Directed by Tinto Brass Starring Anna Jimskaia, Riccardo Marino, Max Parodi Unrated Italy
"The ass isn't a place just for making poo-poo. And as they say in my neck of the woods, it hasn't got a meter."
Famed ass-man Tinto Brass returns, this time in HD, with Monamour.
The plot is fairly simple: Marta (Anna Jimskaia) and Dario (Max Parodi) are newlyweds, but Marta has a problem - since their marriage began, she has not been able to orgasm and Dario seems to not notice or care.
Marta's methods for dealing with this problem start simply enough by her sharing her thoughts in a diary and fantasizing about more pleasant times.
One day though, Marta is at a museum when a handsome stranger (Riccardo Marino) stalks her, corners her and fondles her lady bits. At first she is offended, but soon finds that she enjoyed the illicit encounter.
Later, Marta and Dario are partying on a boat when Marta runs into the stranger who accosted her earlier. They share a dry hump on the dance-floor and sneak away to share even more inappropriate moments.
That night, Marta shares what happened with Dario and he gets mad - and horny. Hoping his jealousy will ignite his orgasm giving potential, they proceed to have sex, but Dario once again does little more than come and roll over for a nappy-poo.
This pivotal moment sparks Marta's need to orgasm so much that she blows off Dario the next day to go meet Leon (the stranger) at a restaurant. After some table fingering, they giggle away to the bathroom where they have hand-washing soap lubricated butt sex. Really.
While Marta is off with Leon, Dario comes home and stumbles across Marta's diary. He reads through and discovers what is going on.
When Marta returns, Dario becomes irate, slaps her and proceeds to grab a bottle of whiskey to ease his pain.
Will Dario give Marta an orgasm? Will Marta choose love over lust? These are questions that can only be answered by watching Monamour for yourself.
All in all, Monamour is a tale of a woman taking back her sexuality through infidelity. Although the story is really there to give reason to amazing ass and labia shots, and prosthetic penised sexual trysts, the world that Tinto Brass creates is enchanting, whimsical, humorous and thoroughly watchable.
Cult Epics has yet again done a great job with their DVD release of Monamour (along with their long list of other Brass titles). The print is clean, the audio is clear, and the voice-over's (which are highly quotable) are well acted.
Tinto Brass may have created a world that doesn't really exist, but it's a great place to visit. Beautifully filmed and competently acted, Brass's Monamour continues on a well worn path, but it's one that he treads well.
Directed by Bob Clark
Starring Dan Monahan, Kim Cattrall, Chuck Mitchell Rated R Canada
"I've never seen so much wool. You could knit a sweater."
Director Bob Clark (RIP) was always an innovator. He was the first director to utilize the make-up talents of future horror-fx superstar Tom Savini (Deathdream, 1972), he is widely considered the godfather of the slasher film (Black Christmas, 1974), and created the first Christmas-themed film that even people who hate Christmas still adore (A Christmas Story, 1984). But perhaps more importantly, at least to millions of horny teenage boys, Bob Clark invented the modern teen sex comedy.
Anyone with even a passing interest in pop culture is probably aware of Porky's and the impact it's had on filmmaking in the past thirty years. Budgeted at a meager 4 million, it made over a hundred million dollars in the US alone, and was a smash hit all over the world. Also, despite being shot in Florida with an American director and a mostly-American cast, Porky's remains the biggest-grossing Canadian produced film of all time. The movie's financial success still pales in comparison to its cultural significance, however. More than any other film of the era, Porky's established the formula for the teen sex comedy genre, a blueprint that's been used over and over, from Screwballs to American Pie, in hundreds of films. Porky's has it all: a virginal underdog, a gang of rag-tag misfits, a hot teacher, a despicable villain, equally despicable authority figures, a dab of social commentary, and, most importantly, a shower scene. They had existed before, of course, most notably in women's prison flicks of the 70's, but after Porky's, almost no other R-rated teen flick in the next two decades went without at least one visit to the girls' locker room showers. After Porky's, many similar films were judged entirely by how awesome the shower scene was. In fact, the term "shower scene" only entered American vernacular after the success of Porky's.
