The Dance of Reality

Despite the fact that most of his films are in some way autobiographical, Chilean-born auteur/movie metaphysician, comics writer/artist, and spiritual guru Alejandro Jodorowsky (Fando y Lis, El Topo) has rarely made reference to his Ukrainian-Jewish origins in his cinematic works aside from fleeting esoteric references to the cabbala in The Holy Mountain (1973), at least until recently. Indeed, for his first feature in well over two decades, The Dance of Reality (2013) aka La danza de la realidad—a film based on the director’s 400+ page ‘psychomagical autobiography’ of the same name— Jodorowsky depicted his uniquely unhappy, if not equally magical and fantastic, ‘coming-of-age’ as a Ukrainian Jew who had the rare experience of growing up in a small and destitute Chilean town and suffering the emotionally and physical brutality of his sadistic and highly hypocritical Stalinist storeowner father. Quite obviously the director’s most overtly personal, intimate, and even ‘sentimental’ work to date as a film where the filmmaker and self-proclaimed “atheist mystic” makes random abrupt appearances throughout the film where he attempts to console his younger self in what some might describe as a bittersweet mix of nostalgia and self-pity, The Dance of Reality is somewhat predictably the product of a much tamer and less hysterically hermetic Jodorowsky, even if it features a middle-aged Amazonian-like woman with meaty bosoms urinating on her husband and a talking burnt corpse that is covered with maggots and snails. Sort of like a deranged Disney coming-of-age flick that turns into a spiritual quest halfway through as directed by a Chilean Fellini who had the grand misfortune of being the sole Jewish boy in a remote area inhabited by savage Indian boys who were not too sympathetic to his ‘mushroom-shaped’ circumcised cock, Jodorowsky’s latest film may not be the great long-awaited masterpiece that his fans have been eagerly expecting since his last excellent effort 1989 Santa Sangre (Jodorowsky directed The Rainbow Thief in 1990, but he ultimately disowned the film because his artistic freedom was taken away by executive producer Alexander Salkind, whose wife penned the screenplay), but it certainly offers a potent glimpse of the artist’s extremely vulnerable naked soul, so it is only fitting that the 84-year-old posted a video of himself naked to promote the film. Easily the most idiosyncratic and pleasantly unhinged autobiographical film by an auteur filmmaker since belated German dandy Werner Schroeter’s totally impenetrable penultimate work Deux (2002) aka Two, Jodorowsky’s cinematic journey may have been shot on kitschy digital video and features absolutely aesthetically repugnant CGI special effects, but there is no mistaking the artistic integrity of the mensch that created it. Starring the director’s own son Brontis Jodorowsky (who is best known for playing Jodorowsky’s naked son in El Topo) in the role of the director’s father, the film may feature cliché Freudian overtones, but it is unquestionable that it is an innately anti-Hollywood work, as a celluloid spiritual quest in the spirit of what Aldous Huxley described as the, “Perennial Philosophy.”  Indeed, on top of being autobiographical, the film pays tribute to the fact that all religions share a single universal truth, thus demonstrating the director's lifelong obsession with arcane knowledge and all things relating to the spiritual and metaphysical.  Shot on location in the director’s hometown of Tocopilla and set in 1930s depression era Chile, The Dance of Reality is part political-thriller, part Fellini-esque fantasy, part absurdist comedy, part culturally confused allegory for Jewish assimilation, and part grotesque freak show, but it is also 100% Jodorowsky and that is certainly what matters most. 

 Young Alejandro Jodorowsky (Jeremías Herskovits) is a strange and severely sensitive little boy who lives a nightmarish yet fantastic and magical life with his unhappily married Jewish-Ukrainian parents Jaime (Brontis Jodorowsky) and Sara (Pamela Flores) in Tocopilla, Chile, which is a third world hellhole that is mostly populated by half-crazed mestizos, Indians, and cripples.  Jaime is a diehard Stalinist who, despite his ostensible hatred of capitalism and affinity for dressing like a commie dictator, owns a successful bourgeois shoe and clothing store called “House of Ukraine” where a portrait of Joseph Stalin absurdly hangs on the wall as if it where a religious icon like a cross or a portrait of Christ. An unrepentant atheist true believer whose life philosophy is “you die and you rot” and who berates his son anytime he demonstrates an interest in religious matters, Jaime is ultimately a spiritual cripple and aggressively nihilistic materialist who uses communism as a sort of pseudo-religion.  Indeed, while he never outright says it, Jaime seems to think that a communist overthrow of the Chilean government will lead to him becoming a bolshevik god.  A former boxer and rope-climber for the local circus, Jaime hates the fact that the locals think of him as a weak foreign Jew who has no real love for the poor (indeed, during one especially scene, Jaime hatefully attacks a homeless cripple whose hands were blown off in a mining explosion), so he wants his seemingly effeminate son Alejandro to toughen up and forces the boy to cut off his big viking-like blond mane, which he inherited from his maternal grandfather, hence why his mother Sara—a spiritually-inclined woman who literally talks to god and sings in an operatic fashion every time she opens her mouth—strangely refers to her son as her “father,” at least until he gets a haircut.  To the chagrin of Jaime, Sara thinks that her father has been reincarnated via her son.  Indeed, after his marvelous mane is murdered via non-haircut (the barber simply pulls a wig off the boy's head!), mother Sara calls poor Alejandro a “traitor.”  Indeed, after tragically losing his glistening golden locks, Alejandro is forced to be a tough son as opposed to a whiny momma's boy.  After teaching his son to overcome pain by various methods ranging from being tickled with a feather to being smacked in the face to the point where he cracks a tooth, Alejandro is given the honor of becoming the “mascot” of the local fire department, which his father belongs to, but when the little lad witnesses the burnt corpse of a firefighter at the sight of a burned down home and later hallucinates seeing the corpse talking to him during a funeral ceremony for said burnt corpse, he disgraces his padre by fainting and not awaking for two entire days. Indeed, after Alejandro's pathetic display at the funeral ceremony, two of Jaime’s firefighter comrades mock him by remarking that, “Even dressed up as a fireman, a Jew is a Jew,” thus inspiring the Judaic Stalinist to go on a journey to deliver water to countless crippled refugees to prove his supposed dedication to the proletariat, but when he arrives, the poor people kill and eat his donkey and give him the plague, which is only cured when his wife Sara urinates on his face and bare toso. Ultimately, Jaime decides that killing Chilean president Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (Bastian Bodenhofer) will be the best way to prove his manhood and demonstrate his dedication to Chile and the commie cause.  Of course, as a bourgeois-bred kosher capitalist, Jaime will ultimately fail in his dubious mission to liberate the masses via senseless assassination.

