Eldorado (2012)

 

Director: Richard Driscoll

Screenplay: Richard Driscoll

Cast: Darren Morgan as Stan Rosenblum, Richard Driscoll as Ollie Rosenblum, Daryl Hannah as The Stranger, David Carradine as The Spirit Guide, Peter O'Toole as The Narrator, Jeff Fahey as "Doc" Martin, Michael Madsen as Ted, Patrick Bergin as Roy, Brigitte Nielsen as Angel, Steve Guttenberg as J.J., Kerry Washington as Tamara, Rik Mayall as Chef Mario, Sylvester McCoy as General Zwick, Caroline Munro as Lilly, Robin Askwith as Mick, Tyrese Gibson as David, Bill Moseley as Lemma, Robert Llewellyn as "Meat", Buster Bloodvessel as the Sheriff

Ephemeral Waves

 

Opening Eldorado, the late Peter O'Toole literally has to appear onscreen, as the narrator, to explain that he is hired to clarify the events of the film we will be seeing, which will be a first for me to witness in any production. Eldorado is not very well known, and my prior knowledge of British filmmaker Richard Driscoll is entirely based on The Comic (1985), his very odd little debut which got dug up by Arrow Films for Blu Ray restoration and release, the kind of cool trait of theirs to rediscover some oddball films like that particular one. His career at some point beyond this transformed into what Eldorado became, the curious results of when known actors from Hollywood and British television, when older and stepped out of the limelight, are offered some work, the era of 2010s cinema where production design like computer effects are more freely available, and a true sense of this particular film entirely existing because this is what Richard Driscoll wanted to make for himself, with absolutely not a wink of cutting any of the tangents out of this. It is also, infamously, one of his films used as evidence for his arrest and jail sentence for a £1.5m VAT fraud, when investigators from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) investigated the production and found he had falsified invoices¹. This included how a purported production and promotion budget of £12 million was around about £750,000 instead², or the fees for the stars in this film, including late comedian Rik Mayall's supposed £44,350 for four days’ filming was revealed as 6,000 for two days².

He is definitely one of those one-offs in cinema, whatever you think of the films, certainly a man gifted with the gab as, not including other films before and after, only here is where you can get a credit list including O'Toole, Daryl Hannah, Mayall, Michael Madsen, Brigitte Nielsen, Steve Guttenberg, former Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy and others, including David Carradine even if likely here in outtakes. He also really wanted to remake The Blues Brothers (1980), which ultimate sets up why I really could not even appreciate the film in terms of a piece of delirium, that being for all its parts, its tantalising strange juxtaposing of actors from American cinema against British pop culture, its desire to indulge in areas I find not that interesting to see as a viewer instead transpired. There are aspects to the film which raise uncomfortable parts of Driscoll himself, but most of my experience of this comes from the one viewer who would have defended this for all the cheapest of CGI, the most random of tangents and the sense of self-indulgence, only to feel instead it did not progress to anything even if really an interesting form of self-indulgence. Remaking the John Landis film and paying tribute to others, in his own curious way, dragged Richard Driscoll's film down when one was envisioning stranger and more interesting ways to connect the disparate pieces altogether. This managed to get an article, written by Chris Bell and published in The Telegraph called Eldorado: the bizarre story of the worst movie ever made³, but I cannot even say my disinterest in the film is a vehement hate, but a long period of attrition where it loses me.

The set up is The Blue Brothers, only now following the Jews Brothers (director-writer Driscoll  and Darren Morgan), two Jewish musicians who are introduced having made the ill advised decision to perform for Neo-Nazis, leading to a tribute to the car chase from the John Landis movie with former Dr. Who Sylvester McCoy as a substitute Henry Gibson. Their name is an obvious if tasteless joke, but a pastiche to the original Saturday Night Live characters by way of musical numbers dubbed over the actors would have least been something, especially if this played to the lo-fi remake energy or even touched upon Yiddish music by way of local pub karaoke night. Their manager J.J. (Steve Guttenberg), in a room full of CGI flies in one of his only scenes, sets them up with a new gig, unfortunately this time for cannibals, explicitly getting into the premise of Two Thousand Maniacs by Herschell Gordon Lewis, of a group of people accidentally setting forth in a group of Southern Confederate ghosts. I suspect, rather than the original 1964, the version of the story nodded to is the 2005 remake as cult actor Bill Moseley is among these ones too as a cannibal southerner. It also shows how disquietingly easy it was, even in the early 2010s, to find Southern Confederate flags in the United Kingdom, as portions of the film were shot in Cornwall³, but cinema as well as other medium has referenced and even crossed paths with other productions and works from the past. The most obvious example to me, whilst not one of Wim Wenders' widely praised works in the slightest, is Palermo Shooting (2008), in which an acclaimed German director of highly regarded films effectively paid tribute to the filmmakers Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, when they passed away, by crossing Blow-Up (1966) with The Seventh Seal (1957), and if an art house director as Wenders will pay tribute like this whilst creating new stories, there is nothing wrong in a lurid genre film here for Driscoll to do the same. Quentin Tarantino, he who is paid tribute to and recreated in Eldorado a lot, has done this himself so many times, but notable, even when overtly referencing images and dialogue from other films, he placed them in different contexts, which begins a concern with Eldorado itself.

This begins remaking the Blues Brothers with same songs used and lip synched by the cast throughout, as this is also a musical. This is then bolted onto 2001 Maniacs, as a horror-musical pastiche which is blasphemous to the former film but tantalising as a perverse crossover within itself, alongside the fact this was originally supposed to be seen in 3D as well at a time when the format returned in mainstream cinema into the early 2010s. Then there are all the other tributes which instead come off as if they are meant to be laughed at for getting the references, but not sewn into the context so they work without this in-joke. The opening of Reservoir Dogs (1992), with the George Baker Selection song Little Green Bag, is recreated with southern cannibals, there is a briefcase with glowing contents like Pulp Fiction (1994), and the Jew Brothers are confused as the Soggy Bottom Boys in reference to O, Brother Where Art Thou (2000). There is even an actor cast to play Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, just to have an actor who clearly plays Captain Jack Sparrow in his regular career as an impersonator there, in a random back story involving a lower budget CGI kraken. It all amounts to the film focuses on referencing and recreating other films other than its own ideas. Or, if to continue this, to subvert them as one would presume.

It is also very English, attempting to hide itself as an American set film despite actors who are wavering in accents, and literally a Las Vegas set diner scene which is shot in someone's kitchen. The later however offered something beautiful as a film, a remake or tribute to these films with this literal homemade look, with the waitress having the exact accent for an American diner, and the kind of ornaments I would find in a Hollywood themed cafe for a seaside. This idea of recreating the US films in English rooms and kitchens on a low budget is something I could get into for a surreal spin on proceedings, imagining the way this could go in pastiching films in a curious hybrid and allowing the odd crossovers this has. Where I find myself as a film viewer feeling exhausted and disinterested one hour into a two hour film is that the things that interest Richard Driscoll do not match anything of this in context, as we get the Aretha Franklin scene from Blues Brothers in that cafe among others recreated with no sense of interesting for this particular viewer, only bemusement as they feel not properly tethered into the world. You can be pretentious and/or random in your films, but as long as they feel they match the beats of the moment, they least make sense even if it is up to the individual viewer to either appreciate or hate the moments as a whole, but Eldorado's biggest problem is that the scenes are fragments which do not seem to even connect together in their own logic.

