SEX WISH

As I began this week of horror/roughie pornos with the Harry Reems vehicle FORCED ENTRY, it only makes sense to end the week by reviewing Victor Milt’s 1976 DEATH WISH knock-off, SEX WISH. The two films make for a nice pair of bookends, giving us Reems as a perverted sex maniac in the former and an avenging angel in the latter. The plot of SEX WISH is really not that different from its source of inspiration. A man is driven to vengeance after his wife is murdered by a sicko. Unfortunately, as this was a low budget skin flick shot guerrilla style in New York City, you won’t be seeing very many explosive action scenes here.

That isn’t to say the film is boring or without merit, only that it isn’t half as good as it could have been. The fact that it was clearly made to be a more approachable porn flick than the similarly grimy FORCED ENTRY doesn’t help much either. Eroticism was not a key interest of that film, but SEX WISH does in fact want the audience to have a good time, even though it ruins the integrity of the characters in the process. People in the audience want to watch consensual sex so our depressed, mourning husband needs to forget the pain of losing his wife for a few impromptu bump and grind sessions, the first of which happens only a few hours after his wife’s death.

It definitely lessens the emotional impact of the film, though I fully recognize that I might be the only person in the world who gives a shit about that fact.

While Reems makes for a likable enough protagonist, SEX WISH belongs to Zebedy Colt. Colt had already made a name for himself by writing and directing a few rough and tumble pornos like THE FARMER’S DAUGHTERS, THE INTRUSION and TERRI’S REVENGE. Violence, rape and abuse were key components of all of those films. Colt was the Adults Only equivalent of the Findleys or Joe Mawra, the kind of guy who took delight in mixing eroticism with cold blooded immorality. There was probably no one better to take on the role of the murderous Night Walker.

Colt’s performance is simply fantastic. As a self-hating homosexual man with multiple personality disorder, Colt is creepy to the fucking max, with his shrill voice and strangely calm demeanor. It made my skin crawl to watch him on screen, especially in the later parts of the film when his otherwise solid grasp on his temper began to slip. It’s a controlled, layered performance, one I didn’t think Colt was capable of giving, one that is definitely far better than the film probably deserved. While the violence on display is kept largely off-screen, the frenetic editing, handheld camerawork and (mostly) convincing performances gave the film a real hard edge. SEX WISH actually gave me a few shivers.

The action finale is satisfying and the film doesn’t take forever to get there thanks to brisk pacing and an uncluttered narrative. SEX WISH isn’t as squirm inducing or repulsive as some of the other films I’ve reviewed this week, but it is definitely one of the best of the bunch. Colt’s performance is fantastic, Reems is always an engaging actor, the women are attractive, the soundtrack is… well, it’s something else, that’s for goddamn sure… and Colt makes for a truly strange, truly creepy antagonist. SEX WISH has a lousy title, but it’s a winner in virtually every other way.

SATAN'S BABY DOLL

A long, long time ago, on a website long since extinct, I wrote a review for a 1979 Andrea Bianchi movie called MALABIMBA. As I still have a back up of that review lying around, allow me to present you with a highly edited (and poorly written) summation. Ahem. 

“MALABIMBA is not a nunsploitation film. I'll just get that out of the way right now. It's not even really a horror film, though it mines THE EXORCIST for a bit of it's inspiration. It's a simple, tawdry sex flick dressed in darker robes. All of the narrative machinations borrowed from the horror genre are there solely for the purpose of pushing MALABIMBA from one sex scene to another...” 

“The story concerns the Karoli family, a group of cash-strapped bourgeoise who are in immanent danger of losing the family estate. Andrea, recently widowed and living in the estate with his young daughter Bimba, knows the gravity of the situation all too well and his mother, ever indignant and dead-set against leaving the home, offers him a solution. She proposes that he marry Nais, the rich, slutty wife of his invalid brother, Adolfo. Once Adolfo kicks the bucket, Andrea and Nais will tie the knot, keeping the money in the family. This is not something Andrea wishes to do though he clearly craves a little one-on-one time with his brother's wife.” 

