Celluloid Wunderkammer: Call Me Tonight (1986)

From http://i1091.photobucket.com/albums/i386/jgespi/caratulas/CallMeTonightRedux-1.jpg

Dir. Tatsuya Okamoto

Contrary to the provocative image that I've included at the beginning, this short piece of obscure anime flips the expectations for hentai into how perverse the concept of tentacle erotica is. I've been lucky to discover these fascinating obscurities released straight to video, mainly thanks to the Anime News Network article series Buried Treasure - found here - and thankfully these works that have never been released on DVD even in their home country have been discovered by Western fans, subtitled by said fans, and made available online. I admit to haven't even see key anime works like Cowboy Bebop (1998) yet seen the likes of Call Me Tonight, my habit for digging deep into the depths of my favourite things sending me to material like this, made back when money was plenty enough for a subversion of anime sexuality, when anime hentai was only birthed within the same decade, to be made. If this material was made available on DVD, when pigs fly, they would be fascinating curiosities for anyone to see.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/19348/celluloid-wunderkammer-call-me-tonight-1986-director-tatsuya-okamoto/

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/call-me-tonight/w448/call-me-tonight.jpg

Mini-Review: Voodoo Passion aka. Der Ruf der blonden Göttin (1977)

From http://imageshack.us/a/img802/1332/l9x3.jpg

Dir. Jesus Franco

Voodoo Passion is straight-up softcore. There is a story of such, but the main and consistent part of the film is the nudity of its female actresses and sex. It feels like a Franco film, a slow and deliberate pace, dream-like, but its streamlined back to the obsession with the female form more so than Female Vampire (1973). Your ability to like this film depends on your liking of mood in Franco's work. A newly wedded wife of a government official moves to Haiti, only to feel that her sense of reality is dissipating as she believes she's murdered people. As this happens, the sensuality of the local music, and the draw of both her husband's platinum blonde haired, and horny, sister and their maid servant, is becoming too much to handle.

What could come off as a "voodoo is bad" film, under the belief that she's being manipulated and with voodoo dolls laying around the house, actually turns out to be immensely different. Baring in mind it feels less like French softcore than the older film, but more Euro softcore, with said sister whose continually nude and lusting over her brother's wife, it's very much a reimagining of Franco's own Nightmares Come at Night (1970). There's shades of Female Vampire too in at least one moment. Far from feeling like Franco tritely repeating himself, it's actually cool that he was riffing on his own work repeatedly in different tones and styles. It helped that he never made the same type repeatedly each time - which may have made this sort of thing too much when he had the expansive filmography he had - and the interconnectivity of it all, that characters are doomed to be repeating the follies of previous Franco characters, is engaging as an idea in taking his whole filmography as one giant film. It comes off as befitting a musician whose main obsession, jazz, could be as much about repeating sequences from previous work and taking it into new improvisions. The thin plot for Voodoo Passion is enough for Franco to push his female protagonist through a series of scenarios where erotic and bloody incidents take place out of her hands. It also becomes apparent, even if depicting its setting as exotic, that Franco is on the side of the Haitians just because he leaps on the opportunity to use the environment's musical rhythms in his film's score instantly, mixing it with jazz as the film progresses. A lot of the film is people being taken away by the beats of the music, equal opportunity nudity by the bucket load, the entire film more of a musical piece than a narrative. Long stretches, when it's not the softcore sex, is lengthy moments of dance, of characters wandering rooms and outside, the entire eighty minutes or so a vast lengthy atmospheric piece.

Its definitely a weaker Franco piece. It does feel long trying to exist only on its nudity and music, not even a basic plot. Nightmares Come at Night (1970), which it takes its inspiration from, was drawing on an abstract air and slightly more complicated narrative. Admittedly the films which repeat tropes from his previous work, that I've seen so far, have felt weaker, though I don't dismiss those films at all, just that in this case, Voodoo Passion is definitely the weakest of the two. It mainly rests on its erotic material and it has to be viewed through that mainly. Is it sexy? Titillating? I confess to being attracted to every woman onscreen, and to Franco's credit the women (and men) are of many shapes and sizes, and that his actresses, even if lusted over, at least had a distinctness and charisma to them that made them more human than vacant. For a man who could get very scuzzy, the film is actually a lot more held back too despite the wall-to-wall nudity. Its solid visual appearance probably  explains this - this is not The Devil Hunter (1980) which does feel scuzzy - and for simple titillation this film is far and above most softcore of now, which is legitimately worse than something like this in quality in so many ways. Whether you can appreciate this film for that or not is entirely of a subjective opinion in this case rather than with other Jess Franco films.