There is also an uncomfortable streak of violence, in language and gore, against female characters which cannot be ignored, one of the moments where the indulgences of the film do reveal something negative in the director-writer. The risk of any personal creation is that it reveals your worse side if you yourself are guilty of anything in your thoughts that should be rightly damned, which is more prominent as a danger both in auteurs and even in micro-to-lower budget genre cinema where the creators have more leeway to create how they want, but can shoot themselves in the foot metaphorically by opening up their worldviews far more to the public in letting them see their neuroses, obsessions and/or their worse sides. Here, if by accident or an uncomfortable axe to grind, Richard Driscoll does end up with horror scenes having this misogynistic streak, or even dialogue between male characters arguing that they should date strippers but never marry them, and other such moments which feel pointedly spiteful for no reason. This is content which should be warned of for any viewer who is still morbidly curious about the film. Everything else beyond this, where these moments jut out with distaste, is entirely tame with their issues. Even when they involve prurient nudity and blood, the issue becomes that, even in terms of unconventional cinema, it really does not qualify in terms of "weird" accept for me in terms of awkward. For me a film like this should be the world where Robert Llewellyn, the actor I grew up with as Kryten in the cult sci-fi comedy TV series Red Dwarf, should have crossed paths onscreen with Moseley from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) even if Driscoll had only a day's time with one of them, just to see how two actors from wildly different spectrums could have interacted and contrasted in performances, something sadly though we were never going to get in the presentation of the film we got.

This is where Daryl Hannah, even if she is still playing the ancillary angelic figure reciting Edgar Allen Poe poetry, where the Eldorado reference comes from, intervenes in a story which brings us Moseley and Jeff Fahey attempting to recreate the trailer battle she herself was in for Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004). What we get is like when the bean eating scene from Blazing Saddles (1974) is recreated in this film; what in the original context was undercutting a classical Western shot with fart gags, this nods to it without the set up to the punch line, which is felt with a lot of the moments here, punch lines without the set up to really make the film something which, on paper, should have been one of the most gleefully strange and ambitious genre films to exist even just in terms of cast.

David Carradine is in footage recorded at another time in a random ghost fight with a woman with no context to the story, with no ties to the entire production as an actor who passed at the time it was being made, and one actress, a stripper accidentally sent the Bar Mitzvah the musical brothers were meant to in the opening, is immediately never seen again despite being established in a long topless conversation scene over the phone with Steve Guttenberg, an entire segment lost because the actress never returned. The director was even dating the main female lead, Rebecca Linley, only to break up mid-production and force him to re-cut the entire film³, which is a case of unfortunate bad luck out of his hands, but there are times where this neither works as a full story, as pieces are undercutting into each other, or even as a symbolic and/or random piece of filmic brain fever because it still wants to try to be regularly plotted film. It has the cannibals and the musical leads, but also the cheated-on wife of a strip club owner stealing a glowing briefcase, prompting him and Michael Madsen after her, yet it undercuts itself by having characters quietly disposed of messily or off-screen, and even the ending is abruptly ended, not with an ironic middle finger against expectations but a sense the film just hastily ended without thinking how to.

Within this, you find yourself stumbling over moments that, in another context, would be memorable for whether emotional response, an abrupt scene of Brigitte Nielsen in a sing-along of the song Respect with strippers, or Jeff Fahey's random Vietnam War flashback with green screen. Sometimes there were moments which did actually win me over, showing how the film could have been special, Rik Mayall as Chef Mario, as a cannibal cook, briefly appearing lip-synching gamely to a rock guitar version of Verdi’s La Traviata, or Fahey himself as a dentist without a license working on teeth in his trailer to a reggae version of Groove Me. However, most of the film does not stick in the mind, or is drowning in all the material this has over nearly two hours length. For all this film's odd cameos, luridness, and unexpected musical choices (like a cover of Born to Be Wild by Steppenwolf), nothing here ever reaches anything I myself as a viewer would find intentionally or unintentionally memorable. It feels not even with a real sense of the dreamlike or strange in the surreal sense. Despite everything about its production being shot between Cornwall and the United States, including the Wild West tourist attraction near Padstow The Spirit of the West for the cannibal's hometown of Eldorado, which could have really played this homemade tone to its advantage, it never wants this either. Even when it presents the bizarre sight of Michael Madsen lip-synching So Glad We Made It by Steve Winwood next to pole dancers, naked expect for Mexican lucha libre masks, it slipped out of the mind in the time after because the film continues on and on aimlessly. By the time of Fahey's Vietnam flashback, that was the moment too I learnt it had been fifty one minutes into Eldorado, and it already felt like I had wondered on for far too long. Eventually the film literally ends, without closure, with Daryl Hannah having her one single direct interaction with the main story, and even when Heaven is involved, which always symbolises a grand conclusion even if merely depicted with clouds here, there is not even the sense of a real conclusion. I write this review with no sense I am out to get Richard Driscoll but merely shrugging my shoulders wanting to know why the film, with all its interesting pieces, never got anywhere. All it feels like we got was, unfortunately, a group of what-ifs and jail time.

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1) Film producer Richard Driscoll jailed for three years for VAT fraud, written for BBC News and published on July 1st 2013.

2) How the ‘worst film-maker in the UK’ used Hollywood stars in huge Cornwall tax fraud, written by Lee Trewhela and published for the Cornwall Live on February 3rd 2019.

3) Eldorado: the bizarre story of the worst movie ever made, written by Chris Bell and published by The Telegraph on January 23rd 2017.

Ebola Syndrome (1996)

 

Director: Herman Yau

Screenplay: Ting Chau

Cast: Anthony Wong as Kai San; Wan Yeung-ming as Yeung; Wong Tsui-ling (Angel Wong) as Lily; Miu-Ying Chan as Har; Meng Lo as Kei

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

There are some infamous Category III films from Hong Kong, where they used a rating that limited viewers to adults but fed a boom in exploitation, erotic and horror movies, and among them, Ebola Syndrome is one which lives up to the infamy, so much so it is worth having caution in terms of actually watching it. Contextually, when the Category I, II and III ratings were first devised for Hong Kong cinemas in 1988, it was dealing with content, not just gore but films were criminals were shown as heroic, which could have been controversial. The ultra-notorious Men Behind the Sun (1988), an exploitation film dealing with Unit 731, the overt research unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that performed lethal human experiments during the Second Sino-Japanese War, was the first film to get the Category III rating, and when this rating came in, the films which earned them were not necessarily cheap productions, but films with named stars. Even Wong-Kar Wai has had a Category III film in his career, as unfortunately, depictions of same-sex relations were qualifiable for the rating, leading to Happy Together (1997) being among them, a subject for a more complex dissection of what that says in terms of LGBTQ politics at the time.  

The Category III film however has an infamy for the notorious and bloodier entry among them, alongside the erotic works like Sex and Zen (1991), and Ebola Syndrome near the end of their peak in interest can be labeled with justification as the last blow out, for good and bad in offensive ways.  I would have to call myself out a hypocrite for labeling some of the content in this offensive and distasteful, as someone who has been intrigued by this film over a decade and went out of his way to see it, so moral high ground is a ridiculous notion to get into. Just be aware that, whilst it actually calms down in tone, this is pretty extreme as a film can get, starting off with an explicit sex scene introducing “Chicken” Kai San (Anthony Wong), a completely irredeemable villain who we follow as for a large portion of the film, which leads to him being caught with a mob boss’ wife. Threatened with castration, and urinated on beforehand, he kills everyone, including the wife, and nearly torches her young daughter, dowsing her with gasoline, only to have to leg it before the act is done. Already this film before it becomes truly extreme has already set up the tone of taking no prisoners in good taste and gruesomeness, with a streak of deliberately crass dark humour intermingled within it too whether appropriate or not.

