9 Lives of a Wet Pussy

Since he is a supposed crackhead (or as Vincent Gallo once noted, “Abel Ferrara was on so much crack when I did THE FUNERAL, he was never on set. He was in my room trying to pick-pocket me.”) who has directed some of the most unwaveringly sleazy works of celluloid art-trash to slither out of the busted bowels of NYC, it should be no surprise that the McGuido auteur Abel Ferrara (Ms. 45, Bad Lieutenant) started his filmmaking career in pornography, with his first feature being the incest-themed blue movie 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy (1976). Indeed, Ferrara certainly went ‘all the way’ with his first feature film, as the somewhat strange fuck flick not only features the director’s then-girlfriend getting boned by other people, but the director himself being cinematically debased (though many reviewers assume Ferrara hired a cock-double for his scenes, the filmmaker revealed in his obscure 2010 documentary Mulberry St. that he bravely used his own member for the scenes, thus demonstrating his unwavering ‘commitment’ as a true, if not seemingly terribly troubled, auteurist filmmaker). As Italian actress-turned-auteur Asia Argento, who starred in Ferrara’s little mess of a movie New Rose Hotel (1998), stated in 2001 regarding her colleague, “Mr. Ferrara will not speak about his porn film. He says that now he has two daughters and that’s why he will not allow it to be re-released or talk about in interviews,” yet since then, the director has discussed the film, even complaining about the experience of making the film in a 2010 interview with the Guardian, “It's bad enough paying a guy $200 to fuck your girlfriend, then he can't get it up.” In fact, Ferrara had mentioned 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy in interviews long before 2010 because, as noted by biographer Brad Steven in his work Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision (2004), the director told a French journalist in 1988 who asked whether or not the film was a thriller, “Some episodes were sort of like something you’d find in a thriller, but otherwise it was rather an erotic movie. It was my first feature, one of the first things I shot in 35mm. It was a sexy portmanteau drama about three or four women we knew, their sexual adventures. It consisted of seven episodes, ten minutes each.” David Pirell, who played the cold husband of the main character of the film, speculated that 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, “was a way of raising funds to do The Driller Killer. That movie (in my opinion) had redeeming social value, although it was basically a grade B porno. It was filmed during Fall 1975. We had a great time making it, because we were all beginning our careers and had been friends for many years. Abel was a good and unique director. I remember the film opening at a theatre in the city: everyone attended this screening and laughed at how stupid this movie was, but we believed it would lead to better things. We all learned a lot about the film process, and I learned what I did not want to do.” Originally made under the working titles ‘White Women’ and ‘Nothing Sacred’, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy is somewhat in the spirit of the semi-artsy/quasi-narrative-driven works of auteur-pornographers Armand Weston (The Defiance of Good, Take Off) and Cecil Howard (Neon Nights, Scoundrels), albeit somewhat more degenerate and incoherent. Indeed, featuring Abel Ferrara in a scene where he plays a deeply religious old Polack man (he was 25 at the time!) whose daughters take turns raping him after he gets too drunk on wine, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy features a debauched mix of daughter-on-father incest, lesbo miscegenation and lily-licking of the black blue blood sort, superficial occult themes (including dubious tarot card readings and Nigerian ‘black’ magic), and aesthetically vulgar 1970s hairdos (sometimes it is hard to tell if it is a man or woman that is giving a blowjob), 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy is by no means a lost masterpiece from a great American auteur, but simply evidence that proves Abel Ferrara has always been an ‘exploitation’ filmmaker with a wayward moral compass. 

