Monday, March 1, 2021

Shocking Truth (1996) / Shocking Truth 2 (1997)


Throughout the 90's when Gregory Dark was pulling double duty in both the hard and softcore worlds, a conscious decision was made to keep the two separate with the “Gregory Dark” moniker reserved strictly for the adult films whereas the erotic thrillers were typically singed with “Gregory Hippolyte” or a variation on said name. Primarily done for marketing purposes, it made sense as Dark's adult films and erotic thrillers are two very different animals, though there are instances where certain parallels can be drawn, the concept of the interview, or interrogation, being a constant obsession of Dark's. Several of Dark's erotic thrillers like Carnal Crimes (1991), Secret Games 2: The Escort (1993) and the Animal Instincts trilogy (1992-1996) all feature their protagonists narrating their tales to an interviewer or breaking the fourth wall and confessing to camera while Body of Influence (1993) approached the confessional angle through a psychoanalytical lens. Dark had previously incorporated interview cutaways in both The Devil in Miss Jones 3 and 4 (1985), though he would bring back the interview in a hardcore context in a big way beginning with Snake Pit (1996), which psychoanalyzed its performers before and after their respective scenes. Dark would once again step into the role of grand interrogator in the Shocking Truth videos, with the interviews coming to the forefront in two of Dark's most challenging and ahead of their time video experiments.

Unlike Snake Pit which, although being one of Dark's most inaccessible and abstract works, did have somewhat of a reoccurring, albeit obscure, thread running through it, with Shocking Truth Dark dispenses with narrative entirely, his focus being squarely on the interviews and sex. Dark's line of questioning is similar to the ones he asked in Snake Pit, the headline question of the former “Do you think you're a slut?” being central to Shocking Truth as well and existential topics like fear and death are broached often. Dark goes even further than he did in Snake Pit however, getting the performers to open up about their families, asking what makes them feel shame and occasionally throwing in a hilariously crass question. Like Snake Pit, Shocking Truth is especially fascinating due to how the performers respond to the questions, some playing it coy and trying to avoid answering honestly while others really got what Dark was attempting and hold nothing back with their answers, getting uncomfortably personal at times. Like Roxanne Hall in Snake Pit, it's Chloe who steals the show in both her interview and subsequent scene and gives the most revealing and worrying response to one of Dark's questions, saying “It's not the darkness outside the scares me, it's the darkness inside that scares me.” Speaking to Psychotronic Video, Dark commented on that particular scene, saying “And her interview is so strange because she's so self-abusive... and she further portrays that self-abusive nature in the sex scene... It was really sort of unpleasant.”

Shocking Truth 2 takes the same approach with a new line of similarly themed questions for a new group of performers and is as equally interesting as the first when it comes to the performer's various responses to Dark's questions. This time around however, Dark opted to shoot the second half of the interviews immediately after the sex scenes have concluded, making the film even more loaded given some of the topics being discussed with many of the interviewees going to some fairly distressing places. While not without style, the production design in second film is dialed back a bit when compared to the first, which had the girls being interviewed on an electric chair, heavy blue lighting at points reminiscent of Dario Argento's Inferno (1980) and a strong voodoo influence with Dark once again dressing up his performers in skeleton and devil costumes. Dark even spliced in footage from voodoo heavy Melvins “Bar-X the Rocking M” video he directed while also taking a visual cue from the album art of Stag, the Melvins album which “Bar-X the Rocking M” appears. The second film does take off where the first one left off in terms of Dark's trademark unorthodox approach to the actual sex which by 1997 had become more intense and deliberately un-erotic, with many scenes veering off into the surreal with performers in animal masks and both films feature adult starlet Star Chandler as a nude Satan-esque character, painted red head-to-toe occasionally wandering into scenes to bark orders at the performers.

Although Dark's videos did consistently good business, Dark speculated on how viewers would react to Shocking Truth, stating in the same Psychotronic piece “But, lets face it, when people rent porno, they want to jerk off, right? Now all of a sudden I'm dealing with a lot of issues, a lot of questions, a lot of commentaries on what we see as sexual and don't see as sexual, and how the starlets relate to what we consider standard morality. And I think this format makes some viewers uncomfortable... When viewers are exposed to questions “What is sin?” or “Where will you go when you die?”, they begin to have thoughts about these things. And I think that's sort of this antithesis of porn in general. But, see, there's such a distinct level of mediocrity in the whole porn market that, in order for me to push the envelope of pornography as it currently exists, I've got to go to these different places.” Dark would continue to go to different places for a few more years before bowing out of hardcore in 1998 to focus on music videos, but his continued ability to find inventive ways of subverting a medium even after what it had become far into the 90's made Dark the last of his kind, with the Shocking Truth films being stand out titles from a period of immense creativity for Dark.

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