Porky's admittedly thin story line sprang from the teenage experiences of director Bob Clark, growing up in Florida in the 1950's. Essentially, underachieving Pee Wee (Don Monahan) wants to get laid. His friends decide the only way to make that happen is to take a trip out to the everglades, to a notoriously unhinged strip club called Porky's, named after its fat-bastard owner, Porky Wallace. Their trip is disastrous, and they vow revenge. Besides some adolescent hjinks and school-day sexcapades along the way, that's pretty much the whole story. Simple, but effective.
As the story begins, we meet our hero, Pee Wee, who wakes up and does the same thing he does every morning - measures his penis with a ruler, hoping it got bigger overnight. Alas, it did not, and so Pee Wee shuffles off to school, where he meets up with his prank-loving pals.
After a long day spent trying to see their gym teacher naked, the fellas head out to shack in the woods to have sex with a hooker delightfully named Cherry Forever - played, also delightfully, by Webster's mom, Susan Clark.
Anyway, it's all just a goof to scare the fellas. They hire a guy to pretend to be Cherry's angry boyfriend and mayhem (and full-frontal male nudity) ensues. Naturally, a naked Pee Wee ends up getting picked up by the cops. Everybody dumps on ol' Pee Wee, all the time. The very next day, Wendy Williams - who actually went out on a date with Pee Wee - gives him a giant condom for being "The biggest dickhead in the world". Clearly, something needs to change.
The fellas decide they all need to go to Porky's, a notorious stripclub/divebar 70 miles away, in the Everglades, where "anything goes. And so they do. Porky's is some kind of crazy redneck paradise where they let underage kids in, no questions ask, where topless strippers brawl with drunken cowboys, where the bouncer loungers in a machine gun-mounted wheelchair, and where, if you've got enough cash, you just make it upstairs, where god knows what will happen to you.
The fellas meet Porky (Chuck Mitchell, a real monster of a man), who agrees to let the boys have at three of his girls for a hundred bucks. But of course, it's just another ruse. He dumps them all into the moat. Adding insult to injury, the crooked sheriff (Alex Karras - Webster's dad!) shakes them down for the rest of their dough. So it turns out to be a pretty bad night.
Meanwhile, back at school, Coach Brakket (Boyd Gaines) is under the assumption that his girlfriend, Miss Honeywell (Kim Cattrall), is a virgin. Coach Warren (Doug McGrath) assures him that if he gets her upstairs in the gym's storage room, he'll find out differently. So he attempts to get her upstairs all the time. He has just struck out once again when Miss Ballbreaker shows up and gives Honeywell some lip.
She gets so angry that she does, in fact, go upstairs, and then the big secret is revealed. They store old uniforms up there, and the smell of a men's locker room drives Honeywell into a fit of depraved passion. They have loud, inappropriate sex, and she howls like a dog. Hence her nickname, Lassie. Also, you get to see Kim Catrall's naked ass, which is pretty awesome.
And then, we are treated to the greatest full-bush teen sex comedy shower scene of all time. The mother of all shower scenes.
Unfortunately, the fun ends prematurely when Pee Wee, frustrated because his peephole is obstructed by the plus-sized ass of a girl affectionately known as Blubberman, blows their cover. The girls figure out what's up and they're pretty amused by it, but then one of the fellas sticks his penis through the peephole, and things got south pretty quick from there. Ballbreaker shows up, and the Greatest Shower Scene of All Time turns into the Most Painful Penis-yanking Scene of All Time.
Ballbreaker wants to set up a penis line-up to identify the shower-peeper, but the principal has a giggle-fit when she explains it to him.
Then there's some bullshit with the racist kid and his dad at a party, and just when things get under control again, Mickey stumbles in, covered in blood. He'd been consistently trying to get revenge on Porky this whole time, and every time he comes home, he's a little more battered. This time, he ends up in an ambulance.
Surely you must know, this means war.
Shwartz cooks up a plan, and the boys (and the coach, and a cop), get to work. The plan pretty much involves tearing Porky's down piece by piece. There's distressed strippers and spilled booze everywhere. While this is happening, the sheriff shows up to kill everybody. But the fellas rigged his car, too, and he ends up in the swamp with the rest of the assholes. And once the whole joint is reduced to splinters, they blow whatever is left up.