 Jaime belongs to an underground Stalinist terrorist group—a curiously eclectic collection of cripples, beatniks, homos, lardos, trannies, and other social defective untermenschen that rather symbolically meet in whorehouses and masonic lodges (indeed, aside from the fact that brothels reflect some of the worst elements of capitalist exploitation, some believe that Freemasons were responsible for funding various communist revolutions)—and with his pinko cronies he attempts to figure out the best way to assassinate Ibáñez. After learning that the President loves his horse more than anything else, Jaime figures out his enemy’s ‘Achilles heel’ and leaves his family to carry the assassination out, but a problem arises when one of the member of his commie clique, ‘The Anarchist’ (the director’s rocker son Adan Jodorowsky, who played young Fenix in Santa Sangre), pulls a gun on him and says a foreign Jew should not have the right to kill the Chilean leader. After learning that the Anarchist wants to avenge his journalist father, who was executed by Ibáñez’s men for writing unflattering things about the dictator’s regime, Jaime agree to help his comrade carry out the assassination. Somewhat absurdly, the Anarchist attempts to assassinate Ibáñez at a dog show where canines are judged by how they look in goofy clothing, but Jaime stops him right before he shoots the dictator at close-range. After stating, “I don’t want to live in a world with dressed up dogs,” the Anarchist commits suicide by shooting himself with the same gun that he planned to assassinate the dictator with. For ostensibly risking his life to save him, President Ibáñez honors Jaime’s request to be his personal horse trainer. Indeed, since the original horse trainer Don Aquiles (Andres Cox) plans to retire, Jaime is sent to train with him before he dies (Aquiles later has Jaime bury him alive). While Jaime loves the beautiful white stallion ‘Bucephalus,’ he decides to poison the horse by encouraging it to eat poisonous yellow flowers as a way to get Ibáñez to come by the farm in the middle of the night so that he can shoot him, but when the Stalinist gets the opportunity to kill his supposed oppressor, his hands become paralyzed and he literally loses his mind. From there, Jaime will go on a Christ-like spiritual odyssey that will teach him how to be a humble man and loving father. 

 After Sara covers Alejandro's body with black paint in what is easily one of the strangest and most perverse blackface scenes in film history, the boy is able to get over his fear of the dark.  Indeed, Sarah is a born healer with a spiritual touch and like with her son, she will ultimately save her husband Jaime from his seemingly malignant spiritual sickness. Sara also helps her son get over his fear of mestizos after being beaten up for being a Jew by stating to him, “Out with Pinocchio. Out with the Jew. Out with the nose and white skin!” and subsequently telling Alejandro that he is invisible. Indeed, after Sarah goes to the bar where Alejandro was beaten up, strips off all her clothes, and walks around the place like she owns it, no one touches the scrawny Jewish boy again. With the help of an eccentric and heavily tattooed shaman that resembles a Hindu sadhu named the ‘Theosophist’ (played by the director’s son Axel Jodorowsky, who played the adult Fenix in Santa Sangre), Sara and Alejandro are able to send Jaime a message telling him to come back home. When Jaime receives the message, he snaps out of his amnesia and finds himself in a dilapidated shack in a third world ghetto lying next to a crippled midget who later explains to him that she found him half-starved wandering the streets. Flattered by the fact that Jaime seemed unaware of her glaring deformities and short stature, the crippled midget made him her live-in lover. Upset that Jaime’s memory has come back and that he will no longer want to have sex with her, the midget commits suicide via hanging and the Stalinist is blamed for the death by the locals, thus he is forced to immediately flee from the shantytown. 

 After being tormented by seemingly rabid Catholic schoolgirls and being treated like a lowly beggar, Jaime happens upon a building called “Sacred Wood Carpenters” where he meets a humble old Christian carpenter named Don Jose who helps him to rehabilitate his paralyzed hands by teaching him to make wooden chairs that will be given to a local Catholic Church. When Jaime and Don Jose give 26 wooden chairs that they created to the Catholic Church, they are warmly honored by the priest and congregation. During the festivities, Don Jose unexpectedly drops dead and Jaime becomes so touched by the experience that he cries and gives away all his money to the church to help pay for Don Jose’s funeral. With nowhere to go, Jaime hits the streets and sees Nazi brownshirts parading down the block yet despite being a Judeo-Bolshevik, he decides to warmly salute the Chilean fascists. When a SS officer beats Jaime for supposedly disgracing the fascist salute by doing it with a crippled hand, the lapsed Stalinist becomes a true ‘man of steel’ and beats up an entire brigade of brownshirts and forces the SS officer to hail Don Jose. After beating the Latino Nazis, Jaime is arrested by Ibáñez’s secret service men and undergoes grueling torture, including receiving electrical charges to his genitals, but luckily he is saved by a group of commie resistance fighters just before one of his tormentors puts a bullet in his brain. As it turns out, due to public uprisings, Ibáñez decided to relinquish his power and flee to Argentina. With the help of the communist resistance fighters, Jaime manages to get back home to his family, but Alejandro and Sara are saddened to see that their once proud and stoic Stalinist is now a weak, broken, and crippled untermensch that looks like a poor man’s Jesus and cries like an autistic little girl. With Sara’s spiritual guidance, Jaime begins to learn the error of his ways. After Sarah says, “you found all you admired in Ibáñez in Stalin. And here you are…You are the same as they are!,” a guilt-ridden Jaime cries out in terror and shoots a portrait of himself where he looks like a commie dictator, which causes a fire that burns his portrait, as well as portraits of Ibáñez and Stalin, thus ritualistically ridding himself of his old commie dictator self. In the end, Alejandro and his family leave Tocopilla, though the memories that the filmmaker received there never left him as he describes at the conclusion of the film. 

