Faceless (Jess Franco, 1987)

The extreme lengths one will go through in order to attain the perfect complexion is examined in the ghastly Faceless (a.k.a. Les prédateurs de la nuit), a plastic surgery gone awry chiller from trash peddler extraordinaire Jess Franco (Bloody Moon, Eugénie de Sade, and hundreds of other works of sleazy goodness). Well, actually, I wouldn't go as so far to say that there is any sort of "examining" going on this film–after all, it's a Franco flick (tawdry thrills and lingering leg moments are the main order of business). But as far as watching backroom chainsaw dismemberment, unwanted face peeling, gigolos getting scissored in the neck, drill heads being changed prior to a head being drilled, and, my personal favourite, syringes wielded by sophisticated women of European extraction go, I'd say the film is resounding success. Oh, sure, Telly Savalas (NFL Players Association Awards Dinner) literally phones in his performance and the amount of flame coming off the guy playing the Dorothy-friendly fashion photographer will cause your inexpensive gaydar to explode into a million fabulous pieces. But what exactly is wrong with using a telephone and being aggressively flamboyant? I can't think of anything.

After a night of high end shopping, Dr. Flamand (Helmet Berger), his wife Ingrid (Christiane Jean) and his sister Nathalie (Brigitte Lahaie) are confronted in a Paris parking garage by a dissatisfied patient. Unhappy with the results of her plastic surgery, the scarred woman throws a glass of acid in Ingrid's face. Mildly disfigured ("mildly" because I thought she still looked hot), Ingrid retreats from the world. Determined to bring his wife back to a state of acceptable attractiveness, Dr. Flamand and Nathalie begin to work on finding her a new face.

This search sees them abducting a fashion model named Barbara (Caroline Munro), a prostitute (Amélie Chevalier), and an actress (Florence Guérin). The model's disappearance (she was lured with sweet cocaine) causes her New York-based father (Telly Savalas) to hire a private detective (Christopher Mitchum) to do what the French police can't seem to do, and that is, find out what happened to Barbara.

Luckily for her, Dr. Flamand and Nathalie's deranged man-servant (Gérard Zalcberg) causes Barbara some facial distress during an off-the-cuff sexual assault.

As punishment for this act, the man-servant is forced to rub his face over the fishnet stocking-covered legs of Ingrid. Um, I don't really see how this is a punishment exactly. I mean, I must have missed something, because this looked like, from my cockeyed point-of-view, to be the best punishment ever.

Anyway, unsure of his face transplanting skills, Dr. Flamand employs the services of a former SS doctor (Anton Diffring) who did experiments at Dachau. The nonchalant manner in which Dr. Flamand and Nathalie go about finding the Nazi physician was kind of jarring. Killing women for their faces is one thing, but hiring a Nazi?

A nosy, wheelchair-bound patient (Stéphane Audran), who is recovering in the non-antiseptic dungeon wing of Dr. Flamand's clinic, starts to get suspicious of all the sinister activity going on downstairs, but she is quickly taken care of.

A virtual lingerie bonanza–in that it worships everything below the neck–the human face is effectively rendered redundant in this film. Whether it was Jess Franco's intention or not, but what I took away from the film is that the face, while important in some social situations, isn't necessary. The body, particularly when draped in pleasing fabrics, supplants the face when it comes to winning over the fickle crotches of others.

Every scene that features a woman enticing her intended victim seems to centre around the act of lifting up a piece of fabric to reveal the fleshy, unadorned area that separates the structural inner workings of their intricate lingerie. This combination of nylon and skin is so harmonious, that the person generating the images of this frothy display with his or her cerebral cortex will discover that their genitals have since become inflamed with a feverish form of desire.

However, it should be said, that in the case of Caroline Munro, she doesn't even seem to need lingerie.* Merely utilizing the tantalizing shape of her full-flavoured thighs, Caroline manages to manipulate a degenerate without the aid of flouncy undergarments.

