The Passion of the Christ gets a gay porn redo

A successful strategy in the pornographic film industry is to take storylines and titles from popular mainstream movies and television and rework them into something titillating.

You might never have seen Everybody Does Raymond, or Dawson's Crack, or Bi-Curious George but you know they're out there, somewhere, lurking in the adult section of your neighborhood DVD rental store.

So I suppose with the massive worldwide success of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ it was only a matter of time before some enterprising adult entertainment company took a crack at re-envisioning it.

I just wish it hadn't been a gay entertainment company.

Someone just sent me a formal press release from Dark Alley Media hawking their new movie, Passio, which director Matthias Von Fistenberg describes as a selection of incidents from the life of Jesus...

[The film] also re-creates the director's interpretation of notable artworks, such as The Last Supper and Flagellatio -- both familiar to those with religious leanings or not. "This [Passio] is the Gospel revisited by a modern artist," said Von Fistenberg. "Or, as some wish, merely a pornographer, acquainted with the body language of the underworld."

Hmm. Von Fistenberg. Any relation to the Savannah Von Fistenbergs, I wonder?

Seriously though, this is in incredibly poor taste even by my quite flexible standards. Junk like this (served up to FOX News and other outlets in a press release no less!) makes it so darn easy to demonize the LGBT community.

For that reason, I hesitate to give the folks who made this film any exposure at all by mentioning it here but realized that Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and the like are going to be on this like a duck on a junebug anyway. So when you're flipping through the news channels and see the conservative talking heads ranting about it, at least you can say you heard it here first.

The press release certainly seems calculated to prompt a conservative commentator backlash. It also mentions two other purposefully controversial films:

Gaytanamo, a parody of our administration's questionable policies in dealing with prisoners of war and suspects. In early 2008, the studio will produce Gaytanamo's follow-up, Gay Bomb, based upon the authentic name of non-lethal chemical warfare that was proposed for use in Iraq.

Funny, I don't find these nearly as offensive. But like the Passion of the Christ take off, I don't see how anyone could find them erotic, either.