It is feasibly big budget film shot in two countries, as Chicken hides after this in Johannesburg in South Africa, which is a disarming thing as usually a production value like this in a horror film would not get into some of the content here. Even if you can stomach when it gets into taboos like rape and cannibalism, it is extremely nihilistic about global connections, even without the moment, to be frank about it, the story properly begins when Chicken sexually assaults a female carrier of Ebola and starts to spread it over two countries. No one until the last half, where it somewhat tones down and the heroic Hong Kong police have to try to stop Ebola being spread by Chicken, is defendable expect as transgressive, sick humored or just purposely nasty to make the viewer squirm. The owners of the Chinese restaurant Chicken has been working in at Johannesburg are unlikable, a bickering husband and wife; the husband himself, among others with the Taiwanese and Chinese figures living there, is racist to the white and black Africans, exploiting cheaper meat from the local Zulu tribe of black Africans, who are suffering through the Ebola outbreak; and the white Africans can be racist to the Asian immigrants in a country where one cannot help but look at through the view of Apartheid ending only in 1994. No one in this half of the film is likable, and it is here where some of the most uncomfortable and transgressive details come in.

There is the obvious concern, shot in real locations, that this is an exotic exploitation of South Africa, finding to way to have real decapitations of chickens brought in watching a tribal Sharman try to cure the Ebola plague in the Zula village, viewing the community as a “foreign” other in their dress and appearance to our distasteful lead from Hong Kong. There is some sense of this, alongside exploiting a couple of 1995 Ebola outbreaks in the African continent, such as in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of the Congo, as it was called at the time,  which would have been clear influences, alongside the fact that, as a virus which has tragically had a lot of outbreaks in various African countries in general, Ebola is exaggerated here beyond just being a horrifying disease which can cause internal and external bleeding to literally causing the organs to melt and eat themselves in some of the more legitimately disgusting details, such as an autopsy sequence. There is however, to contrast this, a sense of general misanthropy all round, the idea of transcontinental travel and cultural exchange being a doomed affair, and it becomes less a problematic film in the tone of what “mondo” documentaries from Italy were accused of but its own twisted and transgressive film with some uncomfortable scenes in a variety of taboos, which says a lot when Category III became stereotyped for some extreme films in both gore and sexual violence when these films were being learned of in the West. Some goofy humour, more common in Hong Kong’s cinema, does appear but it is more thankfully to emphasis a sick sense of humour to this, that this film is deliberately emphasizing the transgression whether justifiable or not, in the inventive cursing or the ill advised decision to take a pee in the underbrush only to encounter a leopard, which involved actually placing Anthony Wong, already an acclaimed actor by this point in his career, near an actual leopard.

There are scenes which will be uncomfortable and un-defendable for many, such as the rape scenes, especially as they all involve murder, and it is completely understandable if that is enough to caution a viewer off ever watching this film. In general, the entire passage of the film when Chicken gains Ebola is going to shock even hardened viewers nowadays if just in amazement of a higher budget Hong Kong film managing to “go” where this does. This is a film where Anthony Wong uses raw meat as a masturbatory aid and puts it back in the kitchen to later cook, so there is a deliberate shock value to the film, whether justifiable or not, which was trying to go further than other films. Herman Yau, whose career started with late eighties and kept going into the 2020s, clearly wanted to make a film with some depraved scenes on purpose, as eventually you will get into cannibalism and, in deposing and feeding a body to patrons to the restaurant, Chicken unwillingly beginning to spread the Ebola virus in Johannesburg. Eventually, fleeing to back to Hong Kong, this will continue, if with less emphasis on these more shocking scenes and, with an exception of an explicit threesome scene with two female sex workers played both with horror and goofy humour, on the threat of this virus in a metropolis. Some of the post-contagion and even autopsy scenes are going to be shocking for some viewers in their extremity too, but it starts even playing like a more “tamer” contagion film in how, with slow motion scenes to emphasis whenever Chicken can or does spread his illness, as the ultra-rare case of someone immune to it, the tone becomes less grotesque horror but a virus thriller.

Once it reaches its final, with the police in Hong Kong trying to catch Chicken when they contact an Ebola outbreak, even those who do find the film tasteless will have to concede that this does things with a lot of considerable heft to them even if they themselves understandably do not have the tolerance for the film’s tone, such as having an insane fire stunt in the final scenes with a stunt actor. There is also Anthony Wong himself, who having worked with Herman Yau on The Untold Story (1993) and Taxi Hunter (1993) was not a stranger to extremity. He has been a prolific actor who here brings what is absolutely needed to make this film vaguely defendable – a character who is impossible to connect to as he is a horrifying figure, yet is both fascinating to watch and, when he tries to have a happy ending with an old flame, actually brings in a bleaker shade to the material as you come to realize even a sociopath could have kindness in his heart, despite the chance he will kill that person he cares for even by pure accident as a Typhoid Mary figure. Considering how diverse Wong’s filmography is – John Woo films, Yau’s work, Johnnie To crime films, Ann Hui dramas – like so many Hong Kong actors, it is not a surprise he can add a gravitas even to a sleazy, depraved film like this as being able to act in a variety of genres and tones for films is more commonplace in their cinema. In fact, Wong won an actor’s award, the Hong Kong Film Award, for The Untold Story, which would be like if suddenly a figure like Daniel Day Lewis made a controversial and extreme horror film, and had such a good performance within it he still won an Oscar.

This is the same for Herman Yau too, alongside those in front of and behind the camera here, as with a string of horror films throughout his career, including the long Troublesome Nights series, he has gone from comedies dealing with housing crisis issues (A Home with a View (2019)), action films and entries in the Ip Man martial arts franchise. Yau even co-directed a re-imagination on JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls for a 2015 film set in its own Hong Kong centric context, which makes his notoriety in the West for films like Ebola Syndrome, which does live it to its infamy fully, more fascinating with hindsight. It is a strong film, even in the current day, where time has not made it “quaint” and it is to be approached with caution. Knowing its director went on in a variety of genres, and continues working, places more on respecting him as a director and with a sense that, even if a viewer may find the film utterly irredeemable, it was with hindsight made with the likely hope at least a viewer or two would react like that.

Eaten Alive (1976)

 

Director: Tobe Hooper

Screenplay: Kim Henkel, Alvin L. Fast and Mardi Rustam

Cast: Neville Brand as Judd; Mel Ferrer as Harvey Wood; Carolyn Jones as Miss Hattie; Marilyn Burns as Faye; William Finley as Roy; Stuart Whitman as Sheriff Martin; Roberta Collins as Clara; Kyle Richards as Angie; Robert Englund as Buck; Crystin Sinclaire as Libby Wood; Janus Blythe as Lynette

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

As with many Tobe Hooper films, there is an unhinged air to Eaten Alive, and it's weird and legitimately scary electronic score from the get-go, over a shoot of the moon at the beginning, is Wayne Bell and Tobe Hooper himself composing instant nightmare fuel. It is a very simple story, and honestly, there is not much to Eaten Alive plot wise in general barring a set-up: Neville Brand is Judd, a man out of his mind running a hotel, with an alligator in the nearby water he claims is from the Egyptian Nile. The narrative is supposedly inspired by a real case - of bar-owner Joe Ball, who lived in the small Texan town of Elemendorf in the Thirties, and was convicted of murder and said to have disposed more women then presumed with the help of all the alligators he kept, something which has been challenged as being exaggerated over time from his more simpler crimes of murder¹. For Judd here, any woman (and frankly any man or child) is not safe from him killing them or letting the pet reptile after them. Even family dogs are not safe.

As a Video Nasty, the extremity is entirely felt in the evil intensity in Hooper's films, as much likely the reason it ended up on the list as the problem was when The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) became an enemy of the British censors. Artificially bright coloured lights cover the few locations, an artificial fetid Texas of cat houses and rundown hotels, entirely at night and shot on stages, which presents an unnatural reality to the production. Almost everyone here too is unhinged and wandered out of an entirely different world as well, where your bordello mistress (including her old age makeup) is a strange caricature in suit slacks and shirt, including a money tending cap, to William Finley (Phantom of the Paradise (1974)) and Robert Englund (the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise) adding to the weird aura.

