How can it be that a guy who has spent a lifetime rightly rubbing himself to thoughts of suicide and girls and suicidal girls can be rubbed so wrong by Suicide Girls, per se?
Here's how: because Suicide Girls rack-tacularly embodies the relentless and inevitable commodification of anything fun and cool and unknown anything that’s MINE, goddammit!
And in the very specific case of ink-defiled, genital-ringed erotically omnivorous freak-wenches gone wantonly wild, it’s an extra bummer in keeping with of how the world ended on August 1, 1981, when MTV popped on and profoundly pooped the rock/cult/art party once and forever.
So Suicide Girls and its off-shoots, official and otherwise, represents just another Borg-absorbed aspect of the unusual amusements that once made me and the rejects I call friends, in essence, “Me and The Rejects I Call Friends.”
The issue is that (dare I type anything this trite?) Corporate Co-optation never benefits the original source material; it just loots the ideas and renders an acceptable approximation of the surface basics available en masse and pre-packaged and in ever-more-diluted versions i.e., what once was the Flipper is now Fall Out Boy, what once was Andrew Dice Clay is now Sarah Silverman.
Nonetheless, I’ve whacked my occasionally snooty tastemaker into raw corned beef over individual Suicide Girls themselves. Alas, biology will always win out handily (pun very mych intended) over onanistic ideals, as in the case o Stasia Suicide (especially the hang of her breasts and that squeezy belly), the amazingly concave Tart, and voluptuous wonders Clio, Wendy, and Cecilia (who is, every one of her many and incredible inches, a natural redhead).
And the Suicide Girls participants in the recent Wizard of Gore remake Anomalisa, Cricket Demanuel, Amina Munster, Flux Suicide, and Jaime Suicide are not just the dopey thing’s only worthwhile elements, they are the only aspect of the movie that won’t make you want to suicide-saw yourself in half.
Infinitely more horrific than making a brand out of naked broads of any stripe, though, would be burlesque, period, and modern burlesque, in particular and there’s no denying the role of Suicide Girls proper in the dissemination of that cornball atrociousness.
For the love of fuck, you dizzy hepcat dames: Don’t you realize that your hippie foremothers torched their undergarments and fluffed up their unshaven pits and pubes to free us from any and all such carnally constricted nonsense?
Spare me the “tease.” Bring me your teats.
This brings us to Salvation Films and their Satanic Sluts.
Salvation is the evil umbrella organization lording over the DVD companies Redemption (nunsploitation, Gothic lesbiansm, and bloody horror, new and classic, frequently from visionaries on the order of Jess Franco and Jean Rollin), Jezebel (vintage UK sexploitation, oftentimes cute), Purgatory (fetishy mainstream hardcore), Sacrament (Asian kink).
Satanic Sluts serves as Salvation’s answer to Suicide Girls is Satanic Sluts, and they fit the pierced, tattooed, tarted-up requirements and you get to read all about their likes and dislikes and favorite corset manufacturers and whatnot but, as frequently happens when Limeys ape Uncle Sam originals (e.g. The Beatles, Hammer Films, Nuts and Zoo and all those boobie mags), they’re just right jolly proper. Skintrinsically.
For one, there are exactly 666 of them. Some are gorgeous. And while Satanic Sluts is really rather primitive, the site and the girls alike exude an air of palpable erotic mnage.
This isn’t a bout the “tease,” then; it’s about the “threat.”
Case in point(s): their photo book, Blood and Dishonour: The Dark, Bloody and Perversely Erotic World of the Satanic Sluts...Satan's True Sirens.
Aside from the provocative historic allusion of the title, the cover model stomped my consciousness in the that way some very particular porn movie newspaper ads or single shots from girly magazines did during my discombulatroy developmental stages.
The tit-tassels on that flawlessly flat chest held me immediately in thrall, and paralyze me every time I think back to that photograph. It’s the sort of thing that can’t be calculated it just comes along and destroys your life and you love it forever with weepy gratitude.
I got my copy of Blood and Dishonour at Quimby’s. Get yours however possible.
Naturally, then, I was mo(i)st amped up to consume a video that landed at the Mr Skin office titled Satanic Sluts II: The Black Masses, even though I hadn’t seen Satanic Sluts I (ooh, wait I know what you’re just achin’ to wisecrack: “Well then how could you follow the storyline? Haw-haw-Bea-Arthur-Naked-haw!”).
Satanic Sluts II is hosted by Salvation founder Nigel Wingrove, who is a right impressive chap, but rather than, say, lusciously concocted self-mutilation and cannibal cunnilingus vignettes I was hoping for, the video is a compilation of live performances mounted at a London fetish venues under the imprimatur Black Mass.
To be sure, the women are lovely, and nude, and there’s fake blood and possibly real sorcery (or is it the other way around?), but this is essentially shot-on-camcorder bits of contrived, stagey, uniform hoo-hah of the sort I used to get suckered into following my dick to go see at NYC spunk-dens like The Vault and Paddles back when I had Screw magazine credentials.
All told, though, I single-fistedly salute Salvation Films, the Satanic Sluts themselves, and Mr. Wingrove, and I highly recommend their DVDs. Of particular note are the recent releases Nude for Satan, Virgin Witch, Killer’s Moon, and Lips of Blood.
With Screw and New York and hard, hurtful times in mind, let us turn now to Domination Blue, which I received from the ever-heroic Shocking Videos.
