Before we get into the Italian porn flick Shocking let’s focus on the poster. This is, once again, the work of the marvelous Mafé, who has gone unidentified here for many years. Well, turns out all along he was paperback cover artist Mario Ferrari, whose work we’ve shared often. We probably should have deduced it long ago from the stylistic similarity, but late or not, we always figure it out eventually, even if it takes like fifteen years. We’re curious whether Ferrari deciding to credit his porn posters to a pseudonym was deliberate misdirection, or just a whim derived from working in a different area of promotional art. We’ll probably never know. We’ve gone back and re-keyworded all our previous Mafé and Mario Ferrari posts, so you can now see everything we have on him by clicking his links at bottom.
As for the movie, which was written and directed by French filmmaker Claude Mulot, it’s a political satire following various people, among them Karine Gambier, Emmanuelle Parèze, and Marie-Christine Chireix, as warfare rages between the Soviet Union and U.S. The geopolitical sequences are handled in exactly the absurd fashion you’d expect, as the U.S. president drinks vodka and the Russian president swills Bourbon. Eventually, the Russian prez accidentally hits the big red nuclear button while receiving a blowjob, and the U.S. accidentally retaliates under nearly identical circumstances. While the movie is high-concept, in the end the plot is a mere fig leaf fronting assorted orgies. Sound fun? Then go for it. For our part, we just came for the poster.
