Saturday night I passed up an invitation from the Greek to go to some holiday parties in order to catch the last night of Go to Hell for the Holidays: Horror in December, presented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I'm almost reluctant to write about Life and Death of a Porno Gang (Zivot i smrt porno bande), because one, it's so bleak; two, many of its thematic elements and plot points are similar to that of A Serbian Film that in some ways it feels like revisiting the same place from a different vantage point, and yet the difference between the two could be the subject of a long discussion in and of itself, which in a way is the post I want to write but I may save that for another gray day (and after the holidays, I think).

What do A Serbian Film and Life and Death of Porno Gang have in common?  On the surface, both are about making films, porn films that turn into snuff films; the protagonists make choices driven by extremely limited economic options; they end up being pawns of people with power (largely derived from authority structures associated with the State) which crush them without mercy; the lack of options for artists within Serbia and the effects of the Balkan wars on the Serbian psyche ride right beneath the surface of both films at all times except for the lengthy segments in each where they are the storyline itself, either tacitly or explicitly. Finally, both use violence and sex, beyond what most people have likely seen before in a film, as the means of delivering their message to the audience and to illustrate the lives of the film's characters.

But these are two very different films. Porno Gang looks and feels like Lars von Triers' Breaking the Waves, though I remember reading somewhere that it owed a debt to Bonnie and Clyde, which I think is another apt comparison. Ultimately it's as grim as Breaking the Waves, though there are many humorous moments in the first half or so, especially in the early films we are shown created by Marko (Mihajlo Jovanovic), the lead character who forms the gang and takes it on the road to small villages to perform "Porno Cabaret" unlike anything the villagers have ever seen before.

Writer and director Mladen Djordjevic isn't pulling any punches. When a German journalist shows up in their camp one day, he explains to Marko how not only did he love the excitement of being on the front lines of the Balkan wars, there was also a lucrative market in filming the murders, rapes and beheadings he witnessed. Now such events are harder to film, but the market is still there. So are people who are so desperate they are willing to be the victims in snuff films to provide money for their families. He knows how to find them and will pay Marko's band a lot of money to kill them on camera- if they can combine sex with it so much the better as that will be even more lucrative.

Marko pitches the idea to the gang, who have their own sources of desperation they are unlikely to ever escape, and they are willing to take the step.

The victims tell their stories to the camera before getting killed, including a soldier whose guilt over what he did in the war has overwhelmed him and a grandfather who hopes the money from the film will pay to help his granddaughter, who has been horribly disfigured from uranium released in bombs. These scenes are as moving as they are disturbing.

One by one the gang, which started with ten ebullient, joyous members on a mission to live their lives out loud and spread the joy of sex, is whittled down to just two- Marko and Una (Ana Acimovic) who decide to go out in a decidedly inglorious way, that feels inevitable though still resonates with a disturbing sense of hopelessness.

It's unlikelyPorno Gang will be released in the states without at least one cut- last I heard bestiality on film was still a hard line in the sand as far as the U.S. goes, but if you have an appetite for cinema at the edge, I think it's worth seeking out. At least I think so- Chad, having just watched A Serbian Film the week before, was a bit desensitized to the quieter, much less horrific Porno Gang, and didn't really care for it, as it was for Mike C., who wasn't impressed by it either. There were however, three women seated in front of me who felt differently. One walked out at the first act of animal cruelty (which looked terribly real and probably was) and another spent most of the remainder of the film with her hands in front of her eyes. Upon leaving the theater I overheard one man say, "Now all they need to do is pair that with A Serbian Film for the ultimate feel-bad double feature." That's about right.

One last note/question: if someone can explicate on the dates that appear in the movie, or provide a link to a timeline of the end of the Milosevic era, it would be appreciated.