WINGS Watches: Raw! Uncut! Video!
We kinksters are a creative bunch, or as a leather man in the new documentary Raw! Uncut! Video! (2021) phrases it spot on: “Anything that you can find in a hardware store, we know how to play with real well.”
Raw! Uncut! Video! tells the story of Palm Drive Video, a gay porn studio, that produced more than 150 homemade porn movies from 1985 to 1997. The studio was founded by Jack Fritscher (former Editor-in-Chief of Drummer magazine) and his (romantic) partner for 40 years Mark Hemry. The duo started producing unscripted and ‘real’ fetish porn, pure sleaze, in a time where gay men were dying from HIV/AIDS. Most of their videos feature rugged, non-professional models – rough, tough, manly men – that share and explore their unique, erotic fantasies in solo videos, while trash-talking directly to the viewer and jerking off.
For Jack and Mark shooting porn was a way to make sex fun again during the plague; a way for gay men to enjoy sex, without having to go out the door, meet someone and risk getting infected with the virus. Their videos showed how you could live out your kinks by yourself, without the need for penetration or a partner. All you needed was a dirty mind, a hardware store, and yourself. Safe sex through VHS. Viewers could order the videos by filling out a form found in gay porn magazines. They could choose from a list of kinks and fetishes and then send their wish list to Palm Drive Video by mail.
The documentary begins with a scene where a Castro clone (if you don’t know what that is, go check the interwebs please) is fiercely fucking a puddle of mud. And that scene is pretty mild, compared to the analog avalanche of vintage gay fetish porn that follows. One of the nastiest clips shows porn model Brody Houston (aka the ‘Cheesiest Uncut Cowboy in West Texas’) jerking off his big cheesy dick, that hasn’t been washed for three days, and tasting it as well. With thick layers of yellowish smegma covering the head of his cock, Brody grins at the camera, and states in a deep, husky voice: “You wanna lick that, don’t you? I got two gallons here for you!”
In eighty minutes the audience gets treated to a lot of things that I personally have never seen on the internet – at least not this graphic – and I have seen A LOT of graphic things on the internet. Dick stroking. Smoking. Burping. Whipping. Guys with garden hoses up their hole; water crashing out. Vomit play. A bodybuilder pissing in a glass, taking a sip, spitting it out all over himself. A slap happy homosexual getting beat up by Jack. A limber leather man ejaculating in his own mouth. Sunshine coming out of a hairy ass (very artsy). A guy fucking himself with a plunger; and another one sticking a thick steel rod in his dick – claiming it feels like being jacked-off from the inside. The aptly named Raw! Uncut! Video! bears it all.
Even though the imagery is wild and depraved, the film manages to tell a story that’s sex-positive, moving and fun. It’s a documentary about defiance, survival and love. It shows how porn took its responsibility, when politicians clearly didn’t. We meet the adult entertainers (and even one of their mothers) who tell their side of the story. We are treated to historic images of HIV marches and early editions of Folsom, and we learn why in the eighties there was a new fetish every week.
RAW! UNCUT! VIDEO!
Raw! Uncut! Video! – directed and produced by Ryan A. White and Alex Clausen – will have its Dutch premiere at the Roze Filmdagen film festival on March 13 in Amsterdam. Get your tickets here: https://rozefilmdagen.nl/programma/13/raw-uncut-video
Facebook & Twitter: @rawuncutvideo
Instagram: @wohlerfilm