“Now all of this is well and good but it's really unimportant. What IS important is the opening scene of the film, a seance which unleashes the spirit of a particularly malevolent member of the family. The ghost spends a few moments molesting the party guests before flying upstairs to possess Bimba. What follows from there is, more or less, a series of erotic encounters between the people living in the home with a copious amount of masturbation thrown in to pad the running time. In keeping with the tradition of Italian sexploitation films, these scenes run from fumbling, near-comic excess to genuine eroticism, several punctuated with hardcore penetration shots.”

I bring this up because what is listed above is not only the plot to MALABIMBA, it’s also the plot for SATAN’S BABY DOLL. Or at least, the vast majority of it is. There are some differences, but overall it is exactly the same. And for the most part, everything that occurs past that point in the plot summary is exactly the same too. The only real difference between Bianchi’s original film and Mario Bianchi’s 1982 remake is the tone. MALABIMBA was very much concerned with eroticism (and thanks to a cast that included Patrizia Webley and Katell Laennec, it succeeded with its goal) over spooks. SATAN’S BABY DOLL tries to have it the other way around.

So it would have been a much better choice for Bianchi to jettison all the masturbation and nudity. MALABIMBA was notorious for a single scene, a bit of oral sex between the possessed Bimba and her crippled uncle. Any film that contains a death by blowjob is probably going to gather attention. Well, that scene is repeated here with the gorgeous daughter Miria (played by Jaqueline Dupre) sucking off the wheelchair bound Ignazio. But it isn’t the knob polishing that does him in here. Instead, after suddenly gaining the ability to walk, the dumb bastard falls down a hole and dies.

Mariangela Giordano is featured in both films, playing the exact same role of a nun. In both films, she is used as little more than a sex object, a character only included so that folks with a nun fetish could get their rocks off. Both films give her long masturbation scenes. None of this needed to occur or to be included in a film interested in giving people the chills instead of the hot flashes, yet here they are. 

SATAN’S BABY DOLL does do a little bit more with the family dynamics though. It takes the lax narrative of MALABIMBA and attempts to put a bit of a family drama spin on it. The patriarch of the family, here named Antonio, mourns his dead wife, Maria. The family doctor, ostensibly only concerned with treating the ailing, crippled Ignazio, is hiding feelings of grief, too. It seems everyone in this house (with the exception of Miria) was in some form of a romantic relationship with the dead Maria. That bit of scandal is what pushes the narrative forward. Everyone knows of everyone’s coming and goings, petty jealousies rage, tempers boils over and, eventually anyway, the true cause of Maria’s death is revealed.

And sure, that’s all fine and dandy, but the goddamn film is so slow moving and uninteresting that there might as well not be any plot at all. Maria’s possession of Miria and her slow revenge against the family is handled with no real sense of urgency. Whole stretches of the film are spent watching people do repetitive, mundane things. The opening two minutes is just two naked women in an embrace. The following three minutes are spent watching a family stand around a corpse. At least ten minutes of the film are spent watching a men throw temper tantrums. There’s no pulse here.

Unlike MALABIMBA, which is a leaner and far more visually stimulating film. If you need to see only one version of this particular tale, please make it that version. SATAN’S BABY DOLL has the far more eye-catching title, but it has far fewer pleasures to savor.

BABY ROSEMARY

Rosemary is a woman suffering from the fallout of a terrible childhood. Dumped into an orphanage by her absentee father shortly after the death of her mother, Rosemary has grown up cold and repressed. She has a boyfriend named John, a genuinely decent guy looking to join the police force. He loves her, almost obsessively, but Rosemary, still a virgin, refuses to have sex with him, regarding the physical act as “unclean”. To work his frustrations out, John visits a prostitute regularly. In a strange bit of role play, John pays her to dress like Rosemary and call herself by that name.

