Singapore Sling (1990)

Director: Nikos Nikolaidis

Screenplay: Nikos Nikolaidis

Cast: Panos Thanassoulis as Detective Singapore Sling, Meredyth Herold as the Daughter, Michele Valley as the Mother

An Abstract Candidate

 

It is special to see this film without burnt-in Greek subtitles, a title whose infamy means it finally got a high definition release in 2024 from the American physical media distributor Vinegar Syndrome. It is the one film by Greek filmmaker Nikos Nikolaidis to ever get any traction in the wider world, but that is not this film's fault, just a curse the others did not follow Singapore Sling. Thankfully, for whatever reason, Singapore Sling did, and even if it was out of how transgressive it was, it is good to see it happened even if other films from Nikolaidis' career, like See You In Hell My Darling (1999), a film set in a purgatory with genre tropes, showed he was as idiosyncratic after this production. Originally having to import the US Synapse Films release, this is a work of a director who was always provocative, and a production here which despite its innate transgressive between mother and daughter incest, puking, and a close-up of sexually rubbing a kiwi fruit on one's bared crotch, I do not consider this part of the line of very nihilistic and deliberately shocking films which feel grim for the sake of it, where even a director like Gaspar Noé has accidentally fallen into for all the times he has also impressed me. Whilst it may mortify people to even consider this if they have seen Singapore Sling, there is a sense of humour to all this film, even if very grim.

Singapore Sling is also indebted to cinema, a literal perversion of Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), a film noir about the titular Laura, who is seemingly dead and becomes a fixation for the men with only her portrait the visual image representing her. Here, the film noir detective archetype played by Panos Thanassoulis, washed up and drunk, is an unnamed sleuth who finds himself with a bullet in his shoulder and at the manor his own Laura was said to be working at where a mother and daughter live. In searching for her, however, the soon-to-be christened Slingapore Sling, after the cocktail recipe found on him, has also found himself with two women who are sociopaths. An incestuous family, the late father also involved, they are truly sadeian in the Marquis de Sade template in their complete disregard for morals, which we are first introduced by having killed their chauffer before the film started, trying to bury him in the garden on a rainy night when they are introduced. Though the daughter (Meredyth Herold) looks like Laura, she and her mother (Michele Valley) killed Laura when she visited, and decide to keep Sling hostage, as a torture/sex pet under the idea to know how he learnt of Laura being at their home.

The family can also break the fourth wall and talk to the viewer, which presents the immediate sense this film is more than shock value, and oh boy, this has not lost any of the transgression over the years I have been able to see this. It is a film which juxtaposes really shocking imagery against the absurd, which is arguably more uncomfortable but also adds a greater sense of nuisance. Between the re-enacting of Laura's meeting, with daughter taking the role and her mother with a strap-on involved first, and the daughter talking of having sex with her father, as portrayed by a mummy in the attic, this film is not recommended for everyone, but in even these scenes or details like an actual bandaged mummy representing said patriarch, you find already this film is also off-kilter, that it is juxtaposing the horrible with the strange. Juggling sexual perversity and violence, and explicit gruel in details like real animal organs representing Laura's being carefully placed into jars and on the kitchen top at one point, it also adds overt slapstick which might sound a bad decision but emphasises a tone which is more alarming but also means this never feels miserable for the sake of it.

Specifically there is even an influence, as Nikos Nikolaidis was a huge cineaste, from comedian/filmmaker Jerry Lewis, as described in the documentary on the director called Directing Hell (2011), which might be the hugest eyebrow raising to suggest, but has been confirmed in that work as one of his heroes. Burying the chauffer in the rain when we are introduced to them, even if Michele Valley is baring all as an actress in her nudity whilst wearing lace night clothes, as Meredyth Herold as her mother is too, she is especially more obvious as having been guided to make her sociopathic daughter character overtly wacky. She is playing the film between a farce and pratfalls just to bury that corpse like a manic sidekick, and her manners are over-the-top throughout as she bumbles about. Valley as a result becomes the best thing about Singapore Sling, even if the other two actors Herold and Thanassoulis commit to this as much, because the horror of scenes like the women torturing Sling with electroshock therapy, whilst one of them takes advantage to reach the perfect orgasm with him, is undercut by the ridiculous manners she has.

It sets up an upper class family who fell into madness, as the daughter starts to view Sling as a way out of her current place in life, whilst he becomes less a hostage to both but their sexual partner. It is helped too that Singapore Sling even on a DVD let alone restored was always visually gorgeous, becoming one of its weapons in terms of its transgression. Due to the work of cinematographer Aris Stavrou, it is a film shot in monochrome which is evocative and matched by an elaborate production design and costuming, including the work of Nikolaidis' own wife Marie-Louise Bartholomew, as a few of his films including this one, as Directing Hell talks of, were shot at Nikolaidis' own home. As she discussed in a featurette for the 2024 Vinegar Syndrome Blu Ray release, he worked on lower budgets, funding a film like this with his work in commercials, and despite the horrors onscreen paints a wholesomeness to the perversions, even the vomit which the daughter throws up on Sling mid sex revealed to have been concocted by Bartholomew from food substances that were actually delicious¹. Considering the film also has one of them urinate on him after sex, we are still talking of a very twisted film, if one where the magic of film makes these scenes legitimately dumbfounding for those unprepared for the film, if also emphasising a sense of deliberate bad taste more in the John Waters territory of cinema than dragging the viewer's face into the worse of humanity.

