Hipster Porn: Hump! Film Festival
Dan Savage's Hump! Film Festival revels in homegrown buggery
For those of you who miss the good old days where we enjoyed our porn in theatrical settings — albeit ones plagued by perpetually masturbating strangers wearing beige raincoats — Dan Savage presents the 2016 Hump! Film festival (
). A sex-positive, rough-around-the-edges assortment of homemade pornongraphy — gay, straight, fetish, you name it — Hump! is less erotic than it is avant garde. Think of watching people pound, probe, lick and stick each other, but to hipper music. While it’s definitely not soft-core, it’s also far from erotic.
And yet the seems less designed to titillate and more intent on breaking down sexual barriers. The 22 short films on display are sometimes funny, frequently bizarre, occasionally clever, with the quality varying considerably. There are a few standouts buried deep within the festival. Film Bonoir, riffing off a famous skit in the ’70s classic The Groove Tube, uses semi-erect penises, googly button eyes, and adorable little felt hats to uproarious effect, even though the filmmaker clearly runs out of ideas before the — ahem — climax. Then there’s Let’s Try to Fuck, a dead-on parody of 1950s educational films. It’s balls-out hilarious. Level Up is a clumsy parody of video games that salvages itself with a full-blown orgy, emphasis on the word blown.
The strangest film of the bunch is The Collector, in which a very unusual man shows off his even more unusual assortment of semen-filled jars culled from various sources. Whether or not he’s seeking mail-in donations is never quite made clear. Hump! plays Friday, May 6th and Saturday, May 7th at the Black Cat Main Stage, 1811 14th St. NW at 7 and 9:30 p.m. each night. Tickets are $20. Visit blackcatdc.com or call 202-667-4490. For more info on the festival, visit humpfilmfest.com.
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