Porky and his bro chase the kids to the county line, but once they get there, further humiliation awaits. In fact, you almost start to feel bad for the fat creep.
But wait, what about Pee Wee? Does he finally get laid? I mean, that's what this was all about, right?
Yeah, man. Everybody gets laid!
While it has certainly been trumped, in terms of onscreen nudity and teenage hijinks over the years, and while its fitful attempts at addressing race-relations seem awkward and out-of-place, Porky's nonetheless still holds a special place in the heart of every lusty teenager who stumbled across it over the past thirty years. Clark captured the engorged id of every adolescent American boy better than anyone ever had before. As a former adolescent American boy myself, I can say for certain that boozing, pranks, and going after pussy really are the chief preoccupations for men of a certain age, regardless of the era they grew up in, and Porky's represents those magical years perfectly. It was quickly followed by two sequels and hundreds of rip-offs - and still is - but there's nothing quite like the original. It almost makes me feel bad for today's youth, and their easy access to pornography. In 1982, Porky's was teenage America's porn, and Kim Catrall was teenage America's greatest porn star. If you've never taken a trip to Porky's, a I highly recommend you do. Just be sure to bring some rubbers and a Fake ID.
Directed by Takafumi Nagamine Starring Shino Saito, Juri Inahara, Moa Arimoto Unrated Japan
"Once there was a person who fought for the dreams and liberty of young people by exposing herself." Reading about Japanese pop culture history before my visit there earlier this year got me to appreciate the importance of Shonen Jump. In Kyoto, I loved the manga museum and bought two recent copies of the thick weekly comic anthology from a 7-11. Hell, I could even follow some of the stories despite the language barrier. The Kekko Kamen story began in Shonen Jump in 1974 and has since spawned 10 live action films, more comics and Anime. Students get abused and Kekko Kamen fights the bad people as her small, exposed boobs bounce around in lovely fashion. That's it.
The 3:30-long opening credit sequence is a music video montage of the movie you're about to see (a device I'd expect to see perhaps open an Argentine telenovela). All essential plot twists aren't necessarily spoiled there, as they will be here, but it's an absolutely fucking ridiculous way to begin.
Having been accepted into a prestigious Japanese boarding school for future TV anchorwomen, adorable Mayumi (played by Juri Inahara) returns to her homeland and dreams of being a star. Cue dramatic music and look at the moon. This school is strict, though, and Mayumi's life there becomes increasingly difficult when everyone learns that she can't read Kanji very well (fun fact: school children in Japan are expected to know more than 1,000 Kanji characters by sixth grade). This lapse of basic Japanese education is explained simply: Mayumi's family is Japanese but she's been raised in New Zealand. The entire purpose of this back story is to get Mayumi into the basement torture chamber for "special lessons."
And that officially launches this 69-minute-long film. You see, Kekko Kamen is some kind of light, general and all-encompassing Japanese fetish project masked as a nudie action film. We've already got a schoolgirl stripped to bra and panties, in restraints on a carousel horse while suffering light whips and spanks from authority figures of both genders. These violent bastards then force Mayumi to read out loud...and then they brush her teeth while she screams for help. These screams do not go unanswered--Kekko Kamen (played by Shino Saito) responds, gaining entrance into the chamber using her sexy legs as distraction. ZAM! The full image of our heroine is not unlike a red Power Ranger clad only in vinyl boots and gloves, a mask complete with something like floppy stuffed bunny ears and an exaggerated scarf which continually flirts with her asscrack and magically manages to hide her genitals.
"Even if heaven forgives your evil doings, I will not!" KK declares before summarily kicking ass. Her finishing move? "Muffication!" as she descends, beav first, onto her opponent's shoulders, her legs snapping the neck. The filmmakers seem to think the bad guys are suffocated by KK's vagina, but this film isn't smut, people, she just freezes her opponents with the sight of her special place and then...snap. Before scene end, KK promises Mayumi that she'll be protected as long as she doesn't give up on her dreams. How sweet and profound.
The evil headmaster, watching live surveillance footage from throughout the campus (which he apparently peddles on the voyeur porn market) sees KK in action and is horrified. He claims she's his "greatest enemy" as she "completely obliterated" his first school.
