If I were to wildly oversimplify things, I could put the kinds of content we cover at altporn.net into two camps: artsy erotica and bonerfying pornography. In reality most of it falls somewhere between the two, with sites like FatalBeauty.com floating over near planet Artsy Erotica, and movies like Joanna’s Angels in a shallow orbit around the celestial sphere of Porn.
Alter Ego, the new film from Carlos Batts, is very, very much in the artsy erotica camp; properly emphasized, the ARTSY erotica camp. AE is a carnival of sensuality and skin and bent gender in slow motion, reminiscent of David Lynch and, less frequently, Andy Warhol.
AE is Carlos Batts’ tribute to April Flores/Fatty D, the voluptuous erotic performer and “super muse” who slides effortlessly between phat azz lowrider chica, living porcelain doll, and deadly stitched-up horror vixen. Batts’ moody, ethereal imagery captures a wide-ranging series of Flores’ erotic experiences, some of them sexy, some of them disturbing. Slow-paced and set to a stew of electro and hip-hop, it’s the kind of thing you watch in a quiet room at 2am when no one’s awake.
The altporn scene is just taking off in the mainstream adult industry, and it’s likely that we’re going to get a lot more punk/goth porn vids on the market. I’m not complaining, because I dig watching punk rawk girls get it on bigtime, but films like Alter Ego are important contrasts to easier-to-swallow porn. We need works like this to remind ourselves of the wide-ranging possibilities of erotic art.
