HOUSE OF SIN

Red Sonja: She-Devil With a Sword

2010-08-19T17:50:00.003-04:00

Anyone who loves Red Sonja sooner or later ends up browsing the colaborative tribute blog RED SONJA: SHE-DEVIL WITH A SWORD, a shrine to all things Sonja, from comics to pin-ups to films. As from today, and thanks to the benevolence of über-webmeister Darius Whiteplume, I've joined the ranks of scribes paying homage to the most famous and sexy red-haired warrior ever to grace a printed page. My first post, a sketchy comment on the reasons why Richard Fleischer's RED SONJA (1985) was such an unmitigated disaster, can be read here (if you feel so inclined).

On another front, and as if to compensate from these past few monthes of total inactivity on this humble abode, I took advantage of the bruhaha surrounding J. Michael Straczynski's take on Wonder Woman (from DC's Wonder Woman #600 onwards) to start a new blogue (yeah, if you don't update your blog frequently, what else to do than to divide even further your scant attention, right?) directed at super-hero(ine) comic books. You can find it here. I'll try to keep some regular posting on all three blogs, so please drop by any of them when you have a free minute or two to spare. For the moment, the updates on HOUSE OF SIN will follow closely my thematic concerns on both CAPES AND BUSTIERS and RED SONJA: SHE-DEVIL WITH A SWORD, so expect a lot of superheroines, sword & sorcery and some hot debate about rape fantasies in comics and films.

Time Flies

2010-01-11T18:59:00.003-05:00

It sure is a blink of an eye from Halloween to the New Year. And I've even missed Christmas. Anyway, and once more belatedly, wellcome to 2010 in this humble abode where we pay homage to beautifull, sexy and dangerous women. Lets receive the new year with warm smiles, open hearts and naked bosoms.

Happy Halloween!

2009-10-31T18:45:00.003-04:00

About a week before Halloween, I couldn’t help but feel delighted reading all those wonderful blogs that embark on a now traditional October Halloween countdown. I must confess that I particularly appreciate this special festivity where demons threat to tear through the flimsy walls of our imagination and run amok among us. Hailing from a country with no such tradition, in a way I feel that I enjoy Halloween even more, although in a mediated fashion through movies, novels and comic books. Safe from the inevitable perks of the real experience, I can live Halloween as a constant joy ride of dark frisson.

As I grew up without such an holyday, I tend to have a loose memory of this time of the year, associating it with the plethora of national holydays clustered around the months of October-December that I did enjoy while living in Portugal: October the 5^th, November the 1^st and December the 1^st and the 8^th were all national festivities. Cold and rainy days that I spent at home watching the GROOVIE GHOULIES and SCOOBY-DO on television, or reading SWAMP THING comic books by Bernie Wrihtson and Len Wein.

For me this time of year will forever be associated with 70s horror icons, with go-go boots, mini-skirts, wide belts, gothic castles, muddy and winding roads and lost young tourists seeking shelter in cob-webbed sinister abodes.

And so, each year, I spend Halloween watching groovy movies: BEHIND LOCKED DOORS (1968), TERROR AT ORGY CASTLE (1971), LA LLAMADA DEL VAMPIRO (1971), LA ORGIA NOCTURNA DE LOS VAMPIROS (1972) or EL JOVENCITO DRACULA (1977) all get a spin from my DVD player, alongside Hammer classics and old forties spokies. On recent years I’ve found a strange and eerie fascination with ELVIRA, MISTRESS OF THE DARK (1987) as a symbol of Halloween, a strange mix of October thrills and late summer nights, dry leaves and polyester cobwebs, a promise of sexy frills and wonderful horrific FUN.

So, have fun all you partiers. Happy Halloween!

Body Language: The Practical Aspects

2009-10-31T08:20:00.006-04:00

Just forget about context. Pretend you don’t know these two… pretend they don’t know each other. Discard the fact it may be a cheesy horror movie and that the spray pistol may be charged with a potentially lethal fluid. Just read the situation. Read their bodies. Did you ever tried to hold someone like that? Do you really think it is easy? Watch the fingers of his left hand. He’s not a lefty. He’s holding the gun in his right hand so he can’t be a lefty. Observe how he compensates the imbalance, leaning onto his left – not ambidextrous either. So, the way he is holding her… it’s just not practical.

Now, consider the girl. She clearly has beautiful, firm, round breasts. If you want to immobilize a girl of such a build it would be natural to grab one of her tits. It would give you purchase, it would hurt if she ever tried to pull away from you.

And suddenly, she seems to sense all this. She looks down. She sees the flaccid muscles on his arm. She knows – she feels it, she sees it – that he’s well aware of the swell of her left breast under is forearm. And yet, his left hand has climbed up her arm onto her shoulder, not down towards her bosom. She must now be thinking, is this guy a faggot?

Or, she asks herself, maybe he really doesn’t mean me any harm.

And that’s when she realizes, to her own surprise, that she could have escaped at any time. And the question is, why? Why didn’t she escape? Why didn’t she break that sissy grip? Am I a natural victim?, she seems to ask the heavens. Should I have watched more horror movies?

Run Swinger Run! (Barry Mahon, 1967)

2009-10-22T17:56:00.024-04:00

Why should I think of you as a damsel in distress, Laura? You surely don’t have that old-fashioned doe-eyed innocence that we’ve grown accustomed to. When we see you for the first time you’re a girl on the run, with vicious killers on your tail. But you’ re not hiding, cowering for your life. No. You’re just sunbathing, topless, idly browsing an inconsequential magazine.

It’s only when Schneider comes out of his expensive European Mercedes and comes shooting at you that you think of running. But you’ve been running for a long time, haven’t you, Laura? That’s the story you tell to that bloke whose car you’ve jumped into. That’s the way you deal with problems, Laura, you just drag anyone into them?

Well, you know he can’t resist helping you. Even if he doesn’t seem at first to believe your crazy story. But you see the way he keeps throwing glances at your slender naked thighs, and you know he’s as good as yours to command. You sure know that your body is a powerful weapon, a precious instrument of survival on a world of vicious men that believe themselves masters of the game although they’re just children playing at grown-ups.

And you know how to deal with them. When you went to your auntie Mary in L.A. begging for help she wanted to send you to sell dope to school kids. She knew your young body and your beautiful face could sell anything. You look harmless. That’s what that guy thought, your auntie’s henchman, when he came onto you after your shower. But you sure taught him how to behave. Pretending to be seduced, kneeing him where it hurts the most. And there you go again, running, escaping yourself. At that time you still haven’t met Schneider. That came later.

He saw you alone and haunted and beautiful and offered you easy money just to escort some important business men. At least, that’s what he said. And you accepted. You appreciated the money. And I’m sure you enjoyed the dare, the risk. And yes, I’m sure you’d have enjoyed the sex. That is, if you didn’t find out the scheme Schneider was keeping with some Chinese general, selling American guns to kill American soldiers in some war in far-off jungles. That did it. You fucked their scheme. And they want you dead.

So why should I think of you as a damsel in distress, Laura? Well, it’s the look you get sometimes, the air of a lost child in a cold indifferent world. You may be almost bare-naked, and still, in those fleeting moments, you really do seem innocent.

And I know the thoughts that surround you in those brief instants. You’re thinking of when you stopped being innocent. Of that morning on your mother’s boarding house when one of the gests, taking advantage of your mother’s absence, abused you… made you a woman, as he surely would refer to it. You think of the shame you felt. The humiliation. The shame of the rape, and worst of all, the shame of having enjoyed it. Not the rape. The sex. And thinking of that fateful morning that forced you to flee from home, you ask yourself if you became really lost… or just found yourself at last.

Women in Chains

2009-10-18T17:25:00.009-04:00

Here she must stand alone. With wrists bound by rope or chains, she knows she’s subjected to the dreadful male gaze. She can almost feel its touch upon her skin. The hands on her body will come later, if they come at all. But now… Now she feels it. The menace. The desire. The overwhelming eagerness of the beholder. It’s something primitive, primeval. With arms held high, there’s nothing she can do to prevent the lustful gaze from wandering over her breasts, down her body, consuming her entire being in a furnace of objectification. Her body will become the ashes of who she is.

She tries to get free. It’s useless. She knew that even before making the effort. That’s how the story goes. A story that extends far into the reaches of time. Bound damsels in distress cannot get free from that all-consuming gaze. The gaze is the gazer is the attacker. A unity of menace. To imagine is to do. That’s the equation. Bound, at the mercy of her captors, she is already suffering everything they’re imagining they’ll do to her.

She knows it. She feels them surrounding her with anticipation. They come from the limits of her vision, creeping in from the shadows. She can sense their thoughts. The patterns of perversion that dictate what surely must follow. The rape, the humiliation. Why does it ever have to be like that? Her destiny is as tied up as herself. Tied by the ropes of her female role.

In despair, she may cry, she may plead. But that will only arouse them further. That’s how the deep machinery of depravation works. Her fear will be their pleasure. Her tears their aphrodisiac. Her sweat the fuel of their actions. The furnaces of hell burn on the flesh of its victims.

And hell never fails. It’s as old as god and as sure as death. And just as the first tendrils of hell jump out of the crazy angles of existence, clawing at her clothes, pawing at her skin, striping her, caressing her body, probing where no one should be aloud to probe, she screams. She can hold it no more. She must scream and scream again. And screaming the realizes that in the beginning it was not the Verb. It wasn’t even the Scream. In the beginning that was the GAZE.

God’s male gaze, peeping at Eve’s glorious nakedness and innocence. And God saw it was good. And so he unleashed his snake, his own treacherous phallus, and he shattered Eden in order to preserve that sweet innocence. For God understood that no woman could be innocent until subjected to the gaze of male desire. And so he demanded sacrifices. Sacrifice of beauty and innocence. And so, she now realizes, that’s why women are bound and roped and tied. To open their bodies to the male gaze. Yes, she thinks. Maybe if close my eyes, I won’t see that abject gaze. Maybe if I don’t see I can’t be seen. Maybe it is a two-way process. Maybe…

But I’d bet its better to stare back. To face it unafraid. Defiant. Sublime. Who’s afraid of a peeping old goat of a god? When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back at you, Nietsche said. Well, let me be that abyss that engulfs your pitiful male gaze. Come and do your best. Come and do your worst. I’ll survive. Because it’s me you came to see. It’s me you desire. It’s me you want and cannot have. Bound as I am, I am freer than you.

With my sincere apologies for having left you, dears readers, hanging up while I was tied up with other things. And a big thank you to those who started following this blog while it was inactive. Cheers!

Goodbye Farrah (1947-2009)

2009-06-26T13:26:00.009-04:00

Farrah Fawcett will always be one of the Angels. That’s how I met her, the earliest of my TV crushes for beautiful, distant and unattainable actresses. She was not my favorite Angel – that had to be Jaclyn Smith – but she was the one that dressed the sexier and that looked… well… freer. Maybe it is a misjudgment caused by time and distance, but I still get that impression from her pictures and from her posters.

My love for her deepened all through LOGAN’S RUN (1976) – a brief fling on screen – and SATURN 3 (1980), the movie with the most promising of posters. I remember reading the tie-in novel first, on a dream date with Ms. Fawcett (she was no longer Mrs. Majors after her divorce in 1979) that would never come to pass.

