Though superior to its predecessor, The Conflict is still Nazism via West Hollywood that doesn't really delve any deeper into the problematic erotic psychology of its chosen milieu: fascist torture prisons and the homo-sexy aesthetics of the Nazis. In The Conflict, a group of imprisoned men are mercilessly tortured and humiliated by cruel captors who wear skin tight-uniforms and who wield riding crops, handcuffs and snarling Dobermans on leashes. The excellent documentary Paragraph 175 offers a glimpse at the horror dished out to homos by such regimes, so it feels a little odd to flick a movie like this on and beat off to how hot it all is. But the Abduction series is well-produced and makes a refreshing visual change from regular porn fare, where guys who look like hairdressers pretend to be mechanics or each others' new college roommates.

Watch The Conflict at falcon.com

Having said that, there a more than a couple of scenes in The Conflict that could belong in any regular porn film. In one scene, two guys fuck, and there's all kinds of Tangier-prison paraphernalia strewn about the set, but otherwise, it's two guys fucking on a bench and saying "yeeeeeeeeeeah" a lot. A scene where two prisoners find anal solace with each other could also be transplanted to any other film, as long as the actors changed out of their concentration-camp pyjamas. Like The Abduction's boiler room scene, the sets and costumes are doing all the work: there's absolutely nothing in the sexual energy of the film that suggests anything other than garden variety West Hollywood.

However, it is a porn film, and the sex is pretty impressive. An early scene sees Chance Caldwell, dethroned as commandant in the final scene of The Abduction, and now working as a cook in what a title card tells us is "Prince Dezerad's Secret Legion Headquarters" (I laughed) chopping up carrots for the new Chief's (Jake Andrews) lunch. Nearby, a handcuffed prisoner is chained to a wall, working his way through peeling a lare pile of potatoes. The handsome and heavily-built Caldwell takes no lip from his bratty assistants, but they repay his gruff orders by pinning him to the prep table and spit-roasting him with abandon. It's a very sexy scene - look for Caldwell's booted legs jump in the air when he comes.

Anyway, Andrews charges in wanting to know where his lunch is and is understandably furious to see what's been going on in the kitchen in lieu of cooking. The two assistants are sent packing to a cell somewhere while Caldwell is chained naked, hanging from the wrists, in a dungeon elsewhere Andrews delights in blowing cigarette smoke in his captive's face, slapping him lightly with a belt and calling him a bitch. This scene is lit well and the two guys are great to look at, but again, the name calling and light physical torments are a bit too Desperate Housewives for their own good.

Back in the kitchen, burly and hairy Joe Magnum lumbers in with a sack of fresh potatoes, and the peeler asks him to deliver a "note to the outside". Magnum agrees, but only after demanding a blowjob as payment. Payment received, Magnum retreats to a shadowy alley for a cigarette, where he tears the peeler's note to pieces and throws it in the gutter.

Magnum's size and the feel of this latter scene are abstract quotes from Fassbinder's Querelle, where hulking Franco Nero gleefully torments frustrated, mentally-imprisoned sailors and many a scene takes place in a alley or tunnel lit with rusted golden shadows. Again, it's a nice touch, but it's telling that Genet's 1950 short Un Chant D'Amour and Fassbinder's later Genet tribute are light years ahead of this film in terms of generating sexy imagery and revelling in the seething sexiness of otherwise deadly and deplorable situations.

A bunch of fairly straightforward scenes follow, including one absolutely boring sequence where a line of uniformed guys circle jerk for about ten minutes. An enema scene shows us tubes and water coolers, but no evidence of any liquid going into anybody's body. As with The Abduction, if you're actually into s&m, you won't find this film very interesting - certainly, it isn't especially hardcore or explicit - but if you aren't, The Conflict makes for an interesting-looking change of pace.

The Conflict boasts a cast-of-thousands and interior and exterior sets that suggest a fairly high budget and a production team with expertise. The only hesitation I have is that in these days of knockout amateur porn, filmed with a Mini-DV handheld in someone's lounge room, future films that aim for some serious porn auteurship will have to go a little heavier on the heavy - we can see cute guys fucking each other and beating off on our laptop screens any time we like, for pretty reasonable monthly rates. A big-budget narrative porn film should explore the psychological heat of naked captees at the sexual beck and call of their brutal, ever-horny captors, not just play dress up.

Related Reading:
Spokes
The Abduction
Redemption
Paragraph 175
Bent

Aiden Shaw Interview