THE RASPBERRY REICH Dir: Bruce LaBruce, Germany, 2004, DVD, 90 mins Preceded by: LE LAIT NESTLE Dir: Herve Joseph Lebrun, France, 2002, Beta SP, 8 mins It's difficult to know where to start to review The Raspberry Reich. What exactly is it? Well, firstly, it's porn – hardcore sex scenes stretch from the beginning to the end of its 90-minute running time. It's also funny, entertaining, pretentious and quite insane. The Raspberry Reich of the title is a terrorist organisation run by the sex-crazed, wig-wearing Gudrun. She wants to liberate the world through sexual freedom. In the film's opening, Gudrun and her boyfriend literally copulate their way from their living room out into the corridor and into the elevator of Gudrun's apartment block, where they continue to have sex in front of a disgusted elderly couple, while another of Gudrun's minions listens through the wall, fellating his gun and masturbating. Gudrun also believes heterosexuality is the “opiate of the masses”, and that cornflakes, masturbation, and heterosexual monogamy are “counter-revolutionary”. To that end, she makes her straight male charges have sex with each other. They are devoted followers of Gudrun, so don't seem to take much persuading. How LaBruce got away with some of the sex scenes which are obviously filmed in public is a mystery. One male couple pash with tongues in a crowded street and start to undress each other, while passers-by look on google-eyed. Another couple share blow jobs on a park bench in the middle of the city. The Raspberry Reich is a sense-assaulting ride. Brainwashing slogans and rhetoric flash up on the screen during the sex scenes, and disorienting strobe effects abound. It's like being stuck inside a drug-induced nightmare. Those after buff guys getting down to it will not be disappointed, but may be frustrated by LaBruce's arty pretensions. It's hard to believe this played at the Sundance Film Festival where, not surprisingly, there were quite a few walkouts. It's hard to imagine heterosexuals, particularly uptight ones, sitting through this. With intentionally wooden porn acting and badly-synced dialogue (the entire soundtrack has been re-recorded), it treads the fine line between satire and just being plain crap. It's incredibly difficult to decide which it is, but it's probably one of the trippiest porn movies ever made. Preceded by an inexplicable short film entitled Le Lait Nestle in which a man does unspeakable things with a tube of runny white chocolate. Go figure. Chris Banks - 6th June 2004