Breathless (1983)

While I am one of those assumedly many people that hoped that the urban legend that leading man Richard Gere shoved gerbils up his ass for sexual satisfaction was true and find the remaking of popular European arthouse films to be one of Hollywood’s more pernicious culture-distorting practices, I cannot deny that I am a recently converted fan of Breathless (1983) aka A Bout de Souffle Made in USA directed by Jim McBride (The Big Easy, The Wrong Man). A fairly unwanted and seemingly absurd big budget Hollywood remake of La Nouvelle Vague alpha-auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s undeniably groundbreaking black-and-white debut feature À bout de soufflé (1960) aka Breathless co-written by François Truffaut, the fairly unloved cinematic might be one of the greatest examples of the film maudit in cinema history but it ultimately proved to be seemingly infinitely more entertaining and romantic to me than its almost unanimously respected French predecessor. Seeing as I found Godard’s film to be one of the most decidedly disappointing films I have ever seen in terms of its importance in the context of cinema history, I initially had absolutely nil interest in watching a Hollywoodized Breathless remake set in Los Angeles and starring Mr. Gere, but after reading that legendary underground auteur George Kuchar (Hold Me While I’m Naked, The Devil’s Cleavage) modeled his performance as a macho tranny-killing brute in the underrated experimental horror-comedy Screamplay (1985) directed by one-time-auteur Rufus Butler Seder after the lead in McBride’s remake, I found myself somewhat intrigued and decided to give it a watch, thereupon ultimately discovering a somewhat shockingly engrossing and genuinely romantic love story with sex appeal. Somewhat ironically, Godard’s arthouse flick was heavily influenced by less than respectable American B-movies, which is the undeserved status that McBride’s remake would eventually obtain as a quasi-softcore lovers-on-the-run flick featuring a super sassy, sensual, and somewhat stupid yet thankfully oftentimes unclad frog babe with an extra erotic accent that probably millions of teenage boys masturbated to while it was aired on cable TV during the 1980s alongside similarly fun filmic trash like Paul Schrader’s Gere vehicle American Gigolo (1980). Directed by a fellow from a self-described “normal middle-class, half-Jewish, half-Irish upbringing” who first gained attention among cinephiles and cineastes for his experimental docufiction piece David Holzman's Diary (1967) starring screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson (who co-penned Breathless) as a young Godard-quoting filmmaker and who went on to direct everything from X-rated counterculture-themed arthouse dystopian flicks like Glen and Randa (1971) to stupid bawdy Porky's-esque sex-comedies like Hot Times (1974) aka A Hard Day for Archie, McBride’s Breathless is a stylish and sexy ‘true romance’ that is full of love and life and has very little in common with the Godard flick to the point where it would almost be disingenuous to describe it as a remake. Indeed, thankfully McBride did not pull a Gus van Sant and assemble a sterile and pointless shot-for-shot remake, but instead he completely revamped the entire story and aesthetic to the point that the average American viewer would never suspect that it was a reworking of a French art film that completely changed world cinema and highly influenced the proliferation of the auteur theory in Europe and eventually the United States.

 Featuring a tastelessly charming rockabilly-fueled lady’s man and super slick car thief that finds inspiration from reading Silver Surfer comics and considers fighting for the body and soul of the woman that he loves to be the most important objective in his life as opposed to a goofy frog petty criminal that lives a pathetic parasitic existence and is more infatuated with an ugly mug like Humphrey Bogart than his blonde dingbat girlfriend like in Godard’s flick, McBride’s Breathless films pays intercultural homage to its predecessor in a couple of ways, most notably in terms of the female lead. Indeed, instead of a boyish American love interest with a blonde dyke haircut like in Godard’s flick, the film features a classically feminine brunette French female lead. Of course, what makes the casting even more interesting is that Richard Gere and his ‘French’ costar Valérie Kaprisky (who is actually of Polish, Argentinean, and Turkish extraction) were actually extremely sexually attracted to one another in real-life and their carnal chemistry is quite obvious onscreen to the point where even when the two are fighting, you can tell that they really want to fuck each other’s brains out (in fact, Kaprisky once went so far as to say that the love scenes were not acting, stating, “It was wonderful working with Richard...He [Gere] gives you everything to react to. We were not acting the love scenes. They were half real. You can't say you act only when they say 'Action!'...I think it shows in the movie. If you don't really feel like doing it, it shows.”).  Not surprisingly, Kaprisky had previously starred in a couple pieces of European cinematic erotica, including alongside swarthy bisexual kraut heartthrob Horst Buchholz in English auteur Robert ‘Dr. Phibes’ Fuest’s fairly disappointing softcore swansong Aphrodite (1982) and she was ultimately discovered by Breathless producer Martin Erlichman (who is probably best remembered today for the quite dubious achievement of discovering singularly vulgar and repellant Jewess Barbra Streisand) after he came upon bootleg nude photographs of the actress, though it was apparently Gere that actually selected her for the role after flying to Paris and picking the most sensually sound frogette (of course, Kaprisky makes Jean Seberg in Godard's film seems like a bratty little boy by comparison). In fact, in a similar sense to Robert De Niro (who incidentally was apparently interested in playing Gere's role) with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1996), Gere acted as a sort of secondary auteur on the film, or as director McBride once stated himself, the actor “was a collaborator [and] a co-conspirator” who “worked on the final version of the script, was interested in the art direction, [and] sat in on casting.” As someone that typically cannot stand even looking at Gere, let alone seeming him portraying a sort of archetypical alpha-male, Breathless ultimately managed to do the seemingly impossible by inspiring me to root for the man (or at least his character) just as much I rooted for the ice-axe in Joseph Losey's The Assassination of Trotsky (1972). 

 The story of a self-described “all or nothing” kind of car thief who accidentally kills a cop and plans to flee to Mexico yet has fallen in love with a feisty French college student and thus postpones his self-imposed exile until she agrees to do him the grand honor of being his main babe so that they can commence a happy storybook life together, Breathless ultimately not only depicts how society and the world in general oftentimes destroys lovers and their romantic ambitions, but also the perennial relationship plague of female decisiveness as well as how members of the so-called fairer sex oftentimes have the (anti)emotional capacity to betray their true love because he does not fit perfectly into their big idealistic plans for the future.  In that sense, the film is even more relevant today than when it was first released over three decades ago, as we now live in an uniquely ungodly age where the rotten fruits of feminism have reached an all-time high in the United States and especially Europe as reflected by defeatist men's rights movements like MGTOW and the hordes of unhappy childless spinsters in their 30s and 40s who have nothing to show for their lives aside from an intrinsically worthless career that contributes virtually nothing to society aside from more bureaucracy and mindless consumerism (indeed, places like Starbucks would go out of business without these women).  Indeed, McBride’s film might look, feel, and sound like your typical big dumb stupid Hollywood studio film, but it contains a philosophically insightful love story in the tragic spirit of classic works like the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and Tristan and Iseult and thus naturally concludes in a less than happy fashion (though the ending is hardly as cynical as the one featured in Godard’s film). In that sense, Breathless is a pure and unadulterated romance flick for real men who value testicular fortitude and loathe white knight faggots, so-called ‘male feminists,’ hipster homos, autistic tech dorks with yellow fever, and culturally cuckolded wiggers, among other rabble who do not deserve a real woman. 