From http://eutorrents.ph/imagehost/images/derrufjvj.jpg

Going Through The To-Watch List #1 - Bare Behind Bars (1980)

From http://wrongsideoftheart.com/wp-content/gallery/posters-b/bare_behind_bars_poster_01.jpg

Dir. Oswaldo de Oliveira

With this I'm starting a project that this blog will be incredibly useful in pushing along - clearing out my To-Watch pile. It's not a significant problem, avoiding an obvious pun considering the first film I'm covering, but I want to clear and rewatch through films I've had for up to five years now. It's going to last up to next year, and while I won't review all of them, and there will likely be some bad films I have to go through, there will be at least some peculiar choices within this project. Like Bare Behind Bars. Note the version I viewed was technically censored. For me a single second can have a drastic change on a final film, but I can still fully review this Brazilian women-in-prison film once banned in Britain because, while 1 minute and 35 seconds have been removed by request of the BBFC here, I don't think it drastically changes the film. If an uncut version was available would I watch that one and get a new review from it? Maybe, but this one is fine as it is.

From http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly5v2gvflA1qziwcjo1_1280.jpg

This is certainly one of scuzziest films I've reviewed on this blog, barring of course Alien From The Darkness (1996) for Videotape Swapshop, the difficulty in finding screenshots that have no nudity in them a little harder here because it's a key point of the film and rampant in this content for eighty percent of its sum total. I've avoided nudity and sex in a lot of my screenshot choices over the year or so of adding them to my blog reviews, out of a desire of not coming off as another male film fan whose just obsessed with bared breasts and nudity, thus alienating any potential female readers, but this review is going to have a bit of perversion this time. There was an explicit tag before you enter this site for this reason.

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There's actually not a lot of plot here in the film. A group of convicts in an all female prison slowly plan to escape. Aside from this, the film is bordering on aimless porn but only reaches softcore which just skips to the sex instead of much actual plot. In a rat infested, oppressive prison of torture and neglect everyone has given up and, barring that group who want to escape, decided to shag her nearest neighbours, even prison guard, no stop. The head warden sleeps with her prisoners or sends them off to be playthings for older women, the guards are sleeping with everyone, the bubble headed nurse is in a relationship with one prisoner full of bizarre habits, and the prisoners themselves are literally passing dildos on the same fishing line, from one cell to the other, they trade secret messages on. It truly feels like porn, the removed footage for the British television screening (?!) actually pornographic content, and emphasises this tone by crash cuts to any random sexual acts it could imagine taking place, from 69ing to a phallic cut pineapple being licked. Instantly the area of the male subconscious called "guilt" is reached and asks "should I be watching this?", only for the answer to be a lot more complicated when thought about carefully. The film itself is trashy, with no regard for eroticism, emotion, romance or relationships, just wall-to-wall nudity and titillation. Like the nurse character, high on her own ether stocks and completely weird even if she wasn't on it continually, this film is off-its-gourd in tone. Bafflement is a more likely response to it than actual offense.

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What do you react to in a film like this? Honestly, to get offended by it, if you're not the target audience who would find it a turn on or giggling at its brazen tone, is pointless. There is worse in existence. There are obvious issues still with the content but even an absolute greenhorn like myself in the area of sexuality has learnt how complex this and gender politics actually are. Some will be understandably shocked by the sexualised degradation, with some torture too, but it's no way near as shocking now and barely scrapping the world of BDSM that, despite my little knowledge of it, still has humiliation and dominance scenarios more extreme than shown in here. And that's not taking into account completely fantastical scenarios or sexual masochism like with the direction the late artist/performer Bob Flanagan took it to. The potential gender issues, of a film made by a man for men to drool over stereotypes of lesbians, is more of an issue for me in the discrepancy of material made by people of both genders and all sexualities. If there was a market for it, and people were allowed the budgets and international distribution these exploitation films had, there should have been women-in-prison erotica made by lesbians for lesbians. There should have been ones set in an all male prison with homoerotic longings and lusting over the pained and battered male bodies. These films may actually exist, but in cult circles its patriarchal, heterosexual films like Bared Behind Bars that get the coverage and DVD releases, which is the discrepancy. This film is an example of a more significant issue to tackle in society, not the problem itself.

