'Donkey Punch is the vilest film I've ever seen,' says AMANDA PLATELL



Already the buzz around Donkey Punch is building. After a rave reception at the Sundance film festival earlier this year, it's rapidly emerging as the must-see movie of the summer - 'a gravely serious psychological horror thriller' according to one critic,' frighteningly plausible' says another.

British director and co-writer Oliver Blackburn describes this, his debut feature film, as 'provocative'. Well, I suppose that's one way to describe a morally bankrupt tale of teenage group sex, violence, drugs and sadism which left me sickened to the core.

Scroll down for more

A real horror: Donkey Punch is a tale of teenage group sex, violence, drugs and sadism

But Donkey Punch is no ordinary softporn slasher flick. Blackburn claims the characters in his tale are 'socially realistic' - typical of many young men and women of his generation. 'Everything in the film is rooted in reality,' says the 36-year-old director. 'We just took the stuff that's out there and made it into a story.'

In which case, I despair for the future of Britain.

'Typical of his generation': Olly Blackburn, director of Donkey Punch

The key thing to know about Donkey Punch is that the film takes its name from a potentially lethal and possibly mythical sado-masochistic act involving anal sex.

I apologise for being so explicit, but unless you understand the central premise of the film you cannot comprehend what a vile production it is.

The plot, if it can be dignified as such, goes as follows: three girls from Leeds travel to Majorca for a weekend's fun as an antidote to a cheating boyfriend. They meet four posh British boys who are crewing a 76-foot yacht during their summer holidays. And while the owner is away, they decide to play. And play hard.

Within hours of meeting, they all sail off into the sunset and are soon so out of it on a cocktail of drink and drugs they lose all inhibitions and start having group sex, taking it in turns to film the assorted couplings.

Egged on by his friends, one of the men then attempts to perform the notorious 'Donkey Punch' on a girl, with fatal consequences. What follows is as absurd as it is disturbing, with the remaining characters subjecting one another to increasingly vile acts of cruelty until there's no one left to maim or murder.

It is, quite simply, the most distasteful, depraved and nihilistic film I have ever had the misfortune to sit through. I freely confess that there were times I felt physically ill simply watching it. Certainly, I would have walked out long before the end had I not had to write about it.

It's not that I can't stomach any horror movie. Gory as it was, I adored Silence Of The Lambs for the psychological brilliance of its storyline and the Oscar-winning acting of Anthony Hopkins.

The Blair Witch Project showed how the horror genre can still reinvent itself, even on a shoestring budget.

But Donkey Punch has no such merits. Indeed, it has no redeeming features whatsoever. There is not a single shred of humanity, imagination or creativity detectable anywhere among its 99 long minutes.

Its sole purpose seems to be to suggest that, as far as British youth is concerned, all women are sluts, all men are sadists, everyone takes drugs, group sex with strangers is par for the course and sado-masochism's the norm.

But that's not the worst of it. No, the most depressing thing about Donkey Punch is that we paid for it. It received half of its £1million funding from the government backed UK Film Council and could not have been made without National Lottery funding.

What possible justification can there be for almost half a million pounds of lottery money being spent on this tripe? Lottery money is supposed to help create a better Britain - not coarsen it.

Because that's what Donkey Punch is all about - the coarsening of society to the point where films that revel in sadism, savagery and deviant sex are somehow hailed as authentic social commentary deserving of public funding.

For the sad truth about films like Donkey Punch is that they not only apparently glorify the worst of human behaviour, they also serve to normalise it. They desensitise a society where young people are unsure of the rules any more, where children can be led to think it's not cool to say 'No' to anything - not to drugs, to knives, to sex, to violence.

Thus the old liberal mantra that 'anything is acceptable between consenting adults' has been extended to encompass behaviour that is not just distasteful but dangerous. And we wonder why violent sex acts are on the increase!

It's not just a criminal underclass who get sucked into this amoral orbit, either. Take the case of Jessica Davies.

Nice middle-class Jessica - the niece of a former Tory MP - was just 28 when she reportedly confessed to slitting her lover's throat after a knife she was holding allegedly slipped during a sex game at her Paris apartment last year. You have to read that sentence again to realise how utterly horrific it is.

Needless to say, she was out of her mind on drugs and alcohol at the time, so cannot remember the precise details of what took place.

French Police suspect Jessica may have been 'inspired' by the Meredith Kercher case, in which the pretty English student was murdered as part of what police believe to have been a warped sex game involving Meredith's female flatmate and two men. Again, drink and drugs were involved.

This is the warped world that Donkey Punch inhabits. It portrays a world in which group sex, violence and drugs are part of a typical night out for British youth. In which working-class tarts are there to be abused by posh bastards. In which all traditional codes of behaviour are to be mocked as meaningless.

Which brings me back to the director's assertions that his film simply reflects 'what's out there in society'. Really? Or is society shaped by what's out there on the screen?

I'm not suggesting that all those who go to see Donkey Punch will somehow emerge as sexual sadists or mass murderers. That would be absurd. But I do believe that such 'torture porn' films, as they have been dubbed, contribute towards a society in which sexual savagery is no longer perceived as extreme or exceptional, but increasingly regarded as acceptable and commonplace.

I'm thinking here of the footballers and rugby players who 'roast' girls in group sex sessions. Of the teenagers who film themselves having sex then post it on the internet. Of the dramatic rise in sexually transmitted diseases among 16 to 24-year-olds whose laissez-faire attitude to sex now accounts for half of all such infections in Britain.

And yet as a society we not only fail to condemn casual sex - and the drink and drug culture that fuels it. We actually pay puerile first-time directors like Oliver Blackburn - the Oxford educated son of a lawyer and an art curator - hundreds of thousands of pounds to make films that apparently actively revel in it. Now that really is scary.

In truth, this film is the sort of low-grade, low-intelligence sewage that we expect to seep out of Hollywood's 'straight to video' gutters. The fact that its director is now being hailed as one of our most promising young talents speaks volumes about the liberal establishment that controls Britain's arts subsidies.

Every charity whose genuine attempts to improve British society have been denied Lottery funding will have every right to feel Donkey Punch is a kick in the face.