Though Rosemary has very little love for her father, she attempts to visit him in the motel where he stays. Not finding him in his room, Rosemary decides to wait, only to be accosted and raped by a verbally abusive, clearly violent man named Mick and his girlfriend Kate, an unfortunate event that just so happens to trigger a sexual awakening inside her.

A few years later, Rosemary is a teacher and John is finally on the force. Meeting for the first time in years, John informs her of her father’s death, news that Rosemary largely just shrugs off. She introduces John to a couple of her pupils, two nubile young ladies belonging to an occult group that views life and death as expressions of sexuality. A little later, the two students will seduce and screw the funeral director looking after the corpse of Rosemary’s father while John and Rosemary watch and fondle each other.

John and Rosemary begin seeing each other, but there is something about him that turns her off. Instead, she seeks attention from Mick, her old rapist. As he verbally abuses and aggressively fucks her, Rosemary has her first orgasm. From that point on, the two are a thing. But their intense sexual relationship begins to change Mick on a fundamental level. He begins dressing better, gets a job, starts treating Rosemary well… He begins, in other words, to act like a responsible (one might even say fatherly) man, a change of character that drains Rosemary of her desire. When she is finally unable to have sex with him, Mick regresses, threatening her life before running off. 

This is where Rosemary begins to crumble. She drifts further away, lost and remote. And worse, she begins hearing a voice calling out to her at night, the voice of her dead father...

This 1976 porno flick from John Hayes is a Freudian powder keg of a film. It begins with a warning of oncoming repression with a full screen editorial warning that the government is trying to repress adult entertainment before becoming a film almost entirely about that very subject. Repression runs through the film in waves, colliding with every character, plot point and set up. It hits Rosemary especially hard, giving birth to not just her feelings on sex as “unclean” activity, but to her need to engage with abusive men to get her rocks off. At the center of her psychological troubles is the figure of her father, someone who abandoned her, someone who, the film suggests, abused her. One has to wonder if Hayes was a fan of Sylvia Plath. There’s an awful lot of Plath’s poem, Daddy, floating around in BABY ROSEMARY, right down to the idea of the father as some kind of emotional vampire, a dark force that controlled and overpowered the long suffering daughter.

If that all sounds too pretentious for you, you can relax in the knowledge that BABY ROSEMARY works rather well as a pure skin flick too, with about a half dozen or so well photographed, erotic couplings. It even ends like all other 1970s pornos ended, with a big ol’ orgy. But I think you might need to turn the volume down for that scene if you’re planning on getting your own rocks off. Because the final 15 or so minutes of BABY ROSEMARY is where the horror kicks in and, much to my surprise, the horror on display is actually quite good.

There’s a well done homage to Jacques Tourneur’s CAT PEOPLE during those final 15 minutes. There’s a shift from recognizable reality to a strange nightmare reality, replete with discordant, eerie music on the soundtrack. It all builds to that orgy, the last overpowering, sexually frustrated scream of the film. I know it sounds odd to refer to a 1970s orgy scene as creepy, but it actually really is. Were you just stumble upon this scene on RedTube or something, you might not get much out of it, but in context, the scene just… I don’t know… it works. It’s so full of desperation and psychological torment, just a writhing pile of bodies and spilled fluids, all taking place in front of a blue skinned corpse. It’s isn’t horror in the “scream out loud” sense of the word. It’s horror in the “makes you squirm uncomfortably in your seat” sense of the word. 

It’s the perfect way to end what is actually a rather deep and involving bit of psychosexual drama, with an unfulfilled Electra complex standing in for the not-quite-dead slasher who will, on screen or off, continue to torment our poor Final Girl for the rest of her life.

