Despite what you’d think based on the name of his film festival, Darryl Gold isn’t a big drinker. Sitting across the booth from me, the founder of the Hard Liquor and Porn Film Festival is washing down his burger and fries with a half-O.J., half-ginger ale concoction.
“I’m working,” says Gold, by way of explanation, adding that he still has booze left over from the festival’s first edition, though he recently had to throw out a poorly aged bottle of vermouth that had turned brown in the years since 2000.
Gold is better acquainted with porn, and his appreciation of it, and all its absurdities, led to what he describes as his “comedy festival of dirty jokes,” which he and partner Jill Rosenberg bring back to the Bloor Cinema Saturday (Oct. 17).
“The great thing about porn is it covers all other genres,” he notes. “You can make a porn version of any kind of movie — western, horror, musical. It’s really flexible.”
A plain ol’ kung fu film would never make it into the festival, he notes. But full frontal kung fu? Now you’re cookin’ with gas.
“Naked people are funny,” says Gold, neatly summing up the fest’s point of view. “Orgasms are very good for you but probably the next best thing after that is laughter. And laughter is more acceptable in a public theatre.”
Per usual, this year’s shorts run the gamut from one-note goofing (like jiggling boobs and food fights? You’ll love Top Heavy by Winnipeg’s Sheena Shand) to the higher-aimed efforts of Signe Baumane, a protégé of animation demigod Bill Plympton, who has sent an instalment of her true story series Teat Beat of Sex.
Gold is also screening Necromance by Brit Kerry Davenport-Burton, another true story which recounts a young boy’s apparent murder at the hands of a satanic cult.
That one may seem like an odd selection — out of step with the fest’s usual shits ’n’ giggles, what with the grisly death and all. Then Gold tells me the rest of the story, and how the boy really died. No spoilers, but its inclusion definitely makes sense, though by the sounds of it the film will cost anyone who watches it several sanity points.
Because Hard Liquor and Porn gets more films than Gold can fit into one night, and many that go over its four-minute time limit, he’s planned a second night of also-rans, a sort of salon de refusées for anything “too dark, strange or experimental.” He calls it The Salon of Awesome Cinema, since some directors didn’t like the idea of being in a “salon of rejects.”
“The great thing about the name ‘Awesome’ is it can mean amazing and brilliant and it can also mean awful,” says Gold.