Murder, She Wrote S3 E22: Murder, She Spoke (1987)

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A temporary blackout at a recording studio leaves Jessica in the dark when the wealthy, soon-to-be-owner is stabbed to death.

Season 3, Episode 22: Murder, She Spoke (May 10, 1987)

Jessica has been booked in a studio to record her mystery books as part of a series for the blind. Mid-recording, a blackout hits the studio, and when the lights come back on, someone discovers Randy Whitman, the owner-to-be, dying of a stab wound to the back.

Who’s in it, outside of Angela Lansbury?

William Atherton (Greg Dalton): The undisputed king of the “guy you love to hate.” Before he was getting his house covered in marshmallows in Ghostbusters, he was starring in the 1974 cult classic The Sugarland Express. Seriously, his IMDb is filled with roles that should just say “jerk.”

G.W. Bailey (Lt. Oswald Faraday): Long before he was the bumbling Captain Harris in Police Academy, Bailey was dodging the undead in Tom McLoughlin’s moody 1982 cult horror One Dark Night.

Michael Callan (Carl Anglin): A veteran of the screen who took a dip into the “Nature Gone Wild” subgenre with the 1977 giant-cat-on-the-loose flick The Uncanny, and appeared in the giallo-influenced TV thriller The Killer on Board.

Michael Cole (Earl Tuchman): Best known as Pete from The Mod Squad, but he earned his horror stripes playing the adult Henry Bowers in the original 1990 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s It.

Charlie Daniels (Stoney Carmichael): The man who told us the Devil went down to Georgia. While primarily a country legend, his presence here adds that grit necessary for a Southern-fried thriller.

Jonna Lee (Sally Ann Carmichael): A 1980s mainstay who faced off against a supernatural force in the 1984 film Making the Grade.

Fredric Lehne (Al Parker): You recognize him as the “Yellow-Eyed Demon” (Azazel) from Supernatural. He’s a genre veteran who also appeared in Night Game, a slasher set at a baseball stadium.

Wendy Phillips (Nancy Dalton): She survived the 1988 TV movie The People Across the Lake, which is a textbook “suburban nightmare” thriller.

Constance Towers (Margaret Witworth): A genuine icon of cult cinema. She starred in Samuel Fuller’s insane 1963 masterpiece Shock Corridor and the 1964 neo-noir The Naked Kiss. If you haven’t seen them, fix your life.

Patrick Wayne (Randy Witworth): The son of The Duke himself. He led the charge against Ray Harryhausen monsters in the 1977 fantasy-adventure cult classic Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

Mark Neely (Sergeant): A familiar face from The Young and the Restless, Neely also did time in the 1981 slasher Graduation Day.

Trish Garland (Secretary): Mostly known for her stage work, but she popped up in the psychological thriller The 4th Floor.

Austin Kelly (Cabbie): A reliable character actor who appeared in the gritty 1970s crime-cult classic Across 110th Street.

What happens?

If you thought the most dangerous thing in a recording studio was a high-pitched feedback loop or a diva’s rider, you clearly haven’t spent enough time in Cabot Cove’s extended universe.

In this week’s episode, our favorite mystery writer is recording her books for the blind. Naturally, because Jessica can’t even go to the grocery store without someone checking out permanently, a blackout hits the studio. When the lights flicker back on, Randy Whitman—the studio’s owner-to-be and a man with all the charm of a paper cut—is found with a knife in his back.

Enter Lt. Faraday, played by G.W. Bailey, who has apparently decided that since he can’t stop Mahoney and Tackleberry, he’ll spend his time being a condescending misogynist to a world-famous novelist. Faraday immediately pivots his detective skills toward Greg Dalton, the blind producer.

Why Greg? Because Faraday’s logic is airtight: Greg can move in the dark, he was near the switch, and he’s the suspicious type. Meanwhile, Jessica finds a bottle of expensive purple nail polish at the scene. That leads her to:

  • Suspect A: Cindy, the runaway niece of country star Stoney Carmichael, wears purple polish, but it’s the cheap stuff.
  • Suspect B: The victim’s widow, who seems about as sad as someone who just won the lottery, wears the expensive brand.
  • The Reality: The nail polish is a Total Red Herring. It has absolutely nothing to do with the murder, but it gives Jessica something to do while Faraday is busy being useless.