Our relationship ended too soon because of my immaturity. I confess I didn’t react well to EXTREMITIES (1986). Yes, I know her character Marjorie was one of the best in her career, and I know her performance won well-deserved acclaim. She even let her nipples show, although not in an erotic or titillating manner. Maybe it was because of it, of watching the movie as one watches sunbathers at the beach, without any concern for plot or character development that did it. But our relation ended then and there. I never looked for her again. I didn’t even gave a spin to the CHARLIE'S ANGELS DVDs waiting on my shelves.

But like all youthful flings I could never really forget her. Every time I glimpsed her name on the credits of some movie or TV Series my heart would jump like a startled horse. I’m sure we would come to terms again. Age heals all wounds of youth. Alas, but now no more. Farrah has left us… the most unfair of deaths… way too soon. I’m sorry I never looked her up again, never saw any of her recent works. But I kept on loving her. I still do. Goodbye kid, you’ll be missed.

Eve and Lillith

2009-06-23T13:30:00.018-04:00

They say Eve was born out of Adam’s rib. But surely not CRANK’s Eve played with sizzling allure by Amy Smart. This Eve has something of Lillith in her, and Lillith was born of no mere mortal. She was born out of God’s wet-dreams. She’s a temptress in a virgin’s disguise. She’s every viewer’s erotic fantasy.

She’s not a character per se in this film. She’s the embodiment of lust, the über blonde bimbo air-head that every adolescent has up in the golden shrine to the promises of tomorrow. She’s hotness personified. She’s the god-mother, the life giver, the nurturing erotic fertility symbol.

When we’re allowed to enter her abode it is with the perspiring skin and hammering heart of a heathen to whom it is given to contemplate divinity. She stretches like a lithe feline, moves like a caress, dresses like a testosterone induced dream. She is all female, sexy and young and prim, and yet she seems unaware of herself… she’s natural. She doesn’t care that each of the simplest moves she makes has the potential effect – like Helena’s before her – of launching a thousand ships.

She’s the virgin and the whore, the Madonna and the Mistress under the same guise. She’s at the same time ripe and unattainable, innocent and temptress. She looks like an angel and behaves like a devil. She could fuel a hundred tracts on theology, and still remain a thousand year old woman on a girl’s body, a girl lost on men’s violent world.

There’s a certain degree of innocence on the deepest of sins, for only the truly innocent can really sin deeply. Although she has but a few lines, she’s the center of this movie. She’s the prize both Good and Evil covet; she’s the fountain of sin and the cradle of redemption. For all the killers, for all the lions, for all the weapons raised and fired, she’s the only one to decide over life and dead… She’s the eternal girlfriend, blowing his man while traversing a hailstorm of bullets, she’s the one officiating the public ritual of resurrection, with both Mary and the Holy Father looking in envy over her shoulder.

She’s every man’s dream, every woman’s nemesis. She’s Lillith the temptress. She’s Eve, the innocent. God, I can’t wait to see CRANK II.

Sensory Overload

2009-06-20T07:19:00.012-04:00

You couldn’t be a teenager in the mid-80s and not be aware of the Brigitte Nielsen phenomenon. At just 22, she starred as the titular character in RED SONJA (1985) alongside genre-veteran Arnold Schwarzenegger, married his real-life main competitor Sylvester Stallone and went on to star in two of his actioneers, cult-fave ROCKY IV (1985) and macho ego-booster COBRA (1986). In 1987 she broke up with hubby Sly, starred on BEVERLY HILLS COP II and then went under the radar for the target-audience of her films.

I confess I was not a big fan of Mrs, Stallone. She was a sexy presence on-screen – that I can not deny – but somehow her Nordic androgynous looks and clearly enhanced breasts didn’t exert a strong attraction over me. I didn’t particularly enjoy RED SONJA - being a huge fan of the Roy Thomas’s version from the comics I couldn’t sympathize with her portrayal of the iconic character, and the confused politics of the film (that seemed unsure towards what kind of demographics, or what kind of feminist demographics, it wanted to please) didn’t help matters much. I enjoyed her wet t-shirt scene in COBRA and the way her long legs drew the camera when she first appears on-screen on BEVERLY HILLS COP II coming out of her stretch-limo, but it was her portrayal of the icily beautiful Ludmilla in ROCKY IV, sporting a Soviet uniform, that most pleased my feverish adolescent mind.

Not even her nude photos on the French magazine PHOTO (“La Femme Rambo Pose Nue”, January 1988) made me change my mind. Naked, she seemed more awe-inspiring than truly erotic or arousing, and I couldn’t help but think that there was something mannish in her strong, tall, athletic body.

It was only Ivana Massetti’s demented and pretentiously surrealist opus DOMINO (1988) that opened my eyes to the depths of sensuality that Nielsen did harbor. The film is a jumble of vacuous dialogue, with a kind of sub-Zalman King musing on the nature of life and love spurting at every moment from the characters’ mouths, but presents itself in a striking palette of vivid colors, strange tableaux and boner inducing erotic scenes. One such scene burned itself into my mind, never to be forgotten. That’s when young Domino (Nielsen), convinced that she is being spied from a window on the building from across the street, wants to confront the anonymous voyeur that she sees only as a silhouette backlit on the window of the otherwise dark facade. Donning a ravishing but simple white dress with white gloves, and bearing an auburn wig – intimations of a desire for anonymity on her part as well, or just a mask, another persona to help fulfill her empty nights? – she ends up meeting the upstairs blind neighbor (veteran actor David Warbeck) who tells her that the couple that used to live on the now empty apartment where she is sure she saw the peeping tom had passed away on a car accident about a month before.

When we first meet the Blind neighbor (Warbeck) he is cutting a magazine with a pair of scissors. The interior of his darkened apartment is lit with a diffuse blue light whose source is not apparent on-screen, and is cluttered by a hanging forest of wind-chimes, which doesn’t seem very practical for a blind man. But then again, he doesn’t seem like an ordinary blind man – he is something more akin to Matt Murdock or any other of the plethora of blind masters that plagues pulp fiction in general. His movements are measured, slow and deliberate, like those of a spider moving softly over her thread as not to give any intimation of its nature to the eventual prey. Domino, our unsuspecting fly – or is she? – hears on his (fatuous and unctuous) words an echo of her own loneliness. The dialogue is awkward – some would say boring, ridiculous and unreal – and for no reason other than aesthetic, the Blind Man complains about the heat and – easily, with the supernatural ability that’s born out of blind habit – turns on an electric fan, thus raising a storm of sound and paper as the swiftly moving blades send the chimes into a frenetic dance and throws all the confetti-like paper clippings into a frenzy of festive proportions.

Caught in this sensory web, Domino unwittingly uncovers an old standing mirror that draws her in as some kind of window into her personal demons. She looks like a deer caught on the headlights of her own self, as she – and us – see her reflected in the twilight-y umber of the room, the Blind Man explores her face and hair with is fingers, building is own image, an utterly sensorial one… a vision of touch, smell and sound. Only her (and us, the voyeur audience) have sight.

He unzips her dress, send his hands roaming down her sensuous arching back, and it’s only in the mirror that we see them closing like spidery shapes over her breasts, underneath the white – so purely white – dress. It’s a mesmerizing moment, an hypnotic ritual, as we are caught by the erotic dance on the screen, on the mirror, caressed by the wind chimes, a soft tingling rhythm interspersed from time to time with the staccato, final, banging of a door or a window disturbed by the wind.

The storm is internal and external as we are drawn into that fury of sound and image, bereft of touch, another point on the sensorial triangle we close with them. The hands slide under her dress, over her breasts, between her thighs… she arches her back, arms held up in sensual surrender, her own (gloved) hands reaching – not to him – but to her own body. She is the goddess being adored, homage. This is her ritual. Not a fly at all, but the Queen of us all.

Her moaning mingles with the wind, the myriad confetti a caressing creature with a thousand fingers; she moans, she writhes, she orgasms, overpowering the storm. She shatters the barriers; looking into the mirror, she became as much the voyeur as the one she was meaning to confront. And we, the viewers, the voyeurs, are satisfied as well.

I saw few of the movies she starred after this one. I somehow enjoyed her role as corrupt lesbian prison warden in CHAINED HEAT II (1993), but she never got to the sublime heights of this little forgotten scene in the annals of second rate erotic films. So I thank her for the memories, as the song goes.

Resuming Transmission

2009-06-14T16:56:00.002-04:00

Interruptions happen when one least expects them. Just as I was about to cap my participation on Pam Grier Week with a short review of Gerardo de Leon’s WOMEN IN CAGES (1971) more pressing professional compromises demanded my full and undivided attention… until about now. And suddenly, I feel myself unable to follow up on my previous posts as if the time gap between them made them feel as if written by somebody else. So, dear readers – dear patient readers – I’ll begin anew, looking back at Ms. Grier’s week with great fondness and promising you that this coming summer, when work matters will be a lot less pressing, I’ll review WOMEN IN CAGES as a bridge between these last few films and a bunch of later WIP movies. As for now, let the program resume, hoping that no other extended interruption shall prove necessary.Thanks for waiting…

The Big Bird Cage (Jack Hill, 1972)

2009-03-20T10:13:00.033-04:00

Well, I guess there’s much not to be liked in THE BIG BIRD CAGE, Jack Hill’s semi-sequel to his own superior THE BIG DOLL HOUSE (1971). Maybe that is even understandable, inasmuch as it was a project born out of the unexpected success of the first movie and the serious money it had made despite the very limited budget. Moreover, it was Hill’s intention to make a “proper” sequel to the first movie, but he didn’t have any of the original actors (but Pam Grier and Sid Haig) at hand as they were filming all over the Philippines in other productions. And, adding insult to adversity, Corman asked Hill to tone down the grittiness and violence of the first film in hopes of reaching an even wider audience. Yes, that’s the recipe to get something that will displease almost everyone who loved the first film.

But, weird guy that I am, I simply love THE BIG BIRD CAGE, despite all its faults. Yes, it is true that the violence is immensely toned down; and that the creepy warden and torturing guards are replaced here by a an histrionic warden obsessed with his “big bird cage” – a giant sugar mill of his own design – and a cadre of big fat unctuous homosexual guards that were as un-PC in 1972 as they are today (and more enjoyable for that). And even sexual violence is toned down and muted, peeking from behind the teasing promises of the abundant female flesh in exhibition here (I don’t remember seeing another movie with this ratio of nipple-slips).

But… the film has a lot of other points to commend it and, if you’re of the right frame of mind, to make you love it. For starters, the photography by Felipe Sacdalan (credited as Philip Sacdalan) is simply stunning in its use of colour and light when capturing some breathtaking Filipino locations around Luzon. Then we have the mad intricacy of the “big bird cage” itself, designed by Jack Hill’s own father, a veteran art director and set designer, and the man responsible for the creation of Disney’s Castle. And what to say of Hill’s own script, a delight of funny quips, smart comebacks and satiric comments that gains impetus all along the movie, never relenting, until the surprising body-count of the film’s finale?

All this adds up to create a fantasy world, a time that never-was, a hinterland of erotic dreams inhabited by beautiful, smart women, crazy homosexual men and fun amiable revolutionaries. And it is to the credit of Jack Hill that he could steer this mishmash of improbable elements, keeping it from veering too far into silliness or from falling down the pits of unfunny camp comedy. And trust me, there are plenty of laughs here; and it’s a joy to watch some very good actors having so much fun playing their parts.

