Maps to the Stars

 Despite the fact that he directed his first feature, Stereo (1969), 45 years ago and has been making mainstream films with Hollywood stars since the late-1970s, Canadian auteur David Cronenberg (Videodrome, Eastern Promises) had never shot a single frame in the United States, let alone Hollywood, until recently with his latest and long-in-coming work Maps to the Stars (2014) aka Bailey's Quest aka Hollywood Nightmare, though he only spent 5 days in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills directing it, with the rest of the film being shot in the filmmaker’s native city Toronto. Of course, considering the film is one of the most pathologically venomous and shockingly scathing assaults on Hollywood in decades, Cronenberg could not have picked a more tactical and befitting time to finally shoot in Tinseltown. Based on a script turned novel by novelist, actor, screenwriter, producer, and director Bruce Wagner—a man that has demonstrated that he is one of the keenest and remorseless critics of his home city as demonstrated by his writing credits ranging from Paul Bartel’s savage satire Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989) to the underrated five-hour dystopian mini-series Wild Palms (1993)—Maps to the Stars languished in pre-production for six years before Cronenberg could get the funds to make it because no Hollywood producer wanted to touch such a biting work that scathingly portrays Hollywood as a modern day Sodom festering with incest, schizophrenia, teenage drug addiction, sadomasochism, and general psychopathic behavior. Unquestionably Cronenberg’s most humorous work to date, albeit in a brutal fashion that will probably make most viewers feel guilty for laughing, the film makes Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) seem like a silly Disney romp and Paul Schrader’s The Canyons (2013) seem like a Hughes-esque teen drama by comparison. Indeed, next to Maps to the Stars, John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust (1975) and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) seem like nostalgic sentimentalist depictions of Hollywood during the good old days. As a rabid hater of Hollywood and everything it stands for, Cronenberg’s film proved to be a rather therapeutic experience for me. The multilayered tale of an ambiguously Jewish Hollywood dynasty and related intertwined Sunset Boulevard scum who are probably better fit for work in a Gulag than getting paid millions of dollars to star in films that contribute to the moral degradation and infantilization of virtually the entire global population, Maps to the Stars ultimately seems like Cronenberg’s unconscious argument as to why he never decided to work in Hollywood, even though he probably could have flourished there as a fellow member of the Hebraic tribe. Indeed, I like to think the film is a prophetic work about holy-wood’s capitulation.

The Weiss family has some serious problems, which probably has largely to do with the fact the mother and father are brother and sisters and their children are inbred demon seeds. To the Weiss’ credit, they did not know they were brother and sister until after they fell in love, but that did not stop them from spawning schizophrenic children. The patriarch of the family is Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), a celebrity psychotherapist and seemingly psychopathic alpha-conman who has managed to successfully con the masses into buying his bogus ‘hocus pocus’ books because he has so many high-profile clients. Dr. Weiss’ sister/wife is Cristina Weiss (Olivia Williams) is the archetypical ‘controlling mother’ in many ways in that she has masterminded the rather lucrative career of her internationally famous child star son Benjie (Evan Bird), who is an obscenely arrogant yet somewhat intelligent 13-year-old recovering drug addict, sort of like a composite of Macaulay Culkin and especially Justin Bieber. Benjie has an estranged schizophrenic sister named Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), who he has not seen since he was a small child when she tried to kill him and the entire family by burning their house down, but not before giving him an overdose of drugs before setting the family homestead ablaze. Badly scarred by the fire she set seven years previously, Agatha has to always wear leather arm-length gloves and is completely scarred on the left side of her face, which she tries to hide with her goofy pseudo-flapper haircut. Unbeknownst to the Weiss’, deranged daughter Agatha travels from her Florida-based mental institution in an exceedingly hopeless attempt to reunite with her family. Naturally, it will ultimately have tragic consequences.

Ultimately, lapsed pyromaniac Agatha takes a job as a personal assistant from her father’s client Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) after being introduced to the batshit crazy burn victim via an exceedingly overweight Carrie Fisher (playing herself). Among other things, Havana is a once-famous, has-been Hollywood actress of the psychopathically self-absorbed sort who literally jumps for joy when her rival’s toddler son drowns to death, thus enabling her to get a role in a remake of a 1960s classic entitled Stolen Water that her belated mother Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon) starred in and received various prestigious film awards for. Clarice died young in a fire and Havana, who resents her mother’s fame and dubiously blames her being supposedly molested as a child, regularly sees her appear as a ghost who constantly taunts her about her glaring insecurities and lack of talent. One of the reasons that Havana hires Agatha is because she was a ‘victim’ of a fire just like her mother, thus making her think she will somehow be able to get over her progenitor’s ghost if she employs the externally and internally damaged dame. Upon arriving in L.A., the first thing Agatha does is visit the home that she burned down seven years before. Agatha also starts a ‘romantic’ relationship with a struggling actor named Jerome Fontana (played by Robert Pattinson in a role based on screenwriter Bruce Wagner’s own experiences before he became famous in Hollywood) who she met after hiring him as a limo driver. Of course, soft-spoken gentleman Jerome, who is the closest thing to a ‘likeable’ and ‘sane’ character in the entire film, is just using Agatha for “research” purposes, as he wants to further develop his acting chops.

Meanwhile, Bieber-esque bitch boy Benjie is on his way to being just as insane as his sister Agatha. Indeed, not longer after visiting a terminally ill girl named Cammy (Kiara Glasco) in the hospital and asking her how she got AIDS even though she has non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) in what is an elaborately planned publicity stunt to bolster his career for paid press he has gotten as a result of being a 13-year-old that had to enter rehab, Benjie finds himself haunted by the ghost of the terminally ill fan whose deadly disease he could not bother to look up. Benjie is famous for starring in a Home Alone-like film franchise ‘Bad Babysitter’ and his mother Cristina has managed to secure him the lead role of the latest sequel, but he soon finds himself resenting the project after being shown up by an enterprising up-and-coming 4-year-old redhead runt named Roy (Sean Robertson). Of course, Benjie gets back on drugs again in no time. After finding out that she came to visit Benjie, Dr. Weiss decides to confront Agatha and more or less threatens her to stay away from the family. Of course, as the film ultimately reveals, Dr. Weiss seems to resent his daughter more due to the fact that she knows his dark secret about being married to his sister/her mother than the fact that she tried to kill the entire family by burning the house down. Indeed, Dr. Weiss’ entire charismatically vomited “self-help” spiel seems to be a sort of instinctive self-defense mechanism to cope with the deep dark secret that he married and had children with his own sister. Ironically, Dr. Weiss’ most famous book, which he arrogantly describes as “a classic,” is called “Secrets Kill” and as the conclusion of the film will reveal, indeed they do. Indeed, while Maps to the Stars might not be in the spirit of Cronenberg’s old school “body horror” flicks, that does not mean that the film does not have a similarly large body count.  Indeed, not unlike the half-braindead teenagers featured in countless c-grade slasher flicks from the 1980s, you just cannot wait until these innately insufferable, inane, and grotesquely vain characters are put of their misery and snuffed out for good.