Mayumi shares her ordeal with several classmates while looking up at the moon...as professional newscaster Mizuho Sakuragi (played by Keiko Kubo) listens in, sort-of-but-not-really hiding behind a wall.
An ugly-faced, large-breasted student who bought her way into the school is next snatched up for special lessons of her own by a school authority figure I know in my own mind only as "Red Boss Man," the evil tooth brusher from Mayumi's earlier encounter. Naturally, he pushes her down onto a table, straddles her and explains his special gift: the ability to suck energy out of breasts and turn it into other energy. He laughs, moving his head stupidly between her breasts and inhaling a green fog that has emerged--her boob power. This student is then transformed into Akira, a young man with the mission to catch KK once and for all. Akira is, hilariously, typical androgynous Tokyo rentboy fare. Mizuho, the newscaster, meets with the headmaster in search of a top student to begin working at her channel. The ensuing rivalry and stress leaves students sweating torrents and dosing friends/competition with laxatives. The latter, of course, leads to fart and poopie jokes. And I laughed. Then realizing this was just another fetish for the filmmakers to exploit, I laughed harder.
Akira squeals on his supposed mentor (for lack of a better term) for some nonsense I can't recall and the student ends up in the basement, restrained and surrounded by lovely, fresh tomatoes as well as the usual gang of molesters. This time, one has a chainsaw--and of course slices up some tomatoes--and in cutting the student's clothes off, they're shocked that it's a girl. OMG! Well, yeah, that's a girl, she looked like a girl with clothes on. Then KK enters...kicks ass. This scene exists only to fill time and incorporate more fetishes. Underwear starts disappearing the same morning that news reporter-ballroom dancing hybrid skills are to be tested. Wakana, the student responsible for the laxative dosing and a supposed friend of Mayumi, couldn't find her panties that morning and, expectedly, falls on her back...cameraman (for the school, not this film) zooming in with her legs spread for an upskirt shot. For this offense--not wearing underwear in a holy room (WTF?)--Wakana is ordered special treatment...and is locked in a glass box with eels while she's poked with a spear. Mayumi comes to Wakana's rescue, despite their personal issues...and just as the headmaster had planned. So, Mayumi gets tossed into the eel box with Wakana in order to attract KK, the real target.
And the headmaster planned this well, he's got an extra fighter this round. And what a secret weapon it is! Yeah, an obese transvestite (or a woman seemingly dressed up as one) that looks like comedian Bobby Lee in drag. As they struggle with KK, Akira "rescues" Mayumi and they flee the room...no, it's not over. Akira takes this moment to reveal his super-hero secret: "An illusion in my heart, an orange muffler around my neck...they call me the Illusionary Panty! Come panties, provide me with your powers!" Yeah, he said that...then transformed into some asshole with an orange scarf, panties on his head (Mayumi's favorite pair, no less!) and panties attached to his dumb black clothes. What a piece of shit.
The Illusionary Panty pulls down Mayumi's panties, but she escapes with them back into the torture chamber. Without the extra power of that one additional pair of underwear the Illusionary Panty has to play dirty, whipping out a handgun...eagle eye on KK. Oh noes! Mayumi ain't no dummy, though, as she lifts up her skirt (panties still pulled down) and temporarily blinds all of the bad people with the sight of her beautiful, unseen vagina, which glows with magical censorship just like KK's during "muffication." And one of KK's gloves floats across the room and takes the Illusionary Panty's gun, shooting the Bobby Lee monster. Geez...Freud would have had a field day with this mess.
So, KK kicks ass again and frees the boob power of the ugly-faced-large-breasted-girl-turned-Akira-turned-Illusionary-Panty, the neon green chi chi essence returns and she wakes up...wearing only a bra and skirt, of course.
To save face, the headmaster unveils his three "androids" created to destroy KK. More secret weapons? Yup. Well, not so much as the "androids" are all donned in last-minute Halloween costumes. 1) "Iron Steel Kamen" - his "body covered in steel" is just a shirtless man in silver boxer shorts and a crappy metal-looking mask/helmet. 2) "Turtle Kamen" - some dummy in Speedos wearing a turtle shell strapped to his back. 3) "Healthy Kamen" - a dude in tighty whiteys.