Andy Centenera as the scenery chewing Warden Zappa and Sid Haig as the carefree and womanizer revolutionary leader play with gusto their opposite roles; Subas Herrero and Vic Diaz (both also appearing in BLACK MAMA, WHITE MAMA) are a delight to behold as the two chief gay guards that compete with one another for the attention of Haig when he infiltrates the prison working as a guard (the sole requisite seems to be being a homosexual).

And then, we have the girls: first and foremost, the indomitable and unequalled Pam Grier, appearing here at her best: gorgeous, funny, tough, ad libing with gusto and getting to sing another catchy tune (if she wasn’t such a fine actress she could perfectly have had made it in the music world). This time she his surrounded by a host of gorgeous women (many of them in their first appearances, some of them in their only appearance in film): Anitra Ford as the seductress that gets arrested because she became a political liability because she’s been fucking the Prime-Minister; Candice Roman, the sprightly and cute blonde that has all the best lines; Teda Bracci (a real rock singer), the tough girl that commands respect and love both from her mates and the viewer; Carol Speed, the delightful black girl that suffers the cruellest death in the film and Rizza Fabian, the Mindanao exotic beauty that rats on the others because the Warden has a say over her son’s destiny.

It is impossible to cover in such a brief review all that goes on in this precious little exploiter. Sid Haig’s Django debating the politics of revolution with his followers that want to raid the female prison because they think the revolution needs more babies (“And do you have any particular bastille in mind?”, he asks). The government party that is inspecting the prison only to get fed up with the trite politically correct speech of the Warden: “Yes, yes, but lets us get to the girls”. And the two best lines of all: Carla (Roman) and Mickie (Speed) debating if Terry (Ford) is a “whore” or a “political”. “Among us, honest thieves and murderers, there’s nothing lower than a political”, says Carla. And when Mickie learns that Terry has been shagging the Prime-Minister: “See, I told her she was all right. She’s a whore”, before Carla observes that she isn’t making it for the money. “She’s not a whore! She’s political!”

But the belly-breaker roll-on-the-floor moment belongs to Vic Diaz. When Terry tries to escape from prison, she ends up about to be gang-raped by some guys to whom she asks to use a phone (yeah, really). She is spared from a fate worse than death (“You can’t rape me…”, she said early on to Django. “I like sex!”) by the sudden arrival of Diaz’s Rocco with some soldiers and the search dogs. Quickly grasping what was going on, and looking from the horny Filipinos to the semi-naked Terry, he just mutters: Oh darn. Nothing like that ever happens to me.

On the whole, THE BIG DOLL HOUSE is great fun. It rehashes some of the ingredients of the previous film and either improves or comments on them through a kinf of don’t-take-it-so-seriously wink of the cinematic eye. Pam Grier is, if possible, even more lovely In this film. She improvised the line “It’s miss nigger to you” when she docks another inmate that calls her nigger. We are also treated to some scenes in the exterior, as well as to a collective mud fight, before arriving at the explosive final battle, with its desperate dash through the jungle, heroic deaths and accounts settled. It is eye-candy of a superior quality and harks back to a time when doing indie cinema meant doing fun, over the top movies, instead of the mushy moralizing pseudo-cine verité crap that comes out of Sundance every year.

And you could still be political while doing it. Not just a commercial whore.

The Big Doll House (Jack Hill, 1971)

2009-03-19T07:14:00.023-04:00

It would be easy to dismiss THE BIG DOLL HOUSE as being an exploitation flick with no redeeming social value whatsoever. And maybe rightly so. But if you’re reading this, you know better. You know this is it. This is the Ur-text, the mother of all subsequent WIP films, an unstoppable truck of fun and sleaze rolling without brakes towards the future. And it is the first film to star Pam Grier in a speaking role. And not only does she speak, she also sings – wonderfully! – the catchy LONG TIME WOMAN title song, later reprised on the JACKIE BROWN (1997) soundtrack. And when she utters her first line, eyeing the new arrival from head to toe (“Green… scared… and pretty”), you know you’re watching, through the time-travelling magic of digital technology, History being made before your eyes.

Obviously, THE BIG DOLL HOUSE was not the first WIP film, a film genre in existence since the thirties and on both sides of the Atlantic; but it was the best of them all and would pave the road for bigger and better ones. Freed of the social commentary of the American WIP films of the 30s and the British ones from the 50s, it outdid and outshone the eurotrash flicks at their own game. With a bare minimum of plot, courtesy of Don Spencer’s script, and a sure-fire direction by Jack Hill, it created unforgettable tableaux that would be re-used time and again in later efforts from other directors. Pam Grier being fondled through the cell bars would be rehashed in Jonathan Demme’s CAGED HEAT (1974); the girls fighting in mud would become almost mandatory in these kind of films (and would be used again in its semi-sequel THE BIG BIRD CAGE); the German-looking Prison Warden would be a necessary staple of the Italian nazisploitation movies of the 70s; and one of the best monologues, the shatteringly funny houseboy story uttered by Judy Brown’s Collier would serve as the punch-line of 1993’s BODY OF EVIDENCE.

For all that matters, it is the ultimate male erotic fantasy: a world practically devoid of men, a gynocracy of beautiful women that prance around in a state of partial undress, fighting in mudpits, loving each other and submiting each other to some rough S&M punishing. And, above all, they’re horny all the time.

But to say that is tantamount to say nothing at all. Sure, it is pure unadulterated fun; sure it has some over the top moments that are pure pulp kink; and sure, it lacks a proper plot capable of cohere the separate tableaux that tell us what little story there is to be told. But it is also one of those cultural artefacts that somehow seem to touch deeper than the candy gloss of its brightly shiny surface. For once, all the characters are wonderfully cast; and contrary to the run of the mill WIP films, none of the prisoners is innocent. They are murderers (one of them, a baby-killer), drug-addicts or prostitutes; and yet, they are human, they carry a past and a story with them, they have weaknesses and they have virtues; they make us care about them. Pam Grier is wonderful as Grear, the dominant lesbian, at once funny, aggressive and yet somehow compelling our sympathy, despite ratting on her cellmates in order to get dope to her protégée and lover Harrad (a wonderful performance by Brooke Mills); Roberta Collins is simply magnificent as Alcott, beautiful and determined, slowly creeping from a careful stance on the margins of the prisoner's power plays to gaining the centre stage of their escape; Sid Haig is at once charming and fun; Kathryn Loder is suitably creepy as the sadistic Lucian, torturing the prisoners with wreckless abandon; and Christiane Schmidtmer steals every scene she’s in, chewing the scenery with gusto every time she’s around as the seemingly trustworthy Warden. And the interplay between them is pure joy to behold.

And then, beneath its prurient male fantasy cover, there’s a deep and insightful well to be tapped. Contrary to common adolescent fantasies, the women on this film are not weak; they know how to look after themselves, they’re determined and they know how to get what they want. When they fight they gouge your eyes out. And such a fantasy world cannot avoid touching on the ever-present male performance anxiety: when Sid Haig’s Harry arrives at the prison with his new partner Fred (Jerry Franks), he tells Fred how all those women are desperate for sex. “One of these days, ZAP! R-A-P-E.” “What? You mean one of this days you’re gonna rape one of these girls?” “No… one of these days, one of these girls is gonna rape me!”

The ultimate male fantasy doesn’t look like it when Fred finds himself on the wrong end of a knife and is forced to satisfy Alcott’s unspent lust (“Get it up, or I’ll cut it off!”); just as it happens to Harry when the same Alcott forces him at gun point to rape the captive Warden. And it is interesting to note how men are represented as an object to be used (nice role-reversal for a cheap exploitation flick, eh, Mrs. Dvorkin & McKinnon?) by women, or as a source of trouble for them: when the Warden watches the girl’s being tortured, she does so disguised as a man; when lesbian Grear decides to allow Harry to fuck her as a way to get dope for her lover and the keys for them to escape, she ends up dead; it’s the amorous interlude between Alcott and Fred that gives Lucian the pretext to torture and beat her; and Lucian ends up being killed by one of the snakes – the phallic symbol par excellence – she used to torture them with.

In the end, THE BIG DOLL HOUSE is a strangely satisfying view, candy for the eyes and food for the brain, expertly teetering between fun and violence and sometimes mixing the two in a heady cocktail. Above all, it is that old cliché: the kind of movie they don’t make anymore.

The Arena (Steve Carver/Joe D'Amato, 1973)

2009-03-17T07:22:00.037-04:00

One year after sharing the screen on BLACK MAMA, WHITE MAMA (1973), Pam Grier and Margaret Markov met once again in the odd genre mixture of THE ARENA, a historical fantasy set against the colourful and decadent background of Imperial Rome, although one reference to the Spartacus revolt of 71 B.C., is enough to show that the film has no intention of letting something like historical accuracy get in the middle of all the fun. And that is not necessarily to the detriment of the film, as it works surprisingly well as an atypical WIP film, enriched by some acute (although by then not too original) social commentary.

Despite some very trite and sometimes syrupy dialogue, the movie exceeds on a purely visual level, allowing the viewer to “read” the story in every frame, no small feat for the shared directing chores of Steve Carver and Joe D’Amato (Aristide Massaccesi) and swift editing by a still young and unknown Joe Dante. But above all, it is the screen presence of Markov and Grier that once more ignite a special chemistry between viewer and the events on screen. Even more markedly than in BMWM, both actresses play determined women who fell afoul on the hands of injustice, violence and degradation.

Bodicia of Brittany (Markov), a priestess, and Mamawi (Grier) a tribal African dancer, are captured during raids from Rome’s provincial forces and dragged to the city of Brundisium where they’re sold as slaves to Timarchus (Daniel Vargas), a games editore and the owner of the title’s gladiatorial arena. At the hands of Timarchus, the girls are forced to entertain his slobbering guests at his abject orgies and to serve the patrons while they’re watching the fights at the arena.

Under the tutelage of Timarchus’s housekeeper Cornelia (Sara Bay), the girls are subject to other public humiliations, fostering even more the differences among them – particularly in what concerns Livia (Marie Louise), another slave, who pretends to be of Roman ancestry, a claim that will prove disastrous to the group’s unity further on. In one of the parties where the girls are forced to serve and entertain, the haughty Bodicia slaps a Roman who tries to grope her and is then “punished” by being raped by another guest amidst the leering partygoers, while Mamawi, ever the adaptable survivor type, looks on with a mixture of haughtiness, disdain and sorrow.

The fights, however, are not going well to Timarchus, as the patrons seem to be getting tired of always seeing the same spectacle – a growing ennui that will later grow to symbolize the indifference of a brutalized society confronted with organized suffering. So, when a particularly vicious fight erupts in the kitchens between Bodicia (who wants to fight the system and escape) and Mamawi (who believes her more restrained way of coping with adversity will get her better results), the wet an messy confrontation spurs Aemilius (Christopher Oakes) to suggest to Timarchus that if the girls could fight like that in the Arena it would be a tremendous crowd-pleaser.