Alluring, chic, and moderately evil all at once, Brigitte Lahaie is elegance personified as Nathalie, Dr. Flamand's unscrupulous assistant/kleptomaniac sister. Whether plunging syringes into the eyes of paranoid patients or driving scissors into the throats of untactful male prostitutes, Brigitte oozes sophistication and a steely brand of grace. I liked how she called the tactless boy-toy an "asshole" right before ventilating his neck area; the way it clashed with her overall European elan made my ovaries sing.

With her dark, piercing eyes–which looked extra nefarious when paired with red leather–Miss Lahaie cast an eerie spell over the proceedings. No fooling, nary a scene goes by without a shot of Brigitte staring intently at something.

When I first saw Florence Guérin dominating the dancefloor at the local discotheque, my eyes couldn't help but notice that her white fingerless gloves had less finger material than your average pair of fingerless gloves. After I grew bored with admiring her swanky handwear, it was Florence's black high-waisted leather mini-skirt's turn to dazzle my senses.

In terms of leather skirts seen throughout the history of pop culture, I'd definitely put Florence's up there with the one Papillon Soo Soo wears as a Da Nang prostitute in Full Metal Jacket and the many that Italian singer Sabrina Salerno struggled to keep on during the late 1980s. What I liked about it was that it gave her vagina and the wind swept confines of her delicious anus the coverage they so desperately need to go about their daily business, or in this case, nightly business, with a modicum of confidence. At the same time, the skirt managed to accentuate the length of her spectacular gams.

While Papillon's leather skirt seemed like it was glued on, and Sabrina's appeared to have a mind of its own, Florence's was lifted up on purpose. You see, Florence Guérin (who plays herself in this film) wants to impress Dr. Flamand and Nathalie (especially the latter, who clearly has dibs on her labia), and she does so by lounging seductively on their sofa. Pulling up her black high-waisted leather mini-skirt with a determined hiking motion, she lays out the exquisite fullness of her Gallic frame for all to see. Exposing the softness of her womanly body like it were a freshly cooked meal, Florence awaits the return of her horny hosts with a breathy mix of trepidation and insincere coquettishness.

A kinda remake of the classic Eyes Without a Face, this knock off/undertaking is similar in that it takes place in France and is about a doctor who desperately wants to procure a new face for a female loved one. Yet, being a Jess Franco film, the deep and thoughtful aspects of the Georges Franju version have been jettisoned and have found themselves replaced with discotheques, fur coats, garter belts, make out sessions with severed heads, cocaine, pimps named Rashid, and, of course, black high-waisted leather mini-skirts. Not a bad trade, if you ask me.

* Do leg restraints count as lingerie? The UCLA, the undergarment council for lingerie affairs, stated in its 1894 charter that: "Any fabric that is used to emphasize the natural beauty of the human body, whether intentional or not, shall fall comfortably under the lingerie umbrella." And, hey, I'm not one to argue with the UCLA, so I guess the answer to my question is a resounding yes. They do count. Yay!

Special thanks to the swanky empresses over at the Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire for causing my frazzled mind to become acutely aware of this botched face lift, high-waisted leather skirt-laden piece of trashy cinema.

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Swamp Thing (Wes Craven, 1982)

"Water meadowland and small shot for the ducks. He walks in the mud, moves aside the reeds. No clapping of wings, no motions around. Just a singing wind in an ominous silence." Why, you may ask, am I quoting the lyrics to "The Bog" by Bigod 20? Well, at first, even I didn't know. But then it dawned on me, the lyrics to that sinister dancefloor jam (I highly recommend the "Techno Duck Mix") and Swamp Thing, a moist chiller from director Wes Craven (The People Under the Stairs), bare a striking resemblance to one another in terms of foggy tone and murky relevance. It's true, I could have started off on a tangent that compared the Adrienne Barbeau cleavage festival with "Swamp Thing" by The Chameleons. But if you check the lyrics to that song, you'll quickly realize that the words being sung/uttered have very little to do with an actual "swamp thing." Or maybe they do, and I'm just looking at them from a too prosaic point-of-view. Ironically, both songs were played heavily at Toronto area nightclubs like the Boom Boom Room and Catch 22 circa 1991.

