[by STACEY WOOD, Stuff.co.nz]
A 3D porn flick from Hong Kong that beat Avatar at the box office is coming to New Zealand movie screens.
Blockbuster erotic film 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy is scheduled to be shown in Auckland’s Hoyts’ Sylvia Park and Botany Downs cinemas, although it has not yet been classified by the Office of Film and Literature Classification.
The film is based on the ancient novel (written by Li Yu in 1657) The Carnal Prayer Mat, which was adapted into a 1991 film.
The 3D version has broken box office records in Hong Kong, recording bigger first-day takings than James Cameron’s Avatar.
3D Sex and Zen took $450,522 when it opened last month, with numbers boosted by visitors from mainland China where the film is banned.
It narrowly missed out on the title of the world’s first stereoscopic 3D softcore porn – beaten out by South Korea’s Natali, released late last year.
Producers said “ladies’ house” women-only screenings in Hong Kong had proved popular and many had sold out.
New Zealand International Film Festival director Bill Gosden said he was not surprised to see 3D porn hitting mainstream screens.
“The connection between new film technologies and pornography is as old as film itself – I think there was a 3D porn fad back in the first era of 3D.”
The film is showing from Thursday at Hoyts in Auckland, but there are no plans yet to show it in Wellington, or anywhere else in the country.
Variety’s Russell Edwards reviewed the film late last month and called it “an eyeful of flesh, served with sadistic, spasmodic laughs”.
“Visuals are buttressed by strained sexual jokes that lose their impact in the English subtitles … although one comic highlight, involving a bungled organ transplant and a hungry dog, supplies excruciating leg-crossing laughter.”
Office of Film and Literature Classification spokeswoman Kate Ward said the distributors, Dream Movie Australia, had submitted the film for classification under urgency last week.
It was “not unusual” for films to be submitted at such short notice, she said.
In Australia, it received an R18+ rating, with a warning about “high impact sex scenes and sexualised violence”.
See the original post here: http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/4958029/Blue-movie-beats-blue-aliens-in-3D