It means Singapore Sling has to be approached with caution, but alongside the make believe - as there is no explicit real sex, everything implied and fake, and no use of real atrocity imagery as other transgressive films have done over the decades - this feels more wickedly perverse with that sick humour always there. Juxtaposing visual splendour and decadence against the grotesque is also poignant to the film, where one of the more gruesome scenes for myself, despite all the things I have described, is a dinner table scene involving the consuming the contents of a real sheep's head in elegant dress, using fingers, eating brains and eyeballs, and throwing up or playing with the food. Having seen other films by Nikos Nikolaidis as mentioned, which I was lucky to have done, this is more explicitly transgressive than others but still feels on point for him, especially as this is in mind to the explicit pastiching of the film Laura, a film about a man obsessed with woman beyond existence which this plays to, as Michele Valley's daughter character, looking like this film's Laura, starts to use this as mind games between her and her mother, with Sling, symbolically unable to tie his shoe laces for most the film, slowly gaining his composer as he learns the real events. [Huge Spoiler] The ending may turn off some even next to the rest of the content, even potentially coming off as misogynistic, as with the deaths of the women in their betrayal of each other using Sling, this predates David Fincher's Seven (1995) for a knife strap-on, but it is telling for a noir protagonist, a genre known for bleak endings, he neither leaves unscathed, a wounded archetype who finishes the film starting the bury himself in one of the leftover open graves among the others, unable to leave. [Spoilers End]. This film will be divisive, undeniably, but as it focuses on the psychodrama, the shock value alongside Nikolaidis' cinema in general predates the New Greek Wave that Yorgos Lanthimos became the figurehead for, predating the transgression but also the sense of perverse humour that films like this had. It is a film which is striking even next to a Dogtooth (2009), where even its use of fourth wall breaking, not the breaking of taboos, will be too much for some viewers, but it is a far more rewarding film for how brave it is. It does indeed in mind to Dogtooth, and the other Greek films following its lead, feel like the older aunt to them to, making its place much more important by its existence.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Grotesque/Moody

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) The Vinegar Syndrome release includes a 12 minute interview with Marie-Louise Bartholomew, where these details are revealed.

Marebito (2004)

 

Director: Takashi Shimizu

Screenplay: Takashi Shimizu and Chiaki Konaka

Cast: Shinya Tsukamoto as Masuoka, Tomomi Miyashita as F, Kazuhiro Nakahara as Arei Furoki, Miho Ninagawa as Aya Fukumoto, Shun Sugata as MIB

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Director Shinya Tsukamoto steps in and stars in another's films, that of director Takashi Shimizu. I can see why he brought his talent as an onscreen actor from his own films, a digitally shot horror film with a very idiosyncratic tone. Tsukamoto is Masuoka, a cameraman obsessed with the lives of others, from possible drug addicts living in the building next to his to the catalyst of the tale, a freak subway suicide he caught on tape during his work as a documentary cameraman, part of his desire to capture the fear of those who die may feel. The suicide he caught on camera on camera is not what one would presume, but a random older man stabbing himself in the eye on camera. Strange visions from rewatching this footage and ruminating on its meaning lead to Masuoka returning back to the site he filmed the suicide at and to a small crawlspace that leads into the underground.  

The resulting film is a slow burn which takes plot strands which you would presume would go in an obvious direction, only to confound them. A notable aspect to this, alongside director/co-writer Shimizu co-writer Chiaki Konaka, who I have kept up with and is a very idiosyncratic voice in his own right. I have had to put a hesitance in my respect for him in case he took the conspiracy theories he has touched upon in his work seriously, infamously creating a villain in a radio play for the Digimon anime franchise which was a physical manifestation of "political correctness", one that used "cancel culture" as an attack¹. When that happened in 2021, people learnt that his blog writings revealed to be interested in such conspiracies¹ in a time, especially in the West, where conspiracy theories have no longer stayed the likes of Area 51 but insidious ones of far-right ideologies which have been allowed to bleed into other conspiracy theories and corrupted the concept. This is something I have to be cagey about, unless it is revealed more to this contextually was lost or he apologises, as Chiaki Konaka is a very distinct writing voice I wish has not been lost in bad ideologies and just bad ideas. He only has a few live action films, and most of his career is in Japanese anime, where very idiosyncratic titles of note like Serial Experiments Lain, a 1998 TV animated series, present such idiosyncratic takes on plotting, on realities bleeding into each other, and references to culture which you find here in Marebito alongside Takashi Shimizu's collaborations.