In terms of technique and ‘artiness,’ I have never really found David Cronenberg to be a particularly gifted filmmaker. What makes his films interesting are the unnerving subjects he chooses, be it William S. Burroughs’ magnum opus or the sex life of ‘Aryan Christ’ Carl Jung. Indubitably, despite being the director’s first film shot in Hollywood and a rare attempt by the filmmaker to take a stab at satire, Maps to the Stars is archetypically Cronenbergian to the core as a work that takes an unwaveringly unflattering look at the darkness of humanity and the sensitivity of human flesh, be it coming in contact with fire or the used-up genitals of a would-be-MILF over-the-hill fire-crotched actress. Personally, I found nothing particularly striking about Cronenberg’s direction and would even argue that Schrader’s similarly themed failure The Canyons proved to be a more aesthetically pleasing and gripping experience, yet Maps to the Stars is still a far more superior film. Indeed, while a work of celluloid fiction, the film still manages to iconoclastically demystify the mythmakers of Hollywood. Like a more coherent and less esoteric twist on David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001) meets a Barton Fink (1991) set in contemporary times, Cronenberg’s film should be playing at every single movie theater in America as a sort of mischievously frolicsome deprogramming tool that lets the masses know that their filmic heroes are sexually depraved junkies with a weakness for incest.

Interestingly, Cronenberg also hints at the self-loathing that has been an innate part of Hebraic Hollywood since the beginning as documented in the rather insightful book An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1989) by Neal Gabler. While never mentioning it overtly, it can be inferred that the central family featured in Maps to the Stars is of the Judaic persuasion as hinted by their stereotypically Jewish surname ‘Weiss.’ In one rather hilarious scene early on in the film, egomaniacal brat Benjie—a little scrawny turd who, like many Hollywood Judaic types, bleaches his hair to make himself look more ‘Aryan’—verbally assaults his stereotypically fat, swarthy, and unkempt middle-aged Jewish assistant, Arnold (Joe Pingue), hatefully stating in a sarcastic fashion: “Great Rabbi…death and dying. Man of wisdom…Zen fucking Arthur. I’ve got a new nickname for you: “Museum of Tolerance.” When Arnold tells the little turd to watch his mouth, Benjie replies, “Why don’t you show me your cunt, huh? I know you have one. Jew faggot.” Of course, considering his less than flattering depiction of Jewish atheist messiah Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method (2011), Cronenberg has never been particularly fond of mindlessly supporting his people’s great “culture-distorters” like most of the Hebrews in Hollywood. Additionally, in Eastern Promises (2007), Cronenberg cast the so-called “Russian mafia,” which is a Jewish entity, in the most brutal of lights. Of course, it is doubtful that Cronenberg is a ‘self-loathing Jew’ but just a sensible mensch that is critical of the more unsavory elements among his people.  In fact, Cronenberg has even gone so far as to distance himself from the cliche money-grubbing Hollywood Hebrew type, stating in an 2007 interview with nypress.com, “A sell-out is a personal thing. Ivan [Reitman] was always destined for Hollywood. That’s what he wanted. I never wanted that.” In the same interview, the director also remarked, “I’m always aware of [being Jewish]. It’s always on my mind, but not obsessively. When you’re threatened because of one aspect of your nature, whether it’s your sexuality or your gender or your ethnic background, you become acutely sensitive to it for that moment. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what defines you as a person.” Indeed, it seems that Cronenberg is “acutely sensitive” to the fact that his people are not only brainwashing the masses with their neo-Trotskyite propaganda and promoting every form of moral degeneracy and metaphysical affliction imaginable, but that they are also degrading and exploiting the artistic medium for those purposes. With that being said, I like to think that Maps to the Stars is the director’s sort of unofficial indictment of insipid Zio-ganda and aesthetic worthlessness of Hollywood, as well as his argument as to why he has avoided working in Hollywood his entire life despite the fact that he could have easily ascended to royal status among the upper echelons of the Hebraic hegemony over Hollywood.

Featuring an aging actress of the borderline psycho-biddy sort being beaten to death with her own film award trophy, a burnout and drug-addicted 13-year-old child star attempting to strangle to death his 4-year-old rival, a fading actress suffering severe flatulence and constipation as a result of taking too many painkillers, an aspiring actor screwing a severely scarred burn victim in an attempt to advance his career and fine tune his acting talents, and a hyper hysterical actress trying in vain to outdo her long deceased mother in terms of popularity, Maps to the Stars is ultimately the closest thing to a film in the spirit of Kenneth Anger’s hilarious hidden history book Hollywood Babylon (1959).  Indeed, as the screenwriter’s other works like Wild Palms and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills also readily demonstrate, Bruce Wagner is surely one of the greatest, if not the greatest, critic of Hollywood working today and thus he should share credit with Cronenberg in terms of being the auteur behind Maps to the Stars. The fact that Wagner—a mystical-minded man who was a member of the inner-circle of Carlos Castaneda and studied under Indian Hindu guru Ramesh Balsekar—has described the aspiring actor character played by Robert Pattinson that literally and figuratively whores himself out as being of a semi-autobiographical nature just goes to show that even a man who has more or less built a career on mocking Tinseltown cannot even escape the debasing powers of Hollywood. Notably, Cronenberg once stated regarding his film, “Hollywood is a world that is seductive and repellent at the same time, and it is the combination of the two that makes it so potent.” Personally, I find nothing particularly seductive about contemporary Hollywood, nor the fictional one depicted in Cronenberg’s film, but the Hollywood of Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a different story.  Indeed, the Hollywood of today is far too vapid, plastic, and uncultivated to produce deranged yet dignified divas like Norma Desmond.  Instead, we have fat ass Hebraic slobs like Jonah Hill, neo-Cro-Magnon morons like Channing Tatum, unattractive and untalented pseudo-diva bitches like Julia Roberts, phony Uncle Toms like Will Smith, scheming neo-vaudevillian sub-smut-peddlers like Friedberg and Seltzer, ethno-masochistic baby-negro-collectors like Angelina Jolie and her beau Brad Pitt, racially ambiguous mystery meat like Wentworth Miller and Vin Diesel, and Asperger-addled blockbuster philistines like Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay.  Needless to say, if Hollywood were to burn to the ground as depicted in one of the posters for Maps to the Stars, it would be no great loss.

-Ty E

Crawlspace (1986)

