By the mid-1980's, it took a pair of maverick movie makers to briefly revive porn's dissipated capacity to shock with this warped delight. Director Peter Vanderbilt and writer/producer Pablo Cairo, who might be one and the same for all I know, completed this film independently in 1983. Yet it would take them almost three years to find general distribution through industry giant VCA in a slightly watered down version.
Chronicling the downfall of one time golden boy Lee Keller obsessing over a mystery woman, they wear their richly varied cinematic influences (ranging from Jess Franco and Jean Rollin to Sam Fuller) on their sleeves. A gutsy central performance by Jamie Gillis, hardcore's Harvey Keitel, really keeps the film together, helping it over the occasional rough spot such as a slow build-up with gratuitous group sex padding, scored with horrible muzak to boot. Thankfully, this is the last helping of conventional carnality the movie has to offer.
The flick kicks into high gear as Gillis loses his sanity over dark dame Desiree Lane (never shown to greater advantage) who indeed turns out to be a disciple of the Dark One. Hey, with a title like that, I really don't believe I might be divulging any well-kept secrets here ! In rapid succession, our man Jamie gets royally ravished in the local loony bin's nympho ward (shades of SHOCK CORRIDOR), coolly witnesses gal pal Lynx Cannon's staged gang rape and goes totally balmy in a stylized S&M bar setting, brutally biting the nipple off the evening's unlucky whipping girl ! I guess that screwing a demon is about the only way any devoted pervert could hope to top that. Gillis and Lane do just that in a climax that is both eerie and romantic in equal measure, with billowing white curtains and a color scheme straight out of CAFE FLESH.
Blown up from a 16mm negative, this moodily photographed film has a gorgeously grainy texture quite uncommon to contemporary carnality. Too bad, its visionary creators disappeared without a tracé following just a few more mundane videos with the off-beat DREAMS OF NATASHA being perhaps the most memorable of the bunch.
Chronicling the downfall of one time golden boy Lee Keller obsessing over a mystery woman, they wear their richly varied cinematic influences (ranging from Jess Franco and Jean Rollin to Sam Fuller) on their sleeves. A gutsy central performance by Jamie Gillis, hardcore's Harvey Keitel, really keeps the film together, helping it over the occasional rough spot such as a slow build-up with gratuitous group sex padding, scored with horrible muzak to boot. Thankfully, this is the last helping of conventional carnality the movie has to offer.
The flick kicks into high gear as Gillis loses his sanity over dark dame Desiree Lane (never shown to greater advantage) who indeed turns out to be a disciple of the Dark One. Hey, with a title like that, I really don't believe I might be divulging any well-kept secrets here ! In rapid succession, our man Jamie gets royally ravished in the local loony bin's nympho ward (shades of SHOCK CORRIDOR), coolly witnesses gal pal Lynx Cannon's staged gang rape and goes totally balmy in a stylized S&M bar setting, brutally biting the nipple off the evening's unlucky whipping girl ! I guess that screwing a demon is about the only way any devoted pervert could hope to top that. Gillis and Lane do just that in a climax that is both eerie and romantic in equal measure, with billowing white curtains and a color scheme straight out of CAFE FLESH.
Blown up from a 16mm negative, this moodily photographed film has a gorgeously grainy texture quite uncommon to contemporary carnality. Too bad, its visionary creators disappeared without a tracé following just a few more mundane videos with the off-beat DREAMS OF NATASHA being perhaps the most memorable of the bunch.