Angst (Gerald Kargl, 1983)

Does anyone know which actress plays the brunette "Guest at the Café" with the tantalizing thighs? I know it's either Claudia Schinko or Beate Jurkowitsch, but I'm having a difficult time figuring out which one is which. You think you're having a difficult time, try transporting two dead bodies from the house you just broke into to the car you're about to steal. I don't know, that doesn't sound all that difficult. Oh, yeah. Well, what if I told you the dead bodies you had to transport formally belonged to two heavy-set Austrians who have spend a better part of the twentieth century eating nothing but bratwurst? Bratwurst, eh? That changes everything. Is it weird that I let out a sheepish cheer (it might have sounded like, "yay!") when "The Psychopath" at the centre of Angst (a.k.a. Schizophrenia) finally managed to get the dead bodies of all his victims into the trunk of his newly acquired Mercedes-Benz? What's that? You're saying it is weird? Right, I thought it might be. I have to admit, there are a number instances throughout this film where I found myself, now, I don't want to say, "rooting," as that's not quite the right word. Let's just say, I found myself hoping that he would succeed in getting the help he so desperately needs. Yeah, sure. No, seriously, I wanted The Psychopath and his newly acquired Daschund to get to a place that would allow the former to receive proper counseling and the latter (who's a cute little wiener dog? you are! you are!) to find a home with a loving family. While I agree that the Angst-Daschund deserves to be adopted by a loving family, I'm afraid The Psychopath is beyond counseling, proper or otherwise. He's too far gone. In other words, there's no turning back for The Psychopath.

Maybe if you stopped calling him "The Psychopath," he wouldn't feel the need to act out in such a transgressive manner. Oh, that's not a value judgment on my part, that's name he's given in the credits. And besides, "Misunderstood Miscreant With Mommy Issues" is too much of a mouthful.

Now, it should be noted that while Erwin Leder is the physical manifestation of The Psychopath, Robert Hunger-Bühler provides the voice of The Psychopath's inner most thoughts, which are sometimes our only companion in this stark and brutal character study.

A couple of quick questions: Do you like the SnorriCam? Now and then, huh? Yeah, it can be overused at times. Do you like the music of Klaus Schulze? Yeah, baby! Synths! I'll take that as a yes. The only reason I ask is because we get a heavy dose of both in Angst, the synthiest slasher film to employ the SnorriCam in existence. In case you're not familiar with the SnorriCam, it's a camera that an actor wears on their body. It's usually attached, like it is in this film, to the actor's chest, which creates this oddly disquieting effect on the viewer.

It's almost as if we're a baby looking at their mother from the comfort of a chest-mounted harness. Except, instead of peering up at our mother, we're looking up at a deranged madman. I know, "deranged madman" sounds a little judgmental on my part; I prefer to view film characters from an objective point-of-view. But I think I can safely state that The Psychopath in Angst is not hooked up right.

When I first saw the Daschund in Angst, I thought to myself: Cute dog. Eyeballed by The Psychopath during their initial encounter, I thought it was curtains for the little wiener dog. But then something miraculous occurs, not only did the Daschund manage to stay alive, it actually started to steal scenes.

Opening with the repetitive sound of a faucet dripping, we quickly learn that The Psychopath is being released from jail after serving ten years for murdering a seventy year-old woman; he also did four years previously for attempted murder (he tried to kill his mother). Having spent half his life behind bars, what are the odds that The Psychopath is going to have a difficult time adjusting to life on the outside? Not to bud in, but I think the odds are pretty high. I mean, look at him. He can't even walk down the street without looking like he's up to no good. And thanks to the ubiquitous narration that details his every thought, we know he's planning something.

Stand back, we have thick, pantyhose ensnared, Austrian thighs dangling from a cafe bar stool. I repeat, we have...Hey, whoa. Don't repeat that. Show some self-respect. But they're dangling. Be cool, man. Tearing into his sausage like a down on his luck Rottweiler, The Psychopath stares a couple of young women, a blonde and a brunette (Claudia Schinko und Beate Jurkowitsch), sitting in a gas station cafe with the intensity of a thousand Fun Fun videos. When the staring (complete with close-up shots of lips and eyes) eventually subsides, The Psychopath decides to change his plans. Oh, don't get me wrong, he desperately wants to kill these two young women. It's just that there are too many people around.

