthy of a Twitter trending topic. The list is endless, but a few personal favourites include: Lawrence of a Labia, Diddle Her on the Roof, On Golden
Blonde and Itty Bitty Gang Bang—the latter movie cast almost entirely with little people.

Not to put too fine a point on it, these titles indicate a real knowledge of film history; a cultural awareness, if you will. Not content with merely punning on titles, a new wave of porn involves parodying entire TV shows.

American company New Sensations recently spoofed sitcom The Office with Ashlynn Brooke taking on the Ricky Gervais/Steve Carrell role. Complete with intentional slightly desperate attempts at comedy, “that’s what she said” gags and cinema verité-style photography, including bored looks direct to camera.

Not that such products haven’t long been in the cultural zeitgeist. Back in 2001, an episode of Friends featured Jennifer Aniston complaining to a hotel clerk that she had not, in fact, watched Dr Do-Me-A-Little in her room. Boy, did we laugh.

Not surprisingly, Friends is a natural candidate for porn parody. As is Star Trek: The Next Generation, with the actor paying tumescent homage to Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard in This Ain’t Star Trek commanding himself to: “Engorge!”

One of the spearheads behind the porn parody movement is Jeff Mullen, who writes and directs under the name Will Ryder. Geddit? Will. Ride. Her. Having produced his ‘Pound Town’ takes on such beloved sitcoms as Bewitched, The Cosby Show and a trio of Brady Bunch homages (the first of which was released in 2007), Mullen believes the genesis of the movement can be traced to a 2005 release entitled Britney Rears.

This mixture of referencing existing entertainment and hard-core porn proved such a hit that Mullen described the phenomenon to Newsweek as “a new gold rush”. (The interview itself an indicator of mainstream awareness.)

Taking the approach that it should be “more akin to making sitcoms as opposed to making porno”, Mullen’s send-up of The Cosby Show echoed in the minutest detail the interior of the Huxtable’s home, the dancing against an all-white background in the opening credits and generally had the characters spot-on.

One of the secrets to Mullen’s success lies in casting. For the role of Cliff Huxtable, he chose Thomas Ward, a Detroit comedian living in LA whose Bill Cosby impression is nothing short of uncanny. Ward doesn’t have sex in the film—he’s there solely to provide a sense of verisimilitude. For his time, Ward was paid as much
as any of the lead female performers who did have sex.

This is notable in that women in porn are generally remunerated to a greater degree than their male counterparts. But according to Mullen, an increasing number of ‘legitimate’ actors will be appearing in porn parodies in non-sexual roles.

Another aspect of porn production that parodies have challenged is the writing. Mullen asserts that if you’re going to parody a comedy, your script must measure up in the hilarity stakes—a feat he believes he achieved with his version of Married With Children. “That show is so damn funny. It’s just line, line, zinger, line, line, zinger. So we had to write it accordingly,” he told Newsweek, before going on to add that he’d be more insulted if a viewer didn’t find his movies funny than if they didn’t find them arousing. His dream project is a hard-core Mary Tyler Moore Show.

So far, the porn parody genre has protected itself from litigation by prefacing its titles with phrases such as “Not The…” and “This Ain’t…” and their targets seem boundless. Everything from Seinfeld to I Love Lucy is fair game, with the latter being shot in both colour and black-and-white, so you can make the experience
as authentic as you desire.

According to the producers, they have “no ‘splainin’ to do” to those who own the source material, and they have the budgets to ensure their spoofs look as accurate as the originals. However, 20th Century Fox did recently issue Digital Sin/New Sensations with a cease-and-desist order regarding its sexy version of The X-Files. Not the movie, just the name. It’s now titled, more clearly, The Sex Files: A Dark XXX Parody.

In matters pornographic, history suggests that where America goes, Australia will follow, and perhaps we’ll even have the market to sustain our own parodies. We’ve already had Crocodile Blondee, so why not King Wood Country? And while the thought of an X-rated Mother & Son is too awful to contemplate, who wouldn’t want to watch Toadfish give it to Mrs Mangle? It may not be a turn-on, but it would be funny. And that’s kind of the point.