Review

Every now and then a porno comes along that’s so mind-blowingly before it’s time, it either sends the audience walking away scratching their heads, or whipping out their meat and bashing along. Hot House have released the Director’s Expanded Edit of Scarborough’s masterpiece, containing previously unseen material that I’m hoping might actually explain what’s going on because to be honest, the first time I saw Descent I was off my tits on Special K. Two years on, the cold light of day reveals it to be even more fucked-up – a work of such frustrating logic it was either created by a genius, a madman or someone with a deep desire to be both. But it pulled Aiden Shaw briefly out of retirement, so that in itself is worthy of note and Freud Freud A. Gogo is gonna try and make sense of the whole darned thing. Disappointing to realize that there’s only four sex scenes in this entire movie, but each is a powerhouse of raw energy that’s primitive in its lust.

Descent begins with a series of quotes passing as intellectual until their attribution exposes them as meaningless pop-lyrics. This is Scarborough’s first joke at our expense - he’s messing with our minds, making us believe irrelevance to be relevant, that black is white, positive is negative, Anna Nicole makes decent TV. Aiden runs, but from what? The quotes tell us it is the “terror of madness” but this can be discarded as now we can’t believe anything we read. The repeating voice, "come to me," beckons Aiden to explore what he can’t face up to. He withdraws into his own subconscious, his "descent" nothing more than a dirty dream to rationalize ones fears, the same way children are told ghost stories to distract them from the real horrors of the world.

Aiden Shaw represents a man with little or no imagination. The only area in the film where he has a purpose - to fuck - is a sterile white void. A man in denial of his true feelings, running away from them as the film begins. Move beyond the stills that represent Shaw’s journey through his frame-of-mind, beautifully art-directed, reminiscent of John Maybury’s Remembrance of Things Fast and instead concentrate on the first of the film’s raison d’être: the sex scenes. The first begins with clippers. A Samson castration nightmare? An Oedipal removal of his masculinity? Actually, it’s self-punishment for collaborating with the yet unseen enemy - Doubt.

Jesus! Frou Frou is back. Here’s what people are buying this for:

Shaw is tied to a chair whilst hairy hunk with the clippers, Anders, rubs his crotch against Shaw’s shoulder. Rock and Gibbs are tied to chairs and get hotter and hotter as they watch Shaw’s famed meat drip with pre-cum. Once released, Rock dives straight for his tool and gives it his all, covering it with sticky hot drool. In the background Anders receives a similar oral treat from strawberry blonde Gibbs before they flip-flop-fuck to an incredible climax. Shaw, proving what made him so great, begins a frantic ass-ramming of Rock, glistening with oil and sweat. Over-the-top performances from both parties make this the stuff of legend to inspire future generations of pornomakers. Rock is a total power-bottom and is in danger of out-sexing Shaw off the screen. Gibbs and Anders’ contributions should not go overlooked either. All four are dynamite, but most eyes will be on Shaw, ending the scene bound with a noose around his neck, as the others jerk their man-sauce all over his muscled figure.

You want an intellectual breakdown? Aiden is being castigated by his psyche - his Id punishes him (by shaving) but it’s his Ego (Rock) that must dominated. When accomplished he finds it’s inadequate. He remains tied (the rebel’s secret desire for normality) until all three components can be reabsorbed into his conscious. Achieved, he moves to the next stage of discovery. Descent poses complex moral questions about human interaction and collapse of infrastructures.

Ah, screw it. Here’s more big cocks:

The next fucktabulous twenty minutes are devoted to an outstanding love-making session between Shaw and the truly amazing Marcus Iron, who can’t keep his mouth off that nine-and-a-half-inch uncut thing of beauty. The two french-kiss passionately and what’s even more important is that the ardor is real (the two briefly became an item after filming). Shaw covers his lover with kisses before fucking his face, Iron’s eyes wide and innocent as he takes it all, Shaw working his way up into his partner’s accommodating boy-pussy. Once there, Shaw becomes a ramming machine, Iron loving every second of Shaw’s ever increasingly intense thrusts. They ride for an eternity until both cover Shaw’s perfect wispy pecs with gallons of their milky-white joy-juice. Romance is far from dead. In fact, this just made it sexy again!

Here now is the next step to self-empowerment, the gaining of knowledge. Shaw meets his true love in a bed, but here he is presented as clean-shaven and tidy, society’s ideal, not what we’ve seen before. Iron is also guilty, performing the role of the “good wife”, doing everything his spouse commands and receiving very little reward. Only in the follow-up, when we see Iron comfortably jerking over closed-circuit images of his partner tormented in a white cell, do we get a truer representation of power struggles in a relationship. His masturbatory actions represent Shaw’s transference of guilt over his own inability to love. Shaw believes Iron should punish him for it, but in reality Iron just wants to see him safe. Could the light-bulb attached to rope be the perfect way out? As he pulls on it, Iron - Shaw’s true-love and symbolic carnality - is set another task. The relationship’s entire equilibrium depends upon this performance.