PORNO HOLOCAUST

Aristide Massaccesi was a fine cinematographer. Joe D’Amato was not a very good director. The two made countless movies together. Sometimes, though rarely, something great would come of it. The lurid early 70s giallo DEATH SMILES ON A MURDERER comes to mind. The early adventures of Emanuelle stand out too, as does D’Amato’s BEYOND THE DARKNESS, a grotesque remake of Mino Guerrini’s 1966 giallo THE THIRD EYE. After going solo for a bit, during which time D’Amato made the Video Nasty entry ANTROPOPHAGUS, the two would reunite for a long, long string of monotonous, largely terrible, titles. D’Amato was trapped in the gravity of the burgeoning adult market and unfortunately Massaccesi was dragged in with him. D’Amato, workmanlike and ultimately forgettable, would thrive in his new home. The skill and creativity Massaccesi showed in his promising early career would wither and die.

Of course, I’m talking about a single person here. I’m sure many, if not most, of you are aware of that. Joe D’Amato was just one of the many names Massaccesi used throughout his career. It just so happens to be the one he used the most. But I’m not being flippant here. D’Amato (I'll just stick with that name) was a damn fine cinematographer who increased the quality of many of the productions he played a part in. He was damn good at his job and even in the later films of his career, the really terrible stuff, there are moments that are well framed and expertly filmed. But I imagine there was far more money in making a half dozen cheap and quick sex flicks in a year than there was in making only a few more respectable films every four or five.

The quality of D’Amato’s adult career is perhaps best exemplified by a quintet of films he directed in 1980. Those films are HARD SENSATION, EROTIC NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD, ORGASMO NERO, SESSO NERO, and the subject of today’s review, PORNO HOLOCAUST. There’s a lot of things connecting these films together. For example, they were all written by actor George Eastman. They were all (mostly) filmed on the same island, utilizing many of the same sets and geographical backdrops. The casts are virtually the same across all films, with only a few unique appearances from actresses like Nieves Navarro and Laura Gemser. At least three of these films, PORNO HOLOCAUST, SESSO NERO and HARD SENSATION, were filmed concurrently.

Of the five movies mentioned above, only PORNO HOLOCAUST has attained any kind of cult following, probably because of its ridiculous name and asinine set up. The absurd plot of PORNO HOLOCAUST concerns a scientific expedition to an unnamed island, an endeavor made in an attempt to study the effects of a decades old nuclear bomb test on the island’s animal life. The expedition team is comprised of a sexy nuclear physicist, a nymphomaniac biologist, a nosy reporter, a sailor with a wart riddled ball sack, and a few other people who do fuck all but sit around and/or screw on camera. After an hour and some odd minutes of lazily acted sex scenes (two of which just so happen to take place on the same log, the least romantic and comfortable setting ever for a prolonged bout of fucking), the film gets down to business. Turns out that there was a family on the island during the bomb testing and the sole surviving, now horribly mutated, son is roaming the island, killing off everyone he comes across. His method for dispatching women? Rape, the perfect way to give them a lethal dose of radioactive semen. I’m not even joking.

All of the negative criticisms I could give about PORNO HOLOCAUST can be attributed to the other four films as well. It’s horribly dull, terribly acted, and padded with unnecessary exposition. The sex is lazy, often uncomfortable, and without variety. D’Amato clearly has his sexual preferences and you can tell exactly what they are by the way he stages virtually every sex scene in the exact same way. One gets the impression that D’Amato was a boring lay, the kind of guy who liked his sex one way and one way only. All five films are sexist, which should come as no surprise, with varying degrees of racism, PORNO HOLOCAUST being the most explicit.

For example, the monster of this film is a black man, albeit one with radioactive sperm, who goes out of his way to rape and kill white women. The only non-white woman in the cast is simply taken prisoner, if only so she can be rescued by our white hero later in the film. It’s the subtle kind of racism you would expect from an Italian film of this sort. It ain’t GOODBYE UNCLE TOM, but it still leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.