A lot of the film is disturbed in general, the same manic energy of the original Chain Saw Massacre (and some fo the 1986 sequel) felt here. The setting and the character of Judd in the little we get is as vivid as the Leatherface family - that he has a caged monkey, the plot points about his wooden leg (and losing it to the pet), even a Nazi flag in the background in one scene, scarred and marked like an acquired from being a soldier and getting hold of it in combat. Without a lot of dialogue and drama to work with here, as a horror film, these details add to the production, but there is already from the get-go a sense most of the cast in unhinged. Before Judd is chasing a young girl under his hotel's foundations with a giant scythe, she is likely traumatised by her family's complete lack of stability, a returning Marilyn Burns from Chain Saw and William Finley having a scene, after the dog is eaten, which is just as disturbing for how he acts out a mental breakdown between parents. That there is stability, with an adult daughter and a father trying to find her sister, adds the sense of ordinary reality in its brief snippets as a contrast but how thin the veneer is. The bar is still full of guys like Buck (Englund), a stud whose bravado is with being a trouble starter, and even if he is harmless, he just has to drive his girlfriend of the night down the right country road and find himself in Judd's nightmare hotel.

The fact the crocodile is cheesy, a giant floating prop, is not going to detract from how alarmingly effective the rest of the film is. It has, as a result, a more visceral sense of peril even if not that violent, able to work around its slighter plot between legitimately disturbing aspects (such as Burns, again put through the wringer, being tied to a bed for a large portion of the film) against an absurd tone close to a very sick sense of humour. Credibly, Hooper would channel this into later films when the eighties came about, and whilst Crocodile (2000) tragically felt more of a sedate TV movie in tone, when it nodded to this film briefly it was still a nice wink at one of Hooper's underrated films.  

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1) Eaten Alive: the bizarre true story behind Tobe Hooper's alligator horror movie, written by Rebecca Hawkes for The Telegraph, published May 4th 2015.

Eaten Alive: A Tasteful Revenge (1999)

 

Director: Gary Whitson

Cast: Debbie D as Stacey; Barbara Joyce as Trish; Tina Krause as Lisa; Dean Paul as Dr. Baines; Sunny as the Dirty Blonde

Ephemeral Waves

 

I wanted to verify you were prettier than me.

Slighted because her boss Trish (Barbara Joyce) felt the most attractive female staff member was needed to talk to their male clientele, Stacy (Debbie D) is not impressed, armed with a shrink and growth ray, thus bringing us vore fetish before this was a known thing. Anyone who has no idea what “vore” means, well, Stacy realises that one has to eat her way up the corporate ladder to get anywhere...

This is a W.A.V.E. Production, which begins with two women getting wet t-shirts for their promo image, openly showing that this company was making softcore. This was an idiosyncratic one thought as, from New Jersey, W.A.V.E from their 1987 had their scripts written by fans, and were fan funded, producing mail ordered ultra-low budget films which catered to their idiosyncratic obsessions. As a result, Eaten Alive is going to be a bizarre experience for so many, in which a male scientist, with a British accent, creates a ray gun able to grow or shrink objects which Stacy uses to her advantage. Among its stilted amounts of dialogue, you get the first moments of this begin something exceptionally strange when the first victim, a W.A.V.E regular and a director in her own right, Tina Kraus, is shrunk and you witness, through video toaster effects and weird positioning of Debbie D's head, a nude woman the size of Tom Thumb being eaten by another. Clearly, this was someone who had a fetish who wrote this, a trendsetter in fact, but the result including the stock screams in the soundtrack and how low budget the sequence is makes it even stranger.

Whilst at least one (clothed) English man is eaten, the fetishishtic nature of this short clear in how all the victims are depicted naked, as Stacy develops a perverse ritual for this. There is even an extended scene of trying on bikinis with an extensive lack of music; this becomes more curious in how modest this production still is in terms of explicit context as, baring Krause being more comfortable with her scene, all the nudity here is the equivalent of a sixties softcore film, topless only, shot as an ultra-low budget film decades after. It is both, as a result, very tame but because of the context kinkier in paradox. It is, absolutely, strange to witness, one of those productions whose history, for those who knew of it, is matched by the fact that all its effects have to be completed with very cheap green screen and digital editing to pull this off, literally splicing the actresses awkwardly in place when they are shrunk. That is not an insult either, as W.A.V.E Productions were clearly a group whose work were made proudly aware they literally had shoestring budgets to these titles, working off their fan base’ interest in them.

That side does make this weirder too, knowing the script’s dialogue is made from a normal person unleashing his idiosyncratic obsessions, like entering the id of a person’s brain tapped into like a beer keg, and I include here for all the jokes I have made within this review no kink shaming, or shaming at all if it was not a kink at all but something that they wanted to see onscreen. It does admittedly produce one of the strangest moments I have probably witnessed in a film – a scene inside Stacy’s gullet, with a naked actress sprayed with water, with slowed down moans and a heart beat on the soundtrack - which is filthier than porn, but it was and so weird it was inspire. Including seven minutes of outtakes as an extra, this comes from this side of independent cinema which is entirely alien for many, as alien to the mainstream view of cinema as you could get, and it is admirable in this, how strange and out-there it is. Certainly, this feels like outsiders to cinema, people you normally do not find even in some softcore cinema despite the casts' careers. It is meaningful in seeing something closer to the world of the film viewer himself or herself rather than something fabricated, more so when time has passed and we can look back on this for that reason and a gleefully (and purposely) bizarre production.

Egomania: Island without Hope (1986)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief

Cast: Udo Kier as Baron Tante Teufel; Tilda Swinton as Sally; Uwe Fellensiek as William; Anna Fechter as Ria; Anastasia Kudelka as Annastasia; Sergej Gleitmann as Anatol; Dietrich Kuhlbrodt as the Notary

An Abstract Candidate

 

I’m the devil’s aunt!

A Christoph Schlingensief film I am glad to catch up to, it is set on an isolated island where a few people speaking different languages live. One is Tilda Swinton, playing Sally, enforcing how the London born actress is one of cinema’s true travelers in terms of her filmography. Even when she is in mainstream blockbusters it raises an interest for me, and her obsession with collaborating with some of cinema’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers surpasses anyone else, whether it is Bela Tarr (The Man From London (2007)), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Memoria (2021)) or even her long standing collaboration with Derek Jarman in her early career, all these figures alien to each other and representing different types of cinema in themselves she has yet travelled within like a space traveler. Among them, Christoph Schlingensief is another really idiosyncratic figure to have collaborated with too, and it also means we can be Swinton onscreen with Udo Kier, another of the great journey actors, opening with Swinton among other witch-like women carrying a man seemingly like Christ across icy tundra.

Considering its director, this will become his heightened cinema by the ending, but for a large part this is a distinct turn for him for having an oppressive mood early on like horror cinema, the sound design and music – the later by Tom Dokoupil, Ella Johnson, Christoph Schlingensief himself and Helge Schneider -  leaving one on edge before anything happens. Udo, playing Baron Tante Teufel, is a man caught between being a man of privilege and a demon, definitely with a satanic edge to himself which he fights and loses too, fixated on Sally who he had a previous relationship with. Driven insane by this force within him, Kier’s debonair figure with a push by an older woman named Ria, who just wanted him to kill her, decides to punish her for becoming pregnant from another man named William (Uwe Fellensiek). If it means taking his love from her and the child it will suffice.