Iron gets into a threesome with Harper and Branch (back when they were still involved). This thirty minute showpiece of sheer sexuality is in danger of giving us all third-degree burns. No act is left uncovered by these macho men, developing a perfect balance as everyone takes time to suck, fuck, rim, kiss, flick, nibble and fuck the other two. Multiple orgasms abound as the scene ends, restarts, finishes and just keeps on going - giving us three sweaty cum-stained sex-pigs in one shot, the subsequent one revealing them to be refreshed and starting their foreplay. It’s a tribute to Don’t Look Now: Iron doesn’t hold back for a second, getting everything he wants; Harper is his usual cum-inducing self; and Branch is the rugged, no-shit sex-slut he’s always played to perfection.

Sometimes sex is just sex. Iron isn’t cheating on Shaw, though these were doubts that he had. You’ll notice that only briefly did the scene change from an ordinary bedroom to the white cell where Iron previously watched his imprisoned desire suffer. Branch is God and Harper plays the Devil. The rope offers no escape. Rather it represented what Shaw in his repressed, downward spiraling persona wanted - the potential easy way-out, the one we’d all prefer to take in times of crises. The rope is cut. Life never offers us the simplest of options. Monks appear, representing both a medieval thought-process that bid mankind no freewill and modern society’s demands for conformity. When they cast off their robes they are embracing a future (nudity = freedom) that Shaw is still afraid of.

Two juggernaut duos begin as hungry Moore cant stop deep-throating every inch of musclestud Mason’s manshaft (the drool and spit on show are from another planet!) before his task is repaid with the same gusto, Moore’s balls dripping with saliva. Daddy-figure then ramfucks his young companion with an intensity that sees the guy reduced to a beast that loves the torture. And it’s all filmed in the low-angled two-shot that is instantly recognizable as Scarborough’s calling-card. It continues as Ford (who never looked sexier) eats out the tight asshole of younger Powell, the perfect combination creating sparks that could set fire to your drapes.

The couple sixty-nine face-fuck before Powell’s moist hole welcomes everything Ford can pump into it, a warp-speed quantum torpedo attack that sends the boy over the edge. Both couples finally meet and together with Rick Allen treat Powell to a circle-jerk that’s way hotter than the sun that’s beating down on their tight naked bodies. Each close-up of cock is treated with a Joe Gage passion: full of movement and manipulation, be it sucked or jerking off to climax. Allen is first to spatter the young guy’s face with his torrent of jism, leading to a cum-shower that means it’s time to go all art-house again.

The finale sees Shaw face his final challenge. Burying his old self, he is resurrected as a pseudo-Christ figure to beat Harper’s “Come to Me” satanic elucidation of Doubt. Once negativity is conquered, Shaw realizes the paradoxical nature of emotions (we kill the thing we most want, we hurt the ones we love the most) and is freed. The cell walls fall. Iron greets him on a beach, the tide representing the constant regrowth of life that emerged from its depths millions of years previously, and eventually to where we’ll all return.

So we’ve learned that ideas can liberate, people can grow and that the human spirit is indomitable. Shaw is building a castle. Impenetrable, but to those on the inside a signifier of warmth, strength and protection. The ideal relationship. But Scarborough has left us with a slight taste of his nihilism: it is made of sand. A terrible reminder that everything is transitory. The castle will tumble, and we may find ourselves back in our old routines.

 -- Froufrou A. Gogo

Notes about Disc Two: If all that wasn’t enough for you, Hot House has pulled out all the stops with the second disk, creating a complementary pornucopia!

We start with the Fantasy Montage: eight minutes of slightly soft-core material selling itself as homage to Art House Independent Film-making. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. There’s nothing like art, and this is nothing like art. So don’t worry thickos, there’s no visual equivalent of “big-words” to make you feel academically inferior in what is essentially a trailer with half the sex taken out. Marcus Iron does some expressive movements and Shaw looks like he’s been attacked by his own bad poetry. And let’s hope the bloody nose he sports wasn’t given to him by Susan Sontag or Marshall McLuhan, offended by such faux-intellectualism. Just this side of pretentious, and that coming from someone who loves Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman and fifties Nouvelle Vague movies.

Gregorian music never had a sexier visual accompaniment though.

The cumshot compilation on the other hand is a twelve minute hard-thumping spoogefest that’ll have you dancing along to the beat, which is gonna be pretty difficult with the size of wood you’ll be sprouting whilst watching it!

The main models all have well-researched biographies, together with galleries of individual photo-sessions taken during the filming of the feature. And there are tons of them - not just one or two each. Hotter pics follow in the Action Gallery: an encyclopedic collection of high quality stills snapped during production, not the dull poor quality screen-captures you find masquerading as the same thing on other companies’ DVDs. Each can be played individually, or as a slide-show movie, allowing you to drop your remote and pick up something much more fun. Also included are the original Descent trailer, as well as ones for other Hot House productions. It all adds up to a collection you’ll want to buy more than one of, storing the original in your trophy case and the other constantly playing!

 -- Froufrou A. Gogo