Porn Watcher

Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m kind of a foreign movie freak. I love films by Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini and Fassbinder (Yes, I‘ve even seen all sixteen and a half hours of Berlin Alexanderplatz, and enjoyed every second of it.) I love these movies. And I’m just enough of a snob that I don’t want to see them dubbed. I like subtitles, mostly because I want to hear the actors’ original interpretations of the lines, even if I can’t understand what they’re saying. Often the dubbed foreign films I’ve seen have been translated oddly, so the dialogue almost doesn’t make sense.

But none have been as ludicrously dubbed as a straight Scandinavian porn flick I purchased recently titled What Women Need from Phoenix Releasing. Directed by and starring the blonde bombshell Ingrid Swede, the film dwells too long on exposition dialogue and with setting up scenes, but the sex is hot and nasty, the women slutty in the best possible way, and the sex scenes plentiful (running time is a remarkable 145 minutes.) Other than Ms. Swede the cast is entirely mono-monikered: Pirkoo, Lucika, Angelica, Melica, Ray, Samson, Martin. And did I mention the men are very hot? In fact, I bought the film because of a hot stud wearing a white uniform on the back cover. And, even better for me, I’ve never seen any of these guys before, and with one exception, they’re muscular, handsome and hung. The only problem is there is no way of telling which guy is which, and so it's impossible to figure out which of the hot men is Samson and which is Martin.

I didn’t know Ms. Swede’s work as a director before I got this video, but I’ll be looking for more of her films next time I head to the porn store. A group of four women at a dinner party are discussing what turns them on sexually. That’s the whole plot. Of course we see each of the things that get these ladies going, and some of the sequences are amazingly hot. We see a dildo salesman pitching his wares to a young girl, a woman seducing a boxer in the locker room, a male masseuse who uses more than just his hands, and a women’s private performance by a male stripper is interrupted by her husband who then joins the fun. The finest scene is the finale, and it’s the only time Ms. Swede performs sexually. She is banged by three stunning men, hungrily sucking their large cocks while they’re fucking her in every conceivable position. They end the sequence by dumping load after load of hot jizz all over her. She looks at the camera, the rivulets of cum dripping off her face onto her ample tits, smiles, and then the topper: The work “Slut” is superimposed over her image. Just terrific.

The problem? The English translation used to dub the lines was not written by someone for whom English is a first language. It’s not just that the over lengthy dialogue scenes are boring, that could be true if the film were viewed in Swedish. It’s that grammar and scansion are no where in evidence. We are subjected to such lines as “Let me show to you my many sex toys, which we can then play with and taste.” Or “Sex is many times much fun.”

The actors reading the English translation are heavily accented, mostly with Swedish accents. The exception is for a hot Asian girl who fucks and sucks in the massage scene; for some reason, she has an Italian accent.

I certainly recommend What Women Need. I’m just telling you to watch it with the sound turned off. Imagine what they’re saying to each other. Whatever you make-up will be better than what's actully coming out of their mouths.