 Jesse Lujack (Richard Gere) is a sort proletarian man’s man who refuses to live by anyone’s rules and sees the lyrics of Jerry Lee Lewis and the personal philosophy of fictional Marvel comic hero The Silver Surfer as a passionate and practical Weltanschauung to live by. Indeed, while Jesse highly respects the fact that the Silver Surfer is constantly thinking about his lover even though she is trapped in a totally different galaxy, Lewis’ songs provide him with both the dance moves and prole ‘poetry’ he needs to let a lady know how much he loves her.  Although not actually depicted in the film, while in Las Vegas, Jesse hooked up with a hot young French architecture student named Monica Poiccard (Valérie Kaprisky of Andrzej Zulawski’s La femme publique (1984) aka The Public Woman) and during their couple days of sharing carnal knowledge with one another, the protagonist fell in love with her, or so the viewer soon learns at the beginning of Breathless after he suavely steals a “Little Baby Porsche” in front of a casino and then begins driving through the desert to make his way to Los Angeles so he can reunited with his beloved and make her his outlaw queen.  It is quite apparent that Jesse truly loves Monica because at the very beginning of the film he does not think twice about blowing off a beauteous big bosomed blonde that practically throws herself at him.  While cruising through the desert, Jesse practices ways to ask Monica to come to Mexico with him, stating, “All right. So, first I go get the money, and then I go ask Monica. I say, ‘Monica, you ever been to Mexico, honey?’ I say—I say, ‘Monica, darling, you coming to Mexico with me? Monica, you’re coming to Mexico with me!’ Me and Monica. ‘Cause I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be. Mon-a, Monica and me. Me and Monica. Yeah, me and Monica go to Mexico.” After ironically declaring, “I know what we need. We need the killer” in regard to listening to a Jerry Lee Lewis song, Jesse discovers a handgun in the glove compartment of the stolen car that will soon get him into some serious trouble in a way that might destroy all his big plans. When Jesse proceeds to drive like a jackass through the desert to impress some young sluts in another car, he soon finds a police car trying to pull him over, so he naturally decides to get away since he’s driving a stolen automobile. Unfortunately, after opting to drive through a roadblock in an attempt to outrun the cop, Jesse crashes his car and in the process causes it to get stuck in a ditch. When the officer finally catches up to him and threatens him by yelling things to him like, “Get away from the car, I’ll blow you away!,” Jesse ‘accidentally’ ends up shooting and killing the cop. Of course, it is not long until the media begins dubbing Jesse the “I-15 Killer” and cops begin hunting for him everywhere, so he must act quick to get both money and Monica so that he can establish a little piece of paradise somewhere south of the border where most sane gringos would never dare go. 

 As a man that is wholly willing to risk his life for love, Jesse naturally refuses to leave without Monica, even when she routinely acts like a fiercely frigid cunt when he comes to see her. Indeed, when Jesse decides to surprise Monica by randomly showing up at her university, she is hardly happy but instead bitches like a cold witch on the rag who would rather see him dead. To Monica’s credit, Jesse shows up in the middle of a college exam where Monica is showing a small model of a building that she has designed and begins both verbally and physically assaulting her seemingly sapless teachers while pretending to be a janitor, so it is only natural that she would be mad at the protagonist, but not really for the reasons that the viewer initially suspects. Indeed, like most modern women, Monica is a self-absorbed social-climber who is geared towards engaging in hypergamy and who seems more interested in having a successful career than having children and a family with the man she loves as demonstrated by the fact that she is fucking her dorky and impotent architect professor Paul (William Tepper, who played the lead in Jack Nicholson’s underrated X-rated quasi-arthouse debut Drive, He Said (1971)), who is the complete opposite of wild gentleman Jesse as a groveling beta-bitch academic who seems like he would auto-ejaculate in his pants if a woman merely touched his leg. Apparently, Monica left Jesse in the middle of the night during their lurid love affair in Las Vegas, thus hinting that she is afraid of love and emotional commitment, so it is no surprise that she gets scared when Jesse passionately declares to her, “…I’m desperate for you, Monica. You know what it’s like blasting along the highway, going like ninety, maybe a hundred miles an hour? All of a sudden there’s this dip in the road. It likes to suck your guts out. Your breath is gone. That’s me around you, sugar. That’s me. BREATHLESS.” In fact, Monica admits so much when she responds to Jesse’s remarks by practically crying, “You scare me, Jesse. You can’t just burst into a person’s life and explode it all up like this [sighs] Las Vegas was a holiday. This is my life.” Of course, Jesse is determined to make himself the most important part of her life, even if he is a petty con turned fugitive who is wanted for the murder of a police officer. 

 Upon arriving in Los Angeles, Jesse wastes no time in breaking into Monica’s apartment building by pretending to be a Mexican pool boy and then making himself at home in her flat after picking the lock on her front-door. When Jesse randomly discovers a photograph of Monica and her professor Paul at Disney world while snooping around his lover's apartment, he tears the romantically hapless teacher out of the photo while calling him a “smuck” and then pockets the pic for himself. Despite the fact that she was willing to have sex with him when they were total strangers, Monica constantly cock-blocks Jesse when he initially arrives in LA because she seems to want to continue her phony love affair with Paul so that she can further her academic career and does not want to emotionally complicate things. Indeed, at one point, Jesse literally asks Monica, “Why are you so afraid to sleep with me again?” and she replies “Because you scare me. I don’t know what you want from me,” thus revealing that she is denial that one can actually have a romance with another person that is based purely on love and not merely personal gain.  Of course, Jesse reveals to Monica the error of her ways when he remarks to her, “you’re like one of those girls who’ll fuck everybody in the whole world…except the guy who loves her.” Like with a lot of women, it is ultimately the small sentimental things that Jesse does for her that makes Monica realize that he truly loves her. Indeed, when Jesse randomly robs a tranny that is taking a dump in a stall in a Hispanic bar restroom, he discovers a blinking light-up heart necklace in the shemale’s pursue and gives it to Monica, who cherishes the completely childish piece of jewelry to the point that she wears it all the time, even though it looks quite preposterous on such a sexually mature woman. 

 When Monica quotes her favorite author William Faulkner’s line, “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief,” and asks Jesse which one he would choose if he had a choice, the protagonist stoically replies “nothing” because, as he extra confidently states, “Like I told you, baby, all or nothing with me.” Although Monica, who certainly has a melancholic essence about her, prefers “grief” over “nothing,” she seems impressed with Jesse’s reply as demonstrated by the fact that she proceeds to make love to him, but her professor Paul interrupts by leaving a would-be-flirty message on the heroine’s answering machine that pisses the protagonist off. Quite irked at the fact that his lady love is sexually servicing an obnoxious academic dork who is probably too big of a pansy to even penetrate a puss, Jesse pushes Monica away, unplugs the answering machine, and then throws it in another room while the heroine, who is completely naked, opts to get out of the awkward situation by going into the bathroom and taking a shower. While Monica is showering, Jesse's anxiety and depression is only worsened when he sees a special news report on TV about how he is a fugitive cop-killer and how the police are currently leading a manhunt to find him, but luckily the protagonist manages to get out of his depression by simply singing Elvis lyrics.  Indeed, Jesse then proceeds to invade the bathroom and loudly sing to his beloved while simultaneously striping his clothes, “I can’t walk out…Because I love you too much baby. Why can’t you see what you’re doing to me when you don’t believe a word I say? We can’t go on together with suspicious minds and we can’t build our dreams on suspicious minds,” which are words that certainly parallel the dubious circumstances of their relationship. Monica is certainly delighted with the protagonist’s solo performance, as Jesse proceeds to penetrate her in the shower and then the two conclude their carnal session in the bedroom. When Monica gets out of bed to get dressed, Jesse passionately states to her without the slightest hint of irony, “Hey. Don’t take a shower. I want us to smell like we’ve been fucking,” which is a sentiment that anyone that has fallen in love can identify with. From there, Jesse begins describing to Monica about the mythos of the Silver Surfer and how the rather romantic superhero is always thinking about his girlfriend despite the fact that the two lovers are, “trapped on two different galaxies.” Jesse’s romantic remarks about the Silver Surfer incite a deep emotional reaction in Monica as she then proceeds to confess to the protagonist in regard to her extremely confused and stereotypical female worries, “I’m afraid because I’d like you to love me. And then – I don’t know. I wish you wouldn’t love me. You don’t fit into my plan for my life.” Indeed, assumedly brainwashed by a lifetime’s worth of frog style feminist brainwashing, Monica is highly idealistic about establishing a career as a successful architect even though her intelligence and fashion sense hints that she does not even have the artistic prowess to compete with a third rate queer fashion designer, let alone design fancy and innovative buildings. When Monica confesses to Jesse that she might me pregnant, he seems shocked at first but soon gets very happy, at least until his lady love abruptly declares, “Why don’t you understand me, Jesse? I have to think about the future,” to which he fittingly replies, “The future is bullshit,” thus causing her to act out like a petulant child who is pissed because her daddy will not buy her a pony.  Indeed, Jesse might be a man with nothing to lose, but his indestructible love for Monica is not something the female protagonist can simply purchase after she has become a successful architect, hence her mixed emotions.

