Baby’s first porn review

Originally published in Bizarre magazine, c. September 2004. Back then, the Bizarre staff liked to give their work experience kids porn to watch and review in the office, just to gauge their reactions. Most of them baulked at the task, but even at nineteen I didn’t embarrass easily, so I produced this. Bits of it really make me cringe now, but I’ve resisted the urge to clean it up. Here, verbatim, is a snapshot of how I viewed porn a decade ago:

Classic Porn: The Scottish Loveknot

It’s like Monarch of the Glen meets Highlander meets Carry on Camping. Kinda.

I love a good period drama. Even better is a porno masquerading as a period drama, as I get to enjoy myself while pretending to be cultured. As far as culture goes, this recent effort from Private pulls out all the stops. The title credits alone – with shots of Scottish landscapes and mysterious hooded figures – fulfilled my intellectual quota for the month.

The opening scene lays down the basics of the plot, narrated rather unnervingly by a woman who sounds like her day job is doing the voiceovers on Channel 4 educational programmes. She helps explain the story throughout the film in a spooky yet reverential voice suitable for recounting ancient legends of this calibre. This helpfully reduces the amount the actors have to speak, which would not only betray their lack of talent, but also their inability to reproduce a decent Scottish accent between them.

So, the deal is that in Days of Old there lived a great warrior by the name of Robert Moore, whose ability on the battlefield was only rivalled by his prowess in the fucking-blonde-porn-stars department. His typical work day included a fair amount of raping and pillaging with his men, but he still liked to return to his “one true love” – the Lady of the Loch – in the evenings. Robert and the Lady purportedly had the most mind-blowing sex of any mortals ever, with the supernatural help of the ancient lovers’ grail.

We cut to a rather boring scene of Robert and his missus in the supposed throes of ecstasy that no other mortals could experience. As the foreplay moves on to a quick spot of anal, my mind begins to wander…they’re quite obviously in the grounds of a stately home. Do the owners know what their beautifully tended garden is being used for? Do porn shoots pay better than the BBC costume dramas? Do they get to watch the filming as a perk? Why are the lovers lying on a dead sheep? How are they that tanned in Scotland? I’m brought sharply back to reality by a cum shot over the fair Lady’s silicon marvels. Is it possible to moan in a Scottish accent? She puts in a valiant, if shit, effort.

Sadly, nothing good ever lasts. You see, Robert’s rivals plot his downfall because they want the grail for themselves, and our Lady is left with a dead Scottish hero and not a great deal to do. She buries him in the first place they “made love” (it’s a nice way of saying boning), and stays by his grave for a month and a day. On the night of the solstice moon she disappears, never to be seen again (dramatic instrumental music swells). Apparently her spirit lives on, and she returns every 100 years to find Robert. The “most renowned lovers of the day” (aka the porn extras available at the time of shooting) are summoned to her each time, and their sexual prowess is tested. If they pass, they get to drink from the grail and fuck the Lady herself. There are finer points to the plot, but they all contradict each other, and, quite frankly, there’s been far too much talk of the storyline already.

Fast forward to the present day. Three bad actors in tuxedos have been transported to the Lady’s castle for their “rigorous testing”. John is the first to undergo his challenge. The Lady, who now talks in an echoey voice reminiscent of 80s electro pop vocals, presumably on account of being dead, explains his task. He is given a choice of three women to have his way with, but he must choose carefully as only one is human, whereas the other two are spirits who devour their mates. Don’t you hate it when that happens? You have a few drinks, meet a nice girl, take her home, and she turns out to be a cannibalistic supernatural entity. John makes his choice, and while you get the sinking feeling that the vigorous blowjob she gives him is just her way of playing with her food, he survives against the odds.

Next, it’s Chris’s turn. He becomes the plaything of two of the girls, but if they manage to make him come before sunset, he dies. Credit to them, the poor girls try everything from fellatio to girl-on-girl 69, but Chris passes the test. It’s good for his life expectancy I guess, but it leaves me wondering what the hell actually gets his rocks off. Maybe Chris has a closet collection of granny porn and Polaroids of morbidly obese Labradors. Whatever. He collects his reward: the two girls for the rest of the night (because he enjoyed being with them so much the first time). It freaks me out considerably that he leaves his boots on throughout.

Finally it is Rob’s turn, which is where things get unnecessarily complicated. Rob somehow turns out to be the reincarnation of the original Robert Moore, and realises that the Lady is his one true love. He still has to pass a test before he can drink from the grail again, so he is “forced” to have sex with another one of the girls until he makes her scream. Personally I wouldn’t have bothered, since the girl is ugly enough to be a guest on Jerry Springer, and I haven’t seen make-up that bad since Bowie got out of the Ziggy Stardust phase, but each to their own.

So all three have passed the test, and are allowed to drink from the grail. This is where they finally give up all pretence of a coherent plot, claim everyone in the room is overcome with the amazing sexual powers of the grail, and finish off the film with one long orgy. It’s also where my copy of the DVD abruptly cut out and sent me back to the main menu, but something tells me that I didn’t miss that much.