The headmaster created three stupid "androids," this is true, but his gold, multi-purpose, penis-shaped remote control was rocking 12 number buttons! Cage match time...and Mizuho and her own cameraman emerge from the shadows, broadcasting the battle live, with Mayumi giving the play-by-play. KK is again victorious, but her "muffication" destroys Mayumi's promised TV job with Mizuho (who gets fired) for broadcasting the spread-leg attack. The headmaster, from a hospital bed, vows revenge and even names the next battle...segue into another KK fight scene (presumably footage from a sequel). Oh yeah, there are more of these shit gems.
It's almost a kid's movie with subversive kink (and KK's bouncing boobies) throughout. Amusing as a 20-minute short film, absolutely. But multiple feature-length films? C'mon.
Directed by Mark L Lester
Starring Linda Blair, Jim Bray, Beverly Garland, Roger Perry Rated PG USA
"Do you have a mental problem, or something? First you want to skate, then you don't want to skate!"
Produced in wake of Saturday Night Fever's phenomenal success, Roller Boogie's premise, angle, and target audience are all pretty obvious: It's Fever, only for teenagers, and on roller skates. Brilliant! While it clearly didn't click with audiences the way Travolta's polyester epic did, Boogie is nonetheless a fine example of 70's exploitation, filled with sparkle, charm, and a delightfully loopy plotline that borrows as much from Saturday morning cartoons as it does from the roller disco scene it's based on.
Linda Blair is Terry Barkley, a poor little rich girl whose parents never listen to her. Bobby (one-time actor Jim Bray) and Phones (Stoney Jackson, Streets of Fire) are the best skaters on the beach. Bobby works at the skate rental shop, but he does not let this deter him from splitting to disco-skate whenever the mood hits. And it hits him often. It is therefore inevitable that Terry and her busty, high-brow buddy Lana (Kimberly Beck) would cross paths with Bobby and Phones and their gang of hot pants-wearing rollerkids. Interestingly, when Bobby first approaches Terry, she rebuffs him, and then skates off to eat ice cream. Bobby asks around about her, and his pals tell him she's from Beverly Hills and drives a million dollar car. So, this going to be a tough nut to crack, especially since Bobby looks like the dude from REO Speedwagon and spends most of his life in brightly colored shorts.
Besides being rich and beautiful, Terry is also an accomplished flautist (!)with a scholarship to Juliard and an equally well-heeled suitor named Franklin. Alas, despite being handsome and snappily-dressed, Terry finds him to be a grabby creep.
With their day of vigorous culture-clashing over, all the kids at the beach, rich and poor, head over to Jammers for an evening of roller boogie-ing. They all disco-skate to Boogie Wonderland, which was a requirement in 1979. By the way, it looks like the most fun ever. Whatever happened to disco-skating?
Bobby saves Terry from a potential face-plant when a wayward skater almost slams into her. He takes the opportunity to ask her out. She again rebuffs him but offers him a business proposal: She'll pay him $10 an hour to teach her to dance on skates.
Their lesson goes on for about 15 minutes, and then Terry skates off with some other dudes. She runs into Bobby the next day at the beach, but by now, he's pretty much had it with this dizzy chick and her Linda Ronstatd get-up. But he's a forgiving fellow, so they give it another go. The skating goes ok, but things get weird later during a beachside make-out session. Sexual tension and abandonment issues and whatnots.
Later on she goes home and tries to have a heart to heart talk with her mom (50's star Beverly Garland!), but it does not go well. Mom ends up popping pills just to get through it. The upshot is that Terry has no real interest in flutes or rich douchebags. All she really wants is to win the Roller Boogie contest.
And then Terry decides to run away from home, but instead, she goes to the beach to skate and make out with Bobby. So that's going on.
Then, in a very Saturday morning cartoons turn of events, a bunch of thugs show and try to force Jammer to sell his place. Luckily, Phones accidentally records the whole conversation on his jam box! Nobody knows that yet, though.