The whole damn thing does actually. It’s yet another sex film with boring sex. It’s yet another horror movie incapable of producing effective horror moments. There’s some unintentional humor to be found in the film, that’s for sure. The monster rapist takes a woman prisoner and ties her hands together so she can’t run away. Again, no joke. The grand finale sex scene is capped off by Mark Shannon ejaculating all over Lucia Ramirez’s back. Shannon then leans down and licks her ass crack. Kinda comes out of nowhere, really. Eagle eyed viewers will notice production assistants popping up in the background a few times as the film goes on. So yeah, it’s a damn mess and did I mention that it runs for just under two hours? That's a lethal dose of radioactive shit for sure. 

PORNO HOLOCAUST was never meant to be a good film. It certainly was never meant to be a serious film. It was meant to be cheap exploitation that could be sold quickly and easily to overseas sleaze merchants. But it’s not erotic or sexy. It difficult to masturbate when you’re trying to not fall asleep as you’re doing it. And it doesn’t operate well as a horror film either as it’s simply incompetent at creating mood, atmosphere or shocks. That’s the thing that really ties these five D’Amato films together. They feel like five different flavors of the same failure. They’re all boring. None of the films are erotic in any way. They fail as porn and they fail as entertainment. Just stay away.

FORCED ENTRY

The anti-Vietnam War film was its own cottage industry in the 1970s, perhaps best demonstrated by mature, important works like APOCALYPSE NOW and COMING HOME. These were Academy Award winning movies and cultural touchstones. They captured the disillusionment and the disappointment, the existential angst, and the destruction of families and small town communities. They were important in their own way, a coping mechanism of sorts for people still stumbling their way through the grief and the outrage.

While films like THE DEER HUNTER were winning Oscars, the exploitation film industry was dealing with the War in their own way. In fact, they beat mainstream Hollywood to the punch years before the 70s rolled around. In 1968, the John Wayne pro-Vietnam War propaganda film THE GREEN BERETS opened in theaters and was a major financial success. But with some critics and liberal pundits, many of whom could smell the stench of government and military support all over it, the film was borderline offensive.

That same year, two genre films were also released, George Romero's groundbreaking NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and Peter Bogdanovich's TARGETS. Romero's film was a social allegory, one that explored the fractured landscape of wartime America. TARGETS meanwhile gave birth to the stereotypical tormented Vietnam Vet character, a villainous role that would power seemingly endless slasher movies. Bogdanovich used the real life story of Charles Whitman, an ex-military man who in August of 1966 shot and killed over a dozen people at the University of Texas at Austin, to propose a new kind of American nightmare, an ordinary citizen conscripted into the killing machine of the US military. What were these men to do when they came home and what would happen if they couldn't turn back on the inhibitors that were switched off when they were unleashed into the battlefields?

Whatever good will films like THE GREEN BERETS built up with the American cinema goers in the late 1960s was gone once the news of the My Lai Massacre was made public. From that point on, domestic resistance grew and the anti-Vietnam War film became the staple. The cynicism of Romero and Bogdanovich was roundly vindicated. The exploitation industry found its model.

Anti-Vietnam War exploitation films run the gamut from realistic terror films like THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT to more dark fantasy horror like DEATHDREAM. Slasher films grabbed hold of the mad ex-soldier and never let go. These films were dark, vicious, violent and nasty. But even more so, they were angry. Growling. Full of barely contained rage. They didn't go for sympathy or empathy. They didn't try to understand the War or the people who fought it, often against their own free will. They were the rage against the military machine, pure and simple.

One of the strongest anti-Vietnam War films ever made is Shaun Costello's 1973 hardcore porno thriller FORCED ENTRY. Shot on the streets of New York over the course of two days, FORCED ENTRY centers itself on an unnamed gas station attendant, an ex-soldier returned home from the War. Over the course of the film, the gas station attendant, played by future porno funny man lead Harry Reems, brutally rapes and murders a couple of women, eventually committing suicide when his violent threats towards two drugged out, lesbian hippies are laughed off.