It is a mood piece, part theatre in tone, and definitely becomes its director’s trademarks when Udo Kier, game as in his other collaborations with his fellow German collaborator movies, does dress up in women’s clothes like a Satanic female relative who has a book reading club, mad eyed and aiming beyond wall chewing. Egomania unlike the others, which could be deliberately offensive and manic, is however more subdued in tone, something of its own. Separated into multiple chapters, and with a very unexpected and inspired touch of old jazz standards scoring this throughout, Egomania feels like a bleak fairy tale in tone, with the Devil in Kier (with his servant Anatol (Sergej Gleitmann)) going out to punish Sally, from giving William forced forgetfulness, to stealing the child on behalf of a notary figure who argues crime is entirely justifiable. It is an interesting entry point for Schlingensief’s cinema, and arguably the best way to come to his work, even if there will be some uncomfortable with the ending, Kier menacing a fake baby in a boiler room-like space. Unlike other work which is more notably cult in tone, this is easier to get to then the really challenging films like United Trash (1996) which get into slapstick transgression, instead leaving one on edge.

It is a testament to Kier as an actor, absolutely on fire in his entire run with Christoph Schlingensief, and a reminder that his journey in b-movies contrasts a man who, always comfortable in any role, was working here or with Rainer Werner Fassbinder or with Lars von Trier among others; even Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974), the infamous Andy Warhol sponsored and Paul Morrissey directed horror films, where Kier is notably struggling with speaking in English, not his native language, was giving it his all regardless. The same is for Swinton, even if this might disappoint some for how small and subdued her role is next to others in her career, standing out as the one person speaking English in the cast, standing out for how the young Swinton, here and with the Derek Jarman films, is virtually different from the acclaimed veteran she became. She was always a chameleon in terms of acting, and the Jarman references feel apt for Egomania, less comparable to other Schlingensief films like The German Chainsaw Massacre (1990) but one of Jarman’s like The Last of England (1987). One scene, merely interacting with the young child playing hers on the beach in what is out-of-character b-footage, but being used still in film, does feel like a Jarman-like touch from a director very notorious for how confrontation he would get in his career in his own trademarks, mo re a whimsical improvisation you normally do not get with Schlingensief.

Schlingensief himself is a director who does deserve an even bigger reputation, and I hope one day, as the brief access to his work on streaming and other methods give him more notability, we will eventually get the big physical media release of his work. His only aspect is that he was confrontational which will challenge a lot of people. Some was deliberately shocking for his political satire, such as attacking fascist politics and xenophobia in a 2000 staged project, Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container, by envisioning a reality TV show scenario where the audience could vote asylum seekers out of the country per voting period. Other things, like United Trash having Udo Kier in black face which, even in a film condemning of the United Nations in post-colonial Africa and their influence over them, will not go over still even if Schlingensief is entirely there to attack the white foreigners. Aspects which will challenge viewers even in good taste would make his work more likely to win over cult film fans, but again, his work can be very unconventional even in this scenario, even with The German Chainsaw Massacre playing as a horror film but reflecting the post Iron Curtain when East and West Germany reconnected. His work though, blurring genre to art house, really compels me and this, one of the less grandstanding and confrontational, is still brimming with an intensity to admire.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric

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

Eden and After (1970)

 

Including a review of N. Took The Dice... (1971)

Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Cast: Catherine Jourdan as Violette; Pierre Zimmer as Duchemin; Richard Leduc as Marc-Antoine; Lorraine Rainer as Marie-Eve; Sylvain Corthay as Jean-Pierre; Juraj Kukura as Boris; Jarmila Kolenicová as Sonia; Ludovít Króner as Franc

An Abstract Candidate

 

We are already into the unconventional when the opening credits invoke a late sixties Jean-Luc Godard production, spoken aloud with arrangements of words in-between staff/cast credits like a psychosexual word association game. “Game” is apt, as acclaimed novelist and later filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet came to filmmaking as making openly artificial works. His film here is a game, an abstract one with the tropes of a genre thriller played by its characters as a game.

In the centre of this is Violette (Catherine Jourdan) and a group of disillusioned university students who hang out at a café called Eden, acting out scenarios as Franc (Ludovít Króner), the waiter, is their fabled sinister butler who may have been involved in white trafficking and drugs smuggling (or not) in a previous life. They play out mock games of violence, male and female members, such as an act of rape or Russian roulette with the twist of one person wearing a blind fold with the gun, and a die being rolled to choose the target with added randomness. Though I will view Robbe-Grillet's work as being artificial on purpose, I cannot help to see a post May 1968 haze seep over this. There is a cynical sense that these misanthropic students belong to a group who, after the May 1968 protests in France where across the country and in different forms the left wing challenged the right wing, were left in a permanent ennui when they were not able to change the world. With no sense of meaning or ability to change the world, these students at Eden now stage poisonings steeped in boredom. The world around them is abstract by itself, with this marking Robbe-Grillet's first colour film too, the world as precisely put together and contrasted even when, as a Tunisian co-production, he filmed in the real Tunisian landscape.

It stands out fully in mind to this, even in terms of his obsession and hatred of the colour green, jettisoned entirely on camera here next to other primary and secondary colours. Aptly the staged deaths in Eden are within a café which is an avant-garde installation in itself, with erotic photography on the walls contrasted by pop art squares of pure primary colour as the tables to seating cubes followed the same aesthetic choices. Even when the film, as mentioned, moves to Tunisia, filming in real locations as part of its conspiracy plot involving a man known as Duchemin/the Dutchman (Pierre Zimmer) and a picture in Violette’s possession, the locations are still striking especially in the buildings and their interiors, designed with pure white with blue prominently used for the likes of the doors. As a result, a vast amount of scenes in movement and still shots are eye-catching, the cast figures made by the director to position and pose in the midst of all this, as they themselves play out choreographed games even with real death involved.

Eden and After, in all honesty, is a work of pure style, knowingly an abstract collage of Alain Robbe-Grillet's obsessions turned into genre tropes as an artificial construct. Duchemin, as a mystery man, first shakes the film towards a plot, the catalyst when he enters the café and shows the learnt knowledge of esoteric abilities to the students from living in Africa, such as powders which induce one’s worse fears. His existence, and possible faked death, pushes Violette to travel to Tunisia and a conspiracy, involving her fellow students and Franc who are after a picture she inherited from her late uncle. The plot itself is a machination, mere context, a structure for the characters and Robbe-Grillet's obsessions, contrasted as much as Duchemin’s erotic masochistic-sadist art, posing his mistress and other women completely naked against white background, against harsh props such as inside steel cages or against doorways. Ultimately this is a mood piece, prominently evoking Robbe-Grillet's real life practices in BDSM among the fascination with games and the structure of games. This could provide some viewers with great discomfort, as he contrasts the full eroticization of women, lusted over in their nudity, against their apparent pain in chains, tied to wheels and being bound. Bear in mind, whether your position on these images, his own life included the importance of Catherine Robbe-Grillet, his widow who worked on this film in the cast and whose career has included being a writer of sadomasochistic writing. With a marriage to the end of his life which included sadomasochistic practices and an open relationship on both sides, she also would become a dominatrix who work continued into even her eighties onwards¹; details like this, of someone important in the director-writer's life, does need to be factored in, his legitimate desires in sado-masochism in real life and his films to be contrasted by the woman who together shared a loving relationship and this obsession with. It at least complicates this even if, truthfully, these scenes are the ones in Eden and After which may prove the most discomforting even if they are entirely artificial even in how the characters are depicted.