Things get messy when Jessica catches Nancy Dalton (Greg’s wife) trying to hide a set of matching silverware in the dryer. Pro tip: if your husband is a murder suspect, don’t try to tumble-dry the evidence. Jessica has to gently remind her that “Obstruction of Justice” isn’t a great look for the fall season.

The lightbulb — literally, see the trivia — finally goes off for J.B. when Faraday calls her and mistakes her recorded voice for her actual voice. Suddenly, the blackout rehearsals and the constant technical difficulties during Stoney’s recording sessions make sense.

Who did it?

Al Parker. He flipped a master switch on his keyboard to cause the blackouts, using them as dress rehearsals to frame Greg (who was conveniently distracted by his meds at the time).

How did Al pull off the ultimate alibi? The old Recorded Audio Trick. He made it look like Randy was calling him on the phone, but Al was actually just listening to a recording of Randy’s voice. This kept Randy pinned in one spot for the stabbing while making Al look like he was elsewhere, chatting away with the soon-to-be corpse.

Al tries to play it cool, claiming the evidence is circumstantial, which is a classic move for a guy who just got outsmarted by a woman in a smart blazer. It isn’t until Faraday finds the actual alibi tape (thanks to a heavy nudge from Jessica) that Al finally folds.

Faraday ends the episode by graciously admitting he’ll never undervalue female intuition again. Jessica likely responded with a polite smile, while internally calculating exactly how many ways she could have disposed of his body without leaving a trace.

Be nice to Jessica Fletcher. She has a very intimate relationship with death.

Who made it?

This was directed by Jessica’s real-life son, Anthony Pullen Shaw and written by Si Rose, who created Sigmund and the Sea Monster and Dr. Shrinker. 

Does Jessica dress up and act stupid? Does she get some?

No. I’m wondering if I’ll ever see that again. Maybe in season 4? This is the last episode of season 3.

Was it any good?

Yes!

Any trivia?

The moment that Jessica figures out who the murderer is, a light bulb comes on above her head.

Screenshot

Give me a reasonable quote:

Lt. Faraday: Oh, I think writing is a real good hobby for a woman. You can cook up some supper. You can chat on the phone. And then pop over to the old typewriter now and then for a few minutes.

Jessica Fletcher: Yes. When I’m not too busy beating laundry against the rocks in the river.

What’s next?

The first episode of season 4! Jessica jaunts to Paris at the behest of an old friend whose fashion boutique is in financial trouble. When a local loan shark is murdered, she must dig deep to find the truth.

CULTPIX MONTH: Bewitched (1976)

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Anise is a woman living in the Argentine countryside with a singular, driving obsession: she wants to be a mother. Her husband is impotent, but that doesn’t stop her from seeking out every possible avenue to conceive, from the desperate (prostitution) to the supernatural (visiting a local witch). However, she has a secret admirer who makes her dance card a literal obituary page. The Pombero, a goblin-like creature of Guarani folklore, has fallen in love with her. He’s the jealous type, and he’s more than happy to slaughter any man who dares to touch the object of his affection.

If you’ve spent any time in the sweat-soaked trenches of South American exploitation cinema, you know the name Armando Bó. He was the man who turned Isabel “Coca” Sarli into a global icon of “sex-and-nature” cinema. Usually, their films involve Isabel wandering through a jungle or a river while men lose their minds over her.

Once you see her, you’ll get it.

Bewitched (originally titled Embrujada) follows that blueprint but adds a heavy dose of folk horror and supernatural sleaze. It’s less of a romantic drama and more of a nightmare where the Coca Sarli brand of eroticism meets a slasher movie directed by a man who clearly spent too much time staring at the sun. Bó dives deep into Paraguayan/Argentine myths. The Pombero isn’t a sparkly vampire; he’s a hairy, whistling forest spirit.

According to Guarani legend, the Pombero is a protector of birds and the forest. If you want to stay on his good side, you must leave honey, brandy and tobacco on a fence post for thirty nights. He is often blamed for unexplained pregnancies or the disappearance of women. Bó took this abductor aspect and made the Pombero into a supernatural stalker with a kill count.

As for his obsession — both Bó and the Pombero — Isabel Sarli was never just an actress; she was a force of nature. Starting as a model, she became Miss Argentina and reached the semi-finals of Miss Universe 1955. Her acting debut was in Thunder Among the Leaves, which has a controversial nude scene featuring Sarli that made it the first Argentine film to feature full frontal nudity. If you’re doing an SAT-style question here, Bó is to Jess Franco as Sarli is to Lina Romay. They became lovers, and she became the primary star of his films until he died in 1981.