And so it is, as the first fight pits Bodicia against a sexily inebriated Deirdre (Lucretia Love), in a fun and gay fight that ends with the crowds cheering and allowing both girls to live. However, that easy first trial doesn’t fool the girls, all to well conscious that just as it was happening to the male gladiators, one day they may be forced to kill one another. And that happens just the next day, when Livia, claiming Roman ancestry is spared from fighting Mamawi, who ends up being forced to kill Lucinia (Mary Count). Truth is just too crude to allow hope to go on. Their choices are simple: escape or die fighting in the Arena.

All considered, THE ARENA is, plot-wise, pretty standard fare, rehashing by the numbers the structure of any run of the mill WIP film, with the final third entirely reserved for the escape from prison through the jungle (or, as in the present case, through the catacombs). Where it departs from others is in the meticulous atmosphere of some of its settings (the idyllic opening, the bath scenes, or the dark kitchen, among others), and the magnificent presence of Grier and Markov, both of them haunting the screen with almost supernatural beauty. More than the crass dialogue they’re given to munch, it is their total physical performance that conveys who and what their characters really are. When they face each other, the screen sizzles with intensity, and it’s their eyes, their posture, that lead us from their initial mutual distrust, through their apprehensive cooperation, to their final fight together.

Although the film has some very funny moments, and doesn’t shy away from goofiness in the form of the effeminate Priscium (Sid Lawrence) or the drunken Deirdre, it is smart on not allowing that goofiness to spread to the fights in the arena; moreover, there are some very clever moments – brief glimpses, sometimes humorous, sometimes not – that evokes Eisenstein’s editing to underscore some social points so in keep with the racial tensions of the time (that is, the American 70s). Consider, for instance, the moment when Cornelia is tripped during the kitchen fight and Livia, she of Roman ancestry runs to her aid, only for Cornelia to grab Livia’s skirt to clean herself up; or the way Mamawi is quick to adapt to every circumstance (she fights when she needs to fight, she dances for the Romans as she danced for her tribe), mirroring the black’s situation on the inner city. And the film is not free of irony as well, as attested by the way Livia ends gang raped by her “fellow-citizens”.

Romans that are so brutalized by the games, so insensitized to violence, so dominated by ennui, that even the fad of the women fighters quickly turns boring to the point that when Bodicia and Mamawi finally face each other on the arena, their struggle is not even seen by the crowd lost in its own search for pleasure. Which makes Mamawi’s plea to be allowed to spare Bodicia’s life even more poignant.

But, as I said above, this is truly Markov’s and Grier’s film, the one in which their beauty goes unsurpassed, the one where their eyes and their faces and their bodies are allowed full expression. And it is wonderful to behold the silent complicity that bonds both women when they fight each other to the death, respecting each other, honouring each other. And the beauty of the moment when Mamawi, endangering her own life, decides not to kill Bodicia, is unsurpassed by any other exploitation film ever. Just scroll up and watch the girl’s eyes and posture in the scenes where they are together, admire the subtle promise of a smile on Markov’s face when Grier’s trident bites the sand near her head. While Grier went on to be queen of the exploitation scene and, in time, to become an icon of the twentieth century, I’ll never understand why hasn’t Markov become a major player in the industry.

Black Mama, White Mama (Eddie Romero, 1973)

2009-03-15T12:51:00.026-04:00

Although usually reviled by both critics and viewers alike, I find that BLACK MAMA, WHITE MAMA, is not only the best film Eddie Romero has ever directed, but also one of my favourite exploitation films of the seventies. In part that is due to the wonderful performances of Pam Grier and Margaret Markov, surprisingly restrained in terms of camp and nudity, but nonetheless pretty rich in warmth and complicity. Add to that some memorable performances from a bevy of supporting actors, from the sexy lesbian couple of guard and warden played with some affection by Lynn Borden and Laurie Burton, campy cowboy bounty hunter Ruben (a wonderful Sid Haig), seedy lowlife drug baron Chen (Vic Diaz) and the surprisingly fit and funny revolutionary leader Ernesto (Zaldy Zschornack), and you’ll get a little gem of a film that will shine through the nooks and crannies of the admittedly scant plot to its bittersweet ending.

Said ending is one of the points of contention among detractors of the movie that think it a denial of everything that happened before; and to some extent it is… but that is life’s way, and although one can not claim that BMWM is a realistic portrayal of life in a female penal colony in some tropical island in the seventies (the movie was lensed in the Philippines), we can not use that fact to deride the few elements of political and social allegory that Jonathan Demme’s script wove all over the fantasy core of the narrative.

And what is the narrative, filled with subplots as it is? Lee Daniels (Pam Grier) and Karen Brent (Margaret Markov), a hooker and a revolutionary, arrive at a female correctional facility run by lesbian warden (Burton) and overseen by her partner Logan (gorgeous actress Lynn Borden), who has the habit of peeping on the prisoners while they shower and to demand sexual favours in exchange for a better treatment. Following a catfight in the prison cantina between Daniels and Brent, both women do a stinch on a hotbox prior to being transferred to a maximum security prison on the city, where they will be interrogated concerning the drug traffic of Daniels’s pimp and the guerrilla’s activity of Brent’s insurrectionist group. Before they get to their destination, the paddy wagon is ambushed by the guerrillas trying to free Brent, and during the ensuing fire-fight both women escape into the jungle, chained to one another, in a clear rehash of THE DEFIANT ONES (Stanley Kramer, 1958).

Although free from the police, they both have distinct agendas: Daniels wants to regain possession of a loot of some 40.000 dollars that she stole from her pimp/boyfriend, and Brent needs to be reunited to her guerrilla companions for she is the only one who can broker a weapons deal that will allow the revolutionaries to fight the corrupt government. That puts them at odds with one another, as they both remain chained to each other and want to follow in different directions. To complicate their difficult and unwanted cooperation, they are being pursued not only by the police, but also by a bounty hunter hired by one of the cops, Cheng’s gang of assassins and Ernesto’s Guerrillas, all of which will have a major showdown on the Fiipino docks in the fiery climactic battle.

Although the heart of the movie resides on the cementing of Grier’s and Markov’s character’s friendship and trust, we feel that they are bound to one another long before they get chained on the paddy wagon. For they are – or seem to be – complete opposites; and as every physics student will tell you, you can’t put two opposites in the same box without them being violently attracted.

The relationship between both women is clearly clichéd, but it is also that relation that justifies the unpopular ending of the film. The mutual despite is obvious from step one, and maybe better voiced when near the end Daniels tells Brent that “I’ve been a revolutionary since I was 13 – the first time I was paid to do it”, hinting that her descent into prostitution was a kind of stance against the system, a means of survival, a strengthner of character. In contrast, Markov’s revolutionary feels more like a pampered rich girl that got bored of having every whim satisfied and wanted to try some action fighting for the poor, something she never was. And the film seems to bear testimony to it.

When we first see Karen Brent on the police wagon that is taking her to prison, she seems more annoyed than frightened or worried with what she was about to experience. She visibly dislikes Daniels that is in the wagon with her, a dislike of which the hooker partakes, eyeing Brent as if she was just a child playing at being a revolutionary with her shiny golden hair, pouty lips and clean battle fatigues. And indeed, despite being a prostitute, Daniels refuses the sexual advances of Logan, asserting her determination to face whatever conditions she would be dealt, but keeping the power to decide what to do, with whom and when. Not so Brent, who easily accepts the unwelcome attention of the guard, as if she is not used to be treated roughly and will do anything in her power not to be hurt. Here it is Daniels who is the revolutionary and Brent the prostitute.

When they fight in the cantina, it is because Daniels shows resentment for Brent surrender before the corruption of the system, and the way Brent deals with it is more akin to a spoilt child than a mature revolutionary. Later on, already chained, when they first fight over which direction to follow – in one of the most erotic bitch slapping contest you can think of (although there is no nudity or clothes-tearing) – Daniels has no trouble in overpowering the weaker girl, showing her totally unfit for guerrilla warfare.

Then, although the plot is to thin to allow room for deep character building, it is during their run from their pursuers that they begin to respect one another, to learn to cooperate and to love each other, a moment of bonding that occurs when Daniels kills Luis (Subas Herrero) when he attempts to rape Brent. If when they escaped the wagon Daniels seems to kill Logan out of pure revenge for the corruption she stands for, and Brent seems more like a unwilling participant, when it comes the time to kill Luis it is for survival, true, but it is also to protect a friend.

And that is why Brent must die. After growing from a pampering rich girl into a true revolutionary, she must die with boots on and a gun in her hand, helping Daniels escape from the killers. Just as had recently happened to Che Guevara - another Ernesto - whose pictures exposed by the CIA made him look Christ-like. It is a shocking and unexpected death, but it is a beautiful death nonetheless. Elegiac, one could say, as it seems fit for a hero – for a revolutionary fighting against the corrupt system that we’ve been shown all over the film, where the girls meet no one that is sympathetic. And it is the expression of pain and loss in Daniels face that most clearly shows us that Brent has grown up to be that hero she used to play at. And no ending could be more fit to this movie.

PAM GRIER: She's a Whole Lot of Woman

2009-03-14T15:30:00.013-04:00

Pam Grier is one of the few fortunate persons who become icons. She’ll probably never be a symbol for feminists, but she’ll forever be the hallmark of the true liberated, independent and assertive Woman.

Discovered by Roger Corman while working as an office assistant at American International Pictures, she would star on a handful of movies between 1971 and 1975, each of which would prove to be surprising commercial successes and gather a growing cult following throughout the years.

From early supporting roles on such cult classics as HIT MAN (1971) and COOL BREEZE (1972) where she is still billed as Pamela Grier, she caught the rising wave of the highly profitable and surprisingly popular black action films (since then known under the moniker of Blaxploitation), establishing herself as the archetype of the modern black woman that wouldn’t stand still when confronted with corruption, injustice or racism (“That’s miss nigger, to you”). But it was the series of WIP films she made for AIP between 1971-1972, THE BIG DOLL HOUSE (1971), WOMEN IN CAGES (1971), BLACK MAMA, WHITE MAMA (1972) and THE BIG BIRD CAGE (1972) that propelled her to stardom as Pam Grier, paving the way to the iconic and iconoclastic trilogy that would put her in the history books as an icon of popular culture: COFFY (1973), FOXY BROWN (1974) and FRIDAY FOSTER (1975).

In these films, Grier pulls no punches, backs before no one and looks as good as one can desire. Dealing death and castration like some unleashed goddess, she was the first (and remains unrivalled) bad ass mama. Sexually alluring, moving with the graciousness of a black panther, and acutely smart, Grier built a persona out of the several characters she played in her movies; a persona with whom black women of the 70s could identify and every male (whichever the colour) could desire and fear.

A persona that could almost be encapsulated on the demise of Grizelda, which Grier played in 1971’s HIT MAN: like a black goddess out of the darkest jungle, it takes a lion to attempt to tame her… and as we avert our mesmerized gaze, we’re left to wonder if it will do the trick.

Grier was so identified with the Blaxploitation phenomenon that she went under the radar almost at the same time as the genre was waning: by 1975, Spielberg’s JAWS was taking exploitation out of the drive-in and the flea-pits and into the mainstream family theatres. And in 1976, white man and black man exchanged violent punches on the Oscar winner of that year, John G. Avildsen’s ROCKY. Blaxploitation had nowhere else to go and so it is not surprising that same year to see the billing of Pamela Grier once more on screen as a tamed slave girl in DRUM (1976) the misshapen follow-up to MANDINGO (1975), loosing even the public’s attention to the scene stealing beauty of a young Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith.