After his attempt to strangle a female taxi driver with one of his shoelaces is thwarted, The Psychopath runs aimlessly through the woods. Now, that sounds like pretty basic stuff; I can think of countless movies that feature psychopaths running through the woods (chchch ahahah). However, there's nothing basic about Gerald Kargl, as he throws every camera trick in the book at us. The aforementioned SnorriCam is employed to great effect during this sequence, as is the music of Klaus Schulze.

Itching to kill another human being, The Psychopath stumbles upon a relatively secluded home surrounded by bushes and an artificial pond of some kind. As The Psychopath cases the joint, Gerald Kargl temporarily puts away the SnorriCam and gives us a series of crane shots that would cause SCTV's crane shot obsessed Johnny LaRue to involuntarily expel seminal fluid in his pants. After circling the house several times, The Psychopath, via narration, declares it to be the perfect location, and enters the residence by breaking a window.

Of course, The Psychopath doesn't mean it's the perfect location to raise a family, no, he's talking about its potential for staging a series of unpleasant murder sequences; the kind that would put the stylish scenarios that appear in most giallos to shame.

I'm curious, how are you're going to handle the whole Silvia Rabenreither with her foot tied a doorknob situation? Whatever do you mean? Are going to perv out or what? I haven't decided yet. Anyway, when the family, including Silvia Rabenreither, who is wearing a denim skirt with a slit in the back for added mobility, her elderly mother (Edith Rosset), her retarded, wheelchair-bound brother (Rudolf Götz), and their dog "Kuba," finally meet The Psychopath, let's just say, things spiral out of control.

Let me give you a hint, Kuba, the world's cutest Daschund, is currently gnawing on Silvia's mother's dentures like they were a chew toy. In fact, the following scenes are so disturbing, that they managed to dampen my appreciation of Silvia's mother's therapeutic pantyhose. And while the slit on the back of Silvia's denim skirt does give her that added mobility I alluded to earlier, the slit eventually fails her in the end. Hey, don't blame the slit. It's The Psychopath's fault Silvia was put in this situation in the first place. You're absolutely right. I'm sorry about that.

After an extended body dragging sequence (where lumpy bodies are dragged across broken glass and down a flight of stairs), the spry film culminates with the sight of a deranged Austrian wearing a woman's coat feeding a Daschund a half-eaten sausage outside a nondescript gas station. Beautifully mundane with a hint of the absurd, Angst is visceral, uncompromising and bleak. In other words...No, wait, those words are fine. I'll end by saying that you're not going to find a more straightforward examination of the mind of a psychopath than Angst.

Body Love (Lasse Braun, 1978)

As I watched this steamy relic from a bygone era flicker before me, I was amazed by the sheer amount of options that lay languishing before me in the reticulated viewing sphere that is my mind's eye. Technically, I could approach the film as yet another uninspired slice of bland pornography. Except, Lasse Braun isn't the type of director to allow his films to be seen merely as mindless masturbation material for the mentally challenged masses. And by casting Catherine Ringer as the lead, he makes it abundantly clear that he's not interested in making your run-of-the-mill fuck film. In fact, with only four sex scenes in total, some might say: what fucking? Nevertheless, opening with the sight of Catherine Ringer, a performer best known for being one half of the great French new wave duo, Les Rita Mitsouko (Fred Chichin, R.I.P.), stretching her legs in a black leotard and a scrumptious pair of red thigh-high leg warmers, Body Love makes the first of its many bold statements. You see, what Catherine's character Martine is doing smacks of being artistic, and if there's anything the raincoat crowd hates more, it's to be reminded that there is art in this world. Still stretching in her leg warmers (the kind that I've seen on headless mannequins hanging from the rafters at American Apparel), Martine tells her father, "The Baron" (Jean-Gérard Sorlin), that her stepmother Glenda (Glenda Farrel), a world famous actress, has left. Watching her drive off through a window located on an upper floor of their spacious mansion/castle, the way Martine stood there motionless reminded me of something you might see in an Ingmar Bergman film, or a parody of an Ingmar Bergman film. If that wasn't enough, the music of Klaus Schulze can be heard throughout the film. And, of course, we're not talking about your stereotypical "bom chicka wah wah" porn music, Klaus makes cutting edge synthesizer music for discerning fans of electronic music.

Seriously, the score is incredible. Reminiscent of the chill out techno music that was semi-popular in the early '90s (The Orb, Pete Namlook, The Aphex Twin, etc.), the music–to be blunt–is way too awesome to wasted in a film like this. Okay, I realize that what I just said oozes the worst kind of porn prejudice (what? you don't think porn movies deserve to have cool music?). What I'm trying to say is that there are only handful movies in this world that are truly worthy of the music Klaus Schulze was making in the late 1970s.

