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.

Halloween 31 For 31: Dementia [The "Daughter of Horror" Cut] (1955)

From http://www.screeninsults.com/images/daughter-of-horror-poster.jpg

Director: John Parker

Screenplay: John Parker

Cast: Adrienne Barrett (as The Gamin); Bruno VeSota (as Rich Man); Ben Roseman (as Law Enforcer/Father); Richard Barron (as Evil One); Ed Hinkle (as Butler)

Synopsis: Shot without any dialogue - barring narration by Ed McMahon in the Daughter of Horror cut that was released - Dementia is a psychodrama following a young woman only known as The Gamin (Barrett) who is stuck between reality and hallucination inducing insanity, the alleyways and streets of Venice, California around her small apartment at night a phantasmagoric odyssey. It'll involve her being enticed to follow a rich man (VeSota) to spend some time with him, committing a murder she has to cover up, a journey with a faceless being a suit into a graveyard to see her late parents, and the crowded environments and jazz clubs becoming more and more oppressive until the faces of policeman are the same as her father's and the suspicion that everyone is after her grows

Dementia is a fascinating curiosity I've stumbled across, one which regardless of which cut you view has no dialogue to speak of at all, expressing everything that happens in the nightmarish journey for the unstable protagonist entirely through the visual content and a score that mixes the avant-garde composer George Antheil with jazz musician Shortey Rogers. For the most part, it's a film noir that has been allowed to decay to the point of festering, a monochrome visual palette where the blacks are the blackest possible and even the colour white is harsh at view. Everyone is a cliché of the genre taken to the extreme, from the rotund rich man who takes the protagonist up to his pad for paid sex to the cop on the street not only stopping a person from mugging her but beating him close to death. The mood is claustrophobic to the point a direct link to Freaks (1932), by coincidence, stands out more in having Angelo Rossitto in a brief role as a newspaper seller on the darkened street. The film also got into trouble with the New York Board of Censors, censored for final release, but what was left is still exceptionally strong for a fifties film in all the implicit references, from domestic abuse to off-camera limb dismemberment. It's a grubby, dank looking film that is both clearly artistic with its presentation but feels lurid too with its dreamlike plotting.

From https://robsmovievault.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/dementia2ffff.jpg

With a protagonist who is already compromised, possibly behind a murder already before the film starts and carrying a flick-knife with her all the time, the world around her is even more out-of-whack. Starting from the aftermath of a domestic abuse incident she passes by in her apartment complex with concern, the oddly named "The Gamin" we follow as viewers goes through an increasingly delirious series of events that weave together regardless of the lack of reality created as a result of this. The film touches the horrific in terms of the paranoia felt by the protagonist, like in Orson Welles' adaptation of The Trial (1962), or Touch of Evil (1958) for that matter in the same heightened tone, where the world around her exists completely out of her control. The only time the film becomes straight ahead horror is an abrupt yet appropriately sudden trip within herself into another reality, where the aforementioned faceless man in the suit he guides with a lantern in his hands to her parents' graves, her life and their sins acted out on the grass as if it's a theatrical performance. Even when it returns back to the film noir environments afterwards, this is just the beginning of the genre mashing fully taking form in a hellish way. Visual flourishes that feel like they're indebted to the type of intentionally exaggerated content of silent films start to appear, and once it's all finally over it leads to a twist ending that, rather than being a disappointment, feels like an exclamation point for the fact Dementia has been a chaotic mass of images from the first minute of the film onwards.

From http://thecinema.blogia.com/upload/20081007014411-dementia.jpg

Technical Details:

The film is carried forward by its score, one that switches from minimalistic female vocals to breezy jazz. The result works perfectly well, feeding into the mood of Dementia as a b-movie that doesn't feel like any others, part avant-garde movie in its own right as much a genre work.

The version I viewed of the film, as dubbed in the title, was the alternative cult that was released in American cinemas renamed Daughter of Horror, which had new narration over it by Ed McMahon. The additional narration is unbelievably camp and energised. In some ways it's inappropriate but also perfect for the film at the same time, Mcmahon suitably deranged and mannered for the tone of the film. His opening monologue for the film setting up the world is so ripe and exaggerated it stands out as a highlight in fact for me.