John Waters has stated several times that Sarli’s movies have inspired some of his own films, and he presented Fuego in Argentina and got to meet her. He famously treated her like royalty. He once described her films as “feminist” in their own warped way because Sarli’s characters were often hyper-sexual beings who existed entirely outside the proper moral codes of the time.

Even when the script asks her to do the impossible, Sarli commits 100%. Her descent from a hopeful bride to a woman haunted by a forest demon is played with an operatic level of mania. 

Embrujada was released during a period of intense political turmoil and strict censorship in Argentina. The fact that Bó managed to release a film about a woman seeking supernatural impregnation and a forest goblin’s killing spree is a testament to his tenacity (and his ability to market art vs smut). Much like Franco and Romay, he and his muse were able to make aberrant cinema in the most restrictive of political cultures.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

CULTPIX MONTH: The Bleeder (1983)

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The Rock Cats, an all-girl hair metal ensemble, are touring the Swedish countryside in a van that probably smells like stale Oppigårds Golden Ale and Aquanet. When their engine gives up the ghost near a decaying manor, they do what any rational slasher protagonists do: they break in.

In real life, I ask you to never do this.

Unfortunately, the mansion isn’t empty. It’s the playpen of The Bleeder, a hulking, pulsating mass of practical effects and bad attitude. What follows is a SOV  gauntlet of synth-heavy chases, creative use of musical instruments as murder weapons and enough stage blood to fill a Viking longship.

Prolific rock drummer Åke Eriksson (of Wasa Express and Boppers fame) puts his back into the role of The Bleeder. He moves with a rhythmic, percussive intensity, literally drumming out a beat on his victims’ skulls.

Was he the original choice for this role? Director Hans Hatwig used his position at Okej (the most influential Swedish pop/rock magazine of the 80s) to create hype. He published a photo of a monstrous, cloaked figure and claimed Simmons was under the mask. In reality, it was a local stuntman. When the film was released, and fans realized the God of Thunder was nowhere to be found, it caused a minor scandal among Swedish metalheads.

There are real rock stars, beyond Eriksson. The Rock Cats — Axet (Sussi Ax, who was also in the band Stitch), Eva (Eva Danielsson), Mia (Mia Hansson), Maria (Maria Landberg) and Eva (Eva Pettersson) — are the band Revansch and Danne Stråhed, who plays the forest ranger, was in the band Wizex. 

If you like the music strings from Halloween, good news. You’ll hear them so many times in this. It really is kind of a formless slasher that meanders, but you can see that it inspired the much better Blood Tracks. 

For decades, Blödaren was a “lost” film, available only on grainy, nth-generation VHS dubs traded by collectors. Its arrival on Cultpix marks the first time many fans have seen it in a watchable format. Despite its formless nature, it remains a crucial piece of Nordic cult cinema because it captures a time when Swedish youth culture shifted from ABBA-style pop to the aggressive hair metal of the 80s.

Tales from the Darkside S2 E19: The Last Car (1987)

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This episode is a surrealist take on the Ghost Train story, serving as an allegory for death and the afterlife.

Stacey (Begonya Plaza), a college student traveling home for Thanksgiving, finds herself alone in a desolate train station. The atmosphere is immediately off as the station feels abandoned, and an exit sign falls from the wall without provocation. When her train arrives, she boards the very last car, the caboose.

Inside, she meets three eccentric passengers. Mrs. Crane (Mary Carver) is a grandmotherly figure who knits incessantly and speaks in soothing, rhythmic metaphors. The Old Man (Louis Guss) is a silent, suited passenger focused on his lunch box. And finally, Joe (Scooter Stevens) is a young boy dressed in a cowboy outfit who appears restless.

Mrs. Crane welcomes Stacey, explaining that the last car sways like a cradle. Stacey attempts to relax, but the logic of the world begins to fray. She notices her watch has stopped, and when the train enters its first tunnel, the lights flicker to the sound of a haunting, maniacal laugh. For a fleeting second, Stacey sees her own reflection closing the window shades independently of her movements.

As the journey continues, Stacey realizes she is trapped. The door to the next car is locked, appearing and disappearing, with signs forbidding passage while the train is in motion. Time becomes elastic; Joe inexplicably changes costumes, from a cowboy to an infantry soldier, and the passengers seem to know Stacey’s name despite never being introduced.