But those crazy years of 1971-1975 burned Pam Grier in the popular consciousness, igniting a slow burning fire that would be once more revived in Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 homage JACKIE BROWN. But that is an altogether different story…For now, just enjoy this trip down memory lane as we, here at HOUSE OF SIN, join Darius Whiteplume's DIRTY AND NERDY to hold a complete PAM GRIER WEEK, starting NOW!

Missing in Time

2009-03-10T19:18:00.012-04:00

While writing my last post I got myself thinking of how frequently we find an actress in some old cheesy movie or TV series that immediately grabs our attention, fills a void we didn't know was there, and then simply disappears down the mad whirlwind of time never to be seen again.

Coraly Zahonero in THE MIRACLE OF ALICE AMES (1989)

Case in point: Coraly Zahonero, the French actress that so sensuously played Alice Ames, a young hooker suffering from stigmata while having sex, in the curious episode The Miracle of Alice Ames (1989) from the TV Series The Hitchiker (1983-1991). Young Coraly plays the title character with a mixture of innocence and pathos, clearly prefiguring the talent that would bestow on her the Prix Daniel Sorano in 1995 for her role in La Double Inconstance. Although she was never to be seen again in a horror or erotic role, we can see more of her in R.I.S, police scientifique (4 seasons, 2006-2009), and several other TV series and films (as well as several plays).

Joanna Pang in THE SECRET OF ISIS (1975-1976)

But what about Joanna Pang, the hotty teenager that played Cindy Lee on the children's TV Series The Secret of Isis between 1975-1976? With full pouty lips, doey eyes and a figure at fifteen capable of obfuscating the mini-skirted toga clad Isis (JoAnna Cameron), she must have been the wet dream of many a horny teen. Sadly she practically disappeared after the series was cancelled, being glimpsed in minor roles in only three more films between 1979 and 1984. Having played the role of an adventurous teen that frequently beat the boys at their own dares and capable of taking care of herself in some dangerous situations, she clearly deserved more and better work..

Andree Maranda in THE TOXIC AVENGER (1984)

And then we have Andree Maranda, who played the sultry blind girlfriend of the Toxic Avenger in the 1984 cheesy Troma classic of horror and laughs, never to be heard of again. And yet, she burned her place in our retinas in that movie, dig her hole in our hearts with her joyful interpretation of a dumb girl with a heart of gold, even when being bent over a table to be anally raped in one of the most inanely funny jokes of the film.

Three girls, three faces, three bodies that will live forever in our memories, preserved in eternal youth on the plastic museum of our video libraries. In a way, they gain a kind of immortality that even the great writers and historic figures lack: they live forever young, firing our dreams with unfulfilled promises.

Home Again

2009-03-06T14:02:00.009-05:00

I’ve been away from this house, lately, wandering the dark streets of the night, aimless among the neon pools on the wet asphalt where lost souls go to share their despair. I’ve been pondering the sinister beauty and gleeful joy of decadence and depravity. They say you can get lost on your own thoughts. I almost did.

But it is now time to come back home. What with the amazing Pam Grier Week coming up under the sage auspices of blogmeister Darius Whiteplume? Time to rev up the brain engines, grab the discs from the shelf and force the DVD player into some serious workout. Our chocolate-coloured queen of the 70s awaits our visit in the candy coloured haze of the past.

Besides, if I didn’t get home soon, it was possible I wouldn’t be allowed in. Our sexy neighbour the Sexy Witch was evicted from Blogger on charges of improper conduct. If so sweet abode of beauty and grace could be so branded, what of my humble lair of sin and depravity? I fear the mobs carrying torches.

Truth is, god is once again prowling the dark alleys of the night, harbouring great fear and bigger resentment. He sees sin where is only beauty, and he knows no beauty where there’s no pain.

He pretends to offer solace to those that are lost…

…but as always has been his way, when you offer him one cheek…

…he demands the other as well.

Peeking down the Gates of Hell

2009-01-14T07:31:00.005-05:00

You can run...

...but you can't hide...

The Gates of Hell are open wide!

LETS WELCOME ...

2009-01-06T11:51:00.004-05:00

... the slightly used year of 2009... however belatedly...

...with open arms and heaving bosoms.

Cheers!

Happy Halloween...

2008-10-31T07:35:00.010-04:00

... all you Satan's little helpers.

With the wind blowing crispy leaves over cracked cement, moaning on the limbs of long dead trees, slithering under the pale gaze of the lifeless autumnal moon, open up your heart and let out the devil you have inside.

Have fun...

...grab life with both hands...

...make her hesitate...

...then love it...

...and overflow with joy.

And for one night in the year, play at being evil without being stupid. That's Halloween.

Have fun kids!

Opening the Gates of Hell: Blouse Ripping

2008-10-26T12:02:00.012-04:00

Women's breasts have always been the symbol of female pride, of female power, of female dominance. Forever at the center of male fantasies and forever fantasied about as long as there have been men on the face of the Earth, the female breast has been concealed from the western eye by dictates of moral, law and honour or shame. Cuvier, the French naturalist, used the female breast to ascertain the unimpeachable superiority of the white race over the black one. Helen of Troy bared her breast in front of Menelaus to gain his pardon. Medieval prieste referred to the lacing on the front of female bodices as the Gates of Hell.

One has just to read Shakespeare's THE RAPE OF LUCRECE (1594), a text frequently considered to depart from the ancient tradition of the rape and revenge story, born from the myth of Philomel and Procne from Book VI of the METAMORPHOSES by the roman poet Ovid, to grasp the importance of the female breast as the center of women's symbolics of power. Consider for instance the following passage, where Lucrece's breasts are described as the "heart of all her land":

His drumming heart cheers up his burning eye,
His eye commends the leading to his hand;
His hand, as proud of such a dignity,
Smoking with pride, march'd on to make his stand
On her bare breast, the heart of all her land;
Whose ranks of blue veins, as his hand did scale,
Left their round turrets destitute and pale.

In fact, Shakespeare lets us know early on that it was Lucrece's ample physical charms, allied to her husband's praise of her as being chaste (and once again we have "Her breasts, like ivory globes circled with blue/A pair of maiden worlds unconquered/Save of their lord no bearing yoke they knew/And him by oath they truly honoured") that inflame Tarquin into taking her by force.

So, is it any surprising that the simple act of ripping open a woman's blouse, shirt or bra has such an universal appeal? Such a titillating potential? Such a symbolic charge? The baring of the female breast is at the same time a manifestation of love (the mother's for the child, the lover's for the lover), a battering down of barriers between spaces that should be separate, or a manifestation of power. I don't very much care for the equation of rape to power, instead of sex, so dear to the extremist feminists like Dworkin or McKinnon. Rape is a much more complex issue, one that can range from a desperate act, to a violent act, through being an erotic game, an erotic fantasy or an evolutionary strategy. But that not withstanding, in fiction - in the realm of the fantasy - there is something to be said for it. And usually, its first step, is the ritualistic ripping open of the victim's blouse.

The baring of the breast.

Opening the Gates of Hell.

Unleashing the demon inside...

Legs can speak for themselves

2008-10-23T05:27:00.012-04:00

Until Martin Scorsese made Cybill Shepherd slow-walk through a crowded room in TAXI DRIVER (1976), moving like a black hole of appeal that drew in everybody's attention, if you wanted press on the viewer the allure of a female character you panned your camera from her feet, up her legs until finally you revealed her face. Yeap, that's how it was. And I can already hear the feminists screaming their flat chests out about objectification of the Woman's body, male gaze rape and misogyny.

Well, I beg to disagree... In fact, women's faces are just like men's faces - only prettier. I mean, they convey emotion and sometimes, they convey personality. But legs... man, that's another game altogether. You can look at any man's legs and you only see a man's legs. But look at a woman's legs, starting from bottom up, and they speak volumes about what you'll get when you reach their eyes.

Yes, they can elegantly convey...

... relaxed waiting...

...lusty anticipation...

...job hunting savvy...

...job hunting anxiety...

...lustful invitation...

...conscious naivete...

...and even hauteur and brains.

So don't talk to me about women's exploitation. When you see a man peeking at your legs, know that he is paying homage to the female body's total expressiveness. And probably, enjoying it too.

The crux of it all

2008-10-21T19:09:00.007-04:00

Trawling the net, one can't help but be mystified by the apparent allure of the "amateur" sex divas that sprang in pop-ups all over the screen. Most of them are clearly pros, with the wear and tear clearly visible in pose, set and taste (or lack thereof). Others, however, are cleverer... They promise innocence. They advertise candid moments caught unaware. They speak of posing only for their boyfriends/husbands. Those are the better ones. The ones with red-eye naturalness, as deers caught in the middle of the road. The ones that appear in photos with natural illumination (the flash seems to be the only extraneous source of luminosity), with simple and everyday clothing... The ones who seem naive... The ones who leave us thinking: can it be?

But why such an allure? Why such a bait?

I believe it must be the old neo-platonic convention rearing up its head, whispering to our inner selves that the woman must be at the same time sultry and innocent, sexy and inexperienced, irresistible and unattainable.

Because we burn with the desire to see that restraint crumble. There are few things more exciting than the transformation of repressed sexuality into wanton lust. The image above is a clear sample of it; all about the girl speaks of boundaries being crossed. She is young, clearly on a night out with friends. I can easily see her having a few drinks, flirting with a boy friend, trying to play sultry... trying to act adult. At the same time, she has the body of a temptress, of a pagan force of nature. Her eyes are daring us to try to get her... pushed by her hands, her breasts seem so big that we can't believe they could ever be sustained by the flimsy straps of the bra. It is the expression on her friend's face that tells us that this photo is the result of a sudden determination. She is clearly pretending for the camera of a friend. She's a child playing the whore. And the crucifix dangling in her wonderful cleavage makes it all seem more risky and more subversive...

Without knowing it, she is transversing the ages, leaping centuries into the role of a Venetian courtesan of the Sixteenth Century immortalised in a painting of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library of Yale. Tolerated by the civil and religious authorities of the city-state for the income they represented, the courtesans gathered at the Ponte delle Tetelli (Bridge of Breasts) in the Castelleto - so called because prostitutes were ordered to uncover their breasts because some of them were known to dress like men in order to attract gay clientele. Commenting the above image, Marilyn Yalom writes in her A History of the Breast (1997): "Uncovered breasts were generally associated with prostitutes, as were the yellow veils they were required to wear in public and the absence of pearls, forbidden to them by law. Yet, despite attempts to control their dress and jewelry, well-paid courtesans continued to flaunt their lavish attire and the crosses that dangled provocatively on golden chains in their cleavage".

Four centuries separate both pictures but the game is always the same: and the crux of it all still remains, dangling between the breasts.

An image can lie...

2008-10-20T17:19:00.007-04:00

I find the film poster to 1985's MISCHIEF one of the most erotic images ever. There is something in the composition of the tableaux that speaks of innocence and joy and hints at dirty secrets. First of all, Kelly Preston was at her youthful prime (she was just 22 in that picture), and the expression on her beautiful face - surprised doe eyes, parted lips that betray the need for justification, small chin drawing our attention to the full young breasts that threaten to spill out of her blouse - is a tribute to youth, to discovery, to long summer days under clear blue skies.