From http://www.bolsamania.com/cine/wp-content/
uploads/2013/10/dementia-051.jpg

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Mindbender

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

With cinematography by William C Thompson, the same man who shot Ed Wood Jr.'s Glen or Glenda (1953), Dementia is a magnificent oddity, the type I hope to find for this blog stuck entirely in its own genre. Film noir archetypes are clashed together until they become chipped of everything but the most primal of images, the environments they're in as distorted. The film already sets the ball going for its tone with a dream the protagonist has where she is hit by a sea wave she is superimposed in front of, only becoming more unconventional from then on. The lack of dialogue has a drastic effect on the content, forcing you to sink into an aesthetic that mixes an underground film with a poverty row b-picture, the expressions of the actors and the ways scenes are depicted exaggerated in the same way you see in German Expressionist movies.

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RGjDQiTPJ9E/U5pIeKdav0I/AAAAAAAAE4A/
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Personal Opinion:

Dementia is a film I've still trying to get a grip on, really requiring the viewing of the original cut without the narration to digest it all. It's the only film made by its director, and it feels like it abruptly materialised into existence, going to take another viewing or so to adjust to the viewing experience and its alien tone. It reminds me of a film I need to badly revisit, Carnival of Souls (1962), another oddity of old American genre cinema that showed the tenacity of people to create a movie, one as here that is completely of its own type. For any reader, it's an absolute recommendation as an unconventional film, the type covered on this site which is as much a surprise discovery for me as it would be for anyone interested in it.

Lost Highway (1997)

From http://36.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_
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Dir. David Lynch

It's the image that opens Lost Highway, the image that closes it, of an unknown entity barrelling down a road, first person, in the middle of pitch black wilderness, never ending with yellow road divider markings barely glimpsed as they hurdle pass. It's the image that always comes to mind first, followed by the image of a man stood up as a statue in Blue Velvet (1986), when I think of David Lynch. Amongst such other films that people throw up as his best, I hold Lost Highway as my personal choice. After attempting, with messy results, to write a university dissertation on what makes a David Lynch film a David Lynch film, I'll be as simplified as possible explaining my admiration for Lost Highway.

From http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c354/sbando/MS/
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Interpretations do vary, but that the film was inspired by Lynch's interest in the infamous OJ Simpson court case, this leads to an obvious frame of reference. Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) are suffering from a strain relationship. With further confoundment by the result of videos of their home being sent to them by mail, it eventually leads to Fred being put on death row for the graphic murder of Renee. However, abruptly in his prison sentence, the guards find a completely different man in his cell, young mechanic Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). Dayton has direct interaction with mob boss Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) which leads him to meet Eddy's new, younger girlfriend Alice (also played by Patricia Arquette). It becomes clear something is utterly amiss. Lynch's obsession with alternative realities, duplicate/mirror personalities and dream logic permeates this film as much as the others. It qualifies as much as part of the post noir subgenre that, for me, really became prominent in the nineties despite existing in films from the sixties onward. From direct period set films to modern day reinterpretations, post noir took the femme fatale, the detectives, the crime bosses and the criminal underbelly of the original film noirs and filtered them through (usually) more violent and gritty content, both being meta-textual and subverting tropes (like Bound (1996)) or being straight forward pulp movies. Lost Highway pushes the tropes further than even Blue Velvet into a more abstract tone, pieces of a psychosis, watched over by the Mystery Man (Robert Blake), a being who in his few appearances is both a figure of either the superego or ego of a mind and one of the creepiest creations Lynch has committed to screen.