In the book Anarchy and Alchemy: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky (2007) by Ben Cobb, Alejandro Jodorowsky is quoted regarding his rather complicated origins: “My parents were Russian…I was born in Chile…the [Chilean] children didn’t accept me because I was ‘Russian’…the young men didn’t accept me because I was a ‘Jew’…the French didn’t accept me because I was a ‘Chilean’…the Mexicans didn’t accept me because I was ‘French’…the Americans think I am ‘Mexican’…after ten years, I will move to another planet. They won’t accept me because they will think I am an ‘American’.” Indeed, it is quite apparent while watching The Dance of Reality that Jodorowsky is a born eccentric and perennial loner and that he did not fit in anywhere, including Chile and especially his own family home (interestingly, the director decided not to include his much resented elder sister as a character in the film). Jodorowsky even went so far as more or less rejecting his Jewishness and opting out of following in family tradition, remarking in Cobb’s book in broken English regarding his decision to quite college: “I realized the scientific way or the logic way, rationalism…was not my way. My way was imagination. My father…was a businessman [who] want to have a child who can be in the university. Like all the Yiddish…they start to sell shoes and the second-generation [become] psychoanalysts. I didn’t want to do that.” Additionally, Jodorowsky would also later criticize the ‘Jewishness’ of Hollywood and Spielberg by remarking in an interview with Bright Lights Film Journal: “I like pictures that are honest. Like some Hong Kong pictures — those filmmakers are honest thieves, they are making business, and they are so honest about it, it's fantastic. But, say, Spielberg is not honest. I hate Spielberg, because none of his movies are honest. His violence is ill, it's not honest. He shows an ill violence, as though he was the father of history. He hates Jews, because he is Jewish. He is making business with that, with Europe. He is fascist, because America is the centre of his world. If I can kill Spielberg, I will kill Spielberg.” Indeed, love it or hate it, there is no denying that The Dance of Reality is honest filmmaking from one of the most idiosyncratic auteur filmmakers that the artistic medium has ever produced. 

 If you're tired of seeing countless hokey holocaust films and period pieces where Jews are depicted as morally righteous god-like beings who were persecuted by Europeans simply because they are Jewish, checkout Jodorowsky's film and learns that many Jews of the 1930s were not commies simply because they cared for the poor stupid goyim, but because they resent strong gentile leaders and opulent Aryans and want to rule over white gentile cattle.  Ironically, it is only when antihero Jaime lives like Christ that he is able to get over his Hebraic megalomania, thus make The Dance of Reality pure heresy to Zionist supremacist types.  Speaking of megalomania, Jodorowsky recently met with revolting negro rapper Kanye West, who apparently considers the filmmaker one of his greatest influences and even modeled the aesthetic of his ‘Yeezus Tour’ after the filmmaker's counter-culture classic The Holy Mountain.  If Jodorowsky receives the gracious respect of a uniquely untalented yet stinking rich neo-minstrel entertainer like West, one would hope that someone will give him the money to make his long-awaited El Topo sequel, Abel Cain aka Sons of El Topo, as The Dance of Reality may be a worthwhile effort for an old artist reminiscing over his life, but he still has yet to create his last great masterpiece. Aside from being one of the greatest, if not the greatest, films of 2013, Jodorowsky's coming-of-age is a visceral attack against Hollywood and its soulless and materialistic weltanschauung of deracinating globalist anti-cultural and philo-Semtic hegemony.  Notably, the director publicly stated that he hoped the film would lose money and intentionally made the film through donations without the backing of studios. While it might seem like some sort of sick joke that the Jewish director is featured at the beginning of the film taking about money while gold shekels falling from the sky and into his hands, Jodorowsky makes it quite clear what he thinks of monetary matters when he remarks: “Money is like blood, it gives life if it flows. Money is like Christ, it blesses you if you share it. Money is like Buddha, if you don’t work, you don’t get it. Money enlightens those who use it to open the flower of the world, and damns those who glorify it, confounding riches with the soul...There is no difference between money and conscience. There is no difference between conscience and death...There is no difference between death and wealth.” Indeed, like Christ, Jodorowsky understands the moneychangers all too well, which, as depicted in the film, is something he learned at an early age via his abusive father, thus making the film a sort of metaphysical cinematic expression of what transformed the auteur into the uncompromising artist that he is today. 