The context of the scene is not clear: both boy (Doug McKeon) and girl look caught in the act; but what act is that? Were they positioning themselves for sex? Is that why she has her back turned to him? Or was she trying to escape his unwanted advances?

What does the image tell us? She is barefoot, but we don't see her shoes anywhere. Were they carefully placed on the backseat? Were they lost in the struggle? Doug McKeon's left hand is resting on the front seat, supporting the weight of both their bodies: but could that same hand been caressing her dangling breasts just a moment before? A moment before something happened: before someone opened the front door, before she pushed the door open trying to escape?

Escape what? She is kneeling inside the car: she could be fending off his hands, she could have been caught fellating him. We cannot see his lap, we don't know where her other leg is resting. But our gaze is drawn to her shapely calf, to her delicate bare foot, to the swell of her firm dangling breasts.

And, whatever is going on, who wouldn't love to be Doug McKeon and hold all the answers in an eternal moment of bliss?

Fetishized Past

2008-10-19T19:00:00.012-04:00

The sense of space... of location... is paramount in any storytelling endeavour. In fact, in some instances it is an harbinger of story: it carries meaning, it brings a load of expectation, it defines what to expect. And never so much as in pulp fiction, where the setting is half the story. The spaceship and the alien planet in science fiction, the haunted house or the decrepit castle in horror, the shanty one-street town in the western, the luscious jungle in adventure stories, and so on and on, gives the reader/viewer a promise of what to expect.

In the particular case of modern pulp fiction we can observe a particular phenomenon: that of the fetishization of the past; the great Zeppelins that soar the skies above futuristic cityscapes, the potent motor-cars of the twenties and thirties, the electric apparatuses from the beginning of the twentieth century... they all gain a veneer of once future promises. The past - the safe past - acquires an aura of perfection as a background set for our mind's fantasies. Movies like QUICK SHOW (1994) or L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997) thrive on the creation of a livable fifties and forties space. A sense of immersion in history, in the past, that makes it feel as true as our own very imperfect present.

And thus, when we face something from the past, we imbue it with that perfection that only dead things can get. The past is golden... polished by yearning it gleams like hell. Case in point: the flight from New York to San Francisco aboard a DC-3 Sky Greyhound in THE SAINT STRIKES BACK (1938). Now that was class. I presume to the thirties viewer this scene was something of a product placement stunt: fly confy, fly expensive, fly the same airline The Saint flies. To the modern viewer encountering it now, it is another lie about an imagined past where an angel of an hostess walked down the aisles like a wet dream...

... smiling like the sun dissolving the clouds...

...jot down the important messages from the elegant dressers flying first class...

... and depart with a promise of heaven in the curve of her bosom...

... and the sensual sway of her round buttocks.

The big metal bird that would play such an important role in the upcoming war is now a fetishistic item from a past of luxury and adventure. A item of our wonderful and fetishized past.

The luckiest guy on Earth

2008-08-15T19:08:00.009-04:00

Or, at least, on the Buffyverse.

Charisma Carpenter became a worldwide wet dream girl when playing Cordelia Chase, first on Buffy, The Vampire Slayer (1997-1999) and then on Angel (1999-2004). Despite starting out as the vacuous "bimbo" in the first season of Buffy, she quickly won the love of viewers everywhere, smitten by her charisma (pun, obviously intended) and her ample charms... some of which became very prominent whenever she donned a tight shirt. Indeed, as the Playboy photo shoot she did for the June 2004 issue well attested, those wonderfuly round breasts are natural fuel for male fantasies everywhere.

Well, it was on Vincent Kartheiser, who plays Angel's son Connor, that fell the burden of groping Ms. Carpenter's right breast in the episode Slouching Toward Bethlehem (episode 4 of season 4, 2002). The episode marks the return of Cordelia from the "higher plane" where she has been herself slouching for the previous three episodes of the season. Returning with a bout of amnesia, Cordelia takes refuge with Connor, who doesn't waste any time replaying the most complex Oedipus on modern TV. Sensing the presence of intruders from the evil law firm of Wolfram & Heart, and pretending to be warning her not to scream, he takes the chance of palming Cordelia's breast, in a what-the-fuck-were-they-thinking heart-stopping moment.

Lucky bastard...

Can this be the craziest dream sequence...

2008-08-15T07:51:00.033-04:00

... ever to grace the screen of an adult film?

Crazy, eh?

I feel particularly dumbfounded by the milk squirting from Cinderella's breasts. Can it be a statement on mortality and the fleetingness of youth? A manifestation of fertility? Probably the yearning for the fulfilment of carnal needs that would surely tempt a young recluse on the brink of missing the hotter event of her sheltered life: the Prince's Ball.

In this light, we could read this scene as the fear - the surrounding forest that spits out this aging satyr, as well as her cruel stepsisters - of being forever under the boot of her elders, subject to every form of humiliation and degradation, never being able to enjoy life and youth. The milk spurting from her tender younger breasts would signify both her obvious sexual fertility and the fear of ending as an old matron, milked by all those around her.

Be as it may, it is a scene fit to rival with the famous pastoral romp on Borowczyk's LA BÊTE (1975), another dream sequence filled to the brim with squirting fluids. And, surely, it is the craziest dream sequence ever.

Or is it?

Keeping Centinella

2008-08-14T09:59:00.008-04:00

I was just watching HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN (1987), when it came to me that I had never noticed how beautiful an actress Cec Verrell really is. A rapid search through the actress's roster of movies on the IMDB quickly told me why: Ms. Verrell must be the most underused actress in the history of B-movies. Now, I must confess I've never seen any of her other films (although I sure intend to, now), and even in FROGTOWN, she isn't given much to do with her role. Despite a totally needless, gratuitous - but oh so welcome nude scene - she keeps such a debonair that clearly elevates her performance above the camp value of the movie itself.

Clad in the most ravishing set of post-apocalyptic military garb that clearly ante-dates Milla Jovovich's in RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION (2007), she quickly out-shines Sandahl Bergman, herself sporting a wonderful wardrobe, both as the nerdy science type and the daring secret agent in safari garb or erotic dancer robes (no nude scene, alas).

And few actresses can look as good in military garb - remember how dreadful Demi Moore looked in G.I. JANE (1997)? - caressing the M-60 heavy machine gun as if was a trained pet, or wearing ammunition-belts as if they were Cleopatra's bejewelled necklaces. But above all, I was smitten by the playfulness with which she imbued her performance. As if she was there just to lend a little light to the movie; better, as if she was in altogether different movie, looking down with warmth on the silly proceedings.

Maybe it's her classic visage, the short hair, the summer blue eyes... Or, probably, that coy little smile, so simple and so alluring, telling us that although she could (should) be in so much better films, with so much more deserving and rewarding roles, she will still give her best in this wacky exercise on sci-fi camp. And to give her best she needs but to smile, like Gioconda before her, to warm our hearts.

Hot Summer swim

2008-08-09T17:07:00.008-04:00

There's a moment where form meets perfection, where zig complements zag, where the wave laps the sky in an embrace of endless blue. We're given one such moment to contemplate, while miss Alba turns cool refreshing water into a blue-burning liquid furnace. And the ocean stands still, thankful for such a gift. Nature, subdued, turns playful, welcoming that desirable mermaid that stuffs the dreams of all us land-imprisoned sailors.

Hell, it's hot outside...

She died a little that night

2008-08-06T06:02:00.003-04:00

If one is to believe it, death is the first step into transcendence. Well, the French said it better, when they called sexual orgasm la petite mort (the little death). And I can't remember a more convincing and ecstatic orgasm then the one this beautiful lady conveys in an unforgettable scene from Joe Sarno's VIBRATIONS (1968), after being inflamed from the animal love-making sounds that filtered from next door through the wall of her bedroom.

If she surely died a little that day, she will live forever in our memory, as an affirmation of unrestrained beauty and joy, through the radiant whites that Sarno used to paint the complicit shadows.

She's got the look

2008-08-04T13:08:00.016-04:00

Surely no one today can deny that Joe Sarno is an aesthete. His earlier movies are chiaroscuro compositions of shadows cut by radiant whites; his later movies, are candy-colored explosions of subdued meaning. All his films are dynamic odes to the beauty of the female body and to the complex mental workings of the beings inhabiting them. Each and all of Sarno's characters have depth, an history that demands viewer empathy. And the story on-screen is most vividly detailed when seen through his character's eyes; for they are the windows through which viewer expectations are juggled by the master trickster.

Case in point: SIN IN THE SUBURBS (1964). In less capable hands it would be just another boring story about bored housewives in search of a passion that can substitute for their absent working husbands, their escapades obsessively timed by the train schedule, the weather or the unexpected appearance of their daughter's boyfriend, tick-tocking down the slope that will eventualy lead them into a world of sex clubs and anonymous lovers. With Sarno holding the helm, it becomes a captivating study of social mores, loneliness and need. Among the couples whose stories we're invited to partake, Audrey Campbell (later famous for the OLGA series of films) gives a fascinating performance as a housewife and mother of a teenage girl, driven by loneliness and boredom to the arms of whomever happens to be at hand. These ephemeral substitutes, however, prove to be as boring as loneliness itself.

In an unrivaled moment of frustration, during one of the afternoon reunions in her home where she entertains a man (her lover) and another couple, and with this other couple already upstairs, she manifests to her lover the growing sense of frustration and routine that begins to tarnish their 'relationship'. While he remains nonchalant, she dares him to go watch the other couple's lovemaking. And there, standing near the bed, looking down on the lovemaking couple, on the steaming sex (conveyed through sound alone), we see in her eyes the need, the hunger, the desire, the great void that is consuming her. We sense that she is feasting upon their ardeur, rekindling a fire that burns intense and oh so fast.

And we keep watching her eyes although her lover is fleetingly touching her breasts...

... unbuttoning her dress...

... kissing her earlobe...

... her neck...

... removing her bra...

It's her eyes that held us, although her nipples are peeking from under her arms, it's her eyes, it's her look, as she shows us what's going down on the bed - hot, passionate lovemaking - that draws her like a moth to a flame, that draws her as her eyes draw us into her, until she finally joins the contorting bodies and we don't see her eyes anymore.

But we know she's happy, at least for a fleeting moment. And we rejoice with her, for through her, we've also made love to the couple on the bed, made love to her...

And we're left to always search for that look on a woman's eyes again.

A new beginning

2008-08-03T12:40:00.003-04:00

And so, dear readers (if really there's anyone out there), from now on my humble blog will thread under a new name. The reason for the change? Well, I just thought I was in need of a new beginning, after almost a complete year of near inactivity.

The aim of it will still be the same: to explore the darkest fantasies of the male psyche. Or, if one does not want to sound very presumptuous, just to let ourselves be drawn by the strange and exciting allure of the feminine body and mind in danger. Sexual danger.

