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Review

There's often the tendency to view the distant past as a more innocent time, but director Michel Reilhac's archival compilation film The Good Old Naughty Days serves as a jaw-dropping reformation to the notion that the early 20th-century was a quaint era of sexual naïveté. Naughty Days collects a series of French hardcore "stag reels" of the 1920s, short silent films shown to men in brothels. In doing so, Reilhac proves that your great-grandparents could quite possibly have been far freakier than you could ever pretend to be.

The films compiled are astounding to modern-day eyes not only in their explicit nature (rest assured that the "money shot" is not a post-Deep Throat aesthetic technique), but also in the sheer breadth of kinkiness on display: orgies, nasty cartoons, and a mixture of straight and gay sexuality are only the beginning. Just wait until you get to the nuns and the monks. Yet there remains a sort of sweetness to these often comical little films, presented here with new scores and explanatory intertitles.

 -- Travis Crawford