Rating unavailable

Republican presidential primary hopeful Mike Huckabee gets fucked five different times in this year’s HUMP! Film Festival. Allow us to explain: conceived (the old-fashioned way) by Savage Love columnist Dan Savage in 2005, the amateur porn exhibition includes among its rules and guidelines the not-mandatory use of a prop determined by HUMP!’s organizers. Judging by its recurring role in this collection of lovingly curated short-form smut, now on tour, Huckabee’s super-shitty book God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy was obviously last year’s prop.

So—it’s not like the former Arkansas governor takes five cocks or anything, but he is lampooned right off the top of a very entertaining 90-minute program. In “Hysterical Bullshit”, a fully clothed woman reads from his dumb-ass book (pointedly, a passage about his admiration of the 19 Kids and Counting Duggar family) until she succumbs to a quivering orgasm, presumably because somebody is under the desk.

Huckabee also shows up in the hilarious “The Collector”, about a guy whose personal museum of jizz includes contributions from Sean Connery, most of One Direction, and the entire state of Delaware. He’s there again in the equally ticklesome “Let’s Try to Fuck”, a neatly accomplished black-and-white parody of ’50s hygiene films that culminates in a string of increasingly weird one-liners (“Mike Huckabee—that’s an old term for people that urinate themselves”).

These are also among the tamer entries in this year’s road-show version of HUMP!. In the sleek “Art Primo: Dick & Pussy”, an attractive het couple indulges in a lot of straight-up fucking and sucking, while the polymorphous four-way of “Hotels and Haircuts” adds strap-ons and squirting to the mix. Pretty as those are—the iPhone 5–shot “Pachisi” is another pro-level effort—enthusiasm trumps technique in many of the more viscerally memorable shorts, including the decidedly lo-fi “Two Boys and Some Rope” and the wild lesbian pissathon “I Fist a Grrrl”.

Given its mandate of total inclusivity, HUMP! is really at its best with these little dispatches from the margins, the farther out the better. “Blown” no doubt answers a lot of questions people might have about enlarged clits and trans fellatio, while the nightmarish “Lube Dispenser”, with its bandaged fisting partners and human K-Y tube, is the hard-core Clive Barker/David Lynch collaboration you never expected to see.

In all cases, the participants are eager, endearing, and generally a lot more like you and me than the hairless gym monkeys of mainstream porn. Which is also the point, of course. It’s furthermore a showcase for talent that goes beyond the inventive stimulation of toilet parts, as evidenced by the BDSM contraptions of “Unicorn in the Castle” or the impressively accurate faux ’80s music video, “Dick”, which manages to capture the tinny dreadfulness of the era while still being stupidly catchy. (And the spinning penis mandala is a nice touch.)

With the exception of Mike Huckabee, everything about HUMP! is done on the condition of anonymity. Your phone will be confiscated right there in the theatre—forever—if you try to take a sneaky screen grab, and I should probably avoid mentioning that at least one of the contributions to this year’s fine selection was obviously made in Vancouver.

The HUMP! Film Festival screens at the Rio Theatre on Friday and Saturday (September 23 and 24).