hafital | Green Porno

Courtesy of The Guardian: Brief encounters of the animal kind: Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno

Well, that's decided. I want to be Isabella Rossallini when I grow up. Or maybe I'm just in love with her.

Direct link to Green Porno. Watch them all. Leave it to Isabella Rossallini to make snails sexy. I mean, seriously.

Favorites are Bee and Snail, and Why Vagina, but they're all really kind of fantastic.

There are certain things you don't expect to hear Isabella Rossellini say. Things like, "I have sex several times a day. Any opportunity. Any female." Or, "To have babies, I need to mate with another hermaphrodite in the 69 position." Or, "When needed, I can have an erection six feet long." But there are plenty of delightfully unexpected things about Green Porno, Rossellini's series of short films about the sex lives of animals, the second batch of which has just gone live on the Sundance Channel's website.

In the first series, Rossellini enthusiastically portrayed, among other things, a bee bleeding to death after leaving its penis inside its mate (as they do), a mantis having its head rather frighteningly chewed off in flagrante delicto ("I keep copulating. Nothing stops me. I keep going! Sex!") and a snail clamped to its partner, dart-like appendages jabbing away ("I use them to inflict pain on my partners before mating – it turns me on. I love to be hurt too. Sadomasochism excites me"). The run ended with a strangely endearing shot of her severed head playing host to gestating maggots.

In the new batch, the theme has shifted underwater and the scale is no longer restricted to the miniature. Lessons are offered on the hydrodynamic shortcomings of a hefty whale penis, self-cloning among starfish and the extraordinary length, relative to its body, of the barnacle's nob. You haven't really lived until you've seen the look on Rossellini's face as a 20-foot handmade penis snakes its way from her clavicle to the other side of the room.

In fact, her charmingly sexy performance is integral to these shorts' successful character, whether she's strolling through a forest of eight-foot-tall, frilled, barbed and spiralling phalli or noting how important it is that her vagina's shape is "species-specific, so that I'm not screwed by a bear". What other actor could bring both coquettish charm and unbridled glee to the declaration "We are sequential hermaphrodites!" – delivered while wearing a limpet shell at a rakish angle?