Fifty Shades of Erotica   Starring: Various Distributor: Nucleus Films RRP: £10.21 Certificate: 18 Release Date: 13 April 2015

It was inevitable that with the success of Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) that companies would jump on the band wagon to get a slice of the pie for themselves, I personally was disappointed by the lack of novelty egg cups, but there you go.

Fifty Shades of Erotica (2015. 1 hr, 58 min, 55 sec) is a collection of fifty trailers from films with erotic content. Erotica, whether in the cinema or literature, has a long standing history of being a doorway into the industry for young, struggling talent as well as a legitimate from of cinema.

Within this collection you will discover many well know actors, including Rutger Hauer, Gerard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve as well as others you might recognise from television, I swear to god I saw Nicholas Young who played John in the original Tomorrow People, which explains what happened to his career.

As well as well-known actors the trailers reflect the work of famous directors, such as Ken Russell, Tinto Brass, although no one would be surprised by either of them being included.

I had a real problem with the collection and it was not the amount of bodily part on display. With fifty trailers included they range from films which have variable levels of artistic merit as well as sex to outright exploitation films. You just get one trailer after another, although you can choose to watch them in a single sitting, pick out individual ones or watch them by the decade of release.

What is really missing is anything which puts the trailers into any context. I would have preferred a commentary explaining the changing cultural attitudes to nudity in films, in the different countries within which the film's were made and the film's individual relative merits.

For instance Night Porter (1974), Belle de jour (1967) and In the Realm of the Senses (1976) are all disturbing films, in their own way, which are really about the destructive nature of obsession, sexual or otherwise. Although contentious when they were first released, these film have artistic merit. These are just lumped in with sex comedies and straight forward sexploitation fare, the former has at least some entertainment value, the latter is a cheap form of cinema.

None of the trailers have been restored, so the quality of the print is very variable and the only extras on the disc is a trailer (2 min, 09 sec) for a disc of trailers - as a self-running slide show of the films posters, whereas presenting them as wallpaper would have been more useful - as well as another eight trailers from the same company.

Had the clips been placed in some form of context then there may have been a reason to purchase the disc, but as it is, most of these trailers are freely available on YouTube, making the disc somewhat redundant.

Mark:

Booooobs

Charles Packer