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Comstock Films has been creating some of the most interesting offbeat porn around. Their last title, Xana & Dax: When Opposites Attract followed what should be a tried-and-true video-erotica format, because it's so damn effective: interview scenes spliced with hardcore sex. It's a similar structure to the one Blowfish used for its Friends & Lovers, with one important difference: director Tony "TC" Comstock prefers to focus on a single couple for the length of an entire feature. The resulting video portrait feels bizarrely intimate, especially since the sexual scenes feel so strangely natural, disarming, and hot. Both Xana and Comstock's first release, Marie & Jack were about straight couples; Damon & Hunter, shot on film, is about the relationship between two gay men. In choosing this feature, you might think that TC may be torpedoing his chances for mainstream distribution -- mixing gay & straight content just isn't done in Porn Valley. But if you spend any time reading his blog, you'll walk away with the sense that he doesn't so much give a flying fuck. In that sense, Damon & Hunter goes to a brave place, a place unsullied by the ringing of 818 cell phones and the clickety-clack of stiletto heels.
But for as valuable and interesting as it is, that's not the meat of the disk. Between short interview segments, we're treated to a close-up portrait of the two fucking, and the erotic heat between them is palpable. Far from being a sterile documentary portrayal, the sex scenes in Damon & Hunter are sexy, passionate and illuminating, whether they're brief clips -- as in the first part of the film -- or longer, more sensuous explorations -- which come later in the piece. Throughout, it works both as sexual education and as romantic hardcore porn. Comstock's "formula," if it can be called that, is very reminiscent of some of the sexological work done in the late '60s and '70s by Laird Sutton and colleagues at the National Sex Forum. The idea, in that project, was to make a record of people as they really have sex. Many of Sutton's films from that era follow exactly the same method as Comstock's -- interviews about sexual behavior spliced with films showing sex. At the time, Sutton's project was distinctly different than the Golden Age porn that was being filmed, and was done not only for sexological docmentation -- that is, in training sexologists and sex therapists -- but as a chance for therapy clients to actually see other people having sex. As such, Sutton's work had to be different than the porn that was being made then, which was, from sex-ed and sex-therapy perspectives, overproduced, confused and unrealistic. But my sense is that Sutton and colleagues weren't setting out to make art, really -- this was social documentation, education, and exploration, pure and simple -- if anything of the sort can ever be pure and simple. Fast-forwarding thirty years, I'm not so sure that I'd accuse something called Sperm Receptacles of being "overproduced," but from a sex-ed perspective today's porn is confused and unrealistic in its own strange way. Both similar and different from those important (and almost impossible to find) sexological films from the '60s and '70s, Damon & Hunter and the other Comstock Films releases have a slightly different mission from Sutton's work -- they're entertaining, enriching and artistic. They work as social documentation, education, exploration, inspiration, titillation -- and porn. In other words: Comstock films has set out to create fine art that you can wank to -- hardcore porn that satisfies brain and boner both. With all three of their releases so far, they've succeeded magnificently. Damon & Hunter Comstock Films (DVD) 2006 Directed by Tony Comstock Starring Damon & Hunter Will Appeal To: Anyone who thinks two cute homo nerd boys are worth 60 minutes of erotic attention.
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