As a mensch whose father was of Polish extraction (the original family surname was ‘Nakszynski’) who dubiously claimed in his autobiography that he made the conscious decision to desert the Wehrmacht during the Second World War and who was one of the first Germans to visit Israel (with National Socialist era auteur Veit Harlan’s ethno-masochistic son Thomas), Klaus Kinski is probably the least likely German actor to hold any sort of National Socialist sympathies, yet that has not stopped various exploitative hack filmmakers from hiring him to play Nazi mad men. Of course, with his ‘blond beast’ appearance, piercing blue eyes, and discernibly deranged persona, Kinski is a Hollywood hack’s kosher wet dream in terms of being the ultimate archetypical screen Nazi. Perhaps the most patently pathetic example of kraut Kinski’s craziness being exploited in a cheap, tasteless, and decidedly dishonest attempt to depict the innate evilness of the Nazis is the actor’s unintentionally humorous performance in the absolutely horrendous horror-thriller Crawlspace (1986) directed by horror hack David Schmoeller (Catacombs, Netherworld). Probably best known today as the ‘auteur’ behind the cult horror classic Tourist Trap (1979) and Puppet Master (1989) where he would demonstrate the best of his meta-mediocre directing talents, Schmoeller—an archetypical left-wing for-hire horror hack who, unlike wine but certainly like many of his genre contemporaries, has only gotten worse with age—originally intended Crawlspace to be an anti-Vietnam War flick but schlockmeister producer Charles Band, who is Jewish (he even named one of his sons ‘Zalman’), demanded that he change the film to feature a homicidal Heeb-hating Nazi antihero. Apparently a huge Kinski fan, Schmoeller agreed to change the film if Band could get the German actor to be in the film, which he did, and the rest was history. Of course, as Schmoeller would recollect in his would-be-humorous documentary short Please Kill Mr. Kinski (1999)—a sort of poor man's equivalent to Werner Herzog's (anti)love letter to the actor, Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski (1999) aka My Best Fiend, which was somewhat suspiciously released the same year—Kinski caused so much havoc, pain, and chaos on the set of Crawlspace that one of the Italian producers proposed killing the actor and cashing in on the insurance money. When Kinski died, Schmoeller’s negative remarks about him were featured in the actor’s obituary, thus acting as a sort of posthumous revenge against the raving screen renegade. A rather rancid celluloid horror turd of the shockingly horrific sort, Crawlspace is a hokey and almost wholly derivative hodgepodge of horror flicks ranging from Michael Powell’s masterpiece of voyeuristic horror Peeping Tom (1960) to Willard (1971) and its sequel Ben (1972) to William Lustig’s classic slasher flick Maniac (1980) that is only worth viewing to see Kinski get kinky with lipstick, hordes of rats, Russian roulette, and nihilistic post-Auschwitz ramblings about life and death. Indeed, in spite of Mr. Jesus Christ Savior’s disruptive behavior on the film’s set, Kinski is the only thing about Crawlspace that saves it from being the cinematic equivalent of prostate cancer. 

 Karl Gunther (Klaus Kinski) is a crazed nihilistic kraut who has a portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche hanging in his office in a spot where a picture of Jesus Christ would normally be and whose Nazi surgeon father used to exterminate Heebs, thus it should be the apparent to the Hollywood-lobotomized viewer that he epitomizes all that is truly evil and rotten in this god forsaken world (or something).  Indeed, apparently after learning he liked killing people while working as part of the Nazi euthanasia program, Gunther Senior developed a fetish for wasting yids.  Like all the evil genius Hitlerite wackjobs featured in Hebraic Hollywood movies that put the propaganda of the real National Socialist propaganda films to shame, Karl is independently wealthy and owns an apartment building which he has rigged with secret passageways (hence, the title ‘Crawlspace’), booby traps, and nonsensical torture devices that he likes to play with when not deriving an almost erotic satisfaction from reading his naughty Nazi father’s masturbatory journal entries regarding euthanasia and the killing of the chosen amongst god's chosen. At the beginning of the film, one of Gunther’s beautiful blonde Aryan babe tenants accidentally walks into a room containing the good doctor’s personal pet, a dyke-like chick named Martha White (Sally Brown) who’s had a forced glossectomy and is confined to a cage, all courtesy of Herr Doktor, who wanted a permanent companion that would not talk back. Of course, Karl is saddened he has to kill beauteous babe, not to mention the fact that he has to go to the effort to rent out her room to somebody else. Ultimately, Gunther rents the room to a somewhat lesbo-like chick named Lori Bancroft (Talia Balsam) after lying to a rather bitchy prospective male tenant (played by the director in an uncredited cameo role) and telling him that the room is no longer available. Like virtually everyone else in the film aside from Kinski’s character, Lori seems to have no personality, thus she does not elicit even the vaguest sympathy from the viewer. 

 Luckily for Gunther, most of his tenants are dumb sluts with either sexually impotent boy toys or old sugar daddies who are too big of candy asses to properly please their ladies. Of course, while hanging out in the various elaborate crawlspace tunnels he has strategically placed around the building, Gunther becomes accustomed to eavesdropping on his titillating tenants' less than impressive sex lives. Meanwhile, a nauseatingly nerdy and ambiguously Jewish “Nazi Hunter” type named Josef Steiner (Kenneth Robert Shippy) shows up at Gunther’s building and accuses him of killing his brother. Steiner also goes on about how he is a “very tenacious” man who spent three entire years of his assumedly rather banal life looking for him and during his research he discovered that the doctor’s father was a SS man that was executed for “crimes against humanity” after the Second World War.  Apparently, while working as the chief resident at a hospital in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Karl killed 67 people, including Steiner’s brother. Luckily, Gunther eventually kills Steiner and, like most of his victims, leaves a poorly drawn swastika on his face. An unhinged Übermensch, Gunther likes to make pseudo-Nietzschean ramblings like, “I’m fascinated by the delicate balance between life and death...good and evil” and “I’m my own god…my own jury…and my own executioner.” Of course, as one can expect from such a patently predictably hack horror work, Gunther’s executioner is ultimately ‘empowered woman’ Lori. 

 Featuring scenes of Klaus Kinski getting off to watching old newsreels of Uncle Adolf like it is pornography, every holocaust and Nazi ‘war criminal’ cliché imaginable, corpses covered with swastikas, braindead blonde Shiksa sluts, and even a Hebrew lament that is played throughout the film, especially when the Nazi murderer is contemplating the crimes of his SS war criminal father, Crawlspace would be a kosher wet dream, especially for philistine Zionist types like torture-porn hack Eli Roth, but the film is just too god damn awful to appeal to the Semitic sensibilities of Teutonophobes. Indeed, as much as I hate to even reference the site, Rotten Tomatoes has the film at an impressive 0% ‘rotten’ rating, thus making it probably the only holocaust-themed work with such a pathetically low rating (it should go without saying that, whether good or bad, in the shoah business world, virtually all holocaust films get at least some sort of puffery-ridden praise). Of course, that has not stopped director David Schmoeller from pretending it is a serious film, even going so far as to state of Italian composer Pino Donaggio’s Hebrew lament that it was designed to, “remind the viewer of the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust.” Judging from Schmoeller’s surname, I assumed he was a member of the tribe, but after watching him complain about Kinski in Please Kill Mr. Kinski, I’m convinced he is just some ethno-masochistic queen of a shabbos goy who whored himself out to Semitic smut-peddler Charles Band and who gets off to trashing his racial kinsmen because he got his ass regularly kicked as kid for being an exceedingly effete pansy. Unquestionably, any entertainment value that Crawlspace features is to the credit of Herr Kinski and I do not blame him for being an intolerable egomaniac on the set as a man who has starred in some of the greatest films of the post-WWII era and thus shouldn't have to tolerate American hacks telling him what to do. If you’re a big enough Kinski fan (and/or masochist) to endure Crawlspace, make sure to watch Schmoeller’s micro doc Please Kill Mr. Kinski right after. As Schmoeller rightly describes in the documentary, Kinski hated directors. Ironically, the last film Kinski starred in, Kinski Paganini (1989), was also his directorial debut. While Kinski Paganini is not a masterpiece, it certainly demonstrates that Kinski was a much more talented filmmaker than Schmoeller ever was. Indeed, as much as I typically hate actors and see them as vain and vapid cattle that should be exploited by good directors, Kinski’s talents transcended that of the onscreen whore, even if he was a deranged psycho whose own daughter accused him of molesting her as a child. 