 While it would be easy to describe Jodorowsky as a ‘self-loathing Jew’ after watching a film like The Dance of Reality where the boy protagonist is literally exorcised of his Jewishness by his mother, I like to think that the cinematic shaman transcended his Judaic roots as an anti-materialistic/anti-Marxist Hebrew that seems to have recognized that his ‘Ātman’ (one's ‘inner-self’ or ‘true self’) is identical with his ‘Brahman’ (‘transcendent self’).  Of course, the director's father failed to obtain this level of spirituality maturity, hence the great misery he suffered as depicted in the film. Indeed, The Dance of Reality makes the perfect comparison piece to French-Polish Jew Jean-Pierre Mocky's similarly surreal and darkly humorous ‘folk horror’ flick Litan (1982), which depicts religion, especially Catholicism, as the most malignant and deadly of diseases.  As the films demonstrate, while Jodorowsky got over his spiritual sickness as a mere child and grew to become a deeply devout practitioner of the perennial philosophy, Mocky seems plagued with spiritual retardation for eternity.  Indeed, while it may sound absurd, it seems that Jodorowsky's rather unconventional childhood as a Jewish boy who suffered regular cruelty from mestizos who mocked his circumcised cock was, in the long run, one of the best things that ever happened to him.

-Ty E

Squalor Motel

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

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

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

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

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

-Ty E

Cemetery Man

I don’t know about other people, but to me, Rupert Everett—a man who first gained critical and commercial acclaim by portraying a British cocksucking commie spy traitor who defected to the Soviet Union in the film Another Country (1984)—positively personifies the pathetically pompous and all-too-proper English poof, even if he looks like a Roman soldier, so I have always found it quite intriguing that he gave one of his greatest performances as a somewhat suave and rampantly heterosexual Guido cemetery caretaker. Indeed, for what is arguably the greatest and most original ‘zombie comedy’ ever made, Cemetery Man (1994) aka Dellamorte Dellamore aka Of Death, of Love aka Zombie Graveyard aka Demons '95 aka Of Death and Love directed by Italian horror auteur Michele Soavi (Stage Fright, The Church), Everett unequivocally proved he could pull off a quasi-illiterate graveyard philosopher with a more bitter than sweet view of romance and a nasty knack for fornicating in graveyards with busty goombah babes and putting more bullets than semen in said women's bodies. A deathly dark (anti)romance of the rather nihilistic sort disguised as a quirky horror comedy, Soavi’s masterpiece of the mirthfully macabre is based on the 1991 novel Dellamorte Dellamore by comic artist/writer Tiziano Sclavi, yet there is no doubt that the director has made the source material his own.  Featuring brain-splattering Fulci-esque zombie kill scenes, oneiric surrealism and misogyny in the spirit of Argento (albeit more playful!), a cynical portrait of Italian society that rivals that of unsung artsploitation auteur Alberto Cavallone, and old school gothic aesthetics that recall the best of Mario Bava (in fact, Soavi opted for using an authentic ancient ossuary for the film), Cemetery Man is unquestionably a highly addictive celluloid treat for anyone with even the most marginal interest in great Guido horror cinema, even if it offers more unhinged laughs than petrified screams, as a work that is, philosophically speaking, sort of like a comedy for antinatalists, as well as a romance flick for lapsed necrophiles. A film that is truly done a great disservice when it is described simply as a “horror comedy,” “zombie comedy,” or anything like that, Soavi’s considerably misanthropic masterpiece may deserve some comparison with works ranging from Federico Fellini’s Toby Dammit (1968) to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987) to James M. Muro’s Street Trash (1987), but when it comes down to it, there is really no other film quite like it. Indeed, if you’re looking for a philistine zombie flick with a sorry ‘socially redeeming’ message like those directed by George A. Romero, Cemetery Man will certainly prove to be an outstanding disappointment, but if you're looking for what is a seemingly seamlessly assembled arthouse-horror-comedy hybrid the visually quotes Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte and makes vengeful mass murder seem strangely merry, you can probably find no better work than Soavi’s lavishly loony neo-gothic celluloid nightmare-within-a-nightmare. 

 Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) is a cynical yet serious cemetery caretaker that rather reluctantly calls a small Italian town named Buffalora his home and he lives in a decrepit old ramshackle at the ancient graveyard with his severely retarded and morbidly obese childlike sidekick/assistant Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), who can only one (non)word: “nyah.” Working at a graveyard where the front gate has the Latin inscription RESVRRECTVRIS (“They will resurrect”) engraved on it, it should be no surprise that Dellamorte has a semi-serious zombie problem, though he prefers to call these rotten flesheaters ”returners.” Indeed, for whatever reason (although never mentioned in the film, director Soavi credited Mandragola roots in the cemetery as being responsible for reanimating the dead), most of the corpses come back to life seven days after the caretaker and his invalid comrade bury them, thus it is Dellamorte’s and his strangely cute and cuddly sidekick Gnaghi’s job to kill them by putting a bullet in their brain, as it is the only way to make the undead dead. A perennial loner who is believed to be impotent by the locals due to false rumors spread by young goombah punks and who is more or less illiterate despite the fact he is an incessantly pondering gravedigger philosopher of sorts, Dellamorte is not exactly the sort of man you would expect to be looking for love, but it eventually comes to him in the voluptuous form of a widow known as “She” (played by Finnish-Italian model turned actress Anna Falchi, who was discovered by maestro Federico Fellini), who comes to the graveyard to grieve over her recently deceased elderly husband. A beautiful yet seemingly warped woman of the rather whimsical sort, “She” only becomes interested in Dellamorte after he shows her his ossuary. While Dellamorte and “She” soon fall in love, their relationship is killed off as abruptly as it starts when the latter is killed after her belated husband rises from the grave and bites her while she is consummating coitus with the sexually virile graveyard caretaker. When “She” later rises from the dead, Dellamorte shoots her in the head, though, as the devastated caretaker will soon learn, she might not have been dead after all. Meanwhile, Gnaghi starts a morbid yet mostly harmless sexless romance with the reanimated head of the local mayor’s prematurely deceased daughter Valentina Scanarotti (Fabiana Formica), who was decapitated in a gruesome motorcycle accident.  Of course, Dellamorte’s beloved “She” also returns as a zombie, thereupon causing the caretaker to realize that he was indeed responsible for her death and thus throwing him into a deep hallucinatory depression that inspires him to kill seven of the young Guido punks who spread the rumors of his completely fictional sexual impotence.  Indeed, as demonstrated by his one-sided talk with a dictatorial Grim Reaper, who ultimately convinces him to kill the living instead of the dead, poor depressed Dellamorte might not have the most sound of minds, though he is certainly more rational and sane than anybody else from his quaint small town.  Of course, Dellamorte kills “She” too after she tries to take a big blood-gushing bite out of his flesh. The Caretaker also has to kill Gnaghi’s zombie lover Valentina after she kills her mayor father (Stefano Masciarelli), who was more interested in his own political campaign than his town’s zombie problem and the tragic death of his teenage daughter. 

