Mistique: Bottom Of The Barrel British Softcore

 

Whenever I think about the world of British softcore porn in the days before the R18 case and the unexpected legalisation of hardcore in 2000, a few names spring to mind – the 1980s saw the Electric Blue series and, after the BBFC ensured that anything even remotely resembling sex was no longer allowed on screen (with American adult features sometimes being chopped down to 40 minutes in length before being deemed suitable for British audiences – and they wondered why there was a thriving illegal trade) labels like Strand International finished out the decade with the lowest rent titles imaginable, where everything – the production values and the performers alike – was bottom of the barrel. If I think about 1990s softcore though, one name dominates – Mistique Films.

Mistique had a relentless production and release schedule throughout the second half of the decade – in 1996, the only year I have a complete reference point for, the company made 20 films and I have little reason to believe that they weren’t doing similar numbers in other years. This was not a company with a huge staff. In fact, there is every reason to believe that the entire Mistique output was the work of one man, by himself. I’m happy to be corrected on this – but I’ve seen Mistique releases and there is nothing to suggest that they are not shot, directed and edited by anyone other than Malcolm Prechner, the man behind the label.

Prechner was almost a cartoonish stereotype of what people outside the industry believed a British porn director was. Shirt, fat, middle-aged and with a seedy air about him, he was not going to be anyone’s choice when it came to rehabilitating adult entertainment with the general public. But his work dominated the British-made sex film world in the mid-1990s. Prior to Mistique, he’d run Orchid Films, which was effectively the same thing; why the name changed is anyone’s guess, but hey, I’m in no position to criticise that. We might also question why ‘mystique’ is misspelt – I’d like to think that it was a creative decision but I suspect otherwise.

Mistique had a formula that worked in the sex-starved world of legal British softcore. A major stumbling block with softcore – especially softcore struggling under the BBFC’s mad rules of the period – was what to do with men. Clearly, any sign of sexual arousal in a male was not allowed but neither was overly vigorous thrusting. It was easier just to take men out of the equation entirely, which is what Mistique did. The company’s films were what is known as ‘girl-girl’, usually with two performers but sometimes stretching to four in the more extravagant productions. Even here, producers had to be careful lest they showed too much exposed genitalia, and so the average Mistique film had naked girls stroking each other listlessly, seemingly brought to the heights of arousal by osmosis. Knowing what the BBFC would allow, producers like Prechner could shoot and edit accordingly.

Mistique, like its rivals of the time such as Fantasy Blue and Liquid Gold, depended on the fact that for many viewers, this was all that was on offer. If all you wanted was naked girls and lightweight lesbianism – or if you were resigned to the fact that this was all you could get – then these films probably did the job. I mean, people bought girly magazines that consisted of photos of naked women, so there was obviously a market. But make no mistake – these films were all awful, unless I was just unfortunate enough to see the very worst examples. Nothing happened, and it didn’t happen very slowly. The performers, for the most part, approached it all with the enthusiasm of someone queuing up at the bank and few were ever credited, even when they were recognisable names – only later tapes bother to mention the likes of Teresa May, Louise Hodges and Linda Leigh by name on the cover. Each film lasted for about an hour – the standard length for British-made smut of the period – and so dismal was the market at the time that the tapes made a big deal about the fact that the women on the cover actually appeared in the film. This was, amazingly, a big deal back then. Almost every sleeve featured nude shots on the front cover – another selling point. These tapes were not trying to be sophisticated. They were as low an art form as you can imagine – yet somehow, still not the worst British softcore out there.

Somehow or other, I ended up on the Mistique press list around 1995; actually, I had been on the Orchid press list before that, which makes me think that there is another archive of sleeves lying around somewhere (obviously, if I find them, I’ll add them here). Every month, an envelope of covers would pop through the letterbox. Getting actual films out of the company was rather harder, and after finally seeing a few I understood why. No one, not even the most uncritical and shameless adult film reviewers, was going to give these glowing reviews (actually, some of them probably would…). The supply seems to have come to an end after 1997 and I have no idea how long Mistique actually kept going for. But obviously, the R18 revolution that began around that time with the BBFC’s experiment in allowing snippets of actual hardcore, and from that moment on, the days were numbered for this sort of thing. While softcore didn’t vanish overnight, it had to buck its ideas up to survive – and many of the producers, Prechner included, simply jumped onto the hardcore bandwagon. After all, they had the production infrastructure in place – it wasn’t a big jump.

 

His new company, Premier Film Productions, made much the same sort of thing as before – just with actual sex scenes and male performers. Prechner himself seems to have performed in at least one film, which nobody was asking to see. I haven’t seen any of the R18 releases and, as usual with British releases, the covers are too explicit to share here – the entire British porn industry seemed to believe that they had to plaster as many hardcore images as they could over the cover just to prove that the film was hardcore – an understandable concern but one that effectively ruined the original cover art on many films.

How long Premier Film Productions lasted is another mystery. The last release that I’m aware of is a 3-disc collection of the Dungeon Diva series from 2006. The British porn industry was unfortunate enough to be legalised just as the internet bit into physical media sales. There were a few good years but once PornHub and the like came along, it was the end of the road for a business that was already hampered by distribution restrictions.

The Mistique films are effectively forgotten now. As with many other British softcore titles of the era, I sometimes think that I’m the only person who has kept any record of their existence. In the grand scheme of things, they are entirely unimportant. But as a record of a time and place, they are essential. These films tell us a lot about Britain in the 1990s and so should be remembered. If not necessarily watched.

The cover gallery below features 40 titles – and one Orchid release. If you have others, feel free to pass them on.

 

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