-Ty E

3 A.M. (1975)

While he did splice a couple single-frame erect cocks in the iconic montages featured in his ‘modernist horror’ masterpiece Persona (1966), and had somewhat of a talent for erotic tension when need be, Swedish master auteur Ingmar Bergman never directed a porn flick. Unquestionably, the next best thing to a Bergman blue movie, however, is the erotic melodrama 3 A.M. (1975) aka 3 a.m.: The Time of Sexuality directed by Gary Graver (Garage Girls, Indecent Exposure) under the pseudonym ‘Robert McCallum.’ It should be noted that the film was not directed by just any hack pornographer, but a protégé of none other than Orson ‘Citizen Kane’ Welles. Indeed, on top of starting his filmmaking career by working on the unfinished Welles feature The Other Side of the Wind, Graver appeared in and did still photography for F For Fake (1973) and the cinematography for Filming Othello (1978). In fact, Welles felt so indebted to Graver for working on The Other Side of the Wind that he gave him his 1941 Oscar which he had won as the co-writer of Citizen Kane. On top of working with Welles, Graver was the second unit camera operator for Curtis Harrington’s underrated Oedipal serial killer flick The Killing Kind (1973), camera operator for John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1973), director of photography for Paul Bartel’s Renoir reworking Eating Raoul (1982), and countless other cult classic, exploitation flicks, and even Disney films. While best known as a cinematographer that worked with everyone from Roger Corman to Ron Howard, he would truly master directing pornography, with 3 A.M. being arguably his greatest and most mature work. Indeed, if it were not for the graphic sex scenes and pseudo-Anglo American accents, the film would easily be mistaken for a European high drama. Featuring arguably the most lavish and exquisitely lit ‘shadowy gold’ cinematography that I have ever seen in a fuck flick and set mostly in a beach house in an unnervingly beautiful yet melancholy location that looks like it could have been shot on the other side of the island featured in Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961), 3 A.M. is certainly a lecherous yet equally lavish ‘posh porno’ that makes the oftentimes pretentious works of Radley Metzger seem like pseudo-aristocratic phony twaddle by comparison. Indeed, if there is a fuck flick that will offend the vulgar and philistinic sentiments of the Lumpenproletariat, it is Graver’s elegantly titillating assault on the ultra-urbane American upper-middleclass, as well as an amorous depiction of bourgeois angst. 

 Kate (genuinely talented actress Georgina Spelvin of Gerard Damiano’s 1973 crossover hit Devil in Miss Jones fame) is an old spinster with graying hair, but she is certainly not a sexless virgin as she has been carrying on a hot and heavy love affair with her brother-in-law Mark (Frank Mauro) who, with his curly black hair and overall swarthy Semite appearance, looks sort of like a more masculine and muscular version of Hebraic would-be-ladykiller Norman Mailer. As Kate intimately narrates at the beginning of 3 A.M. while she can hear her brother-in-law and sister Elaine (Rhonda Gellard) have sex: “My name is Kate and I live in this house. This is my sister Elaine and her husband Mark…and this is their home. I have lived with them for a longtime…long enough to help raise their son, Ronnie…long enough to help raise their daughter, Stacey. This is me, Kate…and I have lived here long enough for Mark and I to have been having a love affair for 15 years. I knew loneliness…I didn’t want to hurt Elaine, but I desperately need Mark’s love to help me fill this void. I used my loneliness to justify many sins. I knew the love of other women…even Stacey, my own niece…but this night was to inalterably change the lives of each of us…and the end began at 3 a.m….” Indeed, after having passionate (and secretly recorded) sex with Elaine that concludes with him accusing his wife of being a “half woman” and declaring to her, “what I want to do is be as far away from you as I possibly can…for the rest of my FUCKING LIFE. That’s what I want,” Mark heads to his boat where he meets and has carnal fun with his mistress Kate, but things get ugly from there. After Mark declares, “I left her [Elaine] and I’m leaving you and I’m finding me!,” like some over-the-hill beatnik suffering from a midlife crisis, Kate hysterically declares, “You’re not going to leave me! I want you!,” and proceeds to hit her secret lover over the head with a large bottle, thus leading to his death via drowning after he falls unconscious and falls overboard. 

 Flash forward “Several Days Later,” and the bourgeois family of 3 A.M. is suffering a crisis due to the tragic and rather dubious death of patriarch Mark; indeed, so much so that the circumstances will erupt into an orgy of melancholy incestuous sex. Not surprising considering the unexpected death of her great, beloved husband after the two had a nasty fight that they never had the opportunity to resolve, Elaine is a self-destructive suicidal mess, declaring “I want to die” and downing some pills with liquor as a chaser, which pisses her sister Kate off so much that she calls her a “silly bitch” and forces her vomit in a sink. While all by her lonesome and thinking about past sex with Mark, Kate declares regarding her sister, “How could you know…you’ve never known love,” and proceeds to hump her pillow. Of course, Kate “swings both ways” as demonstrated by the fact that she gets in a heated carpet-munching session in a shower with some random hippie bull-dyke who randomly shows up at the beach house. Somewhat wantonly warped, Kate is also carrying on a lurid lady-licker love affair with her fire-crotched teenage niece Stacey (played by porn star/exploitation actress Clair Dia, who starred in the strange 1972 experimental porn anthology flick Ramäge (Mobility Cathexis)). 

 Meanwhile, Widow Elaine is a total mess due to her loneliness and inability to mourn her husband's death, so she ends fornicating with some dorky hippie dude who wants to buy her late hubby’s boat.  In fact, despite her sorrow over the death of her beloved, Elaine bangs the guy on the very same boat that her husband was in before he drowned.  Despite having sex with her, the hippie beach boy more or less tells Elaine that having sex with random men won’t help her find what she is looking for and that, “The peace will come…when you learn to accept you loneliness.” After his sister Stacey attempts to seduce them after a beachside horse ride, teenage bourgeois bitch boy Ronnie (played by Charles Hooper, whose sole other film credit is Graver’s 1979 fuck flick Tangerine) starts an affair with an ex-model named Vicki (Sharon Thorpe), who tells Elaine that she saw a woman with Mark on the boat the night he drowned. Needless to say, lovelorn Kate eventually becomes so plagued by guilt and sadness due to her accidentally killing of her great love Mark that she records a confession on a tape, which her nephew Ronnie walks in on her doing. From there, Kate leaves the beach house, strips off her robe, and commits suicide by walking into the sea, but her nephew Ronnie makes no real effort to save her, even stopping his sister Stacey from helping. While Elaine and Stacey scream for Kate to comeback, Ronnie gets the cassette his aunt recorded and throws it into the ocean with her, thus forever burying the truth behind the tragedy that lead to his father and aunt’s deaths. 

 While clearly specially tailored for a more cultivated audience that expects more out of their fuck films, 3 A.M. is easily the greatest pornographic condemnation of the bourgeois that I have ever seen, even making Cecil Howard’s classic works like The Final Sin (1977) and The Scoundrels (1982) seem rather redundant by comparison. Indeed, in its depiction of the cowardice of the bourgeoisie, especially when it comes to perennially living a lie and not confronting open secrets that ultimately result in easily preventable tragedies and heartbreak, Graver’s work certainly recalls Bergman, though, aesthetically speaking, it also resembles the early pre-Hollywood works of Roman Polanski. Arguably, the most telling scene of the film is when protagonist Kate’s teenage nephew complains, “Nothing’s ever different,” as a young man who’s already come to realize that, due to his class background, he is plagued with a life of softness and domestic banality. Undoubtedly, 3 A.M. also has a somewhat vague ‘counter-culture’ vibe about it as is especially apparent in a “spirit of ’69” scene wherein siblings Ronnie and Stacey mutually exchange oral sex 69 style to the less than soothing sounds of generic psychedelic rock. Unquestionably, it is easy to believe that the film was assembled by a protégé of Orson Welles who mainly worked as cinematographer. Indeed, the warmly lit cinematography of 3 A.M. is immaculate and, pornographically speaking, the storytelling is fairly fluid, though I can certainly see why Graver found his niche in the pornographic realm as the film’s greatest weaknesses lie in its acting performances (though Georgina Spelvin is characteristically great as the somber spinster) and structuring. If you ever wonder if wantonness and Weltschmerz can be seamlessly blended together for a curious celluloid combo that is more bitter than sweet but wholly sensual, Graver’s porn chic era blue movie masterpiece of upper-middleclass decadence is probably your best bet.  Indeed, if the hallmark of a great hardcore flick is that you forget it is a hardcore flick while watching it, 3 A.M. indubitably one of the best porn pieces ever assembled.