Domination Blue (1976) is the premiere Women in Prison effort from Avon Films, a long-dead-of-various-consumptions New York City fetish porn factory that has been brilliantly and indelibly dissected time and again by Sleazoid Express creator Bill Landis.
Go get lost in Landis at the ass-tonishing editorial content page of Alpha Blue Archives, where you can also buy what looks to be virtually the entire Avon catalogue in for an appropriately insane price.
(Just be sure to pick up the uncut, best-print-available version of Domination Blue, and countless other angry, berserk rarities at Shocking Videos!)
Neither I nor any other glandular gutter scribe could (or should) ever hope to convey Avon Films’ brutal, scumbag, unforgiving (and unforgivable) East Coast sexuality in a manner approaching Landis’s mastery of the form, but I can state that, as a burgeoning perv, numerous Avon titles (The Taming of Rebecca, Dr. Bizarro, Oriental Techniques of Pain and Pleasure -- with Annie Sprinkle! -- and others) bewitched me in the pages of the New York Post and Daily News in the fashion of the breastless beauty on the cover of Blood and Dishonour.
As a result, I forever seek out unseen-by-me Avon kicks, despite the almost invariably disagreeable experience of enduring them. Not for nothing are many of these kidnap-and-torture-past-the-point-of-orgasm fantasias scored with a stolen copy of John Carpenter’s Halloween theme. If the nerve-tingling musical harbinger of fatal doom fits .
Skinny teenager Sharon Mitchell, who headlined numerous Avon beat-downs while barely denting a training bra, co-stars in Domination Blue opposite mega-TA’d “Latin from Manhattan” Vanessa Del Rio. These are primo porn princesses just as they're ripening on a very sick vine.
The opening credits appear scrawled as graffiti along the walls of a jailhouse set. A repulsively ugly man and a female warden, who apparently learned everything she ever needed to know about criminal rehabilitation from Ilsa movies, set out to lay down The Law among inmates who we see behind bars fucking black guards, forks, disposable razors, and Barbie dolls.
From there we get prisoner flashbacks as to how they each arrived in these chintzy cages. There’s a fully realized hardcore before-and-after demonstration of what Aerosmith hints at in “Jamie’s Got a Gun.” Sharon plays a junkie who gets double-teamed by hostile dope pushers in a vintage Times Square porn theater men’s room. Vanessa invaginates an actual NYPD billy-club not happily.
The Domination Blue action then climaxes with a multiple-casualty car crash in the middle a rancidly bleak, freezing, and wet Manhattan winter’s afternoon, which seems to be the only season during which Avon Films ever shot anything, and always on polluted celluloid that any self-respecting maker of snuff films would reject as too disconcerting to human eyes ... and souls.
Oddly, in the wake of Zack and Miri Make a Porno (the box-office bombing of which prompts me to gaily gush, “Thank you, America, thank you!” the way too many turds did the morning after some recent political nonsense a few Tuesdays ago), New Jersey nonentity Kevin Smith came to mind upon my zipping up and popping Domination Blue out of my laptop.
As a filmmaker, Smith is a zilch. This fact (not opinion: fact) is based, fittingly, on the films he’s made. But his recent comments about a movie he hasn’t made prompt me to think that he’s even less than the sum of his fecal output. And that’s saying something, all you Mallrats fans.
Apparently all fired up and righteous over the God Hates Fags clan and it’s a family, not the entire middle portion of the continent, geniuses Smith penned a “political” horror script titled Red State which he repeatedly describes as “dark,” “bleak,” “too dark,” and “too bleak.”
To be exact, Smith has summed up Red State thusly: “The flick is bleak. Beyond bleak, even. Remember how bleak Dark Knight was? This flick makes the bleakness level in that flick seem Beverly Hills Chihuahua bleak.”
Yeah, remember how bleak that movie adapted from a children’s entertainment medium about a man in a bat suit doing superhero stuff to a man in a clown suit was? Somehow, Kevin Smith has confronted ideas for a film ever bleaker than that, by gosh-golly.
This is only possible from an adult to whom Star Wars remains a touchstone of anything. And to whom, obviously, the world of Avon Films, which is to say the world of adults and irrationality and unpredictable danger and tragedy (meaningless and otherwise) and where nothing is as simple as black (Blue State) and white (Red State), really, is utterly alien and something to protect one’s self from ... and something to superheroically protect everybody else from, too, oh boy!
Kevin Smith, whose “filthy” movies are described so based solely on the amount of naughty words spewed by his actors, is frightened by just how far the First Amendment might go to protect speech that might threaten his world of idealized muscleboys in colored tights and sodomy with action figures (which at least would connect him, however tenuously, to Domination Blue).
Of the God Hates Fags honco Fred Phelps, Kevin Smith belched: “The notion of using a Phelps-like character as a villain, as horrifying and scary as that guy can be, there's even something more insidious than him that lurks out there in as much as a public or a government that allows it.”
Kevin Smith is afraid of words and, if yours should rub him in a manner that makes him feel fidgety and icky, he’d apparently like stormtroopers (the ones from the Death Star, not the ones he’s never heard of from World War II, let alone crossover thrashers S.O.D.), to lock you away in Domination Blue-like environs.
May Kevin Smith and Vanessa Del Rio’s billy-club someday meet someday, soon if possible, and in the most apropos fashion. I'm quite sure that would make the Satanic Sluts smile their fang-laden smiles. And me, too.