Even in mind to this, his general fascination (and clear fantasies) of beautiful women in forms of restraint, usually naked here, is an acquired taste and one that become more prominent in his films when they found colour, the erotic becoming more a factor as he went with his film career. The artifice is still there in the actresses (as people and their bodies) posed and contrasted against pure white and manmade objects, and even the male actors are figures he places onscreen. The use of blood, obviously fake but profuse and in vast quantities in deep poster red, is more lurid and shocking in its artifice, such as a suicide in a pure white Tunisian bathtub of stone, the transgression found in something so strikingly simple as using colour itself in purely fictional and un-realistic form. The irony is not lost knowing Alain Robbe-Grillet was an author, using words first, using the visuals themselves here to great effect, which is why too Igor Luther as the cinematographer and Anton Krajcovic for art direction deserve a huge amount of praise for what the pair brought to the film with Robbe-Grillet.

The second half of Eden and After, in Tunisia, still progresses the template of a plot, but is also more of a non-linear piece with Violette experiencing the web of deceit and conspiracy in her relationship with Duchemin and those trying to find the picture. It is, even for Robbe-Grillet's films I have seen, a work which is explicitly more of a conceptual piece, an avant garde production just as liable to have turned into a later era Jean-Luc Godard film as it is undoubtedly a lurid genre piece from this era of sexploitation. The content of the film, more extreme than before, is of a type Alain Robbe-Grillet would fit more in with his later films if still out of synch with them, too avant-garde and too idiosyncratic for even that sexploitation tag to fully work for them. Certainly it is as compelling as it is incredibly idiosyncratic, the equivalent for a famous author penning a pastiche of a genre story, dissecting it entirely to contrast its tropes into striking images, legitimately in this case for the images onscreen.

This was not the end of the film as, creating its mirror sibling, an alternative cut called N. Took the Dice (1971) was produced. Deserving to be included in this review side-by-side, Robbe-Grillet created a remix of Eden and After, which included existing footage with outtakes and materials from the shot itself. The narrator, with dice, talks at the beginning directly to the viewers on TV having to be in an order, with shows that need to be explained, with a complete lack of enigma; the irony is that, whilst this deliberately obfuscates this later eventually to question this concept, Robbe-Grillet here is playing a perverse game of taking a work, originally meant to deconstruct a story, and turning into a work of telling a new story, through reused footage and that not used in the original version.

Tonally it does feel different, right in the beginning with significant greater use of footage of the locals in the Tunisia shot before.  Violette is now the nameless figure to be christened Eve, a figure N. is aware of from his past as he gives her this name and gives us this tale she is within. Duchemin is now a nefarious older man with connections to female slavery with an interest with Eve, the painting of the first film still important but the context changed. This does not feel like a pointless reinterpretation as, whilst the use of older footage is prominent, the context is radically changed, and the previously unseen footage adds a lot. There is even humour, like the fake advertisement (using scenes in the Eden cafe) of a personal anti-pick pocket/theft device for women that can fit in their pocket. Now a story of Duchemin being a trafficker in kidnapped women, Eve his newest target, and other characters trying to rescue her, Robbe-Grillet not only changes the story completely, showing how stories can be told with the same footage, but this even brings in realities within realities, where alternative realities between Tunisia and the Eden cafe can be entered between each other, becoming as abstract as the original as a result in its own distinct way. The only aspect which is unexpected to Alain Robbe-Grillet himself is that far less, if almost none, of the BDSM themes are here, and whilst sensuality is referred to, it is never explicitly depicted either even in nudity, which also changes the tone. The more expected aspect, considering its sister film, is when this ends with the joke that our lead has won a washing machine, least a post card says so. It is not really a spoiler to a production which, whilst taking a subversive route by actually telling a story, is still an Alain Robbe-Grillet film which is going to undercut this game itself. N. Took the Dice does work as its own film, but honestly, it needs to co-exist with Eden and After; together they make a compelling pair, Eden and After the superior film but N. Took the Dice as rewarding when the two can reinterpret the other.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Avant-Garde

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

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1) The Thin End of the Whip, written by Toni Bentley, published for Vanity Fair on February 2014.

L'enfant secret (1979)

 

Director: Philippe Garrel

Screenplay: Philippe Garrel

Cast: Anne Wiazemsky as Elie; Henri de Maublanc as Jean-Baptiste; Xuan Lindenmeyer as Swann; Cécile Le Bailly as Chloé

Canon Fodder

 

I have a camera instead of a heart.

A man named Jean-Baptiste (Henri de Maublanc) meets a young woman named Elie (Anne Wiazemsky), who had a son with a male actor. By herself, Jean-Baptiste takes interest in her, and they fall in love. Influenced by his real relationship with the singer Nico, with L'enfant secret Philippe Garrel moved away from his earlier experimental films, where he would have films with no soundtrack let alone dialogue, to dialogue driven dramas.

Rather than a straight forward narrative however, L'enfant secret presents the daily turmoil of a wife and filmmaker husband, struggling in their lives. Randomness happens in this world as in real life, such as whilst abroad with Jean-Baptiste being beaten up on the street, having already had a sour moment with Elie where she left him alone. Some major events are also unavoidable, as Jean-Baptiste, working an independent filmmaker, has a mental breakdown at one point and ends up in an asylum as a result, even having shock therapy treatment which comes off as destructive as it is meant to help him before he is allowed out, continuing the narrative. Ultimately the pair will continue to fracture, partially due to his work but because they slowly drift apart. This is a bleak film without being morose or depressive however, least in the sense this is about everyone trying to cope with the world around them, be it even harmful in the end, and how life will continue even if sometimes it does not end happily. Drugs are a frequent factor in this world, be it taking too much LSD and ending up in the mental asylum, or a young working woman we briefly met who uses cocaine to get through the days. The film does not feel gloomy about the end of love either, merely that it is inevitable, and in one of the it's many lengthy takes, one is forced in contemplation sitting on a chair in a corridor. Garrel never feels miserable for the sake of miserable here.

What Garrel took from his earlier work as well, here also shooting in stark monochrome, is a very still style. In fact, he removed the moving camera shots from the likes of The Virgin's Bed (1969) and similar aesthetic flourishes, instead using very minimalistic shot compositions. He embraced dialogue fully, contrasting it with a precise aesthetic style, minimalist, which means the film still has a very slow and contemplative tone. It is, paradoxically, as difficult for me to experience as the more avant-garde films before this from Garrel were, yet still remains the most accessible in the end as, once I worked with its flow and mood, the emotional power combined with the developed directorial style is the deepest to embrace.

The influence of his previous work, which was without even sound for the likes of this, is still felt in that he has contemplative and long scenes which can become silent again.  A lengthy post asylum embrace uses this, for example, for meaning, as this has been a long separation in context, making sense throughout the film to have these moments. When music is actually used, it is good, used sparingly for moments of emotional desolation like how the central couple break up. It is an impressive piece, and this early in his career, Philippe Garrel would continue to perfect this style over his career. Working with his films, and find the virtues within them from contemplation, I have gained an admiration now for him as a filmmaker.

The Erotic Witch Project 1 & 2 (2000)

Director: John Bacchus

Screenplay: [Erotic Witch 1] John Bacchus, Michael Raso and Joe Ned / [Erotic Witch 2] John Bacchus

Cast: [Erotic Witch 1] Darian Caine as Darian; Laurie Wallace as Katie; Victoria Vega as Vikki / [Erotic Witch 2] A.J. Khan as Dr. A.J. Khan; Darian Caine as Darian; Katie Jordan as Barbara; Rio as Dee Dee; Allanah Rhodes as the Coma Patient

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #243-4

 

Yes, I have had a portion of my own faeces...