-Ty E

Cabaret Sin

Since one of my girlfriend’s favorite films is Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), it was only natural that she would dig up a hardcore rip-off of the classic cyberpunk flick. Indeed, the stylishly salacious, vintage shot-on-video hardcore science fiction flick, Cabaret Sin (1987) aka X TROP, directed by one-time porn auteur Philip O'Toole, was such a hit upon its release that it was later re-edited and released in a non-pornographic cut under the title Droid (1988) a year later, with the director deciding to adopt the pseudonym ‘Peter Williams’ and claiming a bogus British background, as if it would make him seem more cultivated or something (of course, as far as I know, the Brits have never made a decent fuck flick, so adopting an English persona might be a wise choice for a filmmaker that is attempting to the obfuscate the dubious history of their sex flick turned sci-fi flick). With about 10 minutes of extra hardcore footage and a conspicuously ‘cooler’ name, I naturally opted for watching Cabaret Sin over the fuck-free flick Droid. Typically, I try to stay away from any post-porn chic, shot-on-video fuck flick, especially if it seems like it was made to appeal to the banal tastes of virginal Trekkies and related sexually autistic nerds whose greatest fantasy is getting laid by Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan, yet when I saw screenshots from O'Toole’s seemingly vaguely imaginative bargain bin blue movie, I could not resist. A nude neo-noir flick that seems like it was created by some sort of psychopathic preteen genius with easy access to an entire bordello of whores and the props of his local high school’s theater department, Cabaret Sin is a strangely charming work that, due to its aesthetic ambitiousness and wanton weirdness despite its discernible lack of budget and asinine acting performances, has to be seen to believed. Like Liquid Sky (1982) as directed by someone who does not know a god damn thing about new wave, new romanticism, or underground music/culture in general as molested by the post-apocalyptic pornographic cult classic Café Flesh (1982) directed by ‘Rinse Dream’ (aka Stephen Sayadian) meets countless popular 1980s Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, O'Toole’s decidedly decadent piece of eccentrically erotic dystopia ultimately defies all forms of cinematic sanity as a seemingly aesthetically apocalyptic work that combines most of the worst clichés of dystopian sci-fi cinema, the meta-kitschy essence of late-1980s music videos, and an army of perturbingly plastic would-be-pretty people sporting mullets and other forms of obscenely odious outmoded Reagan era mullets on their seemingly empty heads. Indeed, if you ever wanted to experience the worst of 1980s dystopian sci-fi in a playfully pornographic package that strives to be, orgasmically speaking, out-of-this-world but more resembles the thematically impotent and incoherent yet nonetheless endlessly enthralling fantasy of an autistic American west coast take on Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) with a nihilistically nostalgic softspot for the worst elements of Stars Wars (1977), Cabaret Sin is a pure and unadulterated cinematically spastic win of the third cinematic kind as a hardcore-sci-fi hybrid. 

 The year and setting is Los Angeles 2020 and, as he narrates in a pseudo-noirish fashion, mullet man ‘Taylor’ (Greg Derek in what is clearly his most ‘famous’ role)—a horrible Harrison Ford/Mel Gibson hybrid played by a clear non-actor who seems like he was randomly discovered by the casting agent while working out at Gold's Gym—is a futuristic cop called an ‘Eliminator’ who works for the government as a lone wolf assassin.  Although he hates to admit it as a macho killing machine that is not supposed to have emotions (of course, this is a reference to the Replicants of Blade Runner) despite the fact he is a flesh and blood human and not a robot like a good portion of the assassins around the superlatively shitty west coast city, he is a lethally lovelorn lad who longs for his beloved whore ‘Nicola’ (played by pseudonymous German buxom brunette ‘Krista Lane’), who eloquently smokes her fag in a fashion almost worthy of Sean Young à la Blade Runner. As Taylor narrates about himself in a less than impassioned manner: “Its not that I’m a good cop…I’m a tired cop…tired of this dome, this job, this planet, but I still did what any good cop tried to do. Stay alive.” Unquestionably, the L.A. of 2020, not unlike the real L.A. of today (which seems worse, with its apocalyptic hodgepodge of impoverished Hispanics, disillusioned and culturally cuckolded whites, negro gangsters, East Asians, IT-inclined Indians, 711-running Arabs, and other assorted forms of mystery meat) is a decadent dystopian hellhole of the culturally and racially mongrelized sort suffering from a severe case of malignant multiculturalism as demonstrated by the fact that rather culturally confused individuals like meaty Mestizos wearing goofy pseudo-Japanese clothing and white Islamic towelheads sporting business suits can be found everywhere. Aside from ‘Eliminators’ like Taylor that drive goofy futuristic hovercrafts that do not seem to move, the L.A. of this salacious piece of non-celluloid sci-fi is inhabited by angry androids called ‘The Reformers’ that have flashing beady red lights for eyes, black helmets, and black uniforms, thus making them seem like a cross between a futuristic Gestapo soldier and Darth Vader. Needless to say, Taylor seems like a second-rate crack-addled pop-country singer compared to the Reformers. 

 In a scene parroting the famous space alien cantina scene from Star Wars, Taylor enters a stylish, eclectically themed strip club with the less than creative name “Pleasure Dome” where he sees a Jap geisha (Kristara Barrington) doing pseudo-Kabuki theater in front of a giant bald retro Jap head.  Not surprisingly, the ‘master of ceremonies’ of the club is a creepy smirking midget that waddles around with an equally creepy ventriloquist doll affixed to his shoulder. While lurking around the Pleasure Dome in a moody and broody manner in the hope that he will run into one of his targets, Taylor also watches in seeming boredom as a superficially amorous chick in an aesthetically vulgar Ancient Egyptian outfit, Azteca (Lorrie Lovett), strips and fucks for the adoring audience. When a girl goes up to Taylor, sits on his lap without permission, and asks, “Didn’t I pleasure you?,” he robotically replies, “Business before pleasure,” but of course, as the film later reveals, the coldhearted cop is in love with naughty Nicola, who peddles her puss to a tyrannical towelhead named ‘The Turk’ (played by veteran Hebraic hardcore star Herschel Savage), who owns a sleazy local club. 