 Undoubtedly, things get rather strange and 'soul-stirring' for Dellamorte when two women (also played by Anna Falchi) that look exactly like his beloved ‘She’ enter his life and ostensibly fall in mutual love with him at first sight. Indeed, the first is the secretary of the town’s new mayor Civardi (Pietro Genuardi), who instantly falls in love with the cemetery man and even agrees to marry him. Rather unfortunately, the Secretary is afraid of cocks and cannot stand the thought of a big purple-headed love truncheon deflowering her nubile naughty bits, so Dellamorte confirms to her the false rumors of his impotence and goes to a local doctor so he can be castrated (!), but luckily the physician refuses to do the procedure and instead injects his member with a painful substance that will supposedly guarantee that he will fail to “rise to the occasion” for at least the next month. Unfortunately, while Dellamorte is recuperating from taking a gigantic needle to the dick, the sensual Secretary is raped by mayor Civardi and she enjoys it so much that she drops the seemingly perennially forsaken cemetery man and cancels their planned marriage. Rather enraged after losing his second lady love, Dellamorte drives around town while looking for a prostitute and is ultimately approached by two young female college students, including a lady that also bears a striking resemblance to “She” named Laura (Anna Falchi), who he instantly falls in love with and vice versa. Indeed, despite the cock-blocking injection that he received to his dago dong, Dellamorte is so aroused by Laura that he manages to sexually service the carnal college student three times in row, but when he subsequently finds out that she is a high price prostitute, he kills her and two of her friends by setting fire to their apartment. When Dellamorte finds out from the local police investigator Marshall Straniero (played by American actor Mickey Knox)—a malignantly moronic man of law who humorously blames everyone except the cemetery man for the crimes that the cemetery man did indeed commit—that his friend Franco (Anton Alexander) took credit for burning up the college girls, he visits his less than sane comrade in the hospital to find out why he “stole his murders.” While talking to Franco, who is in a semi-comatose state, Dellamorte casually puts a bullet in the brain of a nun, a nurse, and a doctor. While leaving the hospital, Dellamorte once again bumps into Marshall Straniero and confesses to the murders, but the automaton-like cop does not pay him any attention. Fed up with life, love, and killing as man who states, “I’d give my life to be dead,” Dellamorte decides to leave Buffalora for good, so he tells Gnaghi to pack up his things, including an ancient coffin, and the two leave town. After leaving Buffalora and heading towards a mountain road, Dellamorte abruptly slams on the breaks, which causes Gnaghi to severely injure his rather thick head. After coming to the conclusion, “The rest of the world does not exist,” and becoming all the more upset by the fact that his only friend is dying in a rather ridiculous fashion, Dellamorte decides to kill himself and his comrade, but Gnaghi stops him at the last second. Indeed, somehow smashing his head was to Gnaghi’s benefit as he can now talk and asks Dellamorte, “take me home…please,” to which the graveyard caretaker eloquently replies, “Nyah.”  Indeed, while life might suck, especially when you're a mass murderer that is responsible for killing your own lover(s), Dellamorte seems to more or less finally come to terms with that fact in the end.

 Apparently, the American fanboy horror magazine Fangoria revealed in January 2011 that Michele Soavi was planning to direct a sequel to Cemetery Man that the director described as being more brutal and shocking than the original, though there seems to be no evidence that the film has ever went past the pre-production stage. Personally, I doubt that even Soavi himself could top the original film, but I have to admit that I would not mind seeing him try, even with an older and even gayer Rupert Everett as the lead. Additionally, in the late-1990s Everett approached Soavi about creating an American remake of the film but the project never went anywhere, which is probably for the better, as demonstrated by the countless horrendous Hollywood remakes of successful European films. Indeed, American filmgoers would have certainly been dumbfound by an unclassifiable flick with the beauteously brutal flesheater-exterminating of Fulci’s Zombi 2 (1979) aka Zombie yet the elegant in-your-face surrealism of Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965), hence why the Cemetery Man was a total flop when it was released in United States. Like the criminally overlooked Spanish arthouse-horror flick A Bell from Hell (1973) aka La campana del infierno directed by mysterious auteur Claudio Guerín, Soavi’s meta-offbeat zombie flick was certainly not specially tailored for the masses, as it is a true auteur piece directed by a born cinematic artist who just happens to work in the horror genre. Indeed, when it comes to Italian horror, Soavi is the only mensch that deserves to be credited as following directly in the footsteps of great cinematic artists like Mario Bava and Dario Argento, though Cemetery Man certainly demonstrates that he is a more eclectic filmmaker than his celluloid progenitors, as neither of these men were able to juggle comedy, horror, and surrealism in such a seamless fashion. A bad dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream that does for the zombie genre what Luis Buñuel did for European arthouse cinema, Soavi's film is like the That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) of horror, albeit more figuratively and literally biting, as a feverishly fucked flesheater fever dream of the fiercely farcical sort where the rotting undead are certainly no more repugnant than the living.  Indeed, if you're looking for a flesheater flick that more accurately captures the essence of our degenerated and disillusioned zeitgeist and do not mind a little art and pathologically politically incorrect humor mixed with your zombie guts, forget the retrograde undead filmic feces of George A. Romero's post-Day of the Dead oeuvre and bite on Cemetery Man.