And what better image to convey the complex web of contradictions, dark sexual charisma, and power of the threatened female than this publicity photo of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (Cassandra Petersen)? She's imprisoned in a dark and forbidding dungeon (doesn't blue lighting and fake smoke work wonders when one wants to build an oppresive atmosphere?), arms shackled and extended above her head (exposing her vulnerability by the way her breasts are thrust forward, threatening to spill out of her low cut gown), subject to the whims of whoever has captured her. And yet... the look on her eyes; the hauteur. Defying, demanding, indifferent to danger. That's the true power of the undiminished female hero.

We Men may want to possess her, we may force ourselves upon her... we may even rape her... but she is, and still will be a creature of power.

And we, her humble subjects.

I fell in love with Amy Amanda Allen...

2008-08-01T17:53:00.008-04:00

... as soon as I saw THE RABBIT WHO ATE LAS VEGAS (Episode 7, Season 1, 1983). Although that isn't entirely true. Melinda Culea, who plays Triple A in the cult series The A-Team (1983-1989) is one of those actresses whose screen presence is charged with that kind of sensuality that makes one both want to cuddle and do dirty things to her, irrespectively of which one does first. Although her character, a journalist, was the pivotal element that led the viewer to the A-Team in the two-parter first episode of the series, she wasn't given much to do in the following episodes... that is, besides being pretty eye-candy with a promise of intellectual depth. Not withstanding, her interplay with the other characters (specially with Dwight Schultz's Howling Mad Murdock) is always funny and nice, and it was not gladly that we saw her disappear from the series after only 25 episodes.

So, in truth, I fell in love with Amy Amanda Allen from the start. Who can resist a sexy investigative reporter that follows doggedly a crack commando unit, surviving as soldiers of fortune, to engage them in a foreign mission and than has the gall to blackmail them into accepting her as one of them? Not I, rest assured.

And she was sexy from start of episode one, wearing a pink dress on a Mexican beach, smiling that warm smile of hers, playing at being the all-american sweet-heart. But it wasn't until episode 7 that she got to wear an unforgettable mini-skirt, carried in Face's arms. Man, the way the light played on her stockinged lithe legs... Everything in her was luminous sensuality, from the red suede boots to the dark patch of panties peeking from the shadowed valley of unfulfilled promises between her shapely thighs.

Amy would ware some other mini-skirts and short-dresses on later episodes of the show. Bu you know what they say: there's no love like the first love, and no memory moment carries more magic than that one.

We miss you Amy.

I fell in love with Daisy Duke...

2008-05-09T11:18:00.008-04:00

... when I was but a teen. And how could you not? She was sassy, smart, sexy and a she-devil behind the wheel of a car. I remember going to high-school carrying a Dukes of Hazzard ledger, graced with wonderful pictures of Daisy (Catherine Bach) and her hypnotically short denim shorts.

Yes, for the teenager I then was, Daisy Duke had the most gorgeous legs in the entire world! And since then, her legs have inhabited my memory as such. They were long as ideal female legs should be, shining under the sheer hose she seemed to perpetually wear. And the show knew it, displaying them openly as the eye-catching treasures they were (both getting her in trouble and out of it... along with the viewers out of our minds).

Strangely, Daisy never stroke me as a breasty girl. All that leg, climbing all the way to that shapely buttocks of her, dominated my mind for the years since I've last seen the show in 1985.

Yesterday I was watching the first episode of the first season of the cult TV Series (The One-Armed Bandit, 1979), and the revelation was breathtaking, as the screencap above can well attest.

I'll have to frisk you...

2007-10-16T07:32:00.000-04:00

There’s no stronger heart-pounding moment in fiction than that in which someone says that our heroine must be frisked. It’s the horniest in breached space. It’s the use of power and authority to satisfy the most primitive of compulsions: that to explore the female anatomy. Like peeping through a keyhole (the first stage of sexual curiosity) and the tentative groping in the darkened cinema or the interior of a parked car, frisking the suspect harks back to unsatisfied desires of an adolescent mind.

To watch it on film, is to relive those days of youth, when the world was full of promise. Here we have three instances of frisking on film. The first one comes from Quick (1993), a Rick King vehicle for hottie actress Teri Polo, who plays here the role of the title character, a paid assassin hired to eliminate a mob accountant, played by nerdy actor Martin Donovan. This scene takes place when Quick (Polo) visits the lair of mob kingpin Robert Davi, and a lucky bit-player gets to frisk her with evident gusto. Unfortunately, the search is interrupted precisely when he tries to reach for miss Polo’s breasts.

It is more or less a staple (more implied than explicit) of action vehicles starring hot young female leads. In Fathom (1967) sexy spy Raquel Welch must expose her breasts to the villain (making us wish she’d do it for the audience as well) in order to assure him she’s not carrying concealed weapons. And in the Ginger series of films, Cheri Caffaro is subjected to several body searches, despite her skimpy outfits.

Let us now turn to Double Impact (1991), Sheldon Lettich’s classic double dose of Van Damme action. Here, the frisking (purred deliciously by Corinna Everson, just seconds before she pushes hot Alonna Shaw – in her first screen role – against a sceptic office wall) is pure sexual innuendo. Danielle Wild (Shaw) works for the bad guys, but she’s soon converted to the cause of good and starts helping twin brothers Alex and Chad (both Van Damme), taking advantage of her position inside the organization. She’s surprised by badass mama Kara while searching through the archive files, and gets frisked in a steamy if short scene. Kara finishes by asking: “Now, do you want to frisk me?”

In both these situations it’s well in evidence the sexual nature of the frisking. When you dwell in a lawless environment, what would be a police procedure turns into wish-fulfilling abuse. That the search for concealed weapons is in most instances no more than an excuse for groping (with all the implied relations of power) the female body (the opposite is far more unusual) is made blatantly clear in this scene, taken from Alan Robert’s Karate Cop (1991).

In this scene, all the viewers’ expectations are played with in a savvy, tongue in cheek approach. When Rachel (Carrie Chambers), the heroine of this post-apocalyptic sci-fi actioneer, is taken by Snaker’s (Michael Bristow) henchmen and held in restraint, incapable of resistance, the über villain, played with campy aplomb by Mr. Bristow, when enraged by her defiance, wants to know: “Has anyone searched her for hidden weapons?”

And gladly proceeds to do it himself. Knowing what the audience expects – confessing the fact that the “search” is merely a pretext for sexual groping – he does it theatrically, in a precise three-step rhythm, closing his paws on Ms. Chambers’ hips, waist and finally, breasts. He doesn’t even pretend to be trying to find any weapon. It’s the sexual innuendo taken into solid affirmation of power.

And the expression on Rachel's face is pure bliss for us sick viewers. («I'd rather have sex with a warthog.» « That can be arranged.»)

(I must apologise for the poor quality of the Quick and Karate Cop stills, but they were taken from some old VHS copies from my own personal collection).

THE SLIME BEAST by Guy N. Smith (1976)

2007-10-13T19:34:00.001-04:00

Guy N. Smith is a hack writer mostly known for his Crabs series. And when one says hack writer in conjunction with Guy Smith, it means precisely that: the guy hacks his stories out of the typewriter with the panache of the proverbial 1000 blind monkeys trying to compose a Shakespearean sonnet. Fear not. He won’t do it, even if the monkeys succeed.

Truth to tell, Mr. Smith writes to recipe: select a monster on the rampage (it needn’t be an original one), add a loony scientist, a hunk hero, a sex interest dumb girl, mix in some violence, a lot of gore and a modicum of sex, shake it up in short sentences composing short chapters and you’ll have a short fun book to read.

And that is also the recipe for the book at hand. The Slime Beast is how the dimwits that pass for the heroes of this short novel treat the smelly abomination they’ve found buried beneath the bogs of the Wash, in the Eastern Coast of Britain.

Well, these dimwits are Professor Lowson, who doesn’t do much but shuffle papers and books on his quarters, and lit a pipe every time he’s described as an archaeologist; Gavin Royle, the hunky Assistant-curator of the British Museum, who doesn’t do nothing much but look the hero, utter short sentences and profess anti-science views, and, of course, lusting over Liz Beck, the professor’s niece (yeap, you read it right, it is that clichéd) who doesn’t do much but sex up the story, allowing Gavin to ejaculate his seed over her thighs as a contraceptive method, and serve as the target for two rape attempts, one of them by the entire village of Sutton (don’t get your hopes high, it sounds more fun than it reads).

Now, please consider that these three form the entire expedition that tries to uncover the location of King John’s lost treasure, and you’ll have the full extent of how ludicrous the story gets. True to Susan Sontag’s purported structure of the 50’s science fiction movies (read, please, Sontag’s Against Interpretation, 1962), this “expedition” accidentally bop into a strange reptilian creature of unknown origin, buried in the mud flats, and quickly all hell breaks loose. It has to be said that it only happens because our dimwit heroes seem not to share a whole brain between them, managing to do the silliest things all the time (like leaving the creature where they find it, never informing the authorities even after it had started killing people, and not even after the whole village of Sutton tries to kill them on the counts that they had awakened the spirit intended to protect the treasure. Yes, they are all dimwits in this book.

Of particular interest to our purposes, there are two staples of the damsel in distress pulp genre narrative in use here: first, the expedition to the uncharted wilderness. Well, maybe we can’t refer to the eastern coast of England as uncharted, but the way Smith describes it, it works as an embodiment of the lost or primitive world’s savage village, where the natives can not be trusted. We find it in every Tarzan movie, as well as in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Wrong Turn (2002) or any other adventure movie you can think of. In fact, observe how Smith describes it: “The rows of cottages and houses were reminders of a past era, of primitiveness, and poverty. Even in this affluent age they had not move with the times. That was the way these people of the Wash wanted it” (p.76).

The operating concepts here are “primitiveness”, “poverty” and “will”(to remain so). That’s what makes them dangerous, even when the monster is killing them one by one. It dates back to the Roman Empire, when an edict from Adrian forbid the rural inhabitants of entering Rome, on account of noisiness, uncleanness and improper behaviour. Obviously, it is the age old riff between primitive and civilized, rural and urban, archaic and modern. Primitiveness bellies a proximity to animals, a closeness to nature, an identity between the animal in man and the self. It speaks of implied bestiality.

And, if the creature doesn’t lust after Liz (as so many Bug Eyed Monsters did in the old pulp covers), the villagers surely do. They are almost as dangerous to our heroes as the beast. When they try to kill them one night, they are eager to rape Liz en masse. And when Mallard Glover, the hermit wildfowler and an unexpected local ally is entrusted with taking care of Liz, he can’t resist his animal instincts, and tries to rape her as well, while she sleeps.

“She was lying on top of the sleeping bag eyes closed, asleep. There were a couple of buttons on her blouse undone. She wasn’t even wearing a bra. He leaned forward in order to obtain a better view. Now he could see a nipple”. I must confess I am a big fan of this kind of scene where the heroine is defenceless in her sleep, being watched, undressed, groped. It speaks of a second level of exploration: also the female body is uncharted territory, daring to be braved, mapped, explored. And, just like the primitive territories that are exploited by civilized capitalism, it can be either admired, enjoyed or raped. It echoes the main theme of the expedition, of the savage in us.

And the sleeping female, the sleeping beauty, can only be awakened by a sweet kiss (as in the fairy tale) or by ravaging, like Anne Rice’s take on it in her The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. The innocence of sleep can be spoiled by the outside world. And this is the second staple I’ve mentioned before, the unconscious female, standing for nature against nurture.