The title is a clear nod to the references in itself, "marebito" a Japanese concept of spirits or divine beings briefly leaving the afterlife to visit the living world, which happens here explicitly just in how the older man who committed suicide will visit Masuoka. He is part of the elaborate bows around this movie's key storyline, that Masuoka will find a nude woman in this underground world through the subway station, chained to a rock, who he will take up to the surface, christening her "F" (Tomomi Miyashita). She will not eat or drink, but he soon learns she likes the taste of blood, especially human, but Marebito takes unexpected directions in the best of ways. For starters, the underground section before we meet F is distinct, Masuoka finding himself in complex tunnels built in World War II and older, where homeless people there can read your narration monologues and the dead walk, the suicidal man greeting Masuoka, and discussing the differences between the hollow earth theory and that of complex tunnels which he thinks is more legitimate. Konaka's finger prints are all over the references in this, from Madame Blavatsky to the christened F being called Masuoka's Kasper Hauser, in mind to the real figure, a 19th century German youth who was said have grown up in the total isolation of a darkened cell, and the subject of Werner Herzog's 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. F, a mute woman with Dracula-like teeth, is found in the literal mountains of madness, crystallised architecture out of Lovecraftian lore, apt as Konaka has written Cthulian Mythos works, and that there is an explicit reference to her likely being related to the "Deros". These figures wandering the place of great danger, portrayed by Butoh dancers, and are her likely kin are explicitly creations of a science fiction writer named Richard Sharpe Shaver, an American whose stories of underground cave dwelling entities called Deros which were presented to Amazing Stories magazine as real documentations of this race.

This still shows the hand of Shimizu as well, the opaque tone of Marebito created between the two writers one of its best aspects, where even when it plays with the idea this is all Masuoka's sanity collapsing, it confounds this. It never goes for the obvious, which presents a far more appropriately eerie tone for horror storytelling, where the unknown in the plot, the completely unexplained, is more terrifying. It is very different horror film in general, with the literary and mystical references. Even when an obvious plot thread comes ahead, Masuoka killing people to feed F as he comes to love her in a weird daughter/lover/pet relationship, it undercuts this on purpose when other films could drag on to less interesting escalations. In terms of the central production,

Tsukamoto is not a case of a director who narcissistically puts himself in central roles in his own films, but part of both the collaborative nature of said films, starting his career in a theatrical troupe whose put together his debut Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) together even if he became the auteur director, and also because he is a compelling actor in his own right. It is fascinating when he appears in others' films, just memorable in Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer (2001), and here he fits this role of a small man with a strange obsession as comfortable as ones from his own films like Bullet Ballet (1998), about his character crafting a handmade firearm in mourning of a loved one's suicide and a fixation on destruction through guns. Here, what could become a simple horror premise, which could have still been fun, becomes compelling by both the dreamlike logic and Tsukamoto's committed performance for a character obsessed with fear. Credit also has to be made, in terms of performance, for Tomomi Miyashita as F. Early in her career, which contains many tokusatsu works like multiple roles in the Ultraman franchise coming later on, there is the clear sense she has a dance background as her performance, mostly without dialogue having to convey F in only entirely movements. Bravely introduced contrasting her physical beauty against the violence of her bruised leg chained to a wall, she contrasts explicit sensuality in the characterisation against animalism, cat-like moments around an apartment which uncomfortable contrasts, of an animal which consumes blood against a sensuality, the uncomfortable schism of beastly violence and even bestiality against lust and love. Her performance is just as important and good, and it is a shame there are less prominent roles in her filmography.

Marebito never takes the expected route, and even when it hints at this all being in Masuoka's head, that within itself is a rug pull moment in an interesting twist, an existential tangent contemplating the scenario at the coast with a dead man as a thoughtful conversationalist. Chiaki Konaka has left many of his stories in animation ambivalent on the reality, not always metaphorical but literally with stories set in fictional stages, characters breaking through timelines, or characters becoming spiritual entities in the literal sense having been once robots that become of living flesh. It has a dream logic, which is apt and nicely contrasts the shot-on-digital realism shot on the streets. A random salary man beating Masuoka up for filming has no real story beat, but feels right for character beats instead, and simple things like a mobile phone in a back alley for Masuoka to answer is both a natural moment that feels surreal but could happen, becoming menacing for a horror story.

In the end, you can argue even if held in perpetual fear for all his life or afterlife, Masuoka could effectively have gained a happy conclusion if only filmed and chained to the same rock with F. It may seem an odd idea to view this as a happy ending, now her pet, but considering the perversity and tone of the film before, it seems credible even if a truly eerie ending as well. Obviously, you cannot ignore that, in between the filming of this film, Takashi Shimizu was building The Grudge franchise he started from his indie filmmaking era into bigger and bigger theatrical productions, cultivating a legendary horror franchise of his own creation. Making this in-between those, it is great he was also creating this unique production, but it is a film stuck within a legacy which could easily overshadow this, more so as this is a title from the Tartan Asian Extreme era of UK film distribution, the legendary sub label of a distributor that is long gone and thus lost to old DVD copies. This, especially in mind to the early digital filmmaking era of the 2000s yet to be acclaimed as a niche, is one of those little gems needing to be re-evaluated.

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1) Digimon Tamers 20th Anniversary Stage Show Features 'Cancel Culture' Villain, written by Kim Morrissy and published for Anime News Network on 4th August 2021.