The horror escalates during the second tunnel sequence. Joe begins shooting his toy gun, but the play turns lethal. The Old Man is riddled with actual bullet holes and slumps over, dead. Stacey screams in terror, but as soon as the train exits the tunnel, the Old Man sits up, perfectly intact, and begins eating a sandwich as if nothing happened. Mrs. Crane simply smiles and tells a shell-shocked Stacey, “You get used to the tunnels… eventually.”

The appearance of the Conductor (Bert Williams) brings no relief. When Stacey demands to be let off or taken to the dining car, she is met with bureaucratic indifference. She offers her round-trip ticket, but the Conductor clips it and returns a one-way ticket, claiming it is the only kind he has.

Stacey’s desperation peaks when she looks through the door’s window as the Conductor leaves. For a split second, the polished interior of the train vanishes, replaced by a rotting, skeletal wreckage. The passengers are revealed as decayed corpses, and the Conductor is a grinning skeleton. However, as the train emerges into the light, the illusion of normalcy returns.

Mrs. Crane reveals the true nature of their journey: the Conductor won’t return until there is a new passenger to collect. Stacey is no longer a traveler; she is now a permanent fixture of the last car. Mrs. Crane drapes a handmade shawl around Stacey’s shoulders—the very one she had been knitting since Stacey boarded—and offers to teach her how to knit. This is the acceptance of death.

The episode concludes with the train entering another tunnel. This time, Stacey doesn’t scream. Instead, she joins the others in a rhythmic, catatonic chant: “Tunnel… Tunnel… Tunnel.” As the darkness engulfs the car, Stacey’s face withers into a pale, skeletal mask. She has finally gotten used to the tunnels, becoming just another ghost on a train that never reaches its destination.

This episode was directed by John Strysik, who directed five other episodes of this series. It was written by Michael McDowell, who wrote the script for Beetlejuice. This is one of the strongest episodes of the show.

Visual Vengeance in August!

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Cyclops: A secret team of scientists has crossed the line between medicine and madness, implanting embryos into human hosts in a series of hideous experiments designed to create a new form of life. But when their latest subject takes her own life before giving birth, the operation spirals into desperation. Accompanied by a malformed cyclops mutant as muscle, the researchers descend into the city in search of a new victim–dragging an unsuspecting young woman into a nightmare of medical horror that degenerates into a frenzy of deformed flesh, slimy transformations and mutant showdowns.

Emerging from Japan’s late-’80s direct-to-video boom, Cyclops stands as an early, unhinged entry in the country’s underground splatter movement. Directed by Jōji “George” Iida in his debut, the film fuses Cronenberg-style body horror with low budget V-cinema rawness — building methodically before erupting into a chaotic finale packed with grotesque practical effects and full-throttle gore. A lean, mean descent into pure biological terror, it’s a classic cult relic of experimental Japanese horror at its most hardcore and bizarre.

There’s a new 2K transfer from original 16mm film elements, as well as extras including commentary with Justin Decloux of The Important Cinema Club and Patrick Macias, author of Tokyoscope: the Japanese Cult Film Companion; a new interview with director Joji “George” Iida; a video essay on his films and the Japanese DTV market of the mid-80s; an image gallery; a sketch gallery; trailers; a folded mini-poster featuring original pressbook art; a reversible sleeve featuring original Japanese VHS art; “Stick Your Own” VHS stickers; two different liner notes booklets and limited eiditon slipcase art by The Dude.

Fatal Flying Guillotine: Deep in the forbidding Valley of No Return, a reclusive master, driven to madness by his own obsessive training, perfects a nightmarish weapon — the “Lightning Strike,” a savage evolution of the flying guillotine with twin, whirling blades designed for maximum carnage. Any intruder who dares cross into his domain faces instant decapitation with ruthless precision. But when a vengeance-driven fighter (Carter Wong) sets his sights on the valley, seeking justice for his mother’s death, he must confront both the master’s deadly invention and the head-chopping chaos it leaves in its wake.

Arriving cheaply and quickly in the fury of the flying guillotine craze that swept 1970s international martial arts cinema, The Fatal Flying Guillotine taps into the era’s appetite for outrageous kung fu spectacles sparked by the breakout 1976 smash hit Master of the Flying Guillotine. This off-brand Taiwanese entry escalates the formula with its delirious titular weapon variation and near-constant combat – while blending mystical elements, rival factions, double crosses and Buddhist brawls into one of the more kinetic and memorable examples of the short-lived but legendary trend.