Costello's film was an oddity then and it's still an oddity now. One of the first XXX Roughies, that brand of hardcore film that mixed the light S&M roughie sexploitation film with explicit unsimulated sex, it prefigures the hardcore work of directors like Lee Frost and Zebedy Colt. It is a sex film in which the sex is used not as masturbation fodder (though I suppose you could get off to it if you somehow managed to free it from its context), but as violence.

With the exception of a long, useless bit of sex between a husband and wife at the beginning of the film, all of the male-on-female sex in FORCED ENTRY is rape and the purpose of that rape is not pleasure. At the end of both acts, Reems tells his victims that he didn't enjoy it at all. But pleasure was never what was sought in the first place. The purpose was to commit violence, to dominate, to invade. Reems spends most of the film having flashbacks to Vietnam, or at least we assume at first glance that they're flashbacks. While it's never really explicitly stated, it soon becomes obvious that these flashbacks are not vivid, painful memories intruding into Reems' conscience. Rather, all the dead bodies and the fire and the artillery and the destruction… These are things he actively thinks about. These are things he misses about his time overseas. When the film juxtaposes a cumshot with real life imagery of dead Vietnamese children, all female… Well, it's difficult to escape the idea that this character is more than a simple shell shocked ex-soldier.

The unnamed gas station attendant is never painted as a victim of the War. He's a misogynist. He's a sociopath. He is a cynic who growls angrily at two free love hippie chicks for no other reason than they represent the antithesis of his world view (hence their role in his death; he simply cannot take their rejection of his pathology and dominance). He is, in many ways, presented not as a product of the Vietnam War, but a stand-in for the War itself. And if you think that is too lofty a bit of symbolism for a cheap porno… well, you're probably right, but one of the most interesting things about FORCED ENTRY is how deftly it avoids simplistic evaluation.

Because there is motive in this quickly shot, cheaply produced sex flick. There is definite skill behind the artistic choices Costello made (although writing in a sex scene for himself seems a bit immature). Yes, the film is somewhat sloppy. Boom mics show up quite a bit and the hand held camerawork sometimes struggles to keep actors in frame, but the film is so deliberately confrontational, both in tone and visuals, that you really can't remain impartial as you watch it. The acting, believe it or not, is pretty damn good through most of the film and those performances help lift it to an entirely different level. With the exception of Gaspar Noe's IRREVERSIBLE and Catherine Breillat's FAT GIRL, I can't think of another film that captures the horrible act of rape this, for the lack of a better word, well. I challenge you to not feel sick as Laura Cannon's character is violated and murdered. I haven't felt that kind of revulsion in a long, long time. In many ways, this is as effective a horror film as you're likely to find.

Now I'm certainly not arguing that FORCED ENTRY deserves to be placed alongside any of the Oscar winning entries in the long running series of anti-Vietnam War films. I'm not claiming it to be some long lost masterpiece. But I think it's often too quickly dismissed simply because it contains very real ball sacks smacking against very real assholes. We're still so damn prudish when it comes to pornography, even in 2017, even with 24/7 access to virtually any fetish under the sun. We still hear the words “porno film” and think of worthless garbage, just jerk off material for sad, lonely guys. I am a staunch supporter of pornographic films, especially those made in the 1970s and 1980s. I think a lot of people's attitudes would change if they just got over the fact that yes, people are in fact really fucking and fingering each other on screen.

There are some genuinely great, genuinely effective films that just so happen to be pornographic. FORCED ENTRY is one of those films. You probably won't enjoy the ride it takes you on, but you really cannot deny that there is power in this film, that it evokes outrage and revulsion with terrifying efficiency. And I am also a fan of outrage and revulsion. I am a fan of film as an emotional conduit between a filmmaker and an audience. I didn't like what FORCED ENTRY made me feel, but I will applaud it until my hands bleed for making me feel something. That's more than can be said about a lot of films these days.