 When Jesse drops off Monica to meet with a famous French architect named Dr. Boudreaux (played by Ukrainian-born French producer designer and director Eugène Lourié, who got his start working with Jean Renoir and later went on to directed Hollywood sci-fi flicks like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)), he is identified as the fugitive cop-killer by an old Jewish man that is sitting in front of the ancient Mishkon Tephilo Synagogue located where Venice meets Santa Monica in West LA, but luckily he manages to get away and then goes to a junkyard to sell a stolen convertible to an obscenely sleazy Hebraic con named Birnbaum (played by Art Metrano of Police Academy 2 (1985) and Police Academy 3 (1985), who incidentally currently has a one-man comedy tour called “Jews Don't Belong On Ladders...An Accidental Comedy”). Birnbaum dresses like a dipsomaniac slob that jerks off to Beach Boys music videos and grotesquely sucks on a Popsicle like it is a cock while he is conducing business with Jesse, who soon realizes that he is doing business with an unscrupulous scumbag. To make a long story short, Jesse beats and robs Birnbaum and his Mexican underling after the gutter grade kosher conman refuses to pay him for the convertible that he stole him by threatening to call the cops on him since he is a fugitive. Meanwhile, Monica is harassed by two completely humorless and absurdly anally retentive cops who threaten to arrest her if she does not tell them where Jesse is, so she lies to them and tells them he is headed to San Francisco. When Jesse subsequently happens upon one of the cops harassing Monica, he immediately steals a car, runs over the officer, and then coerces his lady love into getting into the automobile, thus ushering in their sex-filled outlaw road trip. 

 Considering she is actively evading the police while on the run with a fugitive cop-killer and thus has probably already completely ruined both her academic career and personal life, among other things, one would assume that Monica has finally become completely dedicated to Jesse and is happy to live an outlaw lifestyle and start a family with her bad boy toy in rural Mexico, but of course it is only a matter of time before her stereotypical female anxiety comes into play and threatens to completely ruin everything, most especially the man she loves most. When she and Jesse manage to escape from a virtual army of armed cops that raid an underground New Wave club, Monica seems to practically have an orgasm as a result of the experience even though she badly cuts her hand in the process. In fact, the two lovers subsequently week shelter in an antiquated movie theater that is screening Gun Crazy (1950) aka Deadly Is the Female directed by Joseph H. Lewis and starring Peggy Cummins and John Dall and while the movie is playing they make love with one another even though the screening room is full of people. While making passionate love, Monica quotes a line from the film where lead actress Cummins declares, “I don’t want to be afraid of life or anything else,” but of course fear and anxiety will eventually get the best of her. After wantonly watching the movie, Jesse lets Monica pick out a car to steal, so she chooses a red El Dorado convertible and then the two head to a place called ‘The Pines,’ which is at the ruins of “famous crazy fucker” Errol Flynn’s mansion, for the night until they can meet the protagonist’s suave Guido criminal friend Tony Berrutti (Garry Goodrow) the next morning to get money so that they can finally make their way to Mexico. That night while parked at the “Honeymoon Suite” (aka an old swimming pool) of the Pines, Monica unwittingly reveals that she is having second thoughts about going with Jesse to Mexico by asking her beau a series of questions about what they will do for money in the future. Of course, when Jesse acts somewhat aggravated with Monica the next morning when she attempts to flirt with him while he is tuning up the El Dorado, the female heroine begins to panic. 

 When Monica discovers that the heart necklace that Jesse gave her is cracked after she drops it on the ground, she completely succumbs to female superstition and sees it as a serious sign that their relationship is ruined. Ultimately, Monica betrays Jesse by calling the cops from a payphone after the protagonist makes the stupid mistake of telling her to go to a nearby convenience store to buy imperative things like, “a carton of milk, some ding dongs, [and a] newspaper.” After betraying her beau, Monica then goes back to him and attempts to rationalize her treachery by stating to him in a fairly hysterical fashion, “I don’t wanna love you. I don’t want to go with you. Just now when I went down the hill, I wanted to keep going on. I was not gonna come back. I was not going to come back! But I knew you would come after me, and I knew you wouldn’t stop coming after me […]That’s why I called the polices…so that you would have to go.” Of course, Jesse refuses to leave and instead goes to meet Berrutti as planned to get the money, but the only thing that his friend, who is naturally afraid of getting busted by the cops, gives him is a handgun. Just as Berrutti abruptly drives away and Jesse tosses the gun on the ground, a number of police cars show up and a cop demands that the protagonist put his hands in the air. While Jesse initially follows the cop’s orders and raises his arms air, he soon begins dancing and singing the lyrics from the eponymous Jerry Lee Lewis song, “If you’re gonna love me, lover please don’t tease. If I can hold you, honey let me squeeze” while lovingly staring at Monica. Naturally, Monica is totally moved by Jesse’s inordinately romantic performance and proceeds to run up to him while crying, “Jesse! I love you, Jesse!,” thus inspiring the protagonist to grab the gun and point it at the cops in a true demonstration that he is really an “all or nothing” kind of guy.  One can only assume that the cops unleash a storm of bullets on Jesse after he puts his gun on them, but the viewer never finds out as Breathless concludes with a still shot of the protagonist aiming his weapon at the police in what is indubtably auteur McBride's (pseudo)Godardian equivalent to a Hollywood ending.

 While one of the main reasons I loathe alpha-fan-boy filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is because I think that he has absolutely horrendous taste in cinema despite being such an obsessive cinephile, I can at least respect him to a marginal degree for acknowledging that McBride’s Breathless is an underrated classic of sorts. In fact, Tarantino is such a huge fan of the film that he not only featured a poster of it in his partially lost black-and-white debut film My Best Friend's Birthday (1987), but also included a Silver Surfer poster in Reservoir Dogs (1992) in tribute to protagonist Jesse's love of the superhero. Of course, the script Tarantino penned for True Romance (1993) was also obviously heavily influenced by Breathless. Additionally, both Serbian auteur Emir Kusturica’s Time of the Gypsies (1988) aka Dom za vesanje and avant-garde auteur Thom Andersen’s experimental documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) pay tribute to the flick, with the latter cinematic work featuring excerpts of McBride’s film spliced in throughout. Speaking of Andersen’s film, Breathless features the most ambitious use of Los Angeles and its landscapes that I have ever seen in a film aside from sadomasochistic experimental gay pornographer Fred Halsted’s masterpiece LA Plays Itself (1972), which portrays the city as a sort of concrete jungle that is being perpetually being consumed by industrialization. Indeed, watching the LA depicted in big budget Hollywood blockbusters oftentimes makes me feel completely nauseated due to the seeming outstanding superficiality and singular soullessness of the city in these films, yet Breathless gives the West Coast metropolis a sort of truly magical feel that has not been seen since the great cinematic works of Hollywood's Golden Age. Certainly McBride’s film could not be any further away from Godard’s static and fairly prosaic film in terms of both spirit and aesthetics. Notably, when interviewed by Film Comment in 2013 about his film and its relation to Godard’s original work, auteur McBride remarked, “I would call it an exploitation of the Godard movie [laughs]. Look, I was a huge fan of the original film. If it was only one thing, then Breathless was the thing that made me want to make movies. But in reality, the chance to make a remake of this film that I loved so much came up rather accidentally, and once it was going to actually happen it seemed to me ludicrous. I felt terribly embarrassed! I was really just taking advantage of an opportunity that gave me a chance to direct a movie. Of course, as Kit Carson and I were writing it, it grew into its own thing […] by the end it was something very different from the original, for better or worse.”  Arguably, if Breathless was not a remake of a classic French arthouse film, it would probably be more revered and respected today instead of simply being regarded as a curious footnote of cinema history.

