Porno Apocalypse: Hardcore Classics

Hardcore Classics #1 (of 30)

Granny Ass Lickers

Dir: P.O.V. Rimmer

USA, 1993

Porn normally lends itself to easy demarcations like vanilla, roughie, sicko or fetish, but some hardcore is different and transcends its visual straight jacket through imagination, extremity or, in the instance of Granny Ass Lickers, utter strangeness. Granny Ass Lickers is a slice of eerie American gothic, an existential puzzle box that lingers in the mind as a fundamental statement of loneliness and alienation. I

It is only twenty minutes long but watching it you think what sparseness or desperation in the participants' lives brought them to this. Due to the limitations of its initial distribution and the obscurity of the cast and film maker, there is no precise release date attributed to the title.

It has been tagged at 1993, as Internet forums have deduced that the film was first available commercially in the fall of that year, cryptically offered for sale in the classified sections of half a dozen or so exotic porn magazines and avant-garde cinema journals.

Stylistically the film has a gonzo vibe, shot on video with subjective camera techniques and interaction between the performers and the film maker which dispel the possibility of an imaginary detachment between the work and its audience.

The film opens with the title in gold letters and a flamboyant typeset which drift across the dilapidated farmhouse on screen. It is a pattern book house made from white clapboard with a screened porch. This is followed by the feature's solitary credit 'Captured by P.O.V. Rimmer', which flashes on and off in black gothic lettering.

A long shot of a Dodge Warlock floating on a dust cloud as it ploughs along a dirt track is accompanied by a soundtrack of floorboards creaking and children's laughter, an unsettling overdub that is the only piece of non-diegetic sound in the film. Then a clumsy edit to a shot from the back of the pick-up truck, as it cuts through deserted acres of land. Punctuating the sterile and forsaken landscape are a water tower and barn in the fruition of decay. Now an on foot approach shot to the farmhouse; warped boards form a walkway onto the porch where the stairwell has fallen.

You don't really get a good close up view of the building, just a glance over, but it is conspicuously disused , white paint yellowed and weeds starting a mission creep up the walls. It looks like someone is staring out of an upstairs window. On the porch, we meet the two main cast members.

"Welcome to Georgetown, Texas," drawls a grand Southern dame, flame haired, and curvy. She is wearing a scarlet dress slit at the thighs.

"I'm Blanche', she breathes. More milf than gilf, she's ageing well in the middle. Her make-up is good, striking but not too brassy; Blanche knows how to sell her high cheekbones and smoky eyes. Her co-star is leant against the front of the porch, eating a hot dog and washing it down with a bottle of beer.

"Introduce yourself, Stanley," comes a thin reedy voice from behind the camera; it is now apparent that the camera man is the sole member of the film crew.

A zoom in on Stanley. He has a peculiar build, tall with skinny arms and legs but with a paunch and fleshy buttocks. Stanley belches and wipes the back of his forearm across his mouth. He has a black mullet haircut (later hints at an authorial identity suggest this was a deliberate and ironic styling) and affronted eyes with a mean little mouth topped with an unconvincing moustache woven from soft downy hair. He's wearing black chinos and a grey t-shirt with a print of Butthole Surfers' Locust Abortion Technician album cover on the front. This may seem anal but these details matter. All these signifiers; the referents.

Stanley turns his back. Jump cut to the inside of a dingy cramped room illuminated by a bedside lamp and long thick candles dotted on the bare floorboards, wax collecting in pools at their bases. Thick dark blue curtains are shut, a constellation of sharp tiny pin pricks of light betray the sun's obdurate glow. Blanche is wearing a baby doll night dress and is lying on a mattress that is too small for the four post iron bedframe it is placed upon. Her legs are wide open while the naked Stanley eats and fingers her ginger pussy efficiently.

There's a close up of the cunnilingus then the camera switches to her face and becomes almost preternaturally still. He keeps at it, groaning a lot, but she is still and silent. The camerawork is monotonous and focuses on her face. For a moment it looks like a photograph, only a cough off camera punctures the illusion, two mannequins placed in an obscene pose. Screen blacks out and reopens. Blanche is licking his anus and giving him a reach around. He looks ashen and distraught. She is methodical, smiling and licking, the odd wink at the viewer, a real trouper.

"That is sure one fat hairy ass," comes the off stage observation.

"Shut the fuck up," spits Stanley staring down the camera, his voice nasal and petulant.

"Finger his asshole."

Blanche inserts a well pedicured index finger up Stanley's anus causing him to twitch with a mixture of pain and pleasure, face dreamy and teeth nicking his lower lip. She is working his cock hard with her other hand. It is static and hypnotic in the manner of Warholian cinema, the fingering and masturbation, she is just gazing at what she is doing now like she has just realised where she is and what is happening. Blanche looks distractedly past the camera every now and then, like the evil camera man is pointing a gun at her.

Watching the scene go on and on, you realise how flexible the symbolic meaning of heterosexual rimming is in porn. Is it meant to degrade the man or woman, or both; an act of erotic supplication for the woman yet for the male performer it touches on a troublesome homo-erotic taboo, like double penetrations where they go in dick by dick. Gauge, the hardcore imp whose hyper real performance as 'bitchy stranded girl' in Gang Bang Girl #32 (Biff Malibu, 2002) and ultra-sexuality create a pornographic theatre of the absurd.

Rimming here, where Gauge voraciously licks (amongst others) a corpulent and hirsute middle aged man's glory hole, is a subversive feminist act, where her knowingly overwrought delivery of the anilingus is a parody of the notion of uncontrollable female sexual desire coupled with a lack of distinction in erotic partners. The guy, a regular porn Joe perfectly suited to his role of an anonymous garage mechanic who is part of a gang bang crew, looks vaguely embarrassed at first and then doesn't even bother to look interested, like he's a bystander to his own body, it's all happening to someone else.

