‘Hardcore Guaranteed’ British Porn Documentary Is Now Streaming

The United Kingdom has long been out of step with the rest of Europe, and even the United States, when it comes to porn. While, as AVN.com reported, Denmark in 1960 became the world’s first country to legalize porn, and in the United States a landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision effectively made porn a legal industry of its own, Great Britain has never fully repealed its laws against porn. There has been considerable loosening of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act  over the years, but it was not until February of this very year when the U.K.’s Crown Prosecution Service announced that it would no longer bring cases against producers and distributors of porn that depicts such activities as male fisting, “watersports” and consensual sadomasochism, as AVN.com reported.  Imagine, then, what Mike Freeman was up against in the late 1960s, when London was swinging but producing porn was still very much illegal. To make porn in that social atmosphere took a person who was either incredibly tough, incredibly crazy, or both. Freeman proved he was both when, in 1969, he was convicted of the brutal murder of an even more brutal East End gangster, Gerald Hawley. Freeman, who claims that he was wrongfully convicted due to police corruption, served 10 years of a life sentence—and immediately returned to the porn business, even ending up back in prison for violating the obscenity law by producing hardcore gay porn. The bizarre story of Mike Freeman is the subject of a 2016 documentary film, Hardcore Guaranteed. Now, three years after its limited release, the documentary can be viewed by anyone thanks to the Amazon.com streaming service, which this week has made the NC-17-rated documentary available online. The film bills itself as “inspired” by the book I, Pornographer, which is Freeman’s autobiography. The book tells the story of, according to its own press copy, “the making of porn in the Sixties: The sex mad models who did it for kicks. Orgies of sex and drugs. The Kray Twins who fed their victims to pigs and pythons. Violence, corruption and murder in the London Underworld. The hard and degrading British Prisons where law and order stopped at the prison gates. The Swinging Sixties, marijuana and LSD trips.” But “most of all”  the book claims to detail, “And most of all the "perverse sexual games played by the Pornographer.”  How much of those escapades make it into the film? Hardcore Guaranteed may be rented from Amazon at this link, for $2.99, to find out.