 While brooding at the Turk’s club and watching a trombonist named Tammy Dorsey (Bunny Bleu) handle her instrument on stage as if it is a boner instead of a trombone in a scene that delightfully degenerates into a threesome where the fetishistic front-lady begins banging her band members for the discernibly aroused audience members, Taylor reminisces over his love for Nicola and complains to himself, “There I go again…getting all emotional…just when I thought I had forgotten her.” In easily the most memorably and perversely potent segment of the film, Taylor recalls romantically slow-dancing with Nicola prom-style in a scene juxtaposed with a heated fuck session between the two jaded lovers. When Taylor finally gets the testicular fortitude to approach his beloved Nicola, she does not accept him warmly and lovingly but berates him rather viciously, complaining, “You’re just like everyone else…you belong here. You’re gonna die here. I’m going to do anything I can to get out of her.” Indeed, as it turns out, Nicola is working for the enemy and after being nearly killed by a Reformer robot at the behest of the terrible Turk, the killer cop prepares to shoot his great ladylove with more than just good old fashioned baby batter. Of course, ‘love conquers all’ in the end and Taylor declares like a true punk poser, “fuck the system” after deciding that the woman he loves is more important to him then the dead-end job that he loves to hate. In the end, in the middle of Nicola sucking off Taylor in his rather hazy and almost otherworldly Greek-statue-adorned apartment, a Reformer android breaks down the door and the film concludes with the predictable inter-title: “To Be Continued…” 

 Of course, as one can expect from successful films, especially porn films, a sequel was made to Cabaret Sin entitled Empire of the Sins (1988), though it was directed by a dude named Kirdy Stevens (Little Me and Marla Strangelove, A Taste of Sugar) instead of Mr. O'Toole. In fact, scenes from both films were edited together to make the non-pornographic work Droid, which is vaguely more coherent than the two other films, though at the decided detriment of hopelessly 80s style hardcore debauchery. It should also be noted that both Empire of the Sins and Droid feature quasi-campy elements from the Naziploitation sub-genre. Of course, if 1980s style retrograde sci-fi is your thing, all three videos make for virtuous vices of the pleasantly post-apocalyptic sort that make the Mad Max films seem like the platitude-ridden product of an impotent Mormon mercenary. Indeed, in its own wayward way, Cabaret Sin is sort of ‘outsider’s art’ as assembled by people with very little artistic talent who seemed to put their all into an erotic effort with eccentric tableaux that may have been made to appeal to the rather particular sentiments of virginal sci-fi nerds whose sole sexual outlet is masturbation, but was clearly made with a ‘free’ and ‘determined’ spirit that will surely act as inspiration to any aspiring filmmaker or synth-pop musician. Through its sappy and seemingly intentionally cliche melodramatic romantic subplot and reckless aesthetic and thematic theft from countless 1980s sci-fi flicks, not to mention its inclusion of a totally random scene featuring an upside Casablanca (1942) poster hanging on the wall of a futuristic fuck club in a charmingly sleazy scenario that one might describe as ‘cinematic heresy’ (at least to those many individuals that think Michael Curtiz's film is one of the greatest cinematic masterworks ever made), Cabaret Sin also manages to make a mockery of Hollywood history and formulaic film conventions, which is certainly something I can respect. Of course, Los Angeles has only become all the more racially, culturally, and socially apocalyptic since the film was released over a 1/4 century ago as a result of the ‘Reconquista’ of the city by the supposed ‘Aztlán,’ the general mass colonization of the United States by third worlders of every stripe and creed, and the further spread of the neo-liberal metaphysical disease, among countless other things, so I think it is only natural that a remake of Cabaret Sin should be in order, though, considering the sorry state of the contemporary porn industry, it would probably be a reeking pile of anti-erotic bile steeped in miscegenation, cuckoldry, fake lips and tits, and ugly swarthy meathead dudes with monstrous dicks.  Indeed, Cabaret Sin may make the L.A. of 2020 seem like a conspicuously corrupt culturally bastardized shithole where killer robots run rampant and creepy dwarfs are considered chic, but it pales in comparison to the real dystopia that waits the so-called ‘City of Angels.’

-Ty E

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

In terms of ‘chic’ post-WWII European actresses, no one can touch French blonde Nord Delphine Seyrig (Last Year at Marienbad, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), who worked with many of the greatest and most idiosyncratic filmmakers of her strikingly singular and totally unrivaled multi-era career, ranging from Spanish alpha-surrealist Luis Buñuel to French New Wave master François Truffaut to Austrian-born Hebraic Hollywood Academy Award winner Fred Zinnemann to French commie feminist Marguerite Duras to Teutonic dyke adventurer auteur Ulrike Ottinger. Indeed, what other actress can claim the distinction of starring in both Klein's Mr. Freedom (1969) and Ottinger's Freak Orlando (1981)?! Additionally, Seyrig was a sometimes filmmaker who directed socio-politically charged doc likes Sois belle et tais-toi (1981) aka Be Pretty and Shut Up where she interviewed an eclectic collection of famous actresses like Shirley MacLaine, Jenny Agutter and Jane Fonda about how they were (mis)treated in the film industry. Interestingly, despite her strikingly singular resume as an superlatively sophisticated and dignified screen diva with somewhat repugnant quasi-feminist airs, Seyrig apparently credited the neo-Gothic lesbian vampire flick Daughters of Darkness (1971) aka Les lèvres rouges aka Le rouge aux Lèvres aka Blood on the Lips aka Children of the Night aka The Promise of Red Lips aka The Redness of the Lips aka The Red Lips directed by Belgian auteur Harry Kümel (Malpertuis, De Komst van Joachim Stiller aka The Arrival of Joachim Stiller) as her absolute most favorite of all the films that she ever starred in, which is rather ironic considering she originally did not want to play the somewhat unflattering role of Countess Bathory due to her prestigious reputation as an actress and only accepted the project after being convinced by her then-boyfriend, French auteur Alain Resnais, who loved graphic novels and somewhat rightfully imagined the film would be in a graphic novel-like style. In fact, Resnais apparently like the finished film so much that he said it was better than anything he had directed, or so said auteur Kümel, who certainly did not concur with his cinematic comrade's rather flattering assessment of his film. Indeed, Kümel never wanted to make the film in the first place and has described it as “trashy,” even stating in a DVD commentary regarding the work, “I found it a bit trashy for me…it has been a long time since I have accepted it…I had this silly idea that my parents would be looking at all this pornography […] I didn’t really like it for different reasons,” though he is proud of its success, as a work that would prove to be the very first internationally successful Belgian flick (indeed, it was the only really successful film of his career and even obtained cult status in the United States shortly after it was released).

 A Belgian-French-German co-production that has the delightful ear-solacing distinction of being a rare 1970s “genre” production where all the actors spoke their lines in English as opposed to having their voices horrifically dubbed in post-production despite the fact that most of the actors were Belgian, French, and German and only spoke English as a second or third language, Daughters of Darkness is the post-WWII vampire flick at its most exceedingly elegant and refined as a beauteous baroque bloodsucker piece of the subtly yet forebodingly erotic sort. Indeed, to compare the best of Jean Rollin and Jesús Franco to Kümel’s Sapphic vampire flick would be like comparing shit to gold. In that sense, Kümel is a cinematic alchemist because, despite his resentment towards the genre (in fact, he has denied it is even a horror film, stating, “This is not a horror movie…this is a style exercise…this is not meant to frighten.”) and mixed feelings towards the film, he still managed to assemble a masterpiece of the exquisitely erotically macabre that is big on style and low on sleazy sensationalism that is typical of so-called ‘Euro-sleaze.’ Directed by a man from the same puny low country that produced Roland Lethem (La Fée sanguinaire aka The Bloodthirsty Fairy, Le Sexe Enragé aka The Crazed Sex aka The Red Cunt), Thierry Zéno (Vase de Noces aka Wedding Trough aka The Pig Fucking Movie), Rob Van Eyck (The Afterman, Blue Belgium), Benoît Poelvoorde/Rémy Belvaux/André Bonzeland (Man Bites Dog) and Fabrice Du Welz (Calvaire aka The Ordeal, Vinyan), Daughters of Darkness is a ridiculously entrancing example as to why Belgians, especially the Germanic Flemish, are arguably the foremost masters of making the most artful, cultivated, and hermetic works of superlatively sick stomach-churning celluloid sleaze.  Of course, compared to the aberrant-garde films of Lethem, Kümel's hyper-hypnotic vampire flick seems like a high-camp melodrama.