While the self-satisfied sensation I'm feeling over the fact that I managed to tie together songs by Bigod 20 and The Chameleons with a film that features Reggie Batts is intoxicating, I'd really like focus primarily on the cinematic work known as Swamp Thing (a.k.a. "Das Ding aus dem Sumpf"). In my defense, it should be noted that I have already alluded to the ample division that separates Adrienne Barbeau's breasts, and I've already used a number of adjectives of a slippery and shadowy nature.

By the way, if you should come across a review of this film that fails to mention Adrienne Barbeau's chest region at least once, the person who wrote it is obviously divorced from reality.

Even though I think they can be unwieldy at times, I do have fond memories of looking her animated cleavage in an ad for the film located inside Sgt. Rock #364 back when I was a smallish woodland creature.

The wettest film ever to emerge out of the festering stew that was the early 1980s, Swamp Thing, based the D.C. comic of the same name, involves a male research scientist, Alec Holland (Ray Wise), falling for a female research scientist, Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeau), in the seasonally flooded bottomlands of dewy Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.A. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Only problem being that commandos under the command of a corrupt businessman, Anton Arcane (a ham-and-couscous-filled Louis Jourdan), raid the their laboratory compound just as their relationship was about to blossom and junk.

In the melee that follows, Dr. Holland is transformed into a green monstrosity after being doused with some volatile iridescent sludge, while Miss Cable flees into the swamp with the knowledge of the whereabouts to the final notebook containing the formula for the aforementioned iridescent sludge. The malevolent Arcane wants to procure the recipe in order to use on himself. Mind you, not to become a walking and talking vegetable, but so that he can harness its power to do some evil bullshit.

What transpires after Holland and Cable are cast into the swamp is a serious of commando attacks, followed by a last minute rescue. The commandos, lead by Ferret (David Hess from The Last House on the Left), would chase and harass Adrienne Barbeau, and just as her ass was about to get snuffed, Holland's green thing (portrayed by Dick Durock when in shrub mode) would jump out of the brush to help her just in the nick of time.

As you would expect, this gets tiresome after awhile. The only repetitive motif I enjoyed during all this swamp-based action was the fact that the commando played by the always excellent Nicholas Worth (Don't Answer the Phone) is violently tossed in the water not once, but three times by the Swamp Thing (it might have even been four times). Anyway, it got to a point where I anticipated his dunking with bated breath.

Surprisingly, it wasn't spacious cleavage and regenerating limbs that caught the bulk of my attention. No, what interested me most was the awesome performance by Reggie Batts as Jude, the youthful, bespeckled gas station attendant who assists Adrienne Barbeau in her mad scramble not to get murdered in a swamp setting. There was just something about his head-on line delivery that tickled my fancy. Of course, as with the majority of great film performances, Swamp Thing would end up being Reggie Batts' sole movie credit. Joining the likes of the legendary Madeleine Reynal from Stephen Sayadian's Dr. Caligari and the unheralded Kristen Riter from Student Bodies, Reggie has cemented his place in the possibly made up Panthéon of one role film careers.

The assertiveness of Adrienne Barbeau's character during the film's first third was mildly glorious, especially when Arcane's hired guns are attacking the research complex–she makes a fool out of Nicholas Worth and guns down a nameless commando. Unfortunately, this scrappiness soon turns to timidity, as she slowly evolves into a bit of a damsel in distress. She doesn't even lend a hand to Mr. Swamp Thing during the climatic battle with Arcane. It doesn't exactly ruin the movie, but it was, nonetheless, a disappointing turn of events.

