Ever see an avant-garde film or an off-Broadway play where you wondered if the joke is on you? You don't have to be the least bit paranoid to see through the tissue of lies that is Ron Dorfman's THE FINAL TEST, a test of gullibility that IMDb reactions prove can be flunked no matter how obvious it seems.
Dorfman's usual cast of NYC porn/degeneracy regulars ("get me Jamie Gillis") go through the BDSM motions of role playing without much aid in the way of props/script/sets or direction. Much of the film plays like a rehearsal or an improv session meant to generate dialog to be used in a future shoot.
But in the world of porn, any old slop, outtake, false start or flub is quite likely to find its way into the final print. The concept of a "ruined take" is foreign to gutter-level pornographers, whose ultimate goal of a 1:1 shooting ratio has been achieved far too many times.
The catch-all of "experimental" covers all errors and apologizes for any lack of creativity or accomplishment. I prefer to call this bucket "horsing around". In a jazz context, and us be-bop/hard-bop fans went through quite an extended "avant garde/experimental period" roughly from 1959 (Taylor/Sun Ra/ Coleman) through 1969 (Coltrane on through Ayler) and had to separate the true artists from the fakirs. "Shucking" is the technical jazz term for what Dorfman is up to in TEST.
Now it is out of left field, but a favorite art film for me, covering the same ground, is Ingrid Thulin in Mai Zetterling's NIGHT GAMES -one of the better post-Bergman experiments. In 1966 it was considered pornographic, though obviously in a tame, tame way, dealing with incest, child abuse, decadence and the like. Both Mai and Dorfman are interested in role playing, but the differences between their craftsmanship could not be more polar.
Just to summarize my distaste with Ron's content: Vanessa Del Rio is called upon to do various sexual specialties in her bag of tricks but we have to take it on faith what she's representing - her real character, a fictitious maid, or whether she is dom, sub or in between?
The entire film revolves around a blind man, is he or isn't he?, a theme intriguingly handled many times in movies as disparate (and flawed themselves) as Tony Richardson's take on LAUGHTER IN THE DARK by Nabokov or William Sylvester (B movie actor forever in film history when Kubrick tapped him for 2001) starring in Lance Comfort's all but forgotten (I used to see it often on TV decades ago) BLIND CORNER/MAN IN THE DARK.
David Christopher, perhaps my least favorite porn performer of all time, is terrible as the blind son (he looks older than her) of Vanessa but is given no help from the auteur/director.
Dishing out punishment or humiliation (the real reasons for such a Dorfman film to exist in the first place) are Black performers Red Starr and John Black. Starr was terrible in Richard Mailer's film ON THE STREET, an ethnic exercise, while Black is stuck in the usual stereotyped role, both of them overacting and falling back on the oldest trick: "hey audience, I'm the loathsome villain - look how badly I behave?". I guess if you actually twirl your mustache you qualify for an acting award, but what these two do is the modern equivalent.
During the soft-core era of porn, namely the '60s, there were innumerable poor movies made that not only didn't live up to their lurid, over-the- top synopses (in most cases an impossible task) but were simply dumb & pointless on purpose. Before wasting your time and taking THE FINAL TEST, read the lengthier IMDb synopsis and see how truly bamboozled the schmo who wrote that down and submitted it was - don't be fooled.
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