THRISSUR: The erotic movies that once excited, aroused and gave a turn-on for tens of thousands of porn lovers inside the ‘confinements’ of B and C class theatres in the State and the posters of scantily-clad sex actresses on the compound-walls of every lane and by-lane in the town have become a thing of past with the emergence of the high-speed Internet connections and android phones.
The advent of high-speed Internet services like 3G and 4G and smart phones have virtually sounded the death knell to the B grade movie industry in Kerala, where once a deluge of soft porn movies, also known as ‘Shakeela films,’ made on a shoestring budget of ` 20-25 lakh, managed to rake in the moolah, and give the mega stars’ movies a run for their money. If around 57 movies released out of the total 89 films released in 2001 were raunchy soft-porn sizzlers, it has come down to a big naught in the last few years.
G Sureshkumar, president of the Kerala Film Producers Association, said the porn movie industry, which brought a lot of disgrace and ignominy to the Malayalam film industry in the beginning of 2000, will vanish without a trace, without a chance for its re-emergence.
The state Censor Board and film fraternity had taken some bold steps to curb the spread of the sizzling flick wave which was at its zenith in the beginning of 2000 when Shakeela’s movies had the Midas touch.
The introduction of high speed Internet service in mobile handsets have virtually sounded the death knell for the industry, he said. Though some of the producers made a few weak attempts to revive the industry during the 2007-2010 period, none of these movies could bring the desired response and fared pretty poorly at the box office pointing that there is no chance for the re-emergence of this genre in future, unless there is no major visual value addition, said Shaji Viswanathan, general secretary of Kerala Film Exhibitors Association.
According to experts, it is estimated that there are around 30 million porn sites worldwide.
With the introduction of high speed Internet on mobile phones, there is no need for a youngster to stealthily go to a theatre to watch X-rated scenes.
Almost all major porn movies and clips are just a touch away, says M M Hamsa, general secretary of Kerala Film Distributors Association. “May be a classic film centred on sex like ‘Rathinirvedam’ may make the cash registers ring on rare occasions, but there is no chance for the comeback of the hot movie as its economics has been changed completely,” says Sureshkumar who remade ‘Rathinirvedam’ recently.