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The Malibu Bikini Shop (David Wechter, 1986)

Strange as it may sound, but the brightly coloured bits of fabric used to cover specific parts of the female anatomy end up altering the vocational trajectory of a wannabe yuppie in The Malibu Bikini Shop (a.k.a. Der Bikini Shop), a jarring look at the day-to-day grind of working at a store that sells skimpy swimsuits in a beachfront environment. Opening with a dizzying array of shots featuring faceless female torsos pawing and grabbing at the uncompromising tightness of their newly acquired bathing garments, the firm film tells the story of a young man forced to choose between guaranteed comfort and unknown chaos. While it's telling this plucky little tale, writer-director David Wechter (Midnight Madness) makes sure there's always something jiggling in the background. Of course, all this undulating flesh could cause some problems, as mixing conventional storytelling with the distracting splendour of scantily clad ladies in bikinis has been a high-risk enterprise since the dawn of time. Yet the way the film managed to jump back and forth between the two distinct realms was a thing of beauty. Maintaining its narrative integrity, while at the same time generously providing the titillating eye candy certain members of the audience crave, cinema doesn't get anymore well-balanced than this. Now I realize there's no way to actually prove this, but I guarantee that both your brain and your genitals will be smiling smugly at one another after witnessing the temperamental cohesion that is at work here.

Celebrating his recent college graduation at the palatial home of his soon to be father-in-law, Alan (Michael David Wright) learns that his Aunt Ida in California has vacated the world of the living. When he arrives to put her affairs in order, Alan finds out that he has inherited her beloved bikini shop. While unamused by this turn of events–after all, he's got a plum job lined up and is engaged to a woman named Jane (Debra Blee)–his less motivated brother Todd (Bruce Greenwood) couldn't be more pleased.

Well, for one thing, Todd gets to fraternize with the comely employees of Ida's Bikini Shop; primarily Cindy (Galyn Görg) and Kathy (Ami Julius). A third employee named Ronnie (Barbara Horan) remains off Todd's radar mainly because Alan is transfixed by the budding fashion designer the moment he enters the shop.

Anyway, the buttoned-down Alan spends the majority of his time trying to sell shop, with the help of Mr. Remington (Frank "Yessssss" Nelson), an associate of the late Ida, while the mischievous Todd takes to the cotton-challenged macrocosm of swimwear sales.

As you would expect, the brothers clash repeatedly over their respective ambitions pertaining to the beach-based bikini outlet. And as I already sort of said, the repressed Alan wants to put the whole bikini affair behind him so he can get back to his fiancé and cushy job at his father-in-law's tire factory. On the other hand, Todd sees the bikini business as an opportunity to prove to the world that he is not a complete screw up. (We learn that his plan to open a chain of solar-powered hot dog carts in Seattle didn't go as well as expected.)

Impulsive to the extreme, Todd's madcap enthusiasm for all things bikini-related end up sabotaging every single one of Alan's attempts to sell the shop. The most flagrant example of this was when a couple of snooty buyers drop by just as Todd was in the middle of putting on a well-attended suntan contest outside the shop.

Surprisingly, the most awesome aspect of this glorified sunburn symposium wasn't the gratuitous nature of the contest–you, know, with all the half-naked ladies hurling their sunbaked bodies across the makeshift stage as Bruce Greenwood humped the air in nothing but jean shorts and a ratty tank top. But the fact all the contestants mention their full names before they commenced with the gyrating. I know that doesn't sound very awesome. But think about it, the first dancer (my fave and pick to win the whole shebang) said her name was Sheri Andrews. You see what I'm getting at? That's one more name than any of the lead characters have. I was blown away by this seemingly minor detail.

I also liked it when asked what her ambition in life was, Sheri Andrews answered, "I don't know." Call me someone who is prone to making careless mistakes, but I found Sheri Andrew's indecisiveness to be extremely sexy. In addition, there's nothing more obnoxious than a bikini model with well thought out goals. At any rate, Sheri Andrews is played by a human being named Christie Jakowpck and I thought she looked fabulous in her tri-colourd bikini.

Speaking of indecision, Alan eventually decides he that wants to keep the bikini shop (the lure of Ronnie and her tight bikini bottoms were no doubt a deciding factor). Unfortunately, he has already sold it to some transcendental cult looking to expand their global reach. To get the lease back, Alan, Todd, Ronnie, Cindy and Kathy must raise six thousand American dollars in a two weeks.

