THE SURREAL WORLD OF CHINESE CATEGORY III PORN

Softcore porn is usually a pretty straight up equation: get girls, get them to get it on, and then loosely tie it all together with a vaguely coherent story. Otherwise, the rules are pretty obvious. That's why you never see people fucking animals, slapstick castrations, dudes "accidentally" getting busy with other dudes, or other serious boner-kills. If that's the shit you're looking for then you're best to stick with the fetish scene. Yet, for some reason Hong Kong and back-alley Chinese bootleggers don't see the same need for distinction that we do when it comes to getting kinky on film.

In the shadow of the Japanese empire of porno it's easy to lose sight of the other erotic cinemas kicking around that area. China, it seems, likes it this way. Notoriously heavy-handed with their censorship laws, China's response to internet contraband took a page from its ancestry: they built a massive firewall to keep all kinds of kink outside their borders. Of course, China should know better by now that if the people want porn, they'll stop at nothing to get it. Even after snuffing out thousands of websites and slapping cuffs on over 5,000 people under the claim of filtering out online pornography--all throughout the course of 2009 alone--somehow it keeps slipping back in.

These days the internet police are chilling out a bit over the whole issue, with some previously illegal sites passing their usual scrutiny and lingering around for the otherwise deprived Chinese citizens. Over here in the West we'd like to think of this as progress in an otherwise oppressive regime, but there's a twist: China's been smuggling in porn the old fashioned way for decades now, in the form of bootleg Category III Hong Kong sexploitation flicks.

Category III doesn't mean anything specific to the Chinese other than "sex and/or violence", and it's goddamn impossible to try to rein these movies together in any more cohesive way. It's like they were going to make an R-rating and an X-rating, but got lazy and figured one was good enough to cover all the shit out there that's "unsuitable for children". This means that movies like Ang Lee's histrionic epic Lust, Caution and Johnnie To's critically acclaimed Election get put on the same shelf in Hong Kong as shit like A Chinese Torture Chamber Story and Raped by an Angel 4: The Rapist's Union. Makes sense to you? Me neither. The implications of this ambiguously restricted material is that triad flicks and epic dramas with just a touch too much blood or naked grinding gets classified and exhibited along the same regulations as the period-costume kung-fu/comedy/drama/torture-porn films that you've never heard of. This doesn't mean that the more reserved Cat-III movies are cast into censored obscurity in tow, but instead that these fucked up wuxia fuck fests are given bigger budgets and wider distribution than we'd ever imagine over here in the West. When it comes to the Mainland market, these films are still completely illegal and can only be found as bootlegs, which are also against the law. But if you go to any major city in China you're more than likely going to find entire bazaars littered with boutiques selling bootlegs in open sight. It's not much of a secret that China's black market bread and butter is pirated DVDs, and cleverly tucked away in these vendors' displays are these same Cat-III softcore skin flicks that the PRC keeps cock-blocking online. If you're still not totally on-board with the concept, here's a list of some essential Cat-III sexploitation films to properly set the mood (btw, the clips are obviously NSFW, doye):

VIVA EROTICA

This scene probably looks familiar. It's a ripoff of that sped-up fucking scene in

Funeral Procession of Roses.

The same scene that Kubrick admittedly ripped off in

A Clockwork Orange.

Starring Leslie Cheung, Viva Erotica was actually nominated for Best Picture and Best Director (along with a dozen other categories) at the Hong Kong Film Awards back in `97. The film is basically like a mashup of 8 1/2 and Boogie Nights but with more sex and less Mark Wahlberg. It's one of the more tame examples of Cat-III erotica, but the fact they got Leslie Cheung and a young Shu Qi--both highly acclaimed actors in HK--gives you a good idea of the different standards these films are held to in the region. Hell, even Jackie Chan got downright smutty in the 70s.

SEX AND ZEN
I'm becoming sadly desensitized to this movie the more times I watch it. Who would've thought you could get bored of watching a guy catch a severed horse dick in his mouth, chicks scribbling calligraphy with their snatch, or the occasional theatrical horse rape? Sex and Zen isn't very Zen at all, to be honest, but at least they don't make a joke of having your tool amputated and then eaten by a dog.

THE FORBIDDEN LEGEND: SEX AND CHOPSTICKS

This was the first Cat-III film I stumbled upon in Chinatown last summer, so it definitely deserves mention. It was sitting unabashedly on the shelf around toddler-eye-level, so I asked the guy at the store what it was, to which he shrugged and said he didn't know in a way that told me he knew full well what it was. It turns out it's based off of a famous 17th century erotic Chinese novel called

The Plum in the Gold Vase

, which makes this porno the closest I've come to reading literature in the last five years. The story details the life of a master of the Taoist erotic arts, who essentially goes around China sinking the pink of whoever he wants because that's what he's famous for. This film epitomizes the tactic of cramming as many different genres or styles into one film to make it commercially viable, as if people screwing on camera didn't have enough pull already.

A CHINESE TORTURE CHAMBER STORY

Despite its cheerful title, this movie isn't quite as funny as

Sex and Zen

or

Sex and Chopsticks

. It's not that I don't get a kick out of exploding penises, nympho-nannies getting passed over by rapists, or ejaculatory eruptions of blood--which was surprisingly artistic, now that I think about it. I'm just still trying to work out how ghost-on-man mouth rape got past the brainstorming phase of production. Despite all that,

A Chinese Torture Chamber Story

is by far the most infamous Cat-III period piece, and if you don't get off on people being stabbed under their fingernails then at least you can take comfort in the fact that you're not the only person who likes to think their dick makes sounds like a laser gun.

MICHAEL BLOOM