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The actual, eye rolling issue with the film for me is, forgiving the actual pun of the review, the movie eventually loses its balls. For three quarters of it length, there are no male characters. One man appears and sleeps with a guard in the storage room, where everyone seems to go to have more intimate relationships, but it's a passing moment of fun between them with no connection to anyone else. The prison setting is one of misery, but the porno tone actually makes it seem that everyone is enjoying themselves way too much, where even taking a shower together sets the prisoners (and their watching guards) off, emphasised by the continuous amount of sex and nudity throughout. The head warden gets to the point she's completely knackered by the next morning from her relationship with one person each night before. Accidentally, for the exploitation content, the film suggests women characters completely disconnected from men and being perfectly content with their own company. When the escape story takes place it goes over to even more subversive areas at the beginning. Then a male or two panicked. The horrible moment in these exploitation films where social norms must win and patriarchy must dominate happens again. Suddenly female characters have to shack up with hairy men, rearing out that damn chestnut that "really, all women desire the love of a man", which is obnoxious, and honestly, feels like the threatened ideology of males jealous of women and compensating for a lack of testicular fortitude of their own. An all-male police force crack down on everyone, a male prison governor gets involved, and while you may be sympathetic to the anti-hero women, it feels like, in masculinity taking power from the female "perverts", my own gender was taking a dump in my mind and embarrassing itself again. This is the real piece of offence of Bared Behind Bars, not lots of very naked women grinding into each other, or in one case, bringing out the strap-ons.

From http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/dvd_reviews53/bare_behind_bars_
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The film even before this crumbles because it has no real plot or tone, just a series of sexual events. It's usually funny when the nurse is onscreen because, along with her English dubbing voice, everything she does is incredibly weird. But the film is dated. It's surprising how far this film goes in content but it's not shocking anymore. It's so full of sex every few minutes that it's not actually titillating, and being mere softcore it cannot become masturbatory material either when viewers could get actual porn online. It could have been sexually potent if there was actual eroticism, but set in dull, oppressive grey prison sets, the camera shows too much of the clearly artificial sets, and the content, upfront and with inmates writhing each other willy nilly like the contents of a gummy worms sweet bag on a vibrating chair, is comically trashy instead. There is something far more transgressive about this film than many others, befitting a country of origin that also gave birth to Coffin Joe, but barring this its nothing shocking or memorable unless you like the car crash of arbitrary nudity and that nurse's ridiculous behaviour. Compare it to Japan's Female Prisoner Scorpion films and it's a sitting target against those films and their technical craft and unconventionality. Its junk and its unfortunately not very memorable junk unless you include the moments where you ask "are those two women really doing that in the storage room?". But this is not memorable in a way beyond catching you off guard and being the moments you immediately conjure up separately then remember the rest of the film fully. My desensitisation to this kind of material influenced this opinion definitely, as I clear through films like this on my to-watch pile, but once you get to that point, you realise what is legitimately shocking and what's just tacky. There's a tacky thrill to the film, but while I'll defend it from accusations of the content, I'm not that fond of it that much by the end.

Your guess is as good as mine. 
(From http://atrocitynights.com/Watching/Images/bbb.jpg)

Representing Canada: Ilsa, The Tigress of Siberia (1977)

From http://wrongsideoftheart.com/wp-content/gallery/posters-i/ilsa_tigress_of_siberia_poster_03.jpg

Dir. Jean LaFleur

There are many things I praise the BBFC, British Board of Film Classification, for since 2000, when they became more lenient on the films acceptable to see in British for the better, but there are a lot of things about them that anger me. An entire social cosmos of modern British attitudes can be gauged in what they censor as well as pass, including the contradictions. With one exception that was released on DVD over here, SS Experiment Camp (1976),  the Naziploitation subgenre has never been acceptable in its mixing of sex, torture and swastikas. Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975), a Canadian film that started the subgenre proper, will probably not be released in Britain still, rejected back when it was first released. Sexual violence is one of the last remaining taboos left that, understandably despite my anti-censorship beliefs, will not die, and a film which has potentially trangressive S&M scenarios, baring a few that have been released, will probably have a tough time being passed uncut or at all still. In the outside world, that Canadian film managed to spawn Italian rip-offs, many put on the Video Nasties list, and the film itself spawned sequels that went away from the Nazis. One of them, Ilsa, The Tigress of Siberia, has been shown on British television uncut in October 2013. The hypocrisy that is latent in this is clear. A film that trivialises the Stalinist gulags, where real people died on mass, for seeing Dyanne Thorne naked and gore, is allowed to be shown on our TV yet Naziploitation is still taboo because it has more historical meaning for the country is questionable even if I'm glad the film was actually broadcasted. I am baring in mind that it hasn't got a lot of really objectionable material that would trouble the BBFC, but the issue is there. If suddenly Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS was passed or another Naziploitation film was released, I would not say this, but until then this point sticks out. As for the film itself...

