Hardcore sex. Clinical sex. Silly sex. Banned sex. Destricted has all this and more. Seven diverse directors - including Larry Clark (Kids, Bully), Gaspar Noé (Irreversible), British artist Sam Taylor-Wood and American artist Matthew Barney (The Cremaster Cycle) - deliver an omnibus of shorts about human sexuality. Full of hardcore, show-all scenes of couples getting it on, it's supposed to provoke debate about sex and art. In reality, porn has rarely triggered so many yawns.
The tabloid-baiting centrepiece comes from the prince of provocation, Larry Clark. His intriguing "Impaled" gives a slacker the chance to have sex with porn actress Nancy Vee, star of Hot Tight Asses 12 (ahem). Exposing the mucky realities of porno ("More lube!"; "More Kleenex!") it's gross beyond belief.
Other segments are content to merely masquerade as "art" (which presumably convinced the BBFC not to slap an R18 certificate on the collection). Sam Taylor-Wood's moribund short "Death Valley" has a man masturbating in the desert for seven minutes and 58 seconds. "Sync" is a three-minute splurge of nanosecond porn clips. "House Call" reworks a clumsy 70s skin flick to little effect.
"USING A 50-TONNE TRUCK AS A SEX TOY"
Meanwhile, "Balkan Erotic Epic" has men literally making love to the earth in a grassy field and "Hoist" features artist Matthew Barney using a 50-tonne deforestation truck as a sex toy. Finally Gaspar Noé delivers a ridiculous entry about the existential loneliness of using a blow-up sex doll. Like most of Destricted, it's repetitive, dull and more entertaining to read about than actually watch.
Destricted is released in UK cinemas on Friday 15th September 2006.