From http://www.filmhafizasi.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/lost-highway1.jpg

Lost Highway is the only film that can be date stamped to the time era it was made in. Lynch blurs the lines in terms of era in his films, Blue Velvet more a re-imagining of the fifties, Eraserhead (1977), Mulholland Dr. (2001) and INLAND EMPIRE (2006) ageless, Wild At Heart (1990) too quirky to sit in any time space comfortably. Lost Highway is definitely a nineties film, but for the post noir vibe but especially for the music - Rammstein, Marilyn Manson, Trent Reznor contributing instrumental tracks etc.. But it never feels dated, only dependant on your taste in the music, and even then, the songs chosen are deliberately unconventional choices that have unnerving sounds within them, especially the German language prelude to a Rammstein song that sounds more like an occult chant. Lost Highway has always been an unnerving experience for me to sit through. A curious one in hindsight actually - starting off as a psychodrama but splitting off, using noir pastiche, into new tangents. The tropes of the more lurid post noir sub-genre, of porn and violent murder, becomes a fitting metaphor for the denials and delusions of the main protagonists. While the interpretation is left for you the viewer to figure out, the obvious central idea of the film is that Patricia Arquette is a figure out of reach of the male protagonist, who transmutes into different forms and feels their world fall down continually as she still stays the same. No matter how much he depicts her as a being from a dirty, lurid underworld, he is the only one who delves into violence and falls apart.

From http://www.filmcaptures.com/wp-content/
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Lynch has always danced between the quirky and the disturbing, but the melding is much more subtle barring a few examples like Wild At Heart. For a film that has a cast as diverse in terms of unconventional  casting, including small roles for Richard Pryor and Gary Busey, to moments of incredibly black humour like Mr. Eddy accosting someone for tailgating, the film never becomes purposely strange. Instead, like many of Lynch's films, these aspects placate the viewer with moments of tranquillity, with humour and with odd juxtapositions, but eventually pull you slowly into a darker mood in the narratives until everything becomes a prolonged nightmare. Sound is as integral as music in this sense, and if my recent viewings of the director's films have shown anything, there is on one hand the sense that I will get a lot seeing these films on the largest screen possible, but hearing them wearing headphones, even watched on a tiny screen, will have a greater impact in drawing you into the movies' worlds. Lost Highway does not feel as confusing as it could when this aesthetic is noticed, especially with how it's endings works to the beginning. There are clearly signposted motifs that suggest what we are in for throughout. It is, like a dream, connected by symbolic tissue of a narrative but that narrative is constructed by logic of tone, not constructed by a rational, easy-to-negotiate plot.

From http://a136.idata.over-blog.com/2/83/57/11/Cinema/David-Lynch/
Lost-Highway/lost_highway-alice_levres.jpg

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

Lost Highway depicts a form of Hell. While there are more abstract films in terms of structure, Lynch's films crawl into your skin. From an idiosyncratic take on performances, prolonged and stilted, to the jarring use of violence, Lynch's ability to switch between the light and vaguely silly to the disturbing is masterful, entirely done in a carefully constructed way. With Lynch¸ a person entering a darkened corridor becomes a literal act of entering an alternative reality, powerful just by itself, which happens in Lost Highway and results in the most horrifying event imaginable taking place. But it feels more abstract because Lynch, baring flirting with a curse in INLAND EMPIRE, never draws from folklore, horror tropes or anything supernatural, but from the perspective of a man raised in the 1950s who is able to picture the worse in humanity as well as the best (and mundane) of it.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPKfkT4XPRYsBVY0LAc1fN6VVdONLFWR6Urd0FLGcjmjCDyc2rcmjOW8TvNTb9lKtOlmarBeMX00c2a5gh1ftx29AYPggFZ49NnA729TrChRY2wqFjGCmRQNExnrWLDg8gG_AV5MpFF_I/s1600/Lost+highway+mystery+man.jpg

Personal Opinion:

This is my favourite Lynch film. Favourite knowing something this disturbing is strange to say is your "favourite", but even when a film disturbs you, you can feel exhilarated as a result. In placing oneself in the position of a potential wife murderer and someone who is losing their mind, as we see the architecture from the inside of this taking place, there is no sense of being morbid, but a journey that goes pass for its two hours like an actual dream.