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The first half is set in a Serbia gulag, where dissidents are brainwashed for the Stalinist cause by Ilsa (Thorne) and her minions/sex partners. One man stands out as being unbreakable, which she wants to reverse. Made with a ragged tone, set in almost desolate locations using Canadian snowy wilderness, it's still pretty raw even by today's standards despite being ridiculous. A lot of this is because, for all the freedom is cinema in terms of violence and sex now, this feels more blatant and lurid about it. The sex, where Thorne (and almost all the female cast) are naked at some point, and her character is insatiable for human comfort, feels like porn has directly influenced it even if nothing is seen. One scene with Ilsa and two of her minions, frankly, becomes double penetration, which causes me to wonder what erotica and pornography at this period of the seventies was like, as the film in these sex scenes and anytime an actress disrobes suddenly has a sheen of softcore. You suddenly expect there to be Vaseline on the camera despite the fact the same raggy look is still there in them. The other content, Ilsa's various methods of torture and brutality, are just as exaggerated. The gore is not that extreme, baring one exception, but the actual material is surprising. The tigress as a pet tiger, as you do, to feed prisoners to. The brain washing is through electric shock punishment, not that different from what the evil communists did to Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). Throughout the film there's limb removal, spear impalement and general abuse of the body. And there is a scene with two chainsaws and arm wrestling that is still striking now, something you will never see in any other film to my knowledge. It's incredibly exploitative. But maybe its my distinctions between legitimately offensive material and these exploitation films distancing further, or I've given up with certain forms of political correctness after realising it has no content to the real world and real issues of human behaviour, but I admit this first half did engage me despite trivialising real historical content. The sexuality of the film is sensual, and titillating in a very vulgar but potent way. An older woman here, Thorne is attractive here while not becoming the kind of actress used in, say for example, most of Andy Sidaris' films whose there because she has large assets, if one is to be honest, and no charisma whatsoever. The tackiness and schlockyness of it all is actually a virtue. And in all its tactlessness in using communist purges, the film by itself is no less as offensive that actual sexual and fantasy scenarios which play with dominance, which if it's an issue for people has more to do with needing to probe the human mind that created the fantasies that criticising the actual scenarios. The only difference here is that there occasional gore from a horror movie spliced in-between it.

From http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/4764/ilsa4vs1.jpg

The second half takes a drastic shift. A huge time and geographical change. It suddenly becomes a strange, strange film, close to Jess Franco but its own weird beast of erotic political thriller. The use of a computer that projects one's nightmares leads to surreal images, and the film at this point gets completely silly rather than tasteless. Someone dies by a waterbed in the least expected way possible. There's unexpected use of a spear on a modern piece of technology. And at this point the real issue with the film is clear. It's not that it weaves sexuality and violence in disconcerting ways. Many films do this that I have defended. Some are awful however because their lifeless, terrible filmmaking actually makes the content offensive because, stripped of any craft, it becomes clear these films are just an excuse to pander to this material in a lazy, presumed to be inherent way rather than something legitimately transgressive. Here, with Ilsa, The Tigress of Siberia, the problem is just that its workman-like schlock. It's entertaining as it is, far from offensive in my mind, but there's no craft. Remove Thorne, and it's a generic film which sustains itself through an occasionally ridiculous moment and sex. Not through real craft, imagination or being truly gonzo and weird. It's strange, but not truly weird to be an interesting cult movie.

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Altogether this film is watchable. Merely tasteless entertainment because, barring the historical reference, there is nothing to be offended by even if it's still pretty surprising. It pushes itself close to the camp of films made by Jess Franco, rarely made now even in a period which has a great deal of artistic freedom, this fact counterbalanced by a hesitance to go this direction for political correctness or for the likelihood now of making it in a way that actually feels cheap rather than trangressive and potentially artistic. Unlike a good Franco film, its no way near as interesting. As distinct with a unique voice. It's no way near as bizarre as it could have been considering the direction it goes with computer generated nightmares and Soviet mercenary raids. The fact that it's a sequel probably doesn't help. Without seeing the original, I can still see that this is trying to continue spinning the wheels for a series with some desperation. Desperate use of nudity and sex. A Soviet theme that feels there to give the series one to follow from Nazis and Middle Eastern oil sheiks in the previous films. Violence and a tiger cage just because it could keep the viewers wanting more. It's a seventies exploitation film that is just entertaining, guilty pleasure or not, not quirky enough, not made with enough passion, not even ramshackle enough for me. I enjoyed it. Revealing in its luridness. But I can think of films better in these categories to rewatch over and over again.

From http://v016o.popscreen.com/eHM3eDVsMTI=_o_ilsa---die-tigerin-1977-trailer-german.jpg