So Jammer gets tanked and gives the kids the bad news - he's closing the roller rink for good. Or is he? See, the kids have a plan! What is it? Well, Terry's dad (Roger Perry) is a lawyer. That's pretty much the plan. Dad agrees to help out Jammer after Terry's recital. Said recital takes place in their backyard. All of Terry's beach-bum friends attend. So do the thug guys, who attempt to slaughter the kids. As these things often go, everybody ends up in the pool.
Also, some people end up covered in cake.
Anyway, it turns out dad is in cahoots with the thugs, so the kids need a plan B. Meanwhile, Bobby does a solo disco-skate dance just for Jammer. His shirt says "BJ" on it while he does this. Granted, those are his initials, but still.
Anyway, none of his flouncing around matters, because Jammer sold the rink to the thugs, dad is sending Terry off to stay with her aunt, Phones joined the Hare Krishnas, and the Roller Boogie contest is dead. The end. Or is it?
Of course it's not the end. Phones recorded the whole fuckin' conversation when the thugs threatened to burn down the rink, remember? And Bobby just discovered the tape. So Terry and Bobby zoom to the scene of the crime in their skates and nail the bad guys. And finally, we get to the roller boogie contest. Was it worth all this bullshit? Yes. Totally worth it.
One of the all-time greatest 70's disco-sploitation flicks, the relentlessly bubbly Roller Boogie is a perennial crowd-pleaser that never fails to provide laughs and boners. Linda Blair's almost impossibly curvy figure and her equally improbable perm are the two of the major highlights here, but there's so much more to take in: the excellent ensemble cast, the spandex and hotpants, the Scooby Doo villains, the obvious stunt doubles, the goofy dance routines, and some of the loopiest dialogue of the era. It all adds up to a sugary ball of dumb 70's fun, an aggressively frivolous joygasm on the wheels that will have even the crankiest among us contemplating a visit to the roller rink.
PS: Come back, Kimberly Beck! We miss your bountiful talent(s)!
Directed by Dustin Guy
Starring Steven Roy, Josie Maran, Scott Hanks Unrated Canada
"A bad blowjob, man. I never thought it would happen to me."
While you can tell, right off the bat, that The Mallory Effect is Canadian - it's got that slightly off-kilter vibe, like Christian rock or European jeans - what is not immediately apparent is what kind of movie it is. It's billed as a comedy, and the basic set-up is pure rom-com hokum: sniveling insurance salesman Charlie (Steven Roy) is dumped, on Valentine's day, by girlfriend Mallory (swimsuit model and reality TV star Josie Maran), a blonde stunner way out his league. Desperate to win her back, he devises a hare-brained scheme to reunite them. However, Charlie is so off-putting and weird (in the opening break-up scene, he shuffles off to the bathroom to slather her lipstick on his face; after she cuts him loose, he tells her next door neighbor she's riddled with STDs), that it seems more like the opening of a stalker-slasher flick, especially after he starts sleeping in his car so that he can stake out her house at night.
Also, assuming that he's our protagonist, feeling any sort of sympathy for Charlie is impossible, since he's a petulant, self-obsessed wretch surrounded by beautiful single women, including insecure barfly Jennifer (Victoria Pratt, Cleopatra 2525) and his hyper boss Robin (Clare Kramer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), who he continuously brushes off in favor of harassing his over-it ex-girlfriend.
Charlie's best/only friend Nick (Sean Marble) is equally reprehensible, a foul-mouthed misogynist who spends most of his time lying to girls. So it's really no surprise when Charlie steps up the creepy by stalking Mallory's new mustachioed boyfriend Curtis (the Iggy Pop-esque Scott Hanks), stealing his mail, and then pretending to be a friend-of-a-friend to win his confidence.
Charlie makes a man-date to hang out with Curtis at a local bar. First though, he picks him up at his house, and while Curtis is getting ready, Charlie rubs his balls with Curtis's toothbrush. Charlie is a complete fuckin' menace in the bathroom. Later on at the bar, he attempts to hook Curtis up with a flirtatious acquaintance, Shauna (Joline Towers).
Curtis doesn't bite, and asks Charlie to drive him home. He does, and then hides in the bushes, peeping in the window to watch Curtis and Mallory fuck. So that was weird. Things get exponentially weirder, however, the next evening. First, Charlie sneaks into Curtis's house and leaves a semen-filled condom on his bathroom floor for Mallory to find. Then Nick calls him up and asks him to come over and watch him bang Laura (Larissa Moore), who can only cum when someone else is in the room, spying on her. Canadians are nuts.
