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.