Gauge nuzzles and guzzles, enthused by her sheer life force and the ridiculous inconsequentiality of it all, and her disdainful and mocking eyes seem to ask, Are you really digging it? You are pumping your cock to this? Gauge tells you that porn myths are horseshit while simultaneously facilitating them.

She is brutally debased for the rest of the film but remains oddly triumphant, something we shall return to when we discuss Abu Ghraib Ass Pounders (Jim Powers, 2004), which is entry number ten on our list. In Granny Ass Lickers rimming seems to go beyond sex, acquiring an occult significance. Then the money shot, shown as a sort of afterthought, a close up of his leaking glans. Blanche stares at the ejaculate on her hand.

The screen darkens again before a barn door wipe opens up the blackness. Another room. The camera meanders letting the viewer take it all in. No one is here yet, except the cameraman, who is quietly singing the lyrics to Dead Kennedys California Über Alles as he compiles a visual itinery of the room.

"My aura smiles, and never frowns. Soon I will be president..."

The room is large and spacious with a high ceiling, musty with the weight of empty years, the heavy drapes adorning the window parted to allow in the sun. A wooden rocking horse, its head partially covered by a cot blanket, is saddled by a life sized doll with a broken face. Not much else in there.

The pale blue walls are unadorned apart from a framed print of Grant Wood's Daughters of the Revolution which is hanging on the right hand side of the window. This hints at a slyly intelligent, nascent auteur behind the camera, its bleak aesthetic and embrace of oddball Americana suggesting a no wave film maker transplanted out of space and time into Georgetown, creating a deep South horror with satirical pretensions that is reminiscent of Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine, 2009).

Yet the film maker, whose likely pseudonym P.O.V. Rimmer is pithier than most hardcore noms de guerre, was never identified, never came forward to claim his awaiting cult status. On. This time a sweep wipe drags across the screen the scene that became beloved of shock sites and paracinema forums, which became commonly referred to as the 'corpse pegging' sequence.

Stanley is naked on all fours and he is being pegged by what appears to be a reanimated corpse. A skeletal woman outside age with terrifying pisshole eyes, liveried skin hung on angular bones, a blonde beehive wig somehow not toppling off her her head. Wearing a white pearl necklace and nothing else, the hips grinding now and again to shove the strap on up his anus, she is an uncanny automaton in the throes of decomposition, and no one knows how she is worked.

The woman looks fragile, like a brittle photograph that crumbles under the touch after being removed from cellophane wrapping in a forgotten portrait album. Stanley is distraught. The corpse starts coughing and the dildo falls out of Stanley' rectum. He stands up and parts his ass cheeks and presents them in her face, loosing a fart as he does so. The wig finally falls off the living corpse, white hair falling everywhere, sound of a stifled giggle.

Stanley looks at the camera, a single tear running down his cheek, "Some fun."

Chilly, abandoned laughter wells on the audio.

Cut to the porch. Blanche is now barefoot in a baggy jumper that reads 'Property of Georgetown Eagles', the camera settling on her bright red toenails. She seems playful and relaxed. Her co-star Stanley is smoking a cigarette and pulling his Texas Longhorns baseball hat over his eyes. The camera man seems a little wary of him. Stanley finishes his cigarette and lights another. They are sharing a six pack of beer. Blanche holds her can high and bids farewell, 'Hope you all have champagne wishes and caviar dreams."

At the back of the porch sits the living corpse in a rocking chair. She looks better in the daylight, costumed in a pillbox hat and wedding dress. Her mouth is scrunched up and daubed with crimson lipstick with her long white hair brushed straight and resting on her shoulders. There is a close up of her snoring lightly in the dry heat. Screen goes black for the final time. The end credit reads 'A Maldoror Production'.

Nobody owned up to Granny Ass Lickers and nobody knew anyone connected to it. It lay untaken, as it became a curio discussed on Internet forums which attracted the usual dissembling and fancies, leading to it to enter the doubtful realm of creepy pasta.

A picture of the purported director showed an androgynous youth in a leather jacket and too much eye liner blowing a smoke ring while running his fingers through his thick black hair.

Blanche worked in a local diner and went to church.

The house had lain empty between 1987 and 1994. A businessman inherited it from an aunt but after emptying it prior to renovation he surprisingly lost interest in the property and it fell into neglect. He sold it years later when his fortunes soured. The aunt had been widowed by Saipan when she was just out of her teens and never remarried or bore a child, something which began to destroy her in late middle age. They say a doll of a little girl, compliant to the proportions of the average toddler, porcelain faced and with shoulder length strawberry blonde hair, became the child she never had.

The aunt had expensive hand crafted toys brought in and would spend hours nudging her ersatz child backwards and forwards on a wooden rocking horse. In her dotage the aunt dropped the doll breaking its face. Her loyal and decrepit housemaid found her cradling the doll in her arms, inconsolable. The aunt quickly declined and was buried with a meagre audience a few weeks later. Everyone freaked out who entered the house soon after, hearing rocking horses creaking and seeing a little girl with a black void where her face should be. It is said the film was shot in the parlour and the housemaid's old room.

The film maker went to Hollywood to shoot gay pornos and was murdered by a hustler.

Stanley was seen as a crowd extra in a number of Troma films.

A geriatric woman had bafflingly vanished from Sun City Texas around the time the film was asserted to have been filmed and turned up just about alive, inchoate and wearing a wedding dress, in a dumpster in Kingsland.

Only one of these anecdotes was ever validated. Someone may yet come forward to provide a banal account of the film shoot, tethering Granny Ass Lickers to everyday depravities, but for the moment it keeps its mystery, offering the hardcore poetry of a haunted house, its ghosts holding their secrets tight.