 If Breathless is a shameless Hollywoodization of Godard’s film, contemporary French auteur Bruno Dumont’s fairly brutal arthouse horror flick Twentynine Palms (2003) seems almost like a ruthless rape and murder of McBride’s film, as if the frog auteur was committing a sort of cinematic revenge against a mainstream American filmmaker who dared to defile one of his nation's most respected films. Indeed, while I have no clue if Dumont had the Gere vehicle in mind when he created his film, I could not help but notice the similarities between it and McBride's flick in terms of its depiction of a sex-heavy relationship between a stupid American philistine who drives fancy cars and his strikingly beautiful yet emotionally erratic French girlfriend. Quite unlike McBride’s film, the male protagonist of Twentynine Palms is a conniving weakling and capitalist whore who has no real love for his girlfriend and seems to only see her as nothing more than an imported carnal delicacy that he goes to a great pains to erotically exploit while denying her true love and affection, among other things. While largely seen as big budget erotic kitsch nowadays, Breathless is, at least in my less than humble opinion, a shockingly enthralling work that probably can be regarded to heterosexual males what Gone with the Wind (1939) has been to countless generations of American women, as a truly epic romance flick with passion and pathos that at least semi-successfully expresses the emotional ups and downs of a great romance relationship in 100-minutes.

 In its depiction of a man risking everything and putting all his time and energy into a romance that seems completely impractical and doomed to fail, Breathless features a scenario that many men who have fallen in love can completely relate to, which certainly cannot be said of Woody Allen flicks and the countless other Hollywood films where a neurotic Hebraic wuss is all lovelorn over a statuesque Shiksa that could probably kick his ass.  Not surprisingly, McBride later went on to direct a Jerry Lee Lewis biopic entitled Great Balls of Fire! (1989) starring Dennis Quaid and Winona Ryder, but his filmmaking career essentially fizzled out after that and he has spent most of his career since the early 1990s directing TV movies and episodes for TV shows ranging from The Wonder Years (1990-1991) to Six Feet Under (2001).  Directed by a man whose legendary debut David Holzman's Diary was shot under the Godardian cinephile philosophy that “cinema is truth twenty-four times per second,” Breathless is probably my all-time favorite ‘sellout’ film an underground auteur turned Hollywood hack, even though I only saw it for the first time about two weeks ago.  Showing no evidence that it was directed by a man that once was part of the underground (though the comic book sequences did remind me of Paul Morrissey's obscure pre-Warhol short The Origin of Captain America (1965)), McBride's shamelessly Hollywood-esque flick might not be a masterpiece but it is a quintessentially American movie in the best sort of way a flagrantly flashy, stupidly entertaining, and seductively stylish work that features an obscenely arrogant and hopelessly naive outlaw go-getter who is symbolic of the sort of people that once made American a great place.  If there is anything you can learn from Breathless aside from that there is no way that a man that manhandles a hot French chick like Gere does in the film could have a fetish for shoving furry rodents up his manhole, it is that it is better to risk everything for love than to waste your most fertile and sexually virile years going to college so that you can eventually become a cold cunt career or bourgeois automaton.

-Ty E

War Is Menstrual Envy

After a number of years of total inactivity, Cinema of Transgression anti-messiah Nick Zedd (The Bogus Man, The Wild World of Lydia Lunch) attempted to make a comeback of sorts with his first feature-length film in almost a decade. Indeed, the moronically titled cinematic work War Is Menstrual Envy (1992) aka War Is Menstrual Envy: Parts I, II, and III is undoubtedly Zedd’s own sort of equivalent to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising (1972) as a sometimes oneiric flick that is not only special effects heavy, but also the director's most epically artistically ambitious work to date.  Indeed, one can certainly tell while watching the film that Zedd intended it to be his magnum opus, as well as a work that would demonstrate his maturity as both an artist and filmmaker. Of course, Zedd’s film is no masterpiece like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Lucifer Rising as it is basically a convoluted collection of autistic-garde petite vignettes of the intentionally obscenely obnoxious sort that are only loosely connected by an ostensible ‘antiwar’ theme, thus demonstrating that the auteur might have suffered some serious brain damage due to decades of drug abuse (as he described in his book Totem of the Depraved (1996), Zedd was addicted heroin around the time he made his last film Whoregasm (1988)).  Once described by Zedd himself as set, “In November 2092, following the death by radiation poisoning of 9/10ths of the human race. A cult of sea worshipers appears led by a human deity known as Shiva Scythe. Forming a telepathic alliance with the world dolphin population, they bring about the destruction of Christianity and Islam” (notice Zedd does not have the testicular fortitude and/or intelligence to mention Judaism, even though it is an antiwar film and Zionism is directly responsible for a good percentage of the war and chaos that has plagued the Middle East since at least since the end of the Second World War), War Is Menstrual Envy features a uniquely ugly mutant chick with a shaved pussy and bright orange skin who fucks a giant octopus, a large Jew pretending to be a barbaric redneck biker having his head blown off with a shotgun by a female bartender, an apocalyptic soldier sporting a gas mask who drives a bayonet into the chest of a naked baby boy, and porn history's most infamous Jewess porn star making love to and licking the heavily scarred skin of a real-life burn victim, among other things that demonstrate why the filmmaker is and has always been a one-note wonder who lives to attempt to shock and disgust and not much more. Once apparently described by banker turned onetime Warhol superstar Taylor Mead (The Nude Restaurant, Lonesome Cowboys) as, “The greatest underground film ever made,” the aberrantly kaleidoscopic 16mm celluloid work is notable for being a rare truly ‘cinematic’ Zedd flick in that it has a strong sense of mise-en-scène, which is in stark contrast to the auteur's absurdly amateurishly directed early features like They Eat Scum (1979) and Geek Maggot Bingo or The Freak from Suckweasel Mountain (1983). Indeed, almost completely devoid of both plot and dialogue, War Is Menstrual Envy is comprised of would-be-iconoclastic themes and imagery that seem like the creation of a perniciously petulant child who masturbates to the thought of his cinematic miscreations giving his bourgeois parents a heart attack. Seeming somewhat like the result of the Viennese Aktionists attempting to direct a bargain bin antiwar film for Disney starring the descendants of the cast of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), Zedd’s film is about as intellectually stimulating as Brazilian tranny porn, albeit with more cheap makeup and smaller penises (Zedd's included!). In other words, War Is Menstrual Envy oftentimes feels like the patently preposterous result of some trash auteur like John Waters or Andy Milligan developing delusions of grandeur and attempting to reinvent themselves as a real serious ‘artiste.’ 

