Sex, violence, and sensible heels on housewives...this movie has it all. Pages of Death was a half-hour video commissioned by The Hour of St. Francis radio program and distributed by a group that was affiliated with the Catholic Church. Its mission? To teach the world about the dangers of girly mags.
See, according to Pages of Death, a porno mag had the power to sway "even grown men" to a life of crime and violence.
Yes, we're talking about those magazines with ladies in their underwear. No, it doesn't make sense. That didn't stop them from creating a cinematic masterpiece, though.
The "very special story" begins with an eleven-year-old girl named Karen Flemming, whose charming headshot in a frame could only mean one thing: homegirl is gonna die, and she gonna die good.
We find out that Karen's parents are basically right out of Leave It to Beaver except for the fact that her dad apparently doesn't give a shit about her.
The mom's like "I'm really worried about Karen," and then the dad goes "Seriously don't worry about her. I already forgot she was my daughter." Well, he doesn't actually say that, but he's way more interested in his newspaper than the fact that one of his 27 kids is missing.
Then we can fast forward a little bit to the part when we meet Paul. Because Paul is important. He's our killer (spoiler alert).
Paul raped and killed a little girl, so he's as shitty as they come. He's also a dumbass because he forgot to wash his shoes after he did it. This was before CSI and Law & Order were on the air though, so it's slightly more understandable how he could be so stupid.
Why did Paul do it? The nudie mags. Oh, those nudie mags. All of the "GALS!" and boobs and bare ankles...it was too much for Paul.
So he killed Karen.
The moral of this story is not that Paul is a murderous prick with insufferable parents who think he can do no wrong. No, the message is that the nudie mags did it.
Oh, and the guy who works at the corner store also did it, because he sold the magazines.
So obviously all of this is bullshit, since if everyone who ever saw pornography became a murderer, we'd all be killed by now.
Anyway, you need to watch the whole thing because my recap just can't do it justice.
Oh, and for everyone whose mind was boggled by those bizarre statistics at the end:
1. First the narrator tells us, "sex crimes have increased with the same ratio as the obscene publication racket." Luckily, since 1962, a lot more research has been done on this topic. According to Psychology Today, the invention of the Internet has provided the best way to see the effects of the population having a dramatically increased access to pornography. And, since the '90s when porn became available in every household computer, sexual irresponsibility, divorce, teen sex, and rape have all declined. Of course, correlation does not equal causation, but it's safe to say that increased exposure to porn does not equal increased sexual deviance.
2. Then the narrator says, "75 to 90% of obscene material end up in the hands of children." These numbers are absurd, assuming that there isn't a program out there where when someone buys a porn magazine, someone gives one to a child in need. Even then, that would only make it 50% of the pornos. Are people using them up then giving the hand-me-down girly mags to their kids?
Oh, by the way, the narrator, Tom Harmon, who asserts all of these facts? His wife was Elyse Knox, an actress who started her career as a pin-up girl during World War II.
Now if that isn't the look of someone who'd inspire you to murder a small child, I don't know what is.
