Squalor Motel

Forget Gregory Dark’s (in)famous hardcore crossover hit New Wave Hookers (1985), Squalor Motel (1985) directed by Kim Christy (Dream Lovers, She-Male Sanitarium), which was released the same year, is the ultimate punk/new wave/new romanticist fuck flick. Indeed, like Slava Tsukerman’s dystopian cult classic Liquid Sky (1982) minus the sci-fi meets Mark L. Lester’s Class of 1984 (1982) minus the crime elements meets the old school video game Maniac Mansion (1987) on Viagra as directed by the tranny and Yazoo obsessed grandnephew of Norman Bates, Christy’s preternaturally lecherous celluloid labyrinth is unquestionably one of the most idiosyncratic, bizarre, and memorable hardcore flicks of the late porn chic era. Featuring an eclectic freak show of perverted motel dwellers with a new wave/new romanticist fashion sense, a multicultural transvestite punk band, an original synthesizer-driven musical score, and a sensual surrealist mise-en-scène that seems like that result of kraut cult auteur Eckhart Schmidt attempting to mimic everything from Jean Cocteau to Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Squalor Motel is celluloid sleaze with style that as just as fetishistic in its set design, wardrobe, and music as it is sexually. Set in a patently politically incorrect pervert pandemonium of pleasure that is inhabited by a lady-licking bald bastard with a rather repellant French art fag mustache, a deranged blowjob-demanding doorman as portrayed by Jamie Gillis (Through the Looking Glass, Water Power), a Hitler-like physician of the Nazi mad scientist sort portrayed by Hebraic porn star Herschel Savage (Debbie Does Dallas, Blonde Ambition) that attempts to cure a Jewess of her frigidness by giving her an extensive gynecological exam with his tongue and member, and an impotent redneck with a seemingly supernatural collection of blowup dolls, Christy's extra curious post-punk porno will certainly appeal to fans of both the oeuvre of avant-garde pornographer ‘Rinse Dream’ aka Stephen Sayadian (Nightdreams trilogy, Café Flesh, Dr. Caligari) and Liquid Sky, as a delightfully deranged and decadent dream-within-a-dream where nothing is as it seems, especially during sex. Indeed, New Wave Hookers might be good unclean fun featuring Judaic Jamie Gillis and a little negro fantasizing about “white bitches” that get horny from listening to new wave music, but Squalor Motel is a shockingly stylish and nicely nuanced proto-alt-porn piece that features an entire unhinged universe that reminds the viewer that there was indeed once a time when the degenerates in the porn industry cared about creating salaciously stylish and creative celluloid art.  Either that or cult porn auteur Kim Christy, who is a transvestite that specialized in tranny porn, was more interested in set-design than heterosexual sex.

 Miss Clark (played by Colleen Brennan, who previously appeared in popular exploitation works like Jack Hill's Foxy Brown, Russ Meyer’s Supervixens and Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS) works at the front desk of a sleazy yet stylish new wave themed motel and she constantly reads extra-erotic novels with delightful little titles like “Bound Pig Fuckers” and dreams about all sorts of meta-sexual debauchery, so sometimes she has a hard time separating reality from fantasy, especially when it comes to sensual matters. Miss Clark works for a sleazy, swarthy, and considerably repulsive Hebrew-like fellow named Manny (Nick Random), who she incessantly cock-teases by saying super sassy things like, “Too bad you don’t have any class. You know, if you were half the man…some nights I might let you lick my ass. You would like that, would you Manny…running your tongue between the cheeks of my butt.” Not unlike Norman Bates, Manny loves cross-dressing and spying on his guests via peepholes that he has assembled in all of the rooms of his truly offbeat motel from hedonistic hell. While a certified scumbag of the patently pathetic sort, Manny is not greedy, as he allows Miss Clark to join him while looking at guests engaging in carnal games via peepholes. Indeed, through a secret peephole in a ‘hip’ and ‘edgy’ lounge segment of motel called ‘The Reptile Room’—a seemingly perennially changing pleasure-dome that is frequented by a dominatrix that wears an SS officer hat and parades around a gimp on a leash—Manny and Miss Clark get off to spying on a seemingly faggy fellow with a French art fag mustache and pancake makeup who quite shockingly exerts his rampant heterosexuality by bending over a babe on a pseudo-classical sculpture of a little girl. Of course, this sex scenario is rather tame compared to what Miss Clark while voyeuristically gaze at during the rest of the night at the maniac motel.