 While only 77 minutes long, War Is Menstrual Envy could have easily been cut by two-thirds of its running time and still have the same impact on the viewer, thus providing strong evidence that spending most of his (non)career making short films really has warped Zedd’s view of nuance when it comes to the art of feature filmmaking (notably, the film was shot in three different segments, which were later combined into one fairly fragmented feeling film). Indeed, it takes about seven minutes before the title screen appears, as the film begins with a sort of pseudo-existentialist epilogue that seems to attempt to abstractly communicate internal pain and sexual dysfunction (Zedd's Cinema of Transgression frenemy Richard Kern aka ‘Nazi Dick’ once described the film as being, “set in the future, where there's no water, women are sluts, and men are fucked up sexually”). Beginning with a shot of two heavily bandaged individuals that resemble mummies lying in awkward positions on a sterile looking floor and quivering in seeming abject pain in an all-white room that is almost painful to look at juxtaposed with discordant noise, the film immediately gives the viewer the impression that the filmmaker is an emotionally and sexually wounded cripple of sorts, or at least he seems to be (sub)consciously communicating as such in a fairly heavy-handed way. Eventually one of the mummies begins twitching rapidly and then attempts to kiss and hump the other one, though he eventually opens his mouth and spews a bunch of blood out of his mouth as if he has just drained his comrade dry of their precious vital fluids. After spitting out the blood, the mummy (played by a young twink-ish Guido named Steven Oddo, who Zedd once mundanely stated of that, “He likes to mutilate himself in public.  I don't know why...His body is covered with scars...”) is featured completely unwrapped (Zedd makes sure to get a close-up of his flaccid member) and then proceeds to slowly and anticlimatically carve “WAR” into his chest in tribute to the first word of the film’s title. After the mummy epilogue, a sort of second title sequence begins featuring quasi-apocalyptic soldiers wearing gas masks and riding horses while attacking some unseen enemy in a sunny desert. In a seeming self-tribute to the director’s ostensible iconoclastic powers as a filmmaker, the title sequence concludes with “Directed By Nick Zedd” superimposed over an atomic mushroom cloud. Unfortunately, things get a little bit less impressive from there, though the film does have its undeniable unforgettable moments. 

 If War Is Menstrual Envy has something resembling a lead heroine, it is indubitably Cinema of Transgression anti-diva, performance artist, and sometimes filmmaker Kembra Pfahler (a strange lady that is probably best known as being the lead singer of the cult glam-punk-shock-rock band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black), who is completely naked for almost the entire film aside from generically vulgar and intentionally unflattering body-paint that would probably appeal to fans of Gwar. In what is indubitably the most tedious, tasteless, and just plain stupid section of the film, Pfahler is featured ‘swimming’ in an aesthetically grating ‘green screen’ (chroma key) scenario where her completely hairless body is superimposed over deep sea stock footage that was seemingly stolen from some sort of National Geographic documentary. Sporting nothing but black thigh-high vinyl boots and a cheap neon yellow wig, Pfahler stands (and sometimes lies) in place while barely pretending to swim by motioning her arms and legs in a goofy lackluster fashion. Clearly Zedd must have been on a minuscule budget that forced him to use all of the footage he shot because the scene features moments where Pfahler unwitting breaks down the fourth wall by staring straight into the camera and then proceeding to blatantly talk to someone (probably Zedd) off-screen. Despite being about twenty minutes long, the segment is comprised solely of the ‘surreal swimming,’ with the climax of the scene being Pfahler pretending to fuck a gigantic octopus (it should be noted that she was once married to a Japanese fellow, so that might explain her octopus fetish). Indeed, at one point Pfahler has one octopus tentacle inside her freshly shaved pussy while another one is penetrating her mouth, thus demonstrating that she is probably a fairly sexually versatile women who lets none of her wet fleshy orifices go unused. Of course, the raunchy orange-skinned lady also grinds her shaved main vein against one of the tentacles, which is depicted in a close-up scene of playfully orgasmic octopussy perversity. Needless to say, none of this is even remotely erotic unless you are someone that gets off to associating vaginas with seafood or are into women that look like they were run over with an ice cream trunk that was driven by members of the Cockettes, though the segment is certainly as contrived and tedious as the average porn flick. 

 In the only segment of the film that vaguely resembles any sort of traditional movie in the sense that it involves human-beings interacting in their own typical social habitats, Jewish artist and sometimes filmmaker Ari M. Roussimoff (who directed Shadows in the City (1991), which Zedd appear in and was the last film to star NYC underground filmmaker Jack Smith of Flaming Creatures (1963) fame) absurdly portrays a violently intolerant GG Allin-esque biker-like redneck brute who sports black ‘tough guy’ sunglasses and a denim vest with a confederate flag patch and proceeds to hassle every single person he encounters while getting drunk at a seedy dive bar for sexually depraved (sub)human misfits. Indeed, when a cheaply tattooed fellow named ‘Tattoo Mike Wilson’ stares down the baldheaded biker due to his obnoxious behavior, Roussimoff rudely throws at bottle cap at his face. While Roussimoff pushes around both men and women, he decides to flirt with a sickly looking tranny (Ron Knice) that is dressed like a slutty 1920s flapper and looks like he is about to die from AIDS. Of course, the big butch bro has not clue that the pseudo-chick actually has a dick, so when the flagrantly faggy flapper randomly whips out a big black strap-on dildo (!) and then proudly waves it around like it is an impressive weapon of sorts, Roussimoff naturally goes completely berserk and begins choking the seemingly physically and mentally sick shemale creep. Clearly highly intolerant of violent rowdy meatheads causing trouble in her sleazy taproom, a dyke-like barmaid whips out a shotgun and blows Roussimoff’s head off in what is easily one of the most hopelessly schlocky head-exploding scenes of cinema history. After the Hebraic GG Allin gets his head blown off, a blonde female dwarf appears out of nowhere and begins destroying everything in sight while standing next to his corpse in a scene that is almost entirely in aesthetically odious color negative film. Eventually a sort of male sex slave sporting nothing but a gimp mask appears and attempts to clean up the menacing she-midget’s mess, so the extra little lady responds by proceeding to hurl pieces of garbage, including broken violins and smashed records, at her assumed sensual servant. During this segment, scenes from Zedd’s previous experimental film Whoregasm are randomly spliced in, including a shot of the filmmaker in drag sucking on his onetime-girlfriend Susan Manson’s extra bloody used tampon. 

 After a collage of sorts that was clearly stolen from a nature documentary that features time-lapse footage of decaying animal corpses and dying flowers (it should be noted that Zedd has an affection for neo-Marxist French Situationist filmmakers like René Viénet and Guy Debord because they utilized the postmodern technique of détournement and made films by simply reworking other people’s footage to give them new meaning while simultaneously destroying their original cultural contexts), the viewer is exposed to sentimental footage of a happy baby boy, who is soon senselessly murdered by an ominous soldier sporting a gas mask who carefully impales the little lad with a bayonet. From there, the soldier walks around post-apocalyptic ruins whilst admiring the dead baby on his bayonet as a flag with a swastika-like symbol waves in the background (of course, this symbol is featured prominently throughout the film). After the sort of pseudo-spiritual soldier scene, the viewer is bombarded with a series of vintage stock still photographs of men whose faces were horribly disfigured in war, as well as footage of deformed fetuses in jars full of embalming fluid. Not surprisingly, things only get uglier from there as the next scene begins with a color negative close-up of Zedd’s unimpressive cock. Completely naked aside from a whorish leopard print fur coat and blue body-paint, Zedd resembles a sort of radically repellent drag queen from 1950s B-movie sci-fi purgatory in a scene that is juxtaposed with some long-winded negro preacher proselytizing about the supposed greatness of Martin Luther King, Jr., among other mostly mundane things. In an assumed juvenile attempt to make this largely senseless scene as aesthetically unpleasing as possible, Zedd opted to have the camera incessantly zoom in and out during the entire segment, thus making it quite the relief when it finally ends. During this scene, anti-diva Kembra Pfahler and some other equally grotesque beings covered in body paint dance around Zedd as if they are having some sort of LSD-inspired Cinema of Transgression pow-wow.  Somehow, I got the impression while watching this segment that Zedd secretly longs to be a decadently glamorous coke-fueled runway model (as the auteur bragged in Totem of the Depraved, Annie Sprinkle once landed Zedd the less than dignified job of posing for a couple porno mags).