Sure, it's the middle of July, but still, that's a lot of bikinis.

The rarest weapon in any film's cinematic arsenal, The Malibu Bikini Shop gives us the sewing montage to end all sewing montages. I may regret saying this, but I think it's the greatest montage ever to involve stitching and synthesizers simultaneously. The resulting fashion show was just awe-inspiring, as it features Ami Julius and Galyn Görg prancing around in military inspired two-pieces. Smoke-filled and peppered with spotlights, the dreamlike display of Ronnie's camouflaged garments was the perfect companion to the intense tailoring that preceded it.

The idea that the general public would go completely gaga to cover their tender areas with green and black fabric wasn't too far-fetched, as I recall there being one month at my school where every other student was wearing camouflaged shirts and trousers.

Out of all the actresses who appeared in The Beach Girls, Debra Blee was the last one I expected to give a performance filled with shrill nuance and spiteful disdain. Playing Jane, the overly demanding fiancé, Miss Blee throws aside her docile tendencies and fully embraces her inner harpy.

Tossing himself across the screen with the vigour of a displaced rag doll, Bruce Greenwood utters party animal platitudes with a frenzied sense of desperation. Uncouth and disjointed like every other slob you see in movies like this, Bruce seemed to add an extra layer humanity to his slovenly creation.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned work of Debra and Bruce were the only performances in The Malibu Bikini Shop to merit any praise, as Michael David Wright and the others seemed to be lacking key attributes. Particularly one's that are crucial when it comes to creating a memorable character. They don't sink the film entirely, they just prevent it from attaining its rightful status as the best movie to be set in and around the daily operation of a shop that sells garish clothing intended to cover the lumps and crevices that our overly prudish society deem indecent.

video uploaded by TexasGuy09

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Eugénie de Sade (Jess Franco, 1970)

Is the desire to suffocate strangers while scantily clad come naturally, or is it more of an acquired skill like say, turnip juggling or the ability to go hand gliding over rural Saskatchewan? Some of you, no doubt, will be so preoccupied with the not even close to being strenuous act of drinking in the visual resplendence dangling from the lower half of Soledad Miranda's exquisitely shaped torso, that you will be unable to properly ask and answer that particular question. However, those possessing the ability to multitask–in other words, counterbalance the vital fluid that is rushing toward places that desperately need it to function effectively–will be surefooted when it comes to enjoying every tantalizing aspect that Eugénie de Sade (a.k.a. De Sade 2000) has to offer. Now this chunk of space is where I usually throw around titles like, "sleaze peddler extraordinaire" and "the crown prince of perversion" to describe filmmaker Jess Franco (Bloody Moon). And while those titles still apply–especially after seeing this film, which is loosely based on a novel by Marquis de Sade–I was genuinely surprised by the level of artistry at work here. It could have been the quality of the source material, or maybe it was completely accidental, but whatever it was, there's no denying that this film had an intoxicating aroma that elevated it beyond your typical slab of Eurosleaze. There was a classy air about it, one that mixed well with the film's seedier elements. Seriously, art and debauchery have never been so compatible with one another.

A shamelessly leggy woman, Eugénie Radeck de Franval (Soledad Miranda), and her author/book critic stepfather, Albert Radeck de Franval (a suave Paul Müller), live in a fancy home just outside Berlin (the winter scenery was eerily beautiful). Molding her like a delicious mound of sexy clay, Albert leaves titillating literature around the house with the hope that she will read them and slowly come over to his perverted way of thinking.

Helping matters is the fact that their relationship was already a tad on the wrong side. They routinely touch each other in an erotic fashion and occasionally share the same bed. Yet Albert wants to steer their creepy relationship in a more murderous direction. You see, he already kills people in his spare time, but now he feels it's time to include his stepdaughter in the homicidal fun.

Watching Eugénie grind her naked crotch into her bed from another room was the exact moment Albert decided to bring her into the sadism fold. Not an exact quote, but he basically tells her: "All pleasure comes at someone else's expense."