 While newlyweds Stefan (played by Polish-American Dark Shadows star John Karlen) and Valerie (played by French-Canadian actress Danielle Ouimet who, incidentally, started her acting career by playing the eponymous lead of Denis Héroux’s 1969 quasi-artsy exploitation flick Valérie) seem like the young perfect couple, at least upon a superficial glance, their relationship is based on lies, hypocrisy, resentment, and contempt. Indeed, despite marrying beauteous yet somewhat dumb virgin-like blonde Valerie, Stefan is secretly a sadomasochistic sodomite who gets aroused by violence and murder and who is the ‘kept man’ of an opulent yet odious and exceedingly effete fat middle-aged English sugar daddy with a fetish for exotic plants. Unfortunately for her, stupid little girl Valerie is hopelessly in love with Stefan and does whatever he says, no matter how degrading, even though he treats her like a contemptible little child. At the beginning of Daughters of Darkness in a scene that was rather risque and unconventional for its time, the mismatched newlyweds, who are on their honeymoon, make love on a train, and afterwards Valerie asks Stefan if he loves her, to which he replies with a firm, “no.” To go along with her bastard of a beau's rather vicious wishes, Valerie lies and also proclaims that she does not love Stefan, to which he sardonically replies, “apparently, we were made for each other” regarding their ostensible mutual unlove for one another. To Valerie’s disappointment, Stefan refuses to tell his ‘aristocratic’ mother about their unholy marriage. As Stefan confesses to Valerie regarding what his mother apparently routinely said to him when he was a young child: “Stefan, we are different. That is God’s gift to us, and we must never debase it,” hence the character's unwarranted narcissism, rampant callousness, and all around controlling nature.  Indeed, it is more than just a little bit apparent that Stefan feels superior to his new wife, but of course it is quite glaring that his sense of superiority is clearly a self-defense mechanism designed to help him cope with his seemingly split personality and ignore the ugly truth about his confused sexuality.

For their scenic honeymoon, the newlyweds stay in the royal suite of a lavish hotel located in seaside Ostend, Belgium, but unbeknownst to them, a coldblooded killer with a thirst for blood is running around loose in the local area and is responsible for the deaths of a number of blonde Nordic babes that look a lot like Valerie. When Stefan learns of the killings and walks by one of the murder scenes by accident while doing some sightseeing with Valerie, he becomes discernibly sexually aroused and even hatefully smacks his wife when she gets in the way of his view of a dead chick. A local retired police officer (played by Belgian actor Georges Jamin, who died a couple months after the film was completed) also seems somewhat 'aroused' by the deaths and he plans to discover who the killer, though it will ultimately cost him his life. Meanwhile, in a scene consciously stolen by the director from the famous scene of Marlene Dietrich making her big entrance in Ernst Lubitsch’s classic Angel (1937), ancient Hungarian lesbo vampire Countess Elizabeth Bathory (Delphine Seyrig) arrives at the Ostend hotel with her flapper-like Louise Brooks-esque muse Ilona Harczy (German actress Andrea Rau) and she immediately becomes entranced upon spotting Stefan and Valerie to the point where her ancient aristocratic sensibilities are not irked by the fact that the newlyweds have already occupied the royal suite that she hoped to stay in, even stating her girlfriend regarding the couple, “look how perfect they are.” The front desk clerk of the hotel, Pierre (played by German actor Paul Esser, who is probably best known for his roles in Wolfgang Staudte's Rotation and Der Untertan aka Man of Straw), is immediately disturbed upon seeing the Countess as he remembers seeing her at the hotel four decades ago when he was just a boy and he cannot fathom how she has not aged a day since then. Of course, poor Ilona is immediately jealous of the newlyweds, especially Valerie, and somberly confesses to the Countess, “I wish I could die.”  Luckily for Ilona, she will get her wish, but not before whoring herself out for the Countess, who has a new love interest in the form of a buxom blonde newlywed.

While Stefan and Valerie intended to leave the hotel the next morning so that they can catch the cross-channel ferry to England so the former can introduce the latter to his supposedly rather bitchy mother, they decide to make the ultimately fatal mistake of staying a couple more days after meeting Countess Bathory and her cutesy sensual-lipped lesbo lover. A perversely penetrating psychopath of the wholly sensual and incessantly sinisterly smiling sort (as the director has confessed, it was Seyrig's excellent idea to play the role smiling) who can give one an agonizing orgasm with her mere erotically-charged words, Countess Bathory is a lethal lady-licking lesbo yet she has a warm and inviting persona that would not scare a fly, though her red/black/white wardrobes tell otherwise (the director had Seyrig wear these colors to conjure up feelings of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS), who of course wore the same colors). Indeed, on top of being a supernatural Sapphic bloodsucker, the Countess is a masterful ‘psychic vampire’ of sorts who preys on people's minds and emotions, which is certainly a trait she shares in common with crypto-homo Stefan, who will ultimately prove to be her rather weak rival in terms of vying for the affection of Valerie. In a somewhat hilarious if not equally awkward scene, Stefan makes a call to his supposed ‘mother’ in front of Valerie, but as the scene soon reveals, he is really talking to his old fag lover/sugar daddy (hilariously played by great Dutch auteur Fons Rademakers(!), who is probably best known for directing low country classics like Mira (1971) and The Assault (1986)). After telling his ‘mother’ that he has done the unthinkable by getting married to a young woman, the snide old queen responds with: “Whatever in the world will we do with her? Well, now, think of it—You working at whatever it is you can do, and that poor little, uh, Valerie, the day she hears about us—Oh, I hate to think about that. And you too! Of course, that’s why you called [clicks tongue] Surely you don’t really believe you would ever, ever do such a—such an ungrateful thing. I can’t wait for you to see our newest Laeliinae, Cattleya Violacea. And by the way, Stefan, be sure to tell that young woman…that Mother sends regards” (it should be noted that the connection between flowers and homosexuality is a subtle tribute to Marcel Proust).  Rather enraged by the conversation with his so-called ‘mommy,’ Stefan unleashes his deep-seated internal rage and sexual frustration on Valerie by brutally beating her with his leather belt and subsequently assumedly raping her. While Valerie sneaks out of the hotel the next morning and attempts to get away on the next train out of town, the Countess uses her charms to convince her to stay. To keep Stefan incapacitated, the Countess sends Ilona to his hotel room to seduce him. Of course, things do not exactly work out completely as the Countess planned.

