'Punch': Below the Taste Line

Nothing ruins a beach vacation like a horde of drunken Brits, yammering into their cellphones about cheap booze, cheap sex and cheap flights from Manchester. It's that crowd -- the young, horny, red-as-a-lobster set -- that might have been satirized in a scabrous new sex-and-murder thriller, "Donkey Punch." An American director, dealing with the same cast of characters, would have made a cartoon filled with the usual caricatures. And you would laugh as the rich twit, the dumb oaf, the arrogant jock and the clueless blonde all met their bloody fate.

But "Donkey Punch" isn't an American slasher film, it's a British flick, and what's good about it only makes what's bad all the worse. It is well acted and at times cleverly directed (by Oliver Blackburn). It is sophisticated enough to sneak into circulation under the loose "art house" rubric. But it is a very ugly film, almost humorless, and laden with a decidedly British, and repellent, class obsession.

It begins with a toxic mix: Three besotted English chicks escaping their dreary Bridget Jones lives, meet up with four oversexed sailor boys, who have the run of a very expensive yacht docked in a sun-drenched Mediterranean harbor. Liquor, flirting and drugs ensue, and soon Bluey (Tom Burke), the brutish lad with the mushy accent and simian face, urges the crew to cross lines they've never crossed before. Anchors aweigh!

So the stouthearted among them descend below decks for a threesome, or maybe a five-some, and some amateur pornmaking. And then, voilà, the most critical line of all is crossed: the donkey punch.

It can't be explained in a family newspaper. It's a miracle that it can even be used as the title of a film in general release, and that premiered at the Sundance Festival. And it's a deeply cynical gesture that this much talent is lurking in a film that centers on something -- a violent and misogynistic sexual act -- that should remain a black hole in the civilized consciousness. Some films go to dark places because the narrative compels them there. This film begins there, and willingly, just to get an ugly idea into circulation, and then rather deftly follows the chain of consequences.

In any case, the donkey punch yields the film's first corpse. Is it murder? Or an accident among consenting adults?

Blackburn immediately switches gears, wrenching the story from sun-dappled, not-so-soft porn to a nocturnal study in the nightmare world of Hobbes and the jungle. Out come the blunt objects, the knives and guns, and several improvised weapons including an outboard motor that fills in for the obligatory chain saw.

The American slasher film would present the two parts of "Donkey Punch" -- a half-hour of sex and transgression followed by an hour of murder and vengeance -- as a silly exercise in a moral no one feels obligated to believe: that the wages of fun are death.

But "Donkey Punch" is more interesting than that, not as art or entertainment, but as a symptom of the old, social stratification that still haunts British society. When Bluey introduces us to the donkey punch, he subtly challenges Josh (Julian Morris), an aspiring lawyer with an innocent face and the whole world before him, to give it a whirl. And suddenly we're in the old, macabre, fun house of British class anxiety, the world of Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte and the whole colonial project upon which the sun never set. How easy it is for someone in the lower orders to reach a hand out of the muck, and drag you down.

And down goes Josh, and all the hopes and dreams of the others, who aspired to a better life. The women turn out to be quite savvy and resilient in this gladiatorial contest, but that hardly excuses the film its more revolting moralism.

There's some confusion about the rating of the film. According to its distributors, the DVD release is rated R, while the theatrical release is not rated. The Web site for the Motion Picture Association of America makes no distinction, and gives the film an R. But this is not an R film. The sex scene is graphic, violent, dehumanizing and cruel. Was it necessary to show it in detail?

American directors, hemmed in by prudishness and fear of an NC-17 rating, are sometimes forced to be ridiculously elliptical about sex. But European directors, who seem to relish in their (self-congratulatory) freedom from such constraints, often end up making films that are simply pornographic. Several reviews of this film have already been published using the R rating, but don't be fooled by the bait-and-switch: This film is unnecessarily pornographic.

Just before the story turns dark, when we're receiving our first lesson in something we'd all rather not know about, the donkey punch, one of the women asks, "What's in it for the girl?"

Nothing. And that goes for the men, too.

Donkey Punch (100 minutes, Landmark's E Street Cinema) may be not rated, or may be rated R for a scene of strong sexual content involving an aberrant violent act, graphic nudity, violence, language and drug use.