Since I've already exposed myself to be a porn snob, I might as well continue in that vein by declaring Catherine Ringer's performance way too awesome to be wasted in a film like this. It doesn't take long to realize that Catherine is immensely talented, as even the sight of her standing motionless in a window manages to convey a surprising of amount of depth. The audience is no doubt thinking to themselves, "Who is this woman, and why does she fascinate me so much?" Of course, nowadays, this kind of emotional breadth is no longer welcome in the realm of modern day erotica. But let's not dwell of the differences between the arty smut of the past and the crude, dehumanizing porn of the present, let's get back to extolling the many virtues of Catherine Ringer–who is credited here as "Lolita Da Nova."

As Catherine Ringer is stretching her legs on a free standing barre, you'll notice that only a small swath of thigh skin is being soothed by the room's sooty air. Why is that, you ask? Well, the skimpiness of her black leotard combined with the excessive of length of her red thigh-high leg warmers has caused there to be a bit of an impasse, a flesh-based deficiency, if you will, in terms of how much skin is exposed. While this may sound like a negative, it's not. If anything, the volume of thigh skin Catherine Ringer exposes in this scene was, as far as I'm concerned, the perfect amount.

Playing a young woman named Martine, Catherine Ringer continues to stretch (the creaking sound the barre made as her leg rested on it did not, much like her exposed thighs, go unnoticed by this viewer). Suddenly, something outside grabs her attention. Look. It's a blonde woman wearing a reddish suit. Where she is going? I didn't wonder, as she got into her car, a white Mercedes-Benz. After she's finished watching the woman drive off, her father, a blonde man with a snooty aura, asks her if she's ready to be "mounted" for the first time tonight. Yeah, that's right. He used the word "mounted." Which, like you, I thought was a little odd.

Wait a minute. I hope this isn't one of those movies where a rich aristocrat tries to "convert" his lesbian daughter to heterosexuality by forcing her to participate in an elaborate orgy set to ambient techno music. Because if that's the case, I would totally watch that movie.

Remember how I pretended not to care where the blonde woman was going in her fancy car? Well, I wasn't being entirely truthful. To be honest, part of me does want to know where she was going, and that part is about to find out. Driving to a secluded house in the country, Glenda gets out and starts to explore its many rooms. I liked the creepy atmosphere Lasse Braun creates as Glenda explored the abandoned house. Startled by a man dressed like the ghost of Robert E. Lee, Glenda runs downstairs only to be confronted by two men sporting, what she later claims to be, "normal cocks."

Robbed of her red skirt (plus, the tan, super-sheer pantyhose that lay chicly beneath its funneled exterior), her matching bred lazer, and a white blouse, Glenda loses some of her appeal as the two men, one wearing a blue t-shirt and one wearing a red t-shirt, begin to paw at her organic structure. It's gets worse when her wig falls off and her fake-looking breasts failed to jiggle after being repeatedly poked and prodded by the unruly men. Luckily, the scene is saved somewhat when a naked Glenda wanders back to the mansion to describe, in graphic detail, her encounter with the two burly men to her piano-playing husband. Asking her point blank as he tickled the ivories: "Did you suck their cocks?" To which she quickly responds, "Why certainly." "What kind of cocks were there?" he sheepishly inquires. Uh, "they were normal cocks." I know, Glenda, what's this guy's problem? Anyway, the sex scene itself features the missionary position, some reverse cowgirl action (with an off to side handy), and a brief session of anal spooning.

I'll admit, I was a tad disappointed by the way the film's first sex scene played out. In fact, if it wasn't for the Baron and Baroness' asinine back and forth about fellatio, I would have walked out of the 42nd Street porno theatre and would have not asked for my money back. However, it's a good thing I stuck around because Catherine Ringer is currently acting tormented on the mansion/castle's roof. Relaxing against some shingles in a long grey skirt, Martine is approached by Gilda (Gilda Arancio), a blonde woman who may or may not be her girlfriend. Judging by the way Martine scolds Gilda for flirting with her father, I'd say they're pretty close. This closeness is confirmed when Gilda initiates lesbian sex with Martine by demanding that she kiss her. Starting off like your typical girl-on-girl scene (gentle kissing followed by some light-to-moderate groping), Catherine Ringer decides to shake things up a bit. How so? Well, for starters, Catherine sweeps her long mane of brunette hair over the top of Gilda's head, which created a kind of hair shield that allowed them to make out in private.