 When a young blonde babe named Nancy (Desiree Lane) who has just married a nerdy Guido shows up to the motel to wait for her husband so they can prepare for their upcoming honeymoon in Hawaii, she has no idea that she is about to be extensively defiled by the guests and employees of the somewhat esoteric establishment. Indeed, after being forced to devour the dick of a demented doorman (Jamie Gillis) who wears a trenchcoat full of black market items ranging from Preparation H to K-Y jelly, Nancy enters the Reptile Room where a multicultural tranny new wave group is playing for an eclectic collection of erotic eccentrics, including a chain-smoking new romanticist babe who is giving a handjob to an unseen gentleman whose cock is poking out of a gloryhole. When the tranny band stops playing, all the guests of the Reptile Room stare at and mock Nancy, but luckily Miss Clark, who has a thing for the naïve and seemingly virginal newlywed as demonstrated by a long cunt-chomping dream-sequence, comes to her rescue and salaciously states, “I know just how to relax that muscular tension.” After sending Nancy somewhere so that she can ‘calm down,’ Miss Clark begins peeping inside various rooms at the hotel as a proud voyeur who admits regarding her vice, “Oh, I love to watch. Watching is almost as good as doing it.” In a sea-themed room, a stupid surfer-like dude is carnally serviced by a high yellow negress on a bed in the shape of a ship. In another bizarrely-themed room, an impotent redneck finally manages to ‘rise to the occasion’ after one of his many blowup dolls transforms into a real flesh-and-blood woman. Meanwhile, pedophile-like motel owner Manny, who is sporting nothing but a Miss Piggy mask, tiny pink bikini, and a little girl’s ballet tutu, masturbates to the bro with the magical blowup doll. 

 Unquestionably, one of the most sickest and shocking segments of Squalor Motel is a scene where a fellow named Dr. Thumbs (Herschel Savage)—a Svengali-like medical physician with an Uncle Adolf mustache who speaks with a horrendous pseudo-German accent and sports a bloody lab coat—‘successfully’ attempts to make a frigid Jewess named Mrs. Shipowitz (played by Tantala Ray, who previously appeared in Stephen Sayadian’s Café Flesh), who sits with her legs spread open on a operating table, sexually aroused. After Dr. Thumbs cures Mrs. Shipowitz of being a frigid sexless bitch, he tells his nurse to schedule a follow-up session, stating, “12 months or 12,000 fucks…whatever comes sooner.” In easily one of the most artfully phantasmagoric fuck scenes of cinema history, Miss Clark engages in a shadowy quasi-expressionistic threesome with a male guest whose face make-up somewhat resembles that of David Bowie's from the cover art of the post-Ziggy Stardust album Aladdin Sane (1973) and his corpse-like lover. In the end, Nancy’s husband finally arrives, only to discover his sweetheart masturbating furiously in a closet while queen bitch Miss Clark laughs manically. 

 On top of being an aberrantly aesthetically pleasing experience that makes Liquid Sky seem like sentimental celluloid child’s play, Squalor Motel is a genuinely humorous cinematic affair, albeit in an innately immoral fashion that makes the literary satire of Ambrose Bierce seem quite puritanical by comparison. Indeed, one has to wonder about a porn production where Judaic porn star Herschel Savage—a man who developed his stage name with his kosher comrade Jamie Gillis (who was incidentally born on the same day as Hitler) by combining a stereotypically ‘nerdy Jewish identity’ with that of a stud—devours an ambiguously Jewish character’s cunt while donning an Uncle Adolf mustache. In other words, Squalor Motel is what one might expect in a sort of campy celluloid new wave hell. Indeed, aside from Teutonic auteur Eckhart Schmidt’s art-horror flicks like Der Fan (1982) and especially Das Gold der Liebe (1983) aka The Gold of Love, as well as Austrian cult auteur Niki List’s sardonic comedy Malaria (1982), Christy’s rather underrated fuck flick is probably the only film that adds an element of danger and darkness to the new wave and new romanticist subcultures. Indeed, new wave is like punk with a better fashion sense sans the visceral potency. Luckily, Squalor Motel manages to be simultaneously strong, raw, and stylish, even if it does feature ebony tranny rockers and hysterical Hebraic Hitler-wannabees.

-Ty E