-Ty E

The Death of Scorpio

While probably better known for hallucinatory experimental heterosexual quasi-hardcore horror works like Bacchanale (1970) and cultivated comedies like Blonde Ambition (1981) which he co-directed with his brother Leo, John Amero was also a prolific gay pornographer who directed brutal butt bandit flicks under the pseudonym ‘Francis Ellie’ (and sometimes the variant ‘Francis Elise’), which was also a name used by veteran exploitation auteur Michael Findlay (The Curse of Her Flesh, The Ultimate Degenerate). Indeed, from the sodomite serial killer flick Killing Me Softly (1979) starring Jack Wrangler as an unfortunate fellow who falls in love with a deranged dude that has an, “uncontrollable need to kill in order to have an orgasm” to the brutal S&M flick Boots & Saddles (1982) also starring Wrangler as a man who must save his lover from a sadomasochistic neo-Nazi played by poof porn icon Scorpio, Amero was one of the most innovative and artistically subversive auteur pornographers when it came to porn chic era fag fuck flicks. Unquestionably, one of Amero’s strangest, darkest, and most sensitive yet minimalistic works is the sensationally titled flick The Death of Scorpio (1979). Indeed, although starring white-trash-like gay porn icon ‘Scorpio’ (real name Wilbur James Weiss Jr.)—a fellow who, like so many men of his time, inevitably succumbed to complications to AIDS (including stomach cancer)—the iconic porn star does not play the lead character, but instead a secondary ‘character’ who invokes the wraith of the beyond bitter antihero, but not before getting involved in a little balls-to-the-wall pre-condom bareback brutality. A sort of warped psycho-sexual thriller and fiercely foreboding carnal chamber piece made very vaguely in the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock’s ambiguously gay classic Rope (1948), albeit with cocks and minus the quasi-Nietzschean philosophy, The Death of Scorpio depicts that revengeful short-time serial killing of a perennially internally wounded artist who decides to get revenge against his long-term ex-lover/great lover and the mutual ‘friends’ that destroyed their relationship. An award winner from the Gay Film Institute, The Death of Scorpio, which mostly takes place in a single dreary and scantily blue room, was largely shot for a live-audience at Show Palace Theatre in Soho, NYC where Scorpio regularly performed while high on “poppers” (Amyl Nitrate) and thus offers a rare raw window into a lost time that was largely vanguished by “gay cancer” (AIDS) and, later, aesthetically insipid shot-on-video smut. 

 As antihero Shawn Gregory (Amero’s In Search of the Perfect Man, All Tied Up) writes in a ‘therapeutic’ letter that to his ex-lover Michael Stone (whose only other film credit was on an episode of the forgotten TV series Sons and Daughters (1982–1987) created by Reg Watson): “Ten years… Ten years…or at least it would have been ten years today, Michael. Oh Michael, how did you let our friends destroy such a wonderful relationship? The day I met you at Jessica’s, I knew you were all and everything I needed. She was the cause of it, you know. Jessica knew that Giuseppe and Scorpio wanted to be more than just ‘good friends.’ They wanted you…they used you, but they never loved you. Not the way I did, Michael. I never tricked with them…our so called ‘best friends.’ But in one year you let them ruin all the togetherness we had developed in the best 8 years of our lives. I need my peace of mind…my course is set…my anguish will be resolved. I will end this torment.” Indeed, struggling painter Shawn plans to “end this torment” by not only killing his ex via poison, but also their mutual friends Giuseppe Welch (Amero and his partner Findlay’s Christopher Street Blues, Amero’s Killing Me Softly) and Scorpio (Jack Deveau’s Just Blonds, Christopher Rage's Street Kids), who he blames for destroying his relationship. Indeed, appealing to their flagrant narcissism by offering the opportunity to be the subject of a painting that will be in his supposed upcoming art gallery showing, Shawn convinces the men to come to his apartment where he paints and then defiles their nude bodies, and afterwards plies them with alcohol, which he has spiked with poisonous pharmaceuticals. 

 The first forsaken fellow that Shawn gets to come by his rather pathetic apartment of death is Giuseppe Welch, who poses for the aberrant artist in nothing but a rather unflattering jockstrap. Shawn convinces Giuseppe to come over by pleading with him over the phone regarding the supposed bad blood between the two men: “I’m all over that. No, no hard feelings. Michael and I just weren’t meant to be. I’ve got my head together…don’t even go to the shrink anymore and I really want to paint you.” After Shawn paints his unsuspecting victim, he worships the young man’s jockstrap and the two proceed to share carnal knowledge with one another, but both men seem to have trouble keeping their members hard. After Shawn gives Giuseppe poisonous wine, the latter soon dies and days later a newspaper headline states regarding the death: “Body Found in Soho…Poison Suggests Murder.” Next, Shawn gives good old Scorpio—a dirty blond mop-head with an equally unflattering mustache that would probably scare away any sensible young child—a call and lets the porn star know regarding their upcoming painting session, “Can’t wait to get you in oil!” While Shawn seems to have fun with Scorpio during their post-painting session after engaging in a little 69 pleasure and aggressive butt banditry, that does not stop the lethally lovelorn artist from perniciously poisoning his subject’s vodka. In what ultimately amounts to a rather pathetic lonely death, Scorpio merely drops dead on the hot NYC asphalt like a common bum, with no one even noticing his degrading demise. In a quasi-poetic post-coitus rambling, Shawn states: “Oh Scorpio, how incredible it is that in this fragile existence we should hate and destroy one another. There was someone that said a man at the point of death was more free than all others…because, Scorpio, death levels all things. Goodbye, sweet Scorpio.” 