 In what is indubitably one of the best segments film, Kembra Pfahler and singularly grotesque porn star Jewess Annie Sprinkle attempt to sexually seduce an extra frigid middle-aged commie officer in a scenario that seems like what might have happened if Hebraic exploitation hack Herschell Gordon Lewis attempted to remake Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971). Like with the bar scene, Zedd decided to ruin this segment by juxtaposing it with outmoded rap music that makes the filmmaker come off as a dorky teenage negrophile fraud who is trying to annoy his parents. Set in a room in the spirit of Ulrike Ottinger’s sardonic postmodern dystopian flick Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (1984) aka The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press aka Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press where the walls are covered with newspaper wallpaper that has a SS Siegrune symbol spray-painted on it, the segment depicts the stoic Stalinist officer trying in vain to keep his composure while Ms. Sprinkle shoves both her cow-like mammary glands and a strap-on dildo in his face while Pfahler simultaneously acts like a ADHD-ridden grade school student that is on the verge of suffering a major epileptic fit. After the girls get done rubbing their largely nasty naughty bits in the poor commie comrade’s face, the film cuts to a shot of a bronze statue of Hindu Tantric deity Shiva that is sitting on top of a table that is right next to a completely motionless man that is completely covered in bandages and is reclining in a sort of campy throne.  After the establishing shot, Pfahler appears out of nowhere in a blasphemous nun outfit that exposes her fairly firm boobs and then begins carefully taking off the bandages on the man in an almost ritualistic fashion, thus eventually revealing that he is a burn victim (played by a real-life burn victim who was simply credited as ‘Ray’). Of course, in his largely moronic dedication to shocking the viewer, Zedd made sure to zoom in on the poor fellow’s heavily scared skin, so it should be no surprise that things naturally get more revolting from there. Indeed, after Pfahler sloppily dresses the burn victim in a poor fitting military uniform, Sprinkle abruptly appears and begins undressing Ray (who she apparently was dating in real-life at the time because she wanted to experience sex with all different kinds of people, including burn victims). In a fairly stupidly disgusting yet strangely tender scene that indubitably demonstrates that she wallows in even the most grotesque of flesh, Sprinkle proceeds to lick Ray’s scars and eventually rub her titties in his face while he delicately kisses all over her body with a certain degree of sensitivity that betrays his fairly horrific appearance. As if to brag that he has thoroughly despoiled the eyes of the viewer by the end of the film, War Is Menstrual Envy concludes with a couple images of red bloody eyes, with the credits scene featuring graphic medical footage of a badly damaged blue eye being repaired during surgery. 

 Quite hilariously, when I mentioned the title of War Is Menstrual Envy to a certain less than liberal lady friend of mine, she remarked that Zedd must be a faggot because no sane woman likes having periods and that it is a patent absurdly that any man would pretend to glorify such a thing. Of course, considering the film features a clip where Zedd sucks on a bloody tampon as well as another clip of Susan Manson's blood-stained ass crack and genitals, one can only assume that the seemingly sexually autistic auteur has a menstrual blood fetish that he is absurdly attempting to project onto both the viewer and his supposed enemies (aka masculine males), hence its senselessly sensational title. Undoubtedly, the best thing I can say about Zedd’s flick is that it is probably the most intricately infantile cinematic work that I have ever seen, as if it was directed by the sexually abused bastard brood of Mayan Deren and Russ Meyer, albeit nowhere near as important as either of those two filmmakers’ contributions to cinema history. Personally, I see War Is Menstrual Envy as the last major work of the Cinema of Transgression movement (though Tessa Hughes-Freeland’s rarely seen experimental Georges Bataille adaptation Dirty (1993) is also a similarly important work from the later period of the movement). It should also be mentioned that Zedd was really into the writings of kosher commie crackpot Wilhelm Reich at the time he made the film, thus exposing the sort of senseless pathological sexual degeneracy that the psychoanalyst’s pseudo-scientific writings attempts to validate in their promotion of a completely unrealistic pan-sexual utopia. Indeed, the only thing one really learns by watching the film is that Zedd is unequivocally a sexual cripple and anti-artistic miscreant who gets a kick out of making his own personal fetishes seem as radically repellent as possible. It might interest viewers of the film to know that despite the fact Zedd hoped that he would be able to sexually defile his two main lecherous leading ladies during the production of the film, both of them apparently turned him down, or as the filmmaker complained himself in his book Totem of the Depraved, “I thought if I made a movie where everyone was naked I might get laid. The film, entitled WAR IS MENSTRUAL ENVY, would deal directly with the misdirection of my sexual energy. Two of the actresses on the project might have wanted to fuck me but for some reason didn’t feel right about it. I thought if I played an octopus, I might be able to rape Annie Sprinkle but Kembra Squalor insisted on doing the scene instead and would only allow her husband to rape her. I thought up another scene where I’d play a mummy and have sex with an old girlfriend, but she had band practice the night we were supposed to do it so I had to give the scene to two other actors. I pray I will find some way to get laid before this film is done since it is costing my investor so much money.”  Of course, had Zedd invested more time and effort into creating a more cohesively constructed cinematic work than trying to get into the seemingly rancid panties of his raunchy female stars, he might have made a film that elevated celluloid trash to something worthy of being described as art.

 In Totem of the Depraved, Zedd demonstrates his sheer and utter cultural retardation by making the boldly moronic blanket statement, “European ‘culture’ is all second hand, and occasionally people with money there pay people like me to bring them the real thing from America so they can decided what next to imitate,” as if War Is Menstrual Envy was not a sort of failed culturally mongrelized attempt to make ‘Viennese Aktionism for Dummies.’ Of course, in general, Zedd is hopelessly American to the core, as a culturally and spiritually vacant artistic defiler and proud philistine who considers rap (which plagues his film) to be a legitimate form of art and whose sole goal as an artist seems to be creating the ugliest and most abhorrent films imaginable. Indeed, while it might be a extremely low-budget Super-8 film about corpse-fucking that features a guy sucking on an eyeball in a sensual fashion, not to mention a graphic unsimulated scene where a farmer kills and skins a cute bunny rabbit, a film like Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik (1987) at least has a certain provocative poetic beauty to it that is nowhere to be found in any of Zedd’s films. What makes Nekromantik such an intriguing and somewhat singularly provocatively poetic work is that it manages to make the revolting and grotesque aesthetically pleasing while War Is Menstrual Envy manages to accomplish the total opposite by making pussies and titties seem like highly deleterious mutant animal parts.  After watching Zedd's film, I can truly see why the filmmaker has at various times referenced wanting to commit suicide, as only a hopelessly lost, passive-aggressive nihilist who lives to figuratively shit on the world with his one-dimensional celluloid ugliness could have sired such a superficially sick flick.

 Somewhat absurdly, Zedd apparently believes that War Is Menstrual Envy has influenced various popular Hollywood cult films, including Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (1992) and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), with the filmmaker once even complaining like a resentful social justice warrior, “I wish that I was making more money, I mean, it's annoying when these people take my ideas and make money off them. Meanwhile I"m still trying to scrape together enough money to make another movie. It's kinda unjust, you know.”  Indeed, Zedd believes that his film influenced Bad Lieutenant because both flicks feature the same Schooly-D song, but Ferrara had already used music by the rapper for his previous film King of New York (1990), which was released two years before War Is Menstrual Envy.  While Zedd once starred in and assistant directed a short entitled Thus Spake Zarathustra (2001) based on the classic philosophical novel of the same name written by Friedrich Nietzsche, it is quite evident from the filmmaker's statements and artistic sentiments that he not only suffers from the sort of slave-morality that the Teutonic philosopher ruthlessly condemned, but that he is also plagued by a sort of soul-decaying passive nihilism, or as avant-garde gatekeeper Jonas Mekas once wrote in his essay Notes on the Work of Nick Zedd in regard to the totally tactless trash auteur, “I discern a great sadness in Zedd's work.  Frustration and sadness.  All those penises, shaking breasts, all those sad, bedraggled protagonists, the dregs or glories of that world which populated his films, they all exude sadness.  There is no ecstasy in those shaking breasts and penises, no joy.  Nothing but frustration, sadness.”  Indeed, Zedd epitomizes the worst attributes of the archetypal anarchistic rebel that Nietzsche venomously criticized in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883-1891) and in no where is this more apparent than in War Is Menstrual Envy.  Of course, I would rather re-watch Zedd's film over the latest Hollywood blockbuster any day, but that is because I found it fleetingly humorous in a fashion not unlike encountering a schizophrenic black bum verbally assaulting petrified white liberals on a city sidewalk or a morbidly obese retarded man attempting to hit on a pretty yet prissy chick who is trying her darnedest not to reveal her sheer and utter revulsion at the fact that such an unwitting romantically forward fellow would dare to even think he was capable of getting with her.  If there ever was a film that unintentionally exposes the importance of seemingly unrelated things like masculinity, spirituality, and artistic self-restraint, it is undoubtedly War Is Menstrual Envy, which was not coincidentally directed by a passive-aggressive girly man who has been known to engage in cross-dressing and banging drag queens, among other rather unflattering things that might lead one to suffer the grand disillusion that human warfare is the natural result of manly men wishing that they had the capacity to hemorrhage from their genitals for a couple days each month without dying of blood loss.