Countless parodies (and rip-offs) exist of the original Blair Witch Project. A softcore parody not only exists for the film, but there are at least two, with the Jim Wynorski The Bare Wench Project (2000) series, which lasted for a further three films, than this has three sequels. The first two being covered here for this franchise is for a couple reasons. Alongside the practical issues of trying to cover softcore erotica, entirely designed around titillation with only plots to paste the scenes together, they follow a progression from each other alongside being shot within the same year, which is parodying the Blair Witch Project when it was a huge hit only to follow a year later with a very disappointing higher budgeted sequel. They are artefacts of a yesteryear; not only is the softcore erotic aspect not being covered but merely to be talked of, as something that specific in preference for each viewer is pointless to critique, but even if that subject does have to be talked of, the really interesting part of how The Blair Witch Project was such a huge pop culture phenomenon at this time it touches into a variety of other areas, such as a specific era of straight-to-DVD softcore. This pair of films, from a company called Seduction Cinema, shot in New Jersey, comes from a specific wave of softcore made for the then-new straight-to-video market.

This wave is one I vividly remember even when too young to rent these as, in the United Kingdom, this wave of cinema which had its own stars, Erin "Misty Mundae" Brown probably the most famous who worked with actresses who are in this double bill, these films were released and could be found in Global Video, the equivalent to the American Blockbusters we also had, the films found on the highest or lowest shelves, titles with bright red boxes on the covers warning they were for adults only, alongside mainstream releases and the early days of cult cinema where companies like Vipco sold with lurid covers and taglines the likes of The Nostril Picker (1993), another of the strange films found in such stores.

Time is going to raise a curious question of how we look to these films and their stars, especially as whilst the original Erotic Witch film has the perfect parody to work with, a micro-budget smash hit set in real woodlands, going to part two, sent in a grey walled building masquerading as a mental asylum where the only character from the first film is sent too as a sex crazed mess, you are dealing with none of the sheen of classical sexploitation or hardcore erotic cinema, but the shot-on-digital era of the early 2000s. This era could find itself like the shot-on-video genre film movement gaining a cult fan base, but works explicitly about sex have their own hurdles to deal with just for the fact that, whether prudishness or disinterest, most people want to watch genre films which, if they have any sex, they are just part of it. Ahead of time, these are not great parodies of the source material - they are curious works, both to think seriously of rather than dismiss, to think of the people (especially the actresses) as working figures rather than dismiss them, and for how odd these films are, especially when we get to Kimbo the gorilla...

These hurdles present the issue, as much a hesitance, in covering titles like this even if this is part of the Blair Witch history. You are dealing with both work entirely meant to be titillating, to masturbate to if I am blunt, more than story, and the issue of the audience. I could feel uncomfortable covering this if it led to readers viewing me as a tasteless heterosexual male, more so as the point of these two films is explicitly sex scenes between women only, a sexual fantasy used for male viewers and in this case explicitly targeting a male audience as the audience in how it is depicted. Note I did not say "lesbian", which comes with a whole issue in that the term in air quotes, which denotes one's real sexuality and definition for themselves, has been used in pornography and erotica in a way that is problematic. The idea of such scenes in erotic is not problematic in itself, but in terms of how it is depicted, and even that is subjective in a way we oversimplify. Even questioning whether I can cover these is problematic in itself as it makes presumptions - when there is possibly a gay or bisexual woman who has watched and enjoyed these films, who could roll her eyes at me having this moment of awkward existentialism rather than getting on with this review. This is why the concept of the male gaze feels completely inadequate in dealing with the subject for me, an oversimplified concept for tackling the likes of horror cinema and erotica as nowadays, the audience is a vast one in gender, sexuality and gender having become vastly more complex, including transgender politics, to consider. Yes, this is still a review where we will get into some deeply silly stuff, but this is worth raising ahead of time.

Here especially I would argue three to four gazes exist at least, which makes simple erotica, entirely around a witch in Bacchusville in New Jersey who makes people feel horny in her prescience, more complicated to debate with seriousness. One is the gaze of a LGBTQ woman; second is a non-gendered eye, trying to stand back and scrutinise images or art which has sexual interactions between women, cis- or transgender, only, which can be argued to be difficult or even impossible to do; three is the male gaze, not taking into considering the viewer's sexuality which is a factor too; the fourth is the market which sells erotic imagery of women with other women which I would argue is entirely separate to even a male gaze, even a male gaze attracted to such imagery. The fourth gaze is the one which, not for this review to be talked of, but has to be considered in the wider scheme, as this in itself is where biases and perceptions are effected in itself. It is not just what a target audience buys where the considerations of problematic depictions of women, trivialisation, and just openly crass material has to be considered, but also the market which creates the product to sell this, as it has been allowed to be dictate what sells more.

If you stick to the template, and leave the politics to the side, this pair of films is very amateur wacky softcore. The first is a straight ahead parody, where in November 1999, three college co-eds (Darian Caine, Laurie Wallace and Victoria Vega) go to Bacchusville, New Jersey to find the Erotic Witch, the tape found two weeks later. It is as loose a parody as you can get, that in 1812 the erotic witch was a very sexual and pansexual woman tied up in the woods when the locals wished her gone. This never attempts a feminist reading of this at all - it is merely central to one of the many type of erotic and hardcore genres in existence, horror parodies, which vary from the Michael Jackson Thriller music video, Driller (1984), or The Hole (2003), the gay parody of the Ring franchise where watching a cursed video tape turns you gay in seven days afterwards.  

The film knows the joke at points and at others, it feels improvised to a sense half-baked. At first, you have the interviews of the original film, of stereotype creepy guys here. Inexplicably a redneck parody or two live in New Jersey, including one nearly slipping he was having sex with his sister, but seeing amateur actors in fake beards (throughout the duo) are amusing. The film does, as is always the issue with some of these erotic horror films, dangerously veers at first to the horniness of a possessed victim causing them to cross personal boundaries with others. An uncomfortable aspect of a lot of erotica for me as how forceful people are to have relationships with others, as happens to Darian Caine's character when she is possessed first in the woods, something the film has to quickly cross away from. Especially by the second film, when you get to the curse almost being a horny virus, the fantasy is there but ever since David Cronenberg made his debut Shivers (1975), about literally parasites that turn people into horny zombies, I have had thoughts of how that film spoilt the fantasy by emphasising how grotesque it could be in reality to have such a fantasy or even a sex utopia. Maybe that is just being cynical and ruining this fantasy, but Cronenberg was always ahead of his time.

There is some of the humour, the low hanging fruit variety, that this had probably a better received sequel than Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000), the openness to parody the sequel the same year it was released ballsy in an admirable way. The sequel does not really follow it at all, but some references do stay. The opening to Joe Berlinger's film, better than the actual movie plot for the original film, is here, where tourists have invaded Bacchusville and spend their time just masturbating together in the open. Or that you have interviews with people like the disgruntled police chief or a tourist (in a ski mask and fake moustache) talking of how he is there to deal with erectile dysfunction with the help of the Erotic Witch. Even the plot point of even video recordings being deceptive is played for one joke, blackmail material on tape turning out just to have two women playing table tennis instead.

The main issue with covering either film is that, only over seventy minutes each, most of their scenes are the sex scenes, choreographed between the actresses, the first playing to the restrictions of the found footage genre of two cameras the co-eds have, the second film having multiple ones (and a CCTV in a room) to work with. No non-diegetic music exists baring a heartbeat sound in places, which is a weird thing to consider. The sequences are prolonged, and they do not vary either, baring the end of the second film where, with five actresses instead of three, there is an orgy sequence to conclude the film, which alongside a scene of a man in a gorilla suit playing cards with an actor playing a male detective, certainly ends these two films, if there were never further sequels, with a spectacle. They are softcore but by the end of the second film, it is surprising these films were not actually hardcore movies by how explicit they are. Obviously, with respect to their female casts, if you are not prepared to go that far in a film, even these films have actresses, whatever you think of the performances, a hell of a lot braver in baring themselves (literally) than most people.