While Ms. Bathory attempts to flatter Valerie by calling her “little Edelweiss” (a reference to dumb European blondes, especially Swiss girls) and complimenting her ravishing good looks, the now-hysterical young wife eventually freaks out on her, abruptly stating, “I despite you. You’re disgusting,” and walking away, but of course the carpet-munching Countess follows her like a stud canine shadowing a bitch in heat. When Valerie defensively remarks that her husband loves her after the Countess mocks the genuineness of their relationship, Bathory makes the stereotypical dyke feminist misandristic argument: “”Stefan loves me, whatever you may think.” Of course he does. That’s why he dreams of making out of you what every man dreams of making out of every woman—a slave, a thing, an object for pleasure.” Meanwhile, Ilona seduces Stefan and they have fairly passionate sex. Unfortunately, a freak accident involving a shaving razor leaves Ilona dead after Stefan scares her by carrying her into the shower (whether Ilona dies as a result of the razor or due to her hinted aversion to water as a vampire is never made completely clear). Right after Ilona dies, Valerie and the Countess walk in on Stefan, who is staring at the dead vamp's naked corpse while in a state of abject shock. When Valerie remarks that she will call the police, the ever quick-witted Countess says to her, “Are you out of your mind? No one will ever believe it was an accident. You are out of your mind,” and subsequently kisses her on the lips in an erotic fashion. At the Countess’ recommendation, the three head to the beach during the early A.M. hours and Stefan digs a hole and buries Ilona’s corpse in it, though he almost buries himself in the process, thus demonstrating his weakness as a man who is not match for Queen Bitch Bathory, who ironically saves his life.

 After driving back to the hotel, the Countess convinces Stefan to take a nap and uses the opportunity to seduce and ‘turn’ poor unsuspecting Valerie into a lesbo vampire.  Naturally, Stefan becomes obscenely jealous when he finds out that the Countess has turned his darling into a member of the undead, so he attempts to take Valerie away, but the scheming bitch Bathory blackmails him by threatening to go to the police about Ilona’s dubious death.  While both of them are ‘psychic vampire’ of sorts, Stefan seems like an autistic and emotionally crippled little boy compared to the ancient bloodsucking undead blueblood being that is the Countess.  Of course, it does not take long before the Countess kills Stefan and feeds on his blood with baby vamp Valerie, who enthusiastically helps her new lesbo lover murder her hubby. After wrapping Stefan's body in black plastic bags, they dump it into a polluted creek like it is trash in what amounts to, like much of the film, a strangely humorous scene that is typical of Flemish/Dutch humor. While mutually deeply infatuated with one another as a sort of figurative quasi-incestuous ‘mother-daughter’ duo, their lurid ‘lady-lickers of the night’ love affair is ultimately cut short when Valerie uses her driving skills (or lack thereof) to accidentally crash the Countess’ luxury automobile after the sun burns her pale baby vamp skin and she loses control of vehicle. Indeed, after losing control of the car, Valerie crashes into a tree, which causes the Countess to be ejected from the car via the windshield where she is ultimately impaled after he body lands on a large protruding tree branch. After taking a stake to the heart in a cruelly ironic moment of pure happenstance, the Countess is subsequently burned alive when the totaled car explodes, thus leading the viewer to suspect that Valerie also perished in the tragic crash. Flash forward a couple months later in what amounts to a bittersweet twist ending, and Valerie has developed a satanically seductive persona just like her master the Countess, even parroting her look and voice, so that she can lure in young couples, thus continuing the vicious circle of hetero-hating lesbian-based vampirism.

While Daughters of Darkness is a truly exceedingly exquisite and extra-erotic example of ‘magical realism,’ auteur Harry Kümel would fine tune his talents for his somewhat superior and obscenely overlooked subsequent arthouse efforts Malpertuis (1973) and The Arrival of Joachim Stiller (1976). Additionally, Kümel’s early avant-garde shorts Anna la Bonne (1959), which is based on a poem by Jean Cocteau, and Pandora (1960), as well as his decidedly bleak Bergman-esque debut feature Monsieur Hawarden (1969), are regarded as some of the greatest masterpieces of Flemish cinema, even if the director has always been an outsider in his native homeland, especially after Daughters of Darkness was a big international success. Indeed, despite being what is arguably the only internationally successful Belgian film in all of cinema history, at least at the time of its release, Kümel found himself marginalized by the Flemish film community for a work he really had no interest in making, or as Belgian film scholar Ernest Mathijs wrote in the book The Cinema of the Low Countries (2004): “Of all the Belgian films of the early 1970s, a boom period in Belgian cinema culture, Les lèvres rouges (Daughters of Darkness, 1971) is probably the most talked about, yet least known. Although it still stands as one of the most commercially successful and academically referenced Belgian films, it is hardly screened today, and even its DVD and video distribution has been hampered by a series of difficulties, ranging from legal to aesthetic objections. This dual status is perhaps the most typical characteristic of the film, being both a high-profile example of Belgian cinema at its most international, and a consciously ignored part of a nation’s cinema heritage.”

Somewhat light on blood and bare boobs, Daughters of Darkness is a perfect example of subtly yet elegantly executed suggestive potency in the cinematic realm, thus it is almost an absurdity to describe the film as a work of ‘exploitation’ (unquestionably, ‘artsploitation’ would certainly be a better label). On top of being one of the most eloquent European ‘genre’ films of its time, the film is also a cryptic tribute to the great auteur filmmakers of European cinema history, as a formalistic flick that pays homage to everyone from Carl Th. Dreyer to Ernst Lubitsch to Josef von Sternberg to Georg Wilhelm Pabst to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to star Delphine Seyrig’s beau Alain Resnais. Indeed, in terms of its enthralling atmosphere, oneiric tone, nuanced pacing, lavish ‘sets,’ and hermetic eroticism, Daughters of Darkness is like the Last Year at Marienbad (1961) of vampire flicks, albeit minus the impenetrable essence, as well as the European cinematic cousin of Richard Blackburn’s criminally underrated Lovecraftian lesbo bloodsucker flick Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (1973). The happy horror accident of a man who spitefully declared “we are going to do something nasty” and reluctantly decided to direct a film for a genre he had no interest in after his directorial debut was poorly critically received, Daughters of Darkness is indisputable proof that a pretentious ‘auteur’ will always direct better genre films than the average horror hack, even if he has little interest in directing them. As Kümel insightfully stated in the audio commentary track for the Blue Underground DVD release of the film: “I’m like Paul Verhoeven, you know…the films he doesn’t like to make are good movies and the films he likes to make are not so good.” Of course, the film also owes a great deal of its endlessly entrancing erotic magnetism and perniciously alluring atmosphere to frog diva Delphine Seyrig's singularly dignified performance as a lethally lecherous undead lady of the night. Apparently, the actress was so confident with her performance that she reassured Kümel regarding his concern that the two young leads were too old and not talented enough for playing the newlyweds by stating to him, “Don’t worry, they [the audience] will only look at me.”  Indeed, as someone that has always found female vampires, especially those of the lesbo sort, to be oftentimes hopelessly nonthreatening and a rather blatant sign that the film was made for largely pornographic reasons, Seyrig proved that middle-aged broads can pull off brutally beauteous and superlatively sensual bloodsuckers in a fashion that no male actor can compete with.  Of course, Seyrig was a vampire in the sense that she had the power to glamor any man, woman, or child that saw her on the silver screen, thus all she had to do was play herself in Daughters of Darkness.  I, for one, can certainly not think of another feminist that was so innately captivating, cultivated, and carnally beguiling.

-Ty E