Vida e Morte de uma Gangue Pornô

This is a quite disturbing movie on post-war Serbia in the early 90's of last century. The main character is a young movie director eager to make his first movie. The only opportunity he has to start his career, is making a pornographic picture. Being partially successful, he begins with his cast a pornographic vaudeville roadshow in rural parts of formerly Yugoslavia. Not surprisingly, the locals disapprove of the explicit content of the sex shows. But than there is a businessman in the audience who wants to have snuff movies produced by the 'porno bande'...... Rise and Fall of a Porno Band is a very interesting movie on how things are today in Serbia. It deals with the poverty and struggle for survival in an European country. The non-professional actors do an excellent job and are convincing in showing the hard times Serbia has to go through. Not for the ones amongst us with weak stomachs.

Paul Algra

Start promises a very decent, realistic movie about a guy who ended up directing and circumstantial (read it for the money) ends up in the porn industry. After deciding to make the first porn theater in Belgrade and the prohibition of forced to do so, decided to gather porno gang will work shows the rural parts of the country. Then chaos ensues.

The film clearly wants to show how victims of war is in our near and distant surroundings and the ultimate extreme way of showing how much people are willing to go far for the sake of personal satisfaction, financial stability and the goals. Again, shows the narrow-mindedness of rural areas who refuse to accept something new when they see that, in their view, a negative effect on some of them.

Great camera and relatively unknown actors leave a real impression as if this team really is, and that was filmed a documentary about them.

Take my word, this film has everything, and I would single out the scene when family take a supper on the back of an old man who was scheduled for lapot.

The main thing the movie greatly succeeds in is being as seedy as possible. Like many underground extreme films, Porno Gang has a no-budget, shot-on-video type of feel to it that adds an immense amount of jarring realism to all of its raw content.

Porno Gang offers a whole gaggle of characters, and while none of them stand out enough to be that memorable, there is still enough dynamic amongst the group as a whole that it carries the film and keeps it entertaining. There are some scenes in the first half of the film before things go even bleaker, that portray a very unique type of cringe camaraderie. Putting on odd sex shows with the lads for small villages of geriatric people...

Without a doubt, the effectiveness of the sex and gore is where Porno Gang excels. The sex is always grimy and gratuitous and plentiful - never pleasant - always cringe-inducing. Special thanks to context, the gore is especially effective - all the cuts, wounds, and blood look entirely realistic, and feel more real than anything else in the film, so when they hit, they are truly quite disturbing. The first "snuff" scene was definitely the strongest scene in the entire movie - not only does the gore and the man goring himself come off as entirely believable, but so does the entire film crew as they watch in horror, accepting they've just taken a step into one of the most depraved realms of human possibility. This is a scene that will stick with me, and has the power to be traumatizing on a visceral level for those are seeking that sort of experience.

I do think that the experience peaked with that first major gore sequence. After that, everything happens kind of quick and is quite a bit more predictable and a little redundant. The ending was probably the most cliche part, but I'm not sure how else you could end a movie like this.

A Serbian Film certainly offers more in the technical department. It takes this concept and makes it a lot weirder, and then takes it further, and does it all with glossy production and a really cool music score. Porno Gang feels like it was edited to hell - there are cuts all over this thing that follow no cohesive style or structure, but hey, maybe that's how they wanted it to feel. It's a mess, but I think it's supposed to be.

As far as extreme movies go, this one does have quite a bit more versatility and value than your average offering. I wouldn't say it has any artistic merit or anything like that, but it does have just enough personality to stand out in the pack. I don't know what I'm supposed to think of Serbia now that the only media I've seen come out of it are two extreme movies about snuff...

I've just watched it...and I've never been so close to being stunned by a movie. So forgive me if I'm being incoherent. There are many movies that try to be deep, smart...They mostly end up being pretentious. Or you're left with something you're sure not even the filmmaker knows what's it about. They try to be philosophical, but get tangled in it. This movie is simple, very simple. Others want to trick you. They play with your senses for their gain, to achieve their goal. They try to impress you, shock you, make you cry...More often than not, it comes off cheap. This movie uses no tricks. This movie is...what it is. You have to deal with it. You can't discard it, or laugh it off and ignore it, it's too sincere. It enters you and you believe it. You become part of it. You're one of them. You're there, with the gang, standing around the victim, behind Vanja who is filming it all with his camera. And you're scared. Of yourself.

"Life and Death of a Porno Gang" is a major work full of pain and despair, about the destiny of a torn apart nation, from a specific part of the world, but whose tragic existence can be found anywhere in these times of major transition in all spheres. It has the same fetid smell of the best films of Harmony Korine, Lars von Trier, John Cameron Mitchell or Jonathan Caouette, although director Mladen Djordjevic cleverly introduced humor all over his motion picture, as in those other filmmakers' products. It is just cultural differences that detract some people from the Serbian images. In "Life and Death of a Porno Gang" it is not easy to turn the head the other way, because Djordjevic avoided giving us a hint of the "nice side of Serbia ", and that is his right, in order to build the morality tale that is the result. Here you do not find the carefree indifference of blank young girls during spring vacation, the cannibalistic crisis of the bourgeois couples or the narcissistic defense of our LGBT bodies with our LGBT backs turned on the misery of other people's lives (and bodies), very characteristic of rich societies, living far from war, bombs and the smell of a pile of dead bodies. This is a rich work that makes you reflect (well, if you care about the film, anyway, or if you can see through its strong images) about the validity of ephemeral art, about the lack of ethics in all strata, the lack of information of people living in the inner country, the devaluation and depreciation of life, the exaltation of death and its cult, and (if you are curious of what happens beyond your national borders) it also urges you to find a bit of information about Serbians, Croatians and all the struggles they have been involved in the recent past. And perhaps above anything else, it makes you think about the validity of cinema today and if we really need the products that are being made. Here, Marko, a young film graduate, wants to direct his first feature, and ends up making snuff films. Cinema has gone a long way: once it was entertainment and, more importantly perhaps, it was an ensemble of many windows to the worlds beyond ours. There were no other lookouts but movies, to go, see, be informed, learn. That mission was fulfilled but now it has to be shared, and television and internet have mostly taken that role. Now we have multiple possibilities. But usually we have to see what the media companies want us to see. So cinema still has a place to fulfill, but those works are not being made. I believe that nobody needs a very high percentage of the movies made today. We get sex, violence, death, "action", fights, and so on, to anesthetize us… But we learn very little. I know some think they learn now a lot from Tarantino and a few others, as they did from Kubrick before. But in my time there were better sources of knowledge than Kubrick, and those movies are seldom talked about... Or they are called "pretentious". And then we wake up. But please do not follow the final example of Marko. Open your mind, watch better films and not the usual dose of crap, domestic, provincial movies, dressed up in special effects and syrupy music to make you believe you are a highly sophisticated "cinéphile", when you are just an Oscar follower.