Everything Catherine Ringer does in this film flies in the face of conventional porn thinking. Every mannerism and every gesture seems to have been filtered through Catherine's unique point-of-view. I'm not entirely sure of how much input she had when it came time flesh out her character, but I like to think that Lasse Braun tried to nurture her creativity–you know, as opposed to stifling it. Moving from the rooftop to a more discrete location, Martine and Gilda take their sappho indoors with a spot of cunnilingus. Rocking back and forth on a hammock, Gilda, who's all but naked expect for a pair of strappy high heel shoes, hurls the moist contents of her mouth-watering crotch in the direction of Martine's smiling face (you'd be smiling too if you saw what was coming toward her French gob every two to three seconds).

No genuine lesbian sex scene should be without some scissor sex, and Body Love does not disappoint in that regard. As Martine and Gilda are bumping their vaginas together like a couple of clammy rams during mating season, Glenda is chatting outside with a reporter (Jacques Gateau) holding a ridiculously large microphone. Talking about her decision to star in a pornographic film, the Baroness rambles on about sex and cinema. The coolest part about their conversation was the fact that Glenda could not control this large English sheepdog, so, instead of fighting it, she let's it off the leash, and the fact that Glenda towers over Jacques by at least a foot.

This sex themed conversation continues as Martine, Glenda, Gilda, the reporter, and the Baron sit down to eat pastries in an erotic manner. Now sporting pigtails, Catherine Ringer's raw talent still manages to shine through despite being saddled with hokey dialogue. Taking the reporter out to her dingy-looking trailer, Martine decides to share her Uruguayan sex slave Nana (Gemma Giménez) with the inquisitive reporter. And by "share," I mean allow him to have sexual intercourse with her on a stained mattress. Instructing her to disrobe, Martine then tells Nana to play with herself. After she's finished, Martine asks the reporter, "Would you like it if she pleased you with her mouth?" Do I have to tell you what his answer was? Besides, we all know what this leading to. Nonetheless, it's the occasional shot of Catherine Ringer's pigtail framed face, and, not to mention, the sound of Klaus Schulz's swooshing synths, that make this scene interesting.

As Jacques is plowing into the Uruguayan beauty with his erect penis, the Baron is greeting his guests as they arrive at the mansion/castle. You haven't forgotten, have you? There's an orgy scheduled for later this evening, and you know what the say? You can't have an orgy without inviting at least eight people (at least I don't think you can).

You can tell something great is about to transpire just by listening to the way Klaus Schulze's synthesizers were starting to percolate on the soundtrack, and, if you really want to get analytical, by the manner in which Lasse Braun's camera seems to be focusing on a white door. Who's behind the door, I wondered, and what will this person find once they finally breach its ashen threshold? All of a sudden, the door swings open, and Catherine Ringer steps through it, closing it behind her with a campy flair. Wearing the same get-up she had on when we first met her (a black leotard and a pair of red thigh-high leg warmers), Martine is standing in a room full of naked and scantily clad men and women who are frozen like statues.

Performing what can be best described as a weird form of interpretive dance, Catherine Ringer moves her body in a fashion that will be very familiar to fans of her work in the music videos for Les Rita Mitsouko, particularly the one for "C'est comme ça." When she's done pretending to molest this stone-faced mass of Euro-flesh, Martine "activates" them by touching their skin. During a moment of pure awkwardness, Martine activates her father by brushing her hand over his flaccid penis. Of course, no-one in attendance seems to think it's awkward, so I guess I'm just an incest prude. Either way, she's tasted their sexual essence, and is now ready to experience the real thing.

Faster than you can say, "I'm gonna need some Nair in here," Catherine Ringer's black leotard is gone and her body is being hoisted in the air by a throng of naked men and women. Who's the lucky bastard to be the first man to watch his penis appear and disappear as it goes in and out of her thickly carpeted vagina? The reporter, of course. Pressing both his hands firmly against her inner thighs in order create thrusting leverage, Jacques plunges his cock deep into Martine's proverbial quagmire with a pelvic aplomb. As the rest of the orgy participants partner up, and Martine accepts three more cocks, and a couple of lady tongues, her red thigh-high leg warmers are the only thing that seems familiar to us, as the scene morphs into an indistinguishable lump of sexual confusion. The crimson glow emanating from their leggy housing comforts the audience as the scene's epicness hits a fever pitch. Orgasms, bodies intertwined, swirling synths, Body Love leaves an indelible mark on the viewer. Pompous porn for the art house crowd.

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