There’s a new 2K transfer from original film elements supervised and composited by film archivist Toby Russell, plus extras like a commentary with Justin Decloux of The Important Cinema Club Podcast; A Brief History of Flying Guillotine Movies and Chan Siu-Pang Was There video essays; a 10 Styles of Tamo demonstration; a dirty VHS version of the film; an image gallery; trailers; a folded mini-poster featuring original pressbook art; “Stick Your Own” VHS stickers; a liner notes booklet by C.J. Lines; lobby cards and limited edition slipcase art by Uncle Frank.

Reanimator Academy: The fraternity brothers at Delta Epsilon Delta are your typical red-blooded American party animals, that is except for Edgar Allen Lovecraft. He’s locked up in his room trying to cure death and finds a serum that works on the severed head of a recently deceased comedian. When a mafia hood steals the serum to use on his murdered squeeze, her reanimated corpse goes on a campus killing spree — let the corny puns and one-punch decapitations fly!

Reanimator Academy was produced down and dirty for the booming early 90s video store rental market by legendary producer David DeCoteau (Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama) and directed by the equally renowned Bret McCormick (The Abomination), under what is possibly the best pseudonym ever used in a film. This silly send-up of Lovecraftian lore and cinematic tropes will leave you feeling as hungover and headless as a three-kegger blowout would.

First time ever on disc following its initial VHS release!

This has a transfer from existing SD tape masters and features commentary from Sam Panico of B&S About Movies and Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum; an interview with director Bret McCormick; a location tour; an interview with actor Tom Fegan and Fred the Head; a feature on the score; the director’s 2023 soundtrack cut; Bret McCormick’s Children of Dracula; a Q&A; a folded mini-poster; a reversible sleeve featuring original VHS art; a “Stick Your Own” set of VHS stickers, limited edition slipcase art by Giorgio Credaro and a limited edition video store card.

B & S About Movies podcast Episode 136: Black Emanuelle

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Women’s Prison Massacre, Violence in a Women’s Prison, Emanuelle In America, Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade and Caligula: The Untold Story. These are scummy movies. This is what I do.

You can listen to the show on Spotify.

The show is also available on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Amazon Podcasts, Podchaser and Google Podcasts

Important links:

Theme song: Strip Search by Neal Gardner

Closing song: Botany 500 by Dawn Davenport and the Window Breakers

Donate to our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ko-fi page⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

CULTPIX MONTH: Helgerån (1989)

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Joseph W. Sarno. Yeah, that Joe Sarno. The Ingmar Bergman of 42nd Street. The man who gave us Inga and Abigail Lesley is Back in Town. If you’re looking for a guy who understood that the distance between high-art Swedish angst and low-rent skin flicks is about the thickness of a silk stocking, Sarno is your man.

Yet imagine a slasher flick filmed in the Swedish woods, directed by this very same softcore legend, with a plot that feels ghostwritten by a nun on a bad trip. That would be Helgerån, which was also released as Sacrilege.

Sara (Christine Moore, a Roberta Findlay veteran from Lurkers and Prime Evil) shows up at the Church of the New Disciples looking for salvation. She’s got a heavy burden: her twin sister is back in Lapland playing house with Satan and possibly gestating the literal Antichrist by having sex with goats. Also, her mom got her head lopped off and spiked like a volleyball in the intro, but the case is colder than a Nordic winter.

Enter George (Kurt Sinclair), a reporter who is supposed to be investigating the sect but mostly just stares at Sara with puppy-dog eyes. When Sara decides to lead a missionary trip to the old country to save her sister’s soul, George follows. Along for the ride is Sister Naomi (Shannon McMahon, another Findlay alum from Blood Sisters), who has a calling for Sara that isn’t exactly sanctioned by the Vatican.

Oh, you’re surprised by a Sapphic plot in a Sarno movie?

Once they hit the forest, the repressed religious zealotry starts to boil over. Everyone is horny, everyone is crazy, and one girl even wants to go full Sound of Music minus the habit and plus some demented spinning. But while the missionaries are busy struggling with their magic underwear, someone is skulking through the brush with a hand scythe, slicing off hands and heads.

Holy shit — I loved this movie. It’s a slow-moving film in which nothing is paid off, filmed by a man who wasn’t just a smut peddler. He was obsessed with the way sexual epiphanies could shatter repression, which in this movie, he takes that very same theme and grafts it onto a slasher. It’s a heady, talky and occasionally overwrought brew about delusion and madness.