-Ty E

Prisoner of Paradise (1980)

Various trashy films have been made about evil sadistic Nazis on exotic deserted islands ranging from Ken Wiederhorn’s somewhat inordinate Nazi zombie flick Shock Waves (1977) to the unintentionally wacky kraut WiP flick Die Insel der blutigen Plantage (1983) aka The Island of the Bloody Plantation directed by Fassbinder superstar Kurt Raab and starring various other Fassbinder superstars like Barbara Valentin and Peter Kern as evil neo-Nazi prison guards who torture and molest poor nubile Filipino girls for sport, but probably none of these films is as patently ridiculous and horribly ‘Hollywood-esque’ as the relatively big budget hardcore porn flick Prisoner of Paradise (1980) aka Nazi Love Island aka Nassau starring porn chic era legends John C. Holmes aka ‘Johnny Wadd’ and platinum blonde gutter diva Seka (Dracula Sucks, Ultra Flesh). Ostensibly co-directed by supposed female pornographer Gail Palmer and Chinese-American Bob Chinn (who was responsible for directing the ‘Johnny Wadd’ series that made Holmes famous), the film was actually co-directed by the latter and a singularly scummy fellow by the name of Harry Mahoney, who is probably best known as the founder of the company Déjà Vu which owns and operates 132 different strip clubs around the United States. Indeed, it was later revealed by various credible sources (including playwright Peter Sagal, who was contracted to ghost-write a still unpublished book for her) that Palmer, who was originally a Playboy playmate, never actually directed any of the films she was credited and that she was merely a front for her mob-backed porn distributor/producer boyfriend Mahoney, who ghost-directed the flicks for her (in fact, in 1984 Palmer sued him for not giving her any of the profits for the films). The first fuck flick that Palmer was credited for was the blaxploitation-hardcore hybrid Hot Summer in the City (1976), which is about a white god-fearing virgin Christian girl who is gang-raped and turned into a sex slave by a group of honky-hating militant black nationalist types. Naturally, considering its subject matter in regard to bestial mandingos raping a little white girl, it should be no surprise that Palmer’s first credited feature was apparently once described by enthusiastic ethno-masochist, perennial cuckold, and shameless negrophile Quentin Tarantino as, “The Greatest Porno Ever.” Of course, Prisoner of Paradise also features the timeless porn gimmick of miscegenation, albeit of the ‘yellow fever’ oriented sort, with Mr. Holmes plowing tight pink Oriental orifices with his semi-erect 13-inch liver-lifter when he is not being ruthlessly ravaged by some carpet-munching Hitlerite sluts who like cunt more than cock. 

 Admittedly, I got the moronic idea to watch Prisoner of Paradise after seeing a somewhat provocative screenshot from the film featuring a Nazi girl holding a Luger next to her pussy, but after getting around to actually watching the not-quite-classic hardcore flick I can safely say that the film had virtually nothing else to offer aside from the fairly brief gun-gash segment. A sort of horrendous abortive mix between the considerably crappy concentration camp sitcom Hogan's Heroes and the insufferably sappy Marlon Brando vehicle Sayonara (1957), Prisoner of Paradise is a totally tedious combination of outmoded vaudeville-esque Teutophobia, unsexy and considerably sanitized sleaze, classic Hollywood style phoniness, and retarded token pro-American sentiment that was typical of WWII era Hollywood war films. As an embarrassing piece of pseudo-melodramatic hardcore kitsch, the film makes the exploitation flick that obviously heavily influenced it, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975), seem like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s swansong Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) by comparison. Indeed, no other film makes pussies and totenkopfs seem as cheesy yet hopelessly banal as Prisoner of Paradise. The plodding tale of a lovelorn Jap-loving American sailor who ends up stranded on a remote South Pacific island near the Philippines (though the film was actually apparently shot in Hawaii) after his Navy battleship is bombed and who eventually finds himself the sex slave of a boorish kraut SS commander and his two lethally lurid lily-licking blonde beastesses, the film is ultimately less erotic than Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938).  In fact, I would argue that Prisoner of Paradise is less arousing than the majority of cheap Nazisploitation films like Lee Frost's Love Camp 7 (1969) because at least they have some minor S&M/BDSM appeal.  In short, probably the only notable aspect of the film is that it somehow manages to not mention Jews or the holocaust a single time, but that probably has to do with the fact that it is a rare all-goyim porn production.

 Prisoner of Paradise begins unimpressively enough with protagonist Joe Murrey (John Holmes) washing up onto a remote island with nothing but a raft and the torn sailor’s outfit that he is wearing. As revealed in flashback scenes that were swiped from the Pearl Harbor flick Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) directed by Richard Fleischer (with additional co-directing done by Japanese filmmakers Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku), Joe’s ship was bombed by the Japs. Despite being at war with the dreaded harbor-bombers, Joe is in love with a Japanese prostitute named Sue Lee (Mai Lin) who he planned to marry, but she was tragically killed in an Allied bombing raid. As can be expected from a fuck flick, there are various flashback scenes in the film where Joe recalls fucking Lee before her ill-fated demise.  As depicted in the flashback scenes, only seconds after Joe walked out of her front door after hinting to her that he planned to ask her to marry him the next time he saw her, Lee was tragically killed in the bombing raid (notably, pseudo-director Gail Palmer is featured in a cameo role during this scene where she is in ‘yellowface’ and dressed like a Jap streetwalker). During the first day or two that Joe is on the island, the only company that he has is his bittersweet memories of his beloved yellow pussy-peddler. During his second day at the island, Joe does fairly mundane things like take a shower under a waterfall and cut down coconuts from a tree with a machete that he just happens to have with him. Of course, when Joe happens upon two completely unclad blonde beauties bathing in a creek, Joe cannot help but investigate, even if they lack the yellow skin that he has a special fondness for. 

 When Joe follows the two mysterious blondes, he discovers that they are Sapphic SS sluts that are under the command of a short and bloated SS commander named Hans von Shlemel (Gail Palmer regular Elmo Lavino credited under the pseudonym ‘Heinz Müeller’) who has a special fetish for cracking his whip, especially on the asses of female prisoners, but for whatever reason he does not like to take a hands-on approach when it comes to female flesh. Hans’ two guards are named Ilsa (Seka) and Greta (Sue Carol) and they especially love dining on yank prisoner cuntlet, though they decide to make a special exception when they eventually see Joe's extra long joy prong. Aside from Ilsa and Greta, a tiny yet super stoic Japanese girl named Suke (Jade Wong) is absurdly responsible for guarding the entire Nazi base with a single rifle. Needless to say, Joe is disgusted when he watches an American army nurse named Gloria (Brenda Vargo) being ruthlessly eaten out by Ilsa while Greta forces her to say, “I love the Führer,” as if Uncle Adolf has turned cunnilingus is a form of National Socialist patriotism.  As a cultured mensch that jovially declares, “Wagner will be here when Germany conquers the world...and so will I,” Hans routinely plays the music of Richard Wagner when the lurid carnal ‘tortures’ are carried out. While snooping around the Nazi base, Joe eventually finds another imprisoned American army nurse named Carol (Nikki Anderson) who he naturally promises to help. Ultimately Joe decides to attempt to save both nurses by starting a fire to create a diversion and running inside the Nazi headquarters to get Gloria while Hans and his gals are scrambling to put out the fire. While Joe manages to get both Gloria and Carol off the base and take them to a seemingly safe place in forest, he and the girls are soon found and brought back at gunpoint by Suke after they make the mistake of taking a temporary break in the woods when the nurse complain that they need to rest. 

