Joanna Angel’s gore-splattered adult movie Re-Penetrator is still a cult hit over 20 years after it was released – but she says she was forced to delete it from the internet two weeks after its release
A veteran adult star says she “broke the internet” with one of her first films – which was so graphic it got banned everywhere.
In one of her first ever films, Joanna Angel decided to shoot a Halloween special which featured fake blood, zombies and graphic Sєx.
The 20-minute movie, called Re-Penetrator made her famous, earning her a first AVN award for “most outrageous scene” and kick-starting a successful 21-year career in porn.
But it didn’t go down well with everyone.
One of the most graphic sections showed a zombie, played by Joanna, waking up on a mortician’s slab and then, as the pair begin making out, she started violently dismembering him.
The scene used “six fire extinguishers’ worth of fake blood”, Joanna told the Pillow Talk podcast.
Describing the moment that “broke the internet” Joanna says: “I’m like pulling his intestines out and there’s blood squirting out everywhere …and then I guess at the end he’s ᴅᴇᴀᴅ and I try to f*** him.
“We sH๏τ in this very big loft [with] very high ceilings and there was actually blood on the ceiling.”
The scene, intended as a Halloween special, came out in mid-October 2002 and created an instant stir.
“The website actually did break …it literally broke the internet,” she continued.
We got tons and tons and tons of traffic you know, people are calling me from Fangoaria and all these horror magazines … it was crazy.”
The clip was an instant hit – but problems were not far behind.
She continued: “I get an email from our credit card processor that’s like ‘Hey this literally breaks every rule, all of them, necrophilia and blood and this and that…’.”
Joanna was in for another shock when the film, which she had paid for herself with around $9,000 that she had earned from stripping, was going to be taken down from the company’s website.
Luckily, she says, after she broke down and begged and pleaded the credit card company agreed to turn a blind eye until after Halloween.
In its two weeks of life Re-Penetrator earned millions of fans. After it was deleted, Joanna says “so many angry people in customer service asking ‘where did the zombie porn go?’”
To this day, Joanna sees bootleg DVD s of the clip being sold at shows. It doesn’t bother her though, she says: “I didn’t really care like about the piracy of it because I just wanted the movie to exist.”
Over 20 years later she’s still going strong, giving up on studio ownership because she found she was spending too much time on admin and has gone back to her first love, performing.
And every now and then she gets a phone call from a curious academic who wants some help with a thesis about legendary “zombie porn” movie Repenetrator.