 Of course, Shawn saves the best for last. Indeed, knowing that his ex-boyfriend is mourning the dubious death of Giuseppe, Shawn calls Michael and states the following like a true scheming psychopath: “Michael, I just heard about Giuseppe…how awful. What?! Oh my god, not Scorpio too! Michael, I must see you, especially after what’s happened. Please come. Remember the good times. I want to be with you. There must be a very sick person somewhere in this city.” Of course, totally unaware that Michael is a malevolent mad man with a thirst for carnally killer revenge, Michael shows up and the two instantly make love in a scene of almost Riefenstahl-esque “body worship.” After having sex, Michael ends up accidentally finding Shawn’s “kill list” while the painter is mixing together a poisonous alcoholic beverage for his ill-fated lover. In a twist ending, Michael switches glasses with Shawn while the two are kissing. Somewhat ironically, Shawn dies in peace in the arms of the man he loved so much that he was driven to coldblooded murder. Indeed, things may not have worked out as Shawn had originally planned, but at least the perturbed painter was able to “end this torment” in a most fitting and, dare I say, romantic fashion, thus giving The Death of Scorpio a sort of morbid and sadistic Shakespearean vibe. 

 While nowhere near as masterful, entrancing, and aesthetically ‘idiosyncratic’ as Amero’s haunting esoteric psychedelic-gothic hardcore effort Bacchanale, The Death of Scorpio is no less dark and depraved, as an unwittingly prophetic piece of pornographic poetry. Indeed, created just before the AIDS epidemic more or less decimated the strongly organized gay community that popped up after the Stonewall riots of 1969, Amero’s film certainly seems like it anticipates the internal ‘self-destruction’ that hit the homosexual world after gay cancer spread like the plague in NYC and every other American metropolis. Despite the fact that the title of the film certainly tells the viewer otherwise, The Death of Scorpio is surely not a mere Scorpio vehicle but a decidedly disturbing chamber piece wherein Shawn Gregory and Michael Stone (whose haunting portrait is focused on in the antihero’s apartment throughout, thus highlighting Shawn's superlatively sick and obscenely obsessive heartbrokenness) are the real stars. Indeed, when it comes down to it, Scorpio’s contribution to the film is no more captivating or iconic than that of a grimy blowup doll (in fact, a blowup doll would have added something more ‘novel’ the film). While a little too ‘porn-heavy’ for my tastes as someone who watches vintage fuck flicks for solely aesthetic reasons, Amero’s perturbing piece of homicidal homo pornography will certainly disappoint those looking for a quick and painless masturbation aid, as an oftentimes melancholy blue movie with an upbeat yet paradoxically strangely eerie electronic/disco soundtrack that anticipates the collective screams of countless AIDS victims. Indeed, with Scorpio now long dead as a result of the same plague that devoured his friends, lovers, and fellow porn star comrades, The Death of Scorpio has gained more meaning with age, thus guaranteeing that not all old school wank material will succumb to the dirty semen-stained dustbin of porno history. 

-Ty E

Pussy Talk

While Gerard Damiano’s mafia financed and distributed crossover work Deep Throat (1972) brought mainstream legitimacy to pornography in the United States, the French were treated to something much more bizarre in terms of pioneering crossover porn flicks. Indeed, Claude Mulot’s Pussy Talk (1975) aka Le sexe qui parle aka Talk aka The Sex Who Talks—the first frog fuck flick to achieve international success and eventually earn cult status—is as wantonly whacked out as its rather literal American English title would suggest, as a patently preposterous porno piece featuring a chattering bushy pussy that likes to use the word “cunt.” Rather loosely based on the French 18th-century erotic novel The Indiscreet Jewels (1748) aka Les bijoux indiscrets by Enlightenment era writer Denis Diderot, Mulot’s flick is what some viewers might describe as a sub-arthouse unintentional laugh-out-loud comedy as a dead serious work with majorly moronic dialogue and scenarios that would baffle even an autistic toddler in terms of its absurdist erotic anti-realism. Sort of like a Radley Metzger film (in fact, Pussy Talk can be seen being advertised on a movie theater marquee in Metzger’s hardcore masterpiece Opening of Misty Beethoven) meets a preposterous premise from some old vintage Nickelodeon cartoon, Mulot’s masterfully moronic yet lavishly lecherous blue movie may be a lot of things that one might describe as unflattering, but no one can say the film is in any way, shape, or form banal. Featuring ‘actresses’ that are far too attractive to be porn stars and mostly physically and psychologically male characters that are more often than not intimidated by beauteous women that probably would not normally recognize their rather mundane existences, the film’s American distributor certainly used false advertising with the following rather ridiculous tagline: “Because you're a Woman, you should see...Pussy Talk.” A sort of raunchy ‘gynocentric’ reworking of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that may or may not have influenced the rather wretched feminist vomit The Vagina Monologues, Pussy Talk is a salacious sick joke at the expense of both men and women that reminds the viewer that pussies have many secrets and complaints to tell.