 When Joe and the nurses are brought back to Nazi headquarters, Nazi she-bitch Greta immediately pats the protagonist down and mistakes his cock for a concealed weapon, which Ilsa subsequently pulls out, thus inspiring Hans to joke, “They thought you had a gun down there. Pretty good joke, yeah?” Of course, Joe does not find Hans very funny, especially after the Nazi commandant attempts to rationalize his sexual sadism by stating that, “it is rather boring on this island. If we did not amuse ourselves, we could go crazy this far from civilization.” After Hans declares, “American girls are lovely creatures. They’re so full of fight and spirit. You should perhaps try a German girl sometime. You ever try a German girl? They have their high-points too, you know…cunning, intelligence, and obedience. They will do anything you want, like Ilsa and Greta here. And right here, my friend, it appears that they want you,” Joe is forced to sexually service both of the SS dykes, with the protagonist first eating Greta’s pussy while she has her Luger pointed at his head and then fucking Ilsa whilst she moans with barely concealed anti-American hatred. Right before Joe blows his load, Ilsa screams, “Don’t you cum in me you American swine,” so he ejaculates on her stomach, thus assuring that the feisty Fräulein will not be impregnated with the mongrel spawn of a stupid American.

 As is fairly predictable, Japanese guard Suke eventually begins falling in love with Joe and even starts grinding her rifle with her crouch while watching him fucking one of the Nazi guards. For his own voyeuristic pleasure, Hans forces to American nurse Carol to suck Joe’s cock, which rather enrages the superficially gentlemanly all-American sailor boy. Hans also forces Joe to fuck Carol and then busts on her face by threatening him and stating, “You want her to live? You’ll put that thing in there.” When Hans declares that he will be whipping Carol after Joe reluctantly blows his load on her face, the protagonist becomes completely irate and declares, “You jerry bastard, I’m gonna kill you, you and those dyke cunts of yours.” Although Hans does not physically torture the protagonist for making the major mistake of insulting a German officer, he does call Joe a “frankfurter-sucking friend” and then informs him that his, “girlfriend will pay dearly” for what he has done. When Joe is led back to his prison, Suke's panties seem to be soaked as she immediately declares her love for the protagonist and the two proceed to fuck while the protagonist experiences flashbacks in regard to plowing the puss of his dead Jap hooker girlfriend (after all, apparently all Asians look the same, so it is not hard for Joe to imagine that the guard is the same person as the dead gutter slut that he fell in love with). When Suke is subsequently accidentally killed in a scuffle after Ilsa starts a bitch-fest due to her jealousy over Greta’s Sapphic infatuation with Carol, Joe becomes exceedingly enraged and finally starts beginning to act like a real man. Indeed, when Ilsa runs to Hans for help after Joe manages to grab a gun, the protagonist screams at her, “Stop, you kraut bitch, or I’ll blow your head off,” but of course she does not listen. Luckily, Joe does not have to do any work in terms of combat (he is a sailor after all), as Ilsa accidentally starts a fire at Nazi headquarters after knocking over a lamp that leads to all three of the evil nasty Nazi dying instantaneously. Indeed, just as Greta mindlessly runs into the burning building to join her comrades, it conveniently explodes. In the end, the film concludes with the epilogue, “Three years after the end of World War II, one American sailor, two army nurses and five children were rescued from a remote South Pacific island near the Philippines…no further details are available at this time,” thus revealing that sailor Joe finally got over his seemingly incurable case of yellow fever. 

 Aside from featuring virtually nil genuinely erotic scenes, Prisoner of Paradise has to have what is one of the least charismatic ‘heroes’ of cinema history. Indeed, Mr. Holmes’ (in)famously long dong does not save him in the film, though his character certainly seems like the sort of insecure white dude that is fairly common nowadays who chases after Oriental skirts. Intrigued by how truly terrible Holmes' performance was in the film, I decided to checkout the documentary Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes (1999) directed by Cass Paley where the ‘King of Porn’ is revealed to be a sort of super loser and outrageous compulsive liar with psychopathic tendencies who was incapable of ever achieving a full erection and who intentionally failed to disclose to his Italian co-stars the fact that he had AIDS when he appeared in the Guido fuck flicks The Rise of the Roman Empress (1987) and The Devil in Mr. Holmes (1987), which would be the last two pornos he starred in before dying of gay cancer (it is speculated that Holmes might have contracted AIDS while starring in various gay porn flicks, including The Private Pleasures of John C. Holmes (1983) where he fucked experimental pornographer Fred Halsted's longtime boyfriend Joey Vale, who notably died of AIDS in 1986). In the Wadd doc, a number of the talking heads argue that one of Holmes’ greatest appeals to men was that he seemed like a fairly normal and unpretentious chap who did not act like a prick because he had a big dick, which does seem somewhat apparent in Prisoner of Paradise when his character does seem genuinely displeased when he is forced to fuck the ferocious Fräuleins.  As the doc also reveals, Holmes apparently completely lost interest in sex in general and refused to ejaculate unless he was getting paid for it, thus demonstrating how completely and utterly soulless his life had become. Certainly, the only captivating character in Prisoner of Paradise is Seka’s Ilsa as she genuinely seems like a sexy little Nazi bitch who gets whatever she wants (notably, Hebraic hardcore leading man Jamie Gillis once described Seka as a “white trash queen” that thought she was “a bit above porn”).  After Holmes croaked, Seka decided to get out of the porn business out of the fear that she might also contract AIDS, which is a somewhat strange thing to think about when you watch her get manhandled in the film by Johnny Wadd while she has an expression of savage ecstasy on her face.

 Somewhat ironically considering the film’s fairly tasteless depiction of the Second World War and National Socialism, there was later an award-winning documentary made entitled Prisoner of Paradise (2002) about German-Jewish actor Kurt Gerron, who was coerced into directing a Nazi propaganda film about Theresienstadt concentration camp entitled The Führer Gives the Jews a City (1944) in the hope that he and his family would be spared from a very certain death at Auschwitz. Undoubtedly, the hardcore flick is even more absurd in terms of historical accuracy than Gerron’s deluded doc (which was never released, though a 23-minute fragment survived and can easily be found online), but I guess that is what one should expect from an American porn flick that was filmed in Hawaii and that immediately concludes with an advertisement for supposed Gail Palmer flicks, including Ecstasy Express and the Chaucer reworking The Ribald Tales of Canterbury, even though the former does not exist and the latter was actually directed by porn star Hyapatia Lee’s husband Bud Lee.  It should also be noted that Holmes spent about three years living in West Germany while he was enlisted in the U.S. Army before he became a porn star, yet Prisoner of Paradise does not exploit any German that he might have learned during his stay in Krautland (though he makes a botched attempt at saying about two words in Japanese).  If you are looking for Nazisploitation oriented erotic/porn with some actual teeth, there are countless other films to choose from, including José Bénazéraf's Bordel SS (1978) aka SS Bordello, Tinto Brass' Salon Kitty (1976) and Senso '45 (2002) aka Black Angel, and Phillip Marshak's Blue Ice (1985), just to name a few.  Of course, if you ever got the urge to beat your meat to Hogan's Heroes and/or you are one of the many white American (beta)males that suffers from yellow fever, Prisoner of Paradise is probably just the film for you.

-Ty E