“Something I’m genuinely proud of”: Quentin Tarantino’s favourite porn parody of his own work
It’s all well and good for a filmmaker to inspire a sea of blatant imitators that reach the big screen, but can they really call themselves culturally transcendent if they don’t have at least one porn parody based on their filmography? For better or worse, it’s not something that Quentin Tarantino has to worry about.
Not content with inadvertently convincing every aspiring auteur that they needed to rip off Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction in one way or another to get a movie made in the 1990s, Tarantino’s signature and impact on pop culture became so significant that it seamlessly crossed over into the porn industry.
This being a guy who used to work in a porno theatre in his youth, the two-time Academy Award winner was always going to wear it as a badge of honour. If a Hollywood movie hits big, then you can guarantee that an XXX-rated version will arrive sooner rather than later, and in Tarantino’s case, it even extends to his name.
There is genuinely a porno director who operates under the alias of Tarantino XXX, who paid tribute to his namesake by channelling elements of Inglorious Basterds, The Hateful Eight, and a certain iconic genre flick into The Vagnificent Seven: A Lesbian Western, where a septet of women find themselves trapped in a remote cabin during a snowstorm, and you can probably guess what happens next.
Since he used to work in a porno theatre, and his New Beverly cinema has revealed plans to start screening pornographic pictures, it conjures the unfortunate thought that the writer and director keeps his ear to the ground for the latest seismic developments in the skin flick business.
We don’t really want to know if he’s aware of The Vagnificent Seven, never mind whether he’s seen it or not, but Tarantino did share some insight into how to create a porn parody worthy of lampooning his big-screen efforts when he explained why one of them left a genuine impression on him.
“They did a porno movie called Pulp Friction. I was just positive they took the name, that they didn’t really do anything with it,” he shared, only to be left pleasantly surprised. “They actually tried to! They didn’t do the costumes. It wasn’t super obvious it was my stuff, except at some point in the porno movie, these two guys and a girl got into a pop culture discussion. It wasn’t really a bad one either.”
How does a Quentin Tarantino porn parody impress Quentin Tarantino? By talking about the classic construction toy, Lincoln Logs, apparently. “The thought that I inspired an XXX Lincoln Log conversation in an XXX porno film, one that wasn’t really too bad, is actually something I’m genuinely proud of,” he concluded.
You can’t just dress a bunch of people up as the Reservoir Dogs and have them start fucking with no rhyme or reason, no: to win the seal of approval from the person they’re ripping off, a Tarantino-inspired porno has to at least try to emulate his screenwriting style.
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