Dressed luxuriously in nothing but red, Eugénie and Albert travel to Brussels via Paris to dispatch their first stepfather-daughter victim. The boldness of their wardrobe is meant to convey a sense of obviousness; in that, sneaking around in the dark will not be their killing method. Anyway, combining three of my favourite things: Backroom fashion shoots, clueless Belgian women in lingerie (Alice Arno) and brightly coloured clothing, this overly chic sequence oozes style and elegance, as Eugénie gets her first taste of the stifling wonder that is close range asphyxiation.

A chatty Austrian hitchhiker is the next on the hit list. Bragging openly about her talent for sizing people up, Kitty (Greta Schmidt) hops in their car with the hope of getting a ride to Hamburg. Unaware of their murderous intentions, the dense women excepts an invitation to come over to their house to play dress up and bizarre drinking games. After failing in a game that involved playing dead, Kitty suggests that Eugénie's punishment be that she perform a striptease.

Even though she came off as annoying and shrill, the amount of love I felt towards Kitty the moment she utters the word "striptease" was off the freaking charts. Also, the genuine struggle Soledad goes through to remove one of her buckle-adorned boots was hilarious. It added humour to what was about to become a dire situation...for Kitty.

Bored with killing hitchhikers–they've apparently dispatched dozens–the kinky duo focus their sinister gaze on a Che Guevara-worshiping trumpet player named Paul (Andrés Monales). The plan is to make him fall in love with Eugénie and somehow get him to kill himself. As expected, Paul falls for Eugénie. (Duh, have you seen Soledad Miranda in thigh-high leather boots?) Totally unexpected, however, was that Eugénie would develop non-murderous feelings for Paul; and, not to mention, become somewhat obsessed with the uncombed roguery of his unshaven ass. This set of circumstances will probably complicate Eugénie's relationship with Albert, who is a bit a stickler when comes to the execution of a cutthroat scheme.

Further complicating matters is a greasy author named Attila Tanner (Jess Franco). He knows that Eugénie and Albert are killers, but looks the other way because he wants to write a book about them when all is said and done. Nevertheless, having this shifty author constantly following them around does cramp their style somewhat.

Cognizant to the fact that her world class legs were causing men discomfort (the external facet of their genitals presses against their tight trousers whenever they found themselves in her tasty presence), Eugénie would try to placate the nascent hardness brewing downstairs by grasping her legs with her arms when sitting.

As with almost every attempt to undermine the integrity of a man's erection since the beginning of time, Eugénie's actions only seem to exacerbate the situation.

Having sexy leg awareness (S.L.A. for short) seems to backfire in Eugénie's case. Her failure to thwart cocks (or as my Aunt Judy used to call them, "filthy coat hooks") from becoming engorged with blood is written all over her face. The tears she sheds are not over the fact that her stepdad is a lecherous fiend, but because she can't seem to contain her own sex appeal.

I'm afraid acute stiffness followed by some mild precipitation is a forgone conclusion whenever Soledad decides to hug her own legs.

Whether clasping at them with her arms, covering them with boots (adorned with long zippers and mouth-watering buckles), sheathing them in pantyhose, or decorating them with garter belt-assisted slabs of red leather, everything Soledad does with her legs ends with the same exact result: Male and female-based wetness.

The thought that Soledad might appear on-screen with her legs completely covered was my biggest fear as I watched Eugénie de Sade. Sure, there were a couple of instances where they were undetectable to the leg admiring eye (during a walk near an icy lake and while leaving the airport). But for the most part, they're on display in a manner that even the most casual gam fan would find agreeable.

Begrudgingly moving up her yummy frame, Soledad Miranda has the kind of piercing dark eyes that cut right through the noise and clutter of the world. You could totally tell that Jess Franco loved getting all up in her face with his camera. Add the girly vocalizing of the music score by Bruno Nicolai, and what you end up with a Soledad-laced treat from start to finish.

Special thanks to the friendly and relatively sane individuals over at Adventures In Nerdliness and Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire for making me aware of the this leggy lark.

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