So anyways, to further muddy the waters of Curtis and Mallory's relationship, Charlie gets Jennifer to lay around in Curtis's bed in lingerie, waiting for them to get home so they can indulge in group sex. Naturally, Mallory is appalled, Curtis is shocked, and everybody's night is ruined, except for Charlie, who's pretty sure he's just broke those two up for good.
But did he?
No, he did not. In the not-so-shocking climax, Mallory turns the tables on all the scheming men in her life, and everyone end up miserable. Except her.
Pervasively mean-spirited and self-consciously profane, The Mallory Effect is an odd duck of a film. If it's a comedy, it's an awful one, since there isn't a chuckle to be found. If it's a drama, it's also awful, since everyone in the film is too horrible to feel anything for. If it's a boner movie - well, there is a bevy of beautiful women parading though it, that much is true. But I'm not sure they're worth the hassle. Victoria Pratt fetishists may want to check this fizzing dud out, everybody else surely has something better to do.
Starring Panos Thanassoulis, Meredyth Herold, Michele Valley
Unrated
Greece
"Do what she says. Hit me, Singapore Sling."
Being equal parts film noir, pitch black comedy, horror, and sadomasochistic scat film, Nikos Nikolaidis's Singapore Sling is quite the odd beast of a movie.
The plot as such revolves around a detective (played by Panos Thanassoulis), referred to only as Singapore Sling, who is looking for his missing love, Laura. His search leads him to a secluded villa where he believes that she may be. But, to make matters more complicated, the detective has been wounded by a bullet and needs help.
Unfortunately, his "help" comes in the form of "Daughter" (played by Meredyth Herold) - a giddy, child-like maniac who lost her virginity to her father (who happens to be a mummy) and has a vomit fetish - and "Mother" (played by Michele Valley), a gypsy-like character who sports a strap-on dildo and enjoys giving golden showers.
Upon taking the wounded detective in, they waste no time in making his life a living hell. Strapping him to a bed, they proceed to torture him in many outrageous and disturbing ways. Daughter teases him, rides him and vomits on his face. Mother straps an electrocution device on his head and shocks him as she rides him to her own writhing orgasm as he convulses in agony - much like a human vibrator, and urinates on him. And this is just the beginning of his troubles.
Much of the exposition is told in voice-over narration by Singapore Sling himself and through fourth wall breaking monologues from Daughter and Mother. Although much of what is revealed doesn't really help to give us a clear idea of what is going on besides the obvious, the stories and reflections are still a pleasure (if that is the proper word) to witness.
Apparently, the film is largely a tribute to the 1944 film Laura, which I have never seen myself. From my personal view, I see Singapore Sling, superficially, as a demented mash-up of Grey Gardens, Spiderbaby and Misery. Although there are intended nods to many different films, I do not believe that having prior knowledge of them is at all essential to viewing this film as a standalone project. I actually think that having knowledge of the influences of Singapore Sling would have the result of cheapening the film by making it appear less original than it really is.
Released by Synapse Films, the image is crisp and clean and the audio is clear and dynamic. My one complaint is in the subtitling department. The print that Synapse received had hardcoded subtitles for the lines that are in Greek, but not all of the Greek was translated on that version. Instead of adding subtitles in those areas, Synapse overlaid a large grey box over the original subtitles so that they could replace them with improved translations. The problem with this is that the box takes up half the screen and really takes away from the film. Fortunately, Synapse has given two options: the original subtitled version and their "new and improved" version. Although not all of the lines in the original are represented, I highly suggest that on your initial viewing that you use the original and if you later want to see the translated lines, try the big block version. Other than that minor quibble, Synapse did a great job with this.
In a world where anything you want or do not want to see is available to you through the internet, it is still surprising to find something that can have a disarming effect on you, and Singapore Sling is one of those things. Highly arousing, cringingly disgusting and laugh outloud funny (depending on your tastes, of course), Singapore Sling offers up something I have never seen before and I am a better person for it. Thank you.
Famed ass-man Tinto Brass returns, this time in HD, with Monamour.