Joëlle (Pénélope Lamour) is a statuesque redhead who is married to a less than sexually virile fellow named Eric (Jean-Loup Philippe), so she must find other ways to satisfy her sexual cravings aside from being soullessly humped by her hubby. When a hot blonde compliments her act of defiance regarding tearing up a traffic ticket that has been left on her car, Joëlle follows the sensual stranger into a record shop, fondles her vulnerable vulva, and attempts to shove a 100 French franc banknote in the woman’s pussy, but the two are ultimately interrupted, thus prematurely aborting the game of ‘cash-in-gash.’ The next day while she is at work, Joëlle, who is an executive at an advertising agency, uses her seductive power as a busty boss to pull out a startled young mensch’s cock and begin deepthroating it. When Joëlle comes home that night, she has to keep company with her husband Eric’s banal friends, so to spice things up, she begins masturbating in front of them. While Eric is somewhat angered by his wife’s vulgar display, it also turns him on, so the two have sex, though Joëlle is ultimately left unsatisfied. Needless to say, Joëlle decides to satisfy herself by masturbating in a bathtub while fantasizing about a group of male frogs in a circle jerk busting their loads on the windshield and windows of a car she is inside. After diddling her naughty bits, Joëlle notices her husband and also notices that her cunt has began talk in a crude fashion.

When Joëlle walks in on her snoozing husband, her mouthy meat-curtain rudely awakens him by stating: “Well, as I live and breathe…isn’t it sleeping beauty? Wakeup you lazy son-of-a-bitch! You hear me? I said wakeup! I wanna fuck…you understand? FUCK! Only, this time I wanna get something out of it. I want you to sock it to me kid […] You better get used to it! You both better get used to it because when I get going, I’m Pandora’s Box without a lid.” Indeed, Joëlle’s pussy is now in charge and it has a voracious yet eclectic appetite, so before the ad executive knows it, she is walking to a porn theater in nothing but a trench coat. Upon entering the sleazy porn theatre and watching a fucked fuck film featuring a deranged dude cutting off a poor girl’s bodice and subsequently raping her, Joëlle begins giving two swarthy frogs with flaccid chodes handjobs at the same time, but her efforts do little to get the men’s dongs up, so the threesome heads to the theater bathroom and gets involved in a claustrophobic ménage à trios. Needless to say, Eric is not happy later that night when Joëlle goes home and her blabbering beaver tells him what his wife has done at the local porn theater. The next day, Eric has his friend Martine (Ellen Earl)—a psychiatrist posing as a veterinarian “with an interest in pussies”—come over to meet Joëlle, whose talking pussy the quack naturally wants to meet. Of course, the chattering cunt, which semi-sinisterly states to the psychiatrist, “You wanna know, cunt?! […] the four of us are going to have a blast,” is too smart for Martine and coerces her to have sex with not only Eric, but Joëlle as well. Of course, minor trouble strikes Joëlle and Eric when Martine decides to go to the press with the story of the “vagina loquens.”

Hoping to get the full scoop on Joëlle and get her surreally sordid story, Richard (Vicky Messica) approaches the ad executive’s absurdly amorous artist aunt Barbara (played by French ‘activist’ Sylvia Bourdon)—a playfully perverted lady who regularly enjoys threesomes with both her male and female subjects—who is more than willing to setup up her niece for the right price. Meanwhile, after Joëlle falls asleep, her compulsively chit chatty cunt tells her husband about her sexual awakening as a teenager. Indeed, on top of revealing that Joëlle’s mother shot her stepfather dead when she was 16 after catching her husband molesting her daughter, Eric also learns that his wanton wife lost her virginity to the nose of a Pinocchio marionette after her high school sweetheart pussied out when it came to deflowering her. Eric also learns that Joëlle was quite the little sadist seducer when she was a teen, as she and her friend managed to molest their high school teacher, not to mention the fact that she fucked a priest after confessing to him. Rather shocked by all these stories, Eric is only all the more emasculated when the cunty cunt viciously states: “You don’t understand anything. She was so vibrant, so full of life…you’ve turned her into a frigid old woman. There’s a cunt issue…You act like a cunt, you work like a cunt, and you fuck like a cunt. Why she married you, I’ll never know.” After the cunt gets down spewing vile, yellow journalist Richard and his comrade break into Joëlle and Eric’s room while they are naked in bed. While Joëlle manages to escape while Eric beats up the jack-off journalists while he is in the bare, the chick with the chattering cunt makes the mistake of heading to her deceitful aunt’s house. After aunt Barbara drugs Joëlle, Robert comes by and starts masturbating the meaty talking pussy with a microphone, thus getting the sordid story he needs. While Eric later manages to silence his wife’s vagina by finally managing to sexually pleasure her with his cock, the hubby’s member becomes infected with the speaking genital STD in what is a rather predictable, if not pleasantly perverse, twist ending.

Apparently, the “talking cunt” (or, as the frogs call it, the “vagina loquens”) is nothing new in France, as it is an ancient folklore motif dating back to at least the 13the century, as demonstrated by the ‘fabliau’ (comical tales written by frog bards) ‘Le Chevalier qui faisoit parler les cons et les culs.’ Indeed, in the allegorical 1748 novel that Talking Pussy is based on, The Indiscreet Jewels aka Les bijoux indiscrets, French King Louis XV is depicted as sultan Mangogul of the Congo and has the power to make women’s “jewels” talk with a magic ring. Somewhat notably, Talking Pussy was such a hit that it spawned a sequel, Triples Introductions (1978), as well as an intentional comedic and thus innately inferior non-pornographic English remake entitled Chatterbox (1977) aka Virginia the Talking Vagina directed by gay pornography to exploitation auteur Tom DeSimone (Hell Night, Reform School Girls). As Talking Pussy demonstrates, the French were no less chic when it came to porn chic, but France’s socialist taxes destroyed the frog fuck film industry before it really began. Indeed, the immaculately titled work is certainly more honest and no less artful that contemporary frog pseudo-arthouse works like Christophe Honoré's banal Bataille adaptation Ma mère (2004) and slave-driving pseudo-Frenchman Abdellatif Kechiche's pseudo-Sapphic epic of counterfeit crypto-pornographic carpet-munching Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013) aka La vie d'Adèle. 

-Ty E