Even this feels weird to type as, due to the issues in how comfortable societies are in talking about real sex in art, and the whole issue of gender bias and pornography's existence, even stating these things may be off-putting to some readers of this without getting into the eyebrow raising, crass type of review language you can get in actually reviews of softcore and hardcore movies. Also trying to critically judge a film entirely about sex, designed for arousal first, is a strange circumstance to have to work with, which adds to this. Really, it is a bizarre sensation to write notes about a softcore sex film entirely about sex, rather than plot, regardless of what I am sexually attracted to; you legitimately feel like an alien studying human culture if any reader looking at this review tried it depending on the work.

Your judgement in the "erotica" is entirely, for each reader, their reaction or interest in that area, which is for any viewer of these films to decide. The one thing to comment about is that, barring one actress in the second film, one named Rio whose appearance is exaggerated*, everyone here actually looks and acts like women you may bump into in New Jersey bar, with their tattoos and piercings, which is a positive. One of the accusations of pornography, alongside its sleazy underbelly, is their unrealistic images of the body and sex, to which these very real women being onscreen is to be praised. This rises as well, if you actually look into these figures in front of and behind the camera, the people who worked with Seduction Cinema are still human beings. For the women especially this should be considered, when sexism could arise to dismiss them for merely being in these and a few straight-to-video horror films, could easily happen.

Darian Caine, who appears in both films, is prolific in these films and straight-to-video genre movies from the era. In part 2, alongside being the most charismatic figure, you have A.J. Kahn; born in India to an Indian mother and Irish father, she plays a doctor with some likably nerdish charisma when introduced in the film, but alongside her own prolific career in these softcore films, her IMDB page credits her to having previously being a professional dominatrix, which whether factually accurate or not really undercuts these films just being dismissible grot by forcing you to think these are regular working women in the entertainment industry. Thinking beyond the surface, to the fact ordinary people who watch these films like us also act in them, especially those for these Seduction Cinema productions these are part of, opens a lot more to consider for them.

Some may be put off by the starkness of the sex scenes, but again this is entire subjective, unless one wants to ask whether it is pleasant to be laid on New Jersey woodland floor or a rock naked.  (It was probably cold outside in the shooting too, as was especially the case with the second film, explicitly set at Christmas and with snow outside.) What I can comment on is that both films have very odd senses of humour. The first film recreates the structure of the first Blair Witch film, but with changes like porn magazines and dildos being left outside the tent, or very bluntly sexually wood decorations instead of menacing stacks of rocks. A blown up doll is found up in a tree as they are apparently funny in context. Stranger for me, set up in the first film and eventually being called Kimbo in the second film, is a gorilla rampaging on the loose, played by someone in a very cheap gorilla costume. In the first film, they are credited as being played by one of the script writers Joe Ned. Kimbo is never involved in any of the sex scenes thankfully, barring the questionable choice of having someone make monkey noises behind the camera during one of the scenes.

My mind, rather than just dismiss it as a dumb running gag, whilst it clearly is, also could not help to evoke Thundercrack! (1975). Curt McDowell's two and a half hour film, seen uncut, is infamous as a cult hit, a hardcore haunted house film which is openly pansexual in content - heterosexual, gay and bisexual sex scenes - whilst being an elaborate horror comedy. Effectively a lewd version of James Whale's The Old Dark House (1932), it has cult avant-garde filmmaker (and the film's screenwriter) George Kuchar in a role where, in a dress, he eventually marries the female gorilla that has been on the loose in that film's narrative since its start. Thundercrack in every way is a superior film, both for what strange and imaginative work you can do even with explicitly sexual content, but I think that probably softened me to Kimbo subconsciously. The character, which is just someone in a tatty gorilla suit, is from the same era where some truly strange things happened in these softcore films, like Jim Wynorski's Busty Cops (2004) having the titular lead's boss being a talking llama. Whether it is surviving being shot by a police detective, humping the sex doll at night in the words, or playing cards, sometimes dumb and embarrassingly slapdash comedy does work when it involves this character. My only disappointment was not exploiting a joke for the second film, where technology allows him to speak through a translator. Thus we learn this is a gorilla who likes twerking his own nipples, making him a lovably and progressive figure in his preferred kinks.

The second film is egregious in some very unfunny characters unfortunately for contrast, namely a female reporter (played by Katie Jordan) with her Eastern European cameraman, who talks of an awful experience in a gulag. At first, they seem a funny bickering comedy pair to have, only to become annoying in their hastily improvised bickering. In general, like those characters, there is a bit throughout these films which feel ill thought-out, where you can roll your eyes and ask, rather than the sexual content, why some ideas where wise to have. The crying confessional scene in the first film, parodying Blair Witch, eventually becomes a close up of a bared breast in the dark, which lasts a really strange and lasts a long length of time. Sound track cues are also perplexing. Heartbeat sounds are the closest to music in these films as mentioned, and the sound of the sea and seagulls in a masturbation scene in the New Jersey woodlands is just questionable. More questionable however, is in the orgy sequence having pig noises on the soundtrack. In mind to the point that it is the most explicit and intense scene, whether you had women, heterosexual couples or gay men acting the scene out, pig noises are acquired taste even if part of a mass witches' curse corruption, only for a really specific kink for a really specific target viewer when, for most viewers, probably just having five really attractive figures in said scene would sell without suddenly feeling the soundtrack from a Throbbing Gristle track has invaded it.

There are two more of these films afterwards - one a period prequel with Erin Brown herself, the other called Lust in Space: The Erotic Witch Project IV (2005) indicating even softcore gets to the point like other horror franchises you have to set them in science fiction. These films clearly churned out alongside all the others from the company who produced these, but in their own way, like the independent regional genre films of the seventies and eighties, and the underground video boom into the nineties,  Seduction Cinema by itself was at this prolific time for in that same ballpark. As regional as you can get, from New Jersey, for every parody they made like The Lord of the G-Strings: The Femaleship of the String (2003), they made many horror parodies, which indicates their film tastes. Without the older mystique of older softcore films, made on digital or in their starkness films which could be dismissed, these films do have a disadvantage in how to view them even as cultural artefacts, but they are curiosities in even how their construction is even exposed, such as one actress, playing one in a coma woken up, is abruptly introduced in a scene to make up numbers.

The more interesting thing for me from these types of films is these people making them. Figures like Darian Caine are visibly enjoying playing the possessed version of herself in a cheap straightjacket, chewing the scenery. That the script occasionally has some curiously memorable moments which make films like these time capsules, such as the suggesting Warren Beatty has likely slept with everyone in New York City, as esoteric and to the era it was made in as any joke can be. Even the director is fascinating to read into, just for the fact back in the day John Bacchus made a film called The Bloody Video Horror That Made Me Puke on My Aunt Gertrude (1989). Eyebrow raising yes, but reading his filmography, Bacchus' career even under pseudonyms can be tracked through an entire time in genre film cinema, from independent and underground work shot on video in the eighties into the nineties, to someone who managed to ride the wave of softcore films like the Erotic Witch Project into the 2000s. He was also working in horror as well including a series of films where each word ends with the letter "Z", like Bloodz vs. Wolvez (2006). I do not view either the Erotic Witch Project films, the first two, as being great parodies in the slightest, but they are interesting to see an industry that was there, with these reoccurring actresses and directors, which faded away. Softcore is still being made, still appearing in the few surviving high street stores in the United Kingdom still in spite of hardcore porn being easy to steal online. This particularly wave and these actresses form a part of forgotten history that, traversing the Blair Witch parodies, is fascinating to have stepped into on this path.  

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1) And even then, that is not to dismiss one figure onscreen next to everyone else, nor suggest a reverse body slander either before anyone raises this. If anything her costuming, even for this film, really exaggerated more, if by the standards of nurse costumes more likely to be found in an Ann Summers, a store here in the British Isles, hers is definitely the least likely to pass uniform regulations less for the skimpiness but how flimsy the material looks practically.