 Beginning with close-up shots of a negress massaging oily white tits and a high yellow chick sucking on a white cock, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy at first seems like another miserable miscegenation porn movie, but things change quite quickly after the title screen disappears, at least temporarily. Narrated and presented by a hippie-like chick named ‘Gypsy’ (Dominique Santos), who reads out letters written to her by her former lesbian lover Pauline (Pauline LaMonde), 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy is a curiously convoluted tale of compulsive carpet-munching, anticlimactic cumshots, and rather tedious tarot readings. As Pauline confesses in a letter to Gypsy, she is cheating on her husband David (David Pirell) with a French stable boy (Shaker Lewis), stating of the erotic experience, “oh god, how I love it when he cums and cums…Oh Gypsy, you must really learn to love men again.” As Gypsy states to the viewer after reading Pauline’s letter, “Learn to love men again? That’s Pauline. She does nothing but have intercourse all day long. Then she writes letters about it as if I might be interested.” Indeed, while reasonably beauteous, Gypsy is a devout dyke and has nil interest in men. Instead, Gypsy spends her days all by her lonesome playing with her kitty cat and tarots cards in the hope that Pauline will one day come back to her so they can rekindle their ‘cunning linguist’ games. After smoking opium from an exotic peace pipe, Gypsy reads a letter from Pauline where she complains regarding her hubby, “Oh we still make love together when he’s not snorting coke with Rachel or balling his mistresses and boyfriends,” adding regarding the dubious status of their relationship, “But this cold detachment of his, which derives me wild when we are in bed, makes the rest of my life unbearable.” Indeed, while taking a leak at a gas station bathroom, Pauline decides to counteract her husband’s ‘cold detachment’ by having sex with a random stranger. Reading tarot cards in a supposed ‘Hungarian fashion,’ Gypsy also describes how savage salaciousness is in Pauline’s blood, remarking, “I know Pauline, she has her grandmother’s soul. They even say she has her grandmother’s face. You see, Pauline’s great-grandfather and two daughters came to America in 1903 from Poland. Pauline’s great-grandfather was a very strict Christian. He was really overprotective with the two girls. When the old man would go out to work, he would lock them up in the apartment. The only time they could leave the house was under his chaperon. Life was pretty lonely and…the older they got, the more curious they became.” Indeed, Pauline’s great-grandfather (played by auteur Abel Ferrara, who sports a rather unbelievable grey wig) was sexually ravaged by his own two daughters after he had too much holy wine to drink. Gypsy then goes on to complain about how Pauline had a steamy love affair with a virginal Nigerian princess named Nacala (Joy Silver) and how she “was afraid of that black bitch” and her double black magic. In one of the more would-be-depraved scenes of the film in what is a less than dreamy dream sequence, Gypsy morphs into a man (of course, this is not actually depicted in the film) and literally begins biting Pauline’s beaver. In the end, Pauline somehow ‘magically’ appears at Gypsy’s apartment. After getting all pseudo-philosophical and stoically stating, “There is no reality except human reality,” Gypsy walks over to Pauline’s naked body and states, “Sister, I have been waiting…It has been lonely and dark for me here since you left.” 

 While I was hoping 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy would be a wanton lost masterpiece, it ultimately proved to be one of Abel Ferrara’s worst cinematic efforts to date. While it attempts to tell a sordid story in an experimental way, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy ultimately seems like a haphazardously constructed collection of banal fuck scenes that Ferrara attempted to piece together with a Sapphic pseudo-occult storyline. Indeed, when everything is said and done, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy is nothing more than a botched celluloid orgasm with a rather misleading title that, with the exception of sexual degeneracy and cheap exploitation, gives little, if any, indication of what sort of filmmaker Ferrara would evolve into. Of course, as musical composer Joe Delia, who would go on to write music for most of Ferrara’s films, revealed regarding the film, “it was never anyone’s intention to make an intellectual statement with this production. I always had the feeling that it was a means to get to the next level, which was to get another film made.” As early Ferrara collaborator Douglas Merov would also insightfully reveal, “The only reason Abel made 9 LIVES OF A WET PUSSY was because that’s the only kind of film he could get money for. Arthur Weisberg, an old porno producer from Detroit, gave him the money. Why he’s not credited, who knows? Tax reasons, maybe. Arthur was a character, boy – a truly tough, no-nonsense Jew […] I saw the film and laughed my ass off at the sight of my friends in powdered wigs and beards showing their private parts for all the perverts in the world to see.” Indeed, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy is nothing short of an abject embarrassment, so it should be no surprise that Ferrara tends to tell people that his arthouse-slasher flick The Driller Killer (1979) was his first film, though the director apparently told Brad Stevens, “I’m not ashamed of having made a porn film, but if I hadn’t directed anything except 9 LIVES OF A WET PUSSY, you wouldn’t be writing a book about me.” A work that ranks below Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire (1953) and John Waters’ Mondo Trasho (1969) in terms of embarrassing first features, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy is ultimately a potent remainder of what can happen when you get involved with Jewish pornographers. 

-Ty E