FILM REVIEW – PREACHING TO THE PERVERTED
A surprisingly good, dark British satire
about the BDSM sex and fetish scene and its struggle against Puritanical hypocrisy.
The plot is straightforward enough. Tom Bell plays Christian moral crusader, Henry Harding MP who gets increasingly hostile to the filth and degradation in Britain’s sex clubs. He hires a young, naïve and virginal Christian computer geek, Peter Emery, played rather woodenly by Christian Anholt, in the film’s weakest performance) for an undercover investigation into a fetish club run by an American Dominatrix called Tanya Cheex. (Played brilliantly by Guinevere Turner).
Emery establishes contact with Tanya’s London scene through the Internet takes a concealed video camera to a BDSM show. Initially, |Peter doesn’t know the jargon of the scene so he can’t tell whether he is a Dom or a sub, and initially, he finds no evidence of anything illegal – immoral, but not criminal activity.
Harding, as concerned for his budget as about the lack of results, sends Peter deeper undercover, and the poor man soon becomes a slave to Tanya, and as he gets closer, he starts to fall in love with her.
Tanya likes spanking and beating men with riding crops, but she avoids penetrative sexual intimacy, She has several slaves, and any who try to have sex with her are immediately thrown out of her inner circle. Tanya has a female slave, Eugenie, a man hating lesbian, who gets jealous an suspicious of Peter, and who also has the hots for Tanya.
When Eugenie finds out that Peter works for Whitehall, she tells Tanya who turns the infiltrator into a double agent, trying to get him to find out what plans Whitehall have to expose her activity. She does not realise that he is part of such an investigation himself.
Eugenie is allowed to punish Peter for not disclosing his real job, by making him act as a chariot-pulling carthorse, taking her round the streets surrounding the castle the fetish group have hired for the weekend. In subjecting himself to such humiliation, Peter runs over a local dog, and the media expose of events brings the case against Tanya to court, but not before he finally makes love to Tanya with proper penetrative sex. .
Much in court depends on Peter’s own evidence, but he openly perjures himself, dismissing his film footage as faked simulated sex, and the case against Tanya is thrown out of court, but Peter goes to jail for disrupting the trial.
When Peter comes out, he finds Tanya, and his own mother waiting for him. Tanya is pregnant to him. Closing scenes show him holding his baby in a room full of BDSM apparatus, and Tanya letting Eugenie breast-feed the child for her as they maintain their business.
The film wisely avoids the traditional trouser dropping Whitehall farce or Carry On film smut and innuendo path in favour of taking a realistic look at the Dom/Sub BDSM scene. There are moments of absurd humour; i.e. a prisoner at the jail holding Peter receiving a hacksaw smuggled in within a bunch of flowers.
There are also some strong social commentary touches such as Londoners, especially a milkman and his son, watching bemused as the fetish slaves leave the clubs with their cages and chains, without bothering to get changed into less conspicuous outfits first.
The film has a strong moral message about leaving consenting adults alone, but also notices how people outside the scene cannot help but be affected by what goes on. The film’s main appeal is going to be to fans of Te fetish scene and Rocky Horror Show aficionados.
The production crew had no problem acquiring the stunning range of fetish-wear on display, but they found that people would not let them buy or hire simple chairs and tables and ordinary clothes for a film with such subject matter.
There are cameos by several leading British actors, Ricky Tomlinson, Don Henderson, and Sue Johnson among them, in a British film that clearly deserves wider attention than it received.
Arthur Chappell