Review

In order to offer a fair critique of this film, you have to ask yourself a few questions first. What exactly is Neu Wave Hookers? What is Eon McKai’s modus operandi? And, whatever it is he is trying to do, does it succeed?

So, first things first. Neu Wave Hookers is—in a sense—both a homage to and a critique of the 1985 porn, New Wave Hookers by the Dark Brothers. The Dark Brothers film is notorious historically in porn because it stars Tracie Lords, then, underage, and unleashed a controversy in which copies of the film were destroyed and subsequent versions deleted Traci’s appearance.

Neu Wave Hookers twists the original premise of guys making girls into sluts—or …ahem…New Wave Hookers—for their pleasure, and turns that on its heel by offering a nouveaux perspective using the prostitutes’ POV that foregrounds the dark side of sex for money, and what girls have to go through. It pokes fun at Traci, in a performance by Dana DeArmond (in a campy blond wig) who auditions by giving a blow-job in a seedy washroom. When asked if she is underage, she pulls out her fake ID. The film cuts between scenes of the hookers watching the original film, talking about their bad tricks, and showing clips of their bad tricks with Dirty Harry, juxtaposed between unenthusiastic, badly lit porn scenes.

Eon McKai has been hailed as the avant-garde of the porn industry. His modus operandi is to challenge mainstream porn and transcend or reinvent the genre by making something new. Film as a medium has two functions: it is used to entertain (the usual purpose of porn); or is willfully non-conformist, opposing mainstream to create films which challenge the viewer as well as orthodox ideologies of a film’s form or function by using the film as a vehicle to make a statement as a social/cultural critique which often references mainstream. Got that?

Neu Wave Hookers does neither. It does not entertain, nor does it challenge. If anything is sponges from experimental cinema and filmmakers, but does not use those techniques in any interesting or unique way. Instead, we have a mishmash of loose references and self-referentiality (in which Eon tries to foreground the nature of film as an artificial construction by placing his directorial commentary and the sound boom into the film frame), which are all meaningless when taken out of context. In order for a technique to work, it has to have some reason for existing, other than “look I went to art school and learned some cool techniques, but have no idea what the hell they are for”. And, as far as I know, when I went to art school they taught lighting techniques which seems to have been a class that McKai missed out on.

Okay. All this sounds harsh, but seriously, in the words of Johnny Rotten: “boring, boring, boring…”

I want to back up here a moment and let you know that I have seen McKai’s Kill Girl Kill series and enjoyed aspects of those films for their Alt style, Kurt Lockwood’s performances, and the fact that McKai was trying to transcend porn’s formulaic style. So, I’m not a McKai hater. We need directors like McKai (love him or hate him) to challenge porn’s conventions and deconstruct the genre. If anything, I’d love to see him really go crazy and break all the fucking rules. But, I’m not sure even McKai knows what he was trying to do in Neu Wave Hookers.

I am not going to bore you with the porn scenes (yawn) except to tell you that they are mostly uninteresting and formulaic, lack momentum and passion (even Kurt Lockwood), are so terribly lit that you can’t see what is going where or by whom, and are dreadfully agonizing to watch. If this were not for a review, I would have fast-forwarded through it. The scenes that feature Dirty Harry as the bad trick are creepy and disturbing (not in a good way) and are not conductive to masturbation or the pleasure of watching sex for entertainment purposes.

The only redeeming part of the film is the “Dig-it” sequence that masquerades as a campy 80s music video featuring James Deen, Tommy Pistol and Sierra Sinn with a special cameo by Veronica Hart.

Overall—to use a metaphor here—this film is a loosely woven frayed hand-me down, with threads that tangle in confusion, and then lead nowhere fast. It is a good waste of talent and a worse waste of digital video. Luckily, DV tapes are cheap. Meta-porn my ass.

 -- Domina Doll