SAN FRANCISCO - How many dead porn stars does it take to screw in a klieg light? Assets from the Raging Stallion's To The Last Man shoot have started trickling in, with dead porn star after dead porn star. And fans have been more than a little shocked at the level of Tarantino-ish violence; there are stranglings, drownings, shootings and hangings. Granted, dealing with porn stars isn't always easy. But slitting RJ Danvers' throat? Maybe the industry should be trading the casting couch for that of a psychoanalyst.
It's not just Raging Stallion, of course - movies like Titan's Folsom Filth, Hot House's Justice and, most recently, StagHomme's Armed have gained notoriety for their hot sex, while upping the ante with rapes, shootings and kidnappings. The Last Man trailer was leaked by a Raging Stallion staffer on Wednesday afternoon and reactions have been swift and strong. Raging Stallion head Chris Ward reports a dramatic increase in the attention the film has gotten from both retailers and consumers - a large amount of concerned e-mails regarding the "extreme violence."
"We made the decision to stay true to the Western genre," said Ward. "This requires violence. The Old West was a very violent place - on the ranch where the movie was filmed, there was a graveyard with a memorial to everyone who had died on the property.... No one in the graveyard lived past about 40 years of age."
While controversy often brings increased sales, success will depend on the quality of the scenes in final release. The movie, which was inspired by the Zane Grey novel of the same name, was nasty and brutish but certainly not short. The script by Tony DiMarco ran 80 pages with nearly a dozen dead: Jake Deckard hung, Anton Harri shot and Scott Campbell drowned. Like the studio's GAYVN Award-winning GRUNTS, Last Man contains three times the number of scenes of a standard release.
The trailer, available both on TheSword and YouTube, may fan the flames of hand-wringing gays in much the same way that William Friedkin's Cruising did in the early '80s. In fact, now that Raging Stallion has taken porn filmmaking to such over-the-top levels, maybe they should make that "classic" film into a porn flick.
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