Donkey Punch

I have never really placed much stock in the idea that pornography is degrading to women. It certainly can be, but after all what career path does not, at times, prove degrading to every human being? Who hasn't done things in the line of duty that they consider wrong or shameful? Those who think any sex act being performed on video is automatically degrading are probably admitting more about themselves and their own hang-ups about sex than they would like to think. The fact that pornography tends to attract the emotionally damaged more than most careers is indicative of the stigma society places on displays of sexuality.

Then there's Donkey Punch. For those few of you not up on your "crazy apocryphal sex acts," a donkey punch is when a man punches a woman in the back of the head as he achieves orgasm. The idea is that the sudden jolt of pain causes the woman to spasm and heightens the man's pleasure. It's similar to drowning or choking someone during intercourse, albeit somewhat less dangerous for the woman.

One of the key drawbacks to translating an act like donkey punching into a premise for a movie is that au naturel donkey punching relies on surprise, but even the most hard-up porn actresses are very surprise averse. They may do anal double penetration for 100 dollars a film, but everything has to be carefully spelled out in their contract. A donkey punching movie would work (and be grotesquely hilarious) if the actresses had been signed for a normal porno and then were just arbitrarily punched in the back of the head at the end of every scene.

Without the freedom to exercise their God-given right to suddenly demean and brutalize women, producers "Grip" and "Cram" "Johnson" have kept the donkey punching spelled out in contracts and have filled the rest of their movie with slapping, smothering, butt licking, spitting, shoving and the ever popular "standing on a woman's face."

Donkey Punch begins, innocently enough, with trailer park goth Deja Daire being slapped in the face by a naked man with an erection. Then, to cement the warmhearted premise of the film, the man holds her mouth open and spits down her throat. Daire gamely chuffs dong until she is producing balls of that puke/saliva substance that fans of hardcore gagging porn have come to know and literally love. The male actor is apparently unsatisfied with Daire's oral abasement as he bends over a nearby couch so she can bury her face in his hirsute backside.

Daire, who is already reflexively tearing up from all that gagging, leaves trails of goth paint smudged on the inside of the man's crack. So much paint is smeared on the man's ass that it looks like he's been having diarrhea from eating a particularly spicy harlequin. Just in case you might have forgotten this porno is about punching women, the man repeatedly strikes Daire in the temple with his knuckles while she's taste-testing the shuttle's o-ring.

The couple moves through a series of predictable sexual positions (each accompanied by punching of Daire's ass or head) with long layovers that involve the man kicking her modest bosom or inserting much of his foot into her mouth. Probably the most painful-looking moment in the scene is when Daire assumes a head-down doggystyle position on the couch. The man begins having anal sex with her and then lifts a foot and steps on the side of her face while this is happening. She does not appear enthusiastic about this position and, given her discomfort, I move that it be stricken from the Kama Sutra.

At long last, the man reaches his climax and administers a series of blows to Daire's head as he completes his day's work. It should be noted that the men in the movie do restrain their punches. Not that the film doesn't still appear quite painful for the women, just that the men seem aware that knocking the actress unconscious or punching teeth out of her mouth are probably grounds for a filming stop.

Ubiquitous Fabio look-alike Alex Sanders donkey punches Rachel Luv in the next scene. Unlike the male actor in the previous scene, Sanders takes a while to ramp up to some real punching, preferring to perform oral sex on Luv. At last, he cuts loose and administers a flurry of punches to Luv's vulva. This scene progresses almost like a tamer version of the previous scene. The punches are more obviously pulled and there is much less of the head-standing and boob-kicking going on. About the only way this scene manages to top the other is in volume of puke/saliva covering the actress' face by the end of the scene.

It ends with Sanders throwing a couple right hooks to Luv as he unloads in her colon. She then craps his offering into her hand (some of it misses her hand as she gets some good distance on her jizz crapping) and then eats it. Let me just take a second to say that shitting out and then eating semen is one of the most grotesque things to ever become semi-mainstream in the porn world. It's not just limited to the award-winning "Cum Shitters" series of films; it will just crop up in a regular porno movie like "Interracial Ass Breeder 2."

Things take a turn for the dramatic in the third scene, which features Alex Divine. Divine's mascara begins running tearfully within seconds so that she looks like some bizarre cross between Amy Poehler and Tammy Faye. The male actor in the scene relentlessly gags, punches, slaps, steps on and otherwise abuses Divine throughout the scene. He also slaps her stomach really hard at several different points and Divine very obviously does not like this. By the halfway mark Divine hates her contractual obligation. She's wincing, getting bitchy and just generally not being a team player when it comes to slapping and hitting her during sex. Finally, during the donkey punching finale, she starts screaming and demands they stop filming as the guy is donkey punching her in the head.

What makes this dramatic finale great is that "Cram" and "Grip" "Johnson" appear on screen in a special follow-up to the donkey punching. Along with them is Alex Divine who is flexing her distended asshole at the camera like some sort of anal bodybuilder. They proceed to apologize for "that dumb bitch" who "totally fucked up the most important part of the scene." She continues to be somewhat bitchy, which is understandable, and they act like stupid assholes, which is also understandable. They slap her and pull her hair, she spits at them. The best line is Cram's, "there's no wrong spot to hit a woman," which if it saw broader release would go down as one of the all time greatest lines in film history for a variety of reasons.

The final scene features Haley Scott, who looks extremely cute for the ten or fifteen seconds at the beginning of the scene during which she is not screaming while being slapped. The scene also has an amusing beginning, which I have converted to an animated GIF to please your senses. The brutality of this one rates somewhere between ol' softy Alex Sanders' work and the horrid first scene. The male actor is a leering and grunting brute and Scott screams like a banshee, but it seems mostly like they're both acting, which is somehow reassuring after Divine's meltdown. Scott takes the punches, the colon blast and craps the prize out on the leather couch. She gobbles it up like rice pudding.

The Horror: I have seen more physically disgusting pornographic movies than this one. Anything involving scat play automatically wins that sort of competition and, jizz crapping aside, Donkey Punch does not get that gross. It is, however, one of the most morally repugnant pornographic movies I have seen. It's even worse than the fake snuff porn I have seen, because those were pure simulation, this is tinged with reality.

Donkey Punch is the sort of movie that the government would cite when trying to arrest pornographers and outlaw pornography. It's the sort of case the ACLU would take and then mention in the same sentence as the time they defended the freedom of speech of the KKK. It simulates violence against women with a very believable and uncomfortable pantomime. As for the most horrible moment, it would definitely be Alex Divine's "I'm getting more than I signed up for" thrashing. That was genuine distress and not the sort of thing I'm comfortable with.

The Bottom Line: For years I thought Islamic fundamentalists were crazy. I thought, sure, Western culture is decadent - guilty as charged, Al Buzkil - but it's nothing worth getting so worked up you start cutting people's heads off over it. Donkey Punch reminds me of the meaning of Allahu Ackbar. It means "God is great," and the existence of a movie like Donkey Punch is pretty damning proof that God really isn't so great after all. Proving God is great in the face of that sort of convincing evidence is the sort of thing that requires a holy war. So the next time you see some Al Qaeda video out of Iraq with a bunch of excited dudes screaming "Allahu Ackbar!" while they try to blow up Humvees, remember that America's armed forces are just caught in a war between Islamic fundamentalists and Grip and Cram Johnson, producers of Donkey Punch.