I'll get back to this theme later.

Breached Space: LA COCCINELLA

2007-09-20T12:11:00.000-04:00

La Cocinella is a short film (30’) by Nello Pepe. At a first glance, it doesn’t seem to be a part of the grand tradition of Damsels in Distress that this blog intends to enshrine. But it works as a nice exercise in breached space, as it tells the story of a young sterile wife (very sexy actress Francesca Nunzi) who needs a sperm donor (Marco di Steffano) in order to get pregnant. Her husband has invited the donor to their home while away on business, but the artsy donor doesn’t feel capable of “performing” for a plastic cup in the couples’ bathroom, to the growing despair of the anxious and uncomfortable wife.

As the time passes and the successive attempts to raise the mast of success succumb to the awkwardness of the situation, they start to try several more risqué alternatives. She dances erotically for him, while he is sitting at the toilet, peeking through the keyhole (a first breach of the personal space, through the immortal medium of voyeurism). As she is not a very capable or enticing dancer (the scene is awkward, as we watch a very sensual actress pretending she is just a shy inexperienced housewife) they try phone sex, from the bedroom to the bathroom, with identical results.

Attributing the failure to the confined and oppressive space of the bathroom, they relocate to the living room, where the donor, an artist, tells her that he usually gets excited when he’s painting, and implies that should she allow him to draw her it could work. Well, it doesn’t, but we have mounted another step on the lather of breaching space. From the visual through the keyhole, we breached the space of the imagination through the phone and are now separated by the thinness of a sheet of paper.

When it also fails, she proposes that he just do it there, looking at her. He agrees, lets the cup fall to the floor, they both make a go for it, space is breached as he grabs her breast. What are you doing?, she cries. I’m trying to make this work!

And there ensues a very hot and steaming sex scene, that goes to show that nature’s methods are still the best ones. It is worth repeating that Francesca Nunzi is a very sexy actress. Adding to her ample personal charms, the intensity of the scene is compounded by the knowledge – stitched there, in the back of the viewer’s mind – that it is not proper adultery, and that it is not fully consensual sex. There is a dimension of necessity that, in the logic inherent to the erotic fantasy, forces the wife to have sex with a stranger. A manifestation of breached space.

Ok. So you may not by my theory. But I had – I just had – to print here these sexy grabs from the film. It can be found in the second of four discs that Filmax has published in Spain under the title Tinto Brass presenta Sus Cuentos Mas Atrevidos (Vols. 1-4, 2002)

Breached Space

2007-09-20T12:03:00.000-04:00

Let me now propose to you an unconventional idea: that one of the central elements of eroticism is that of breached space. That it is the threat of invaded personal space that spices up so many erotic thrillers as well as much of the adventure pulps. Robert Scholes, in his comprehensive essay Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision (with Eric Rabkin, 1977) has counted as many as seventy-four attempted rapes in the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Obviously, it would not do to have the main heroine being effectively raped in a bunch of novels read by kids (although one can ask how many interior fires that menace have started), but it isn’t less true that it is precisely the implied menace that is so thrilling and exciting.

And one of the most effective ways to convey that menace is through the breaching of personal space. One does so in one of two instances: when one as a relation of affection with the person whose personal space is being invaded or shared (family, friends, a lover); and when exerting an act of aggression (when you have to literally step over the virtual line separating personal spaces). It can be argued that the breaching of the heroine’s personal space as a mean of sexual thrilling has much to do with the so-called phallocracy that purports the heroine as “territory” of the hero, thus making that invasion one of the personal space of the hero. But that doesn’t hold water in the cases of independent heroines such as Red Sonja, Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Modesty Blaise, Brigitte Monfort, Ginger and so on, so I won’t consider it here.

One of the most exciting examples of breached space in pulp or erotic thrillers is that of the undercover heroine that must get inside a) a strip club b) a prostitution or white slavery ring c) any other similar situation where her maidenhood is in danger (and I say maidenhood not as a literal concept). Considerer Miss Temple in The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (2006), Athena Massey in The Unspeakable (1996) or the young and naïve Clara in the most erotic novel of all times The Devil’s Advocate (1942).

In each of these cases the heroine has to infiltrate an inimical space, knowing that she may have to pay the correspondent cost of such invasion in terms of bodily currency. In the three examples above, Miss Temple (a Victorian maiden) escapes with her virginity intact, although she feels her fire stoked and is almost raped; Athena Massey is a cop, not a virgin, and must demean herself by stripping naked on the pole (her space is breached with the eyes); while Clara, almost a child in sexual matters, is progressively immersed in a web of depravation that will subject her to vaginal, oral and anal sex (and “between my breasts too”) in order to discover whatever happened to her sister Rita.

And, in each instance, whenever the personal space is breached, we know we’ll have: a) sex (the heroine will be raped or will have to forcefully consent to sexual advances); b) violence (the heroine will fight the assailant or the “hero” or some outside force will intervene).
It’s in those moments that precede the breaching, that stretch the undefined boundary between spaces, between force and consent, that we find the most sublime eroticism.

THE GLASS BOOKS OF THE DREAM EATERS by Gordon Dahlquist

2007-09-17T12:27:00.000-04:00

I cannot recommend strongly enough this wonderful book by Mr. Gordon Dahlquist. If it has all the ingredients to please the fans of several literary genres from steampunk to dark fantasy, its first chapter - Temple - is a tour de force in successfully adopting the tone of a Victorian novel.

The eponymous character, Miss Temple, is a young wealthy lady of 25 ("too old to be single") who, when receiving a letter from her fiancee ending their relationship, is determined to follow him in order to learn the dreaded reason why. It is not clear if she feels more afraid of finding out that the culprit was another woman (one can always slap her) or just the fastidious aim to ascension inside the boring duties of the Ministry.

Her investigation will lead her to a sinister ride on a mostly empty train boarded only by masked men and women who assemble in a not less sinister mansion for a purpose that is not immediately clear to the reader or to Miss Temple. One thing that seems clear is that some of the women are prostitutes, there to entertain part of the guests while real business is carried somewhere else.

Well, the reader's heart must be beating by now. In true pulp sleazy style, Miss Temple is able to pass herself as one of a group of prostitutes, and is immediately led to a changing room, where she's expected to don some very sexy and revealing white silk corset. I must say it is a hell of an erotic read.

Miss Temple is a truly Victorian heroine, not much dissimilar from Catherine Morlan of Northanger Abbey fame, although a lot more smart. And Mr. Dahlquist clearly knows his gothic novels, as he smoothly parades before the reader a succession of horror cliches, from the steps approaching in the dark, through some macabre medical cabinet to a very touchable atmosphere of dread and menace. The shadows are rich with innuendo, as are some of the weird characters that cross this brief section (of around 70 unforgettable pages).

Before the section ends, we'll see Miss Temple at the receiving end of a fairly graphic rape attempt; but the high point must be the scene when she is changing clothes to a more revealing outfit in front of a mirror. As she dons the sexy corset, breathing fast, pink nipples visible above the cloth, it's not only wardrobes being changed. We assist to a profound change in the demeanor of the young (virgin) Victorian girl, and it speaks sociological volumes of an era when even the table legs had to be covered.

I'll return to this novel as I progress in its reading.

INTO THE FIRE by Richard Laymon

2007-09-16T18:12:00.001-04:00

What’s Richard Laymon’s secret? What is it that makes his novels unputdownable? First of all, it’s the sheer strangeness that he imbues in everyday occurrences. He can see, and make us see, the familiar through the naïve – but oh so resilient – eyes of youth. For him, every thing is new. With his characters, we’re just exploring the world for the first time, minds overflowing with heroic and erotic ideals. Even when we find out we’re living in a world of overflowing nightmares.

True, there’s much not to like in his books: the bad guys are usually fat, ugly, filthy and mean; usually they are bums or homeless people. But so are the good guys. Filthy and mean, that is. Remember, they are living the hormone fuelled years of youth. That means meanness, callousness, indifference, larger than life antics and dastardly daring dos.

It’s Laymon’s female characters that are the richest. They are at the same time Justine and Julliette, the virgin and the whore in one single beautiful body. They may be simple wish-fulfilling ideals of a middle age author living an eternal teenage. But they are the lights that attract the moth-readers to the raging fires of his books.

Richard Laymon died five years ago, too soon. His first published novel, The Cellar (1980) was a huge success. And deservedly so. The final chapter, written as an uninterrupted dialog that sheds light on what is going on, should be read in every writing class around the world. His second, The Woods Are Dark (1981) was a not less deservedly flop that almost ended his career then and there. It surely kept him away from the American radars while his reputation grew overseas. The experience was enriching. It helped him find the balance between weirdness and outright pornography. He might have written to formula, but few did it as well as he did.

Into the Fire (2006) is his latest posthumous novel. I confess I don’t really know when it was written or, if unfinished, who did the final writing. The reader who comes to it as a Laymon fan, will find here much familiar territory. Fortunately he won’t find such an abrupt change of style as in No Sanctuary (2003), clearly an unfinished draft completed by a hack, or an hopscotch of earlier writings like Amara (2005).

And, in some ways, Laymon have risen the stakes of weirdness when telling three parallel stories that will intermingle with disastrous results. He treats us to an American geography of madness and meanness, as Pamela (escaping from a mad rapist that has just killed her husband and abducted her to the desert, is saved by a strange and sinister man who drives around in a ancient school bus filled with mannequins) and Duke, Boots and Norman (three teenage hoodlums), converge into the desert ghost town of Pits, where a new breed of cannibals thrive. It is a topography populated with eccentric characters, where the victims are as guilty as the perpetrators, and where minds get twisted by fate.

And, as should be when opening a Laymon book, it oozes sex (here perhaps more openly and unashamedly than in previous novels) and eroticism intermingled with all the violence. It sometimes gets to moments of twisted surrealism, as when Pamela falls asleep having her hurt feet massaged by blonde nordic Nicki: “Her eyes snapped open. The trailer was in near darkness. Peppermint scented the air. Her feet were still being massaged, only… Only differently now. Raising her head a little. She looked down he length of her body. Nicki still knelt by the sofa. She’d removed her sweater. Holding Pamela’s feet by the ankles, she rubbed her big, soft breasts against the soles of her feet. The nipples felt like fingertips” (p.121).

It is not a novel at the same level as The Stake, Bite, Night Games or Funland, but it is pure unadulterated fun with a punch that’s Laymon’s own.

Catchphrase: “He sweated like a pig that’d learned the truth about bacon".

Welcome to this depraved lair...

2007-09-16T17:55:00.000-04:00

.... where damsels will be in dire distress, as we explore their tribulations on films, novels and comics. This blog's name comes from the belief that it is in Sade's Justine ou Les Infortunes de la Vertu (1787) that we can find the prototype of both the pulp maidem and the sexually conscious modern heroines. An archtype of innocence, lust and sexual awakening that can be found both in the heroines of jungle adventure tales (Tarzan's Jane for instance) or more modern satires as Terry Southern and Mason Offenberg's Candy. And that just not to mention recent incarnations of Justine that may range from Alien's Ripley to Star Trek's Six o'Nine.

So stick with me as we brave our path through rapes (both attempted and consumated), revenges, innocent virgins and undercover missions. Themes that have made the mad, delirious and loveble world of sexploitation.

Welcome!