Is Judith really the Sara that gets to have sex and are two people trapped in the same body? Is she a sick young woman? Will men — and a woman? — perhaps wonder which version they’re sleeping with and if one of them is a succubbus?

For a movie directed by a guy who was literally filming legit porn concurrently, it’s also surprisingly chaste for a movie where everyone is DTF in a way that destroys their lives. You get some blouses pinging off and brief topless shots, but it’s more interested in the idea of sex than the act.

The gore, however, is another story. The scythe work is hokey but effective. And at nearly two hours, Sarno may be testing your patience. It’s a marathon of melodrama and some truly wooden acting from Sinclair, who sounds like he’s reciting a grocery list rather than investigating a satanic cult, all in a film that appears to look like it was made for TV, yet with exposed breasts and bloody unattached heads.

But that’s exactly why I drank this in like a sweet glass of Punsch.

Another reason I was all in? The print looks rough. We’re talking tape rolls, tracking issues and VHS static. The fuzziness makes the low-budget decapitations look almost real. It’s a lost oddity from a director who lived in the gutter but kept his eyes on the arthouse stars. It’s not a masterpiece, but in a world of cookie-cutter slashers, this one is a beautiful, bloated freak-out.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

88 FILMS BLU-RAY RELEASE: She Shoots Straight (1990)

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If you’ve ever felt like your in-laws were a nightmare, imagine being Joyce Godenzi (wife of Sammo Hung and a former Miss Hong Kong) in She Shoots Straight (also known as Lethal Lady). This time, she plays Mina Kao, a super-cop who marries her supervisor, Insp. Huang Tsung-Pao (Tony Leung), and finds herself part of the Huang family, many of whom are also cops. While dealing with her sister-in-law, Chia Ling (Carina Lau), who is jealous, a gang of Vietnamese ex-soldiers led by Yuen Wah is razing Hong Kong.

The mid-movie shift is a gut-punch. After an impulsive move by Chia Ling leads to a rescue mission, Insp. Huang Tsung-Pao is blown to bits by a booby trap. The scene where the sisters have to tell the family matriarch at her birthday party is one of the most effective melodrama-meets-mayhem moments in 1990s HK cinema. The final act? Pure, unadulterated vengeance on a freighter that makes Die Hard look like a school play.

The final duel between Joyce Godenzi and the muscular female mercenary Yuen Ying (Agnes Aurelio) is legendary. It involves a lot of broken glass, heavy machinery and zero stunt doubles for the wide shots.

Directed by Corey Yuen, this is more than a Girls with Guns movie. It’s a family drama that just so happens to have high muzzle velocity. It bridges the gap between the weeping melodramas of the 80s and the hyper-violent tactical shooters of the 90s. If you want to see Yuen Wah being absolutely despicable and Godenzi proving she was more than just a pageant queen, this movie delivers.

Extras include commentary with Asian cinema expert Frank Djeng, an image gallery, a trailer and a reversible sleeve. Order from MVD.

The Benefactress: A Celebration of Cinematic Freedom (2026)

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The director of Guerilla Metropolitana either has a massive PR budget or a tireless obsession with messaging me directly to watch his film. After receiving a long, intense audio message from him, I felt I had no choice.

Here’s an example of an audio message I got from him: “I’ll tell you from the beginning. It’s not an easy watch at all. It’s not even horror. It’s horrific, but it’s not horror. It’s quite pornographic, although it’s not porn, but it’s quite pornographic. It’s very extreme, very sadistic.

It is almost plotless. It’s got a very basic plot. The film is highly experimental. It puts the theme of artistic freedom at the center. How far can a filmmaker go in the name of artistic freedom? Voyeurism topics like that are in place. The complete rejection of morality in exchange for enlightenment.

Some have called the film a visionary work of art. Others have called the film an offensive, repugnant piece of film. So nothing in between.”

How could I say no after that message?

After the cult success of Dariuss, director Guerrilla Metropolitana was hired by a dying woman with a fake name, Elektra McBride, who has a powerful televangelist husband. She only has one demand: to appear in the film via video link. A seemingly virtuous charity worker, Juicy X, becomes the face of the film and the twisted desires of its unseen patron, as well as her director.

Then, with no set narrative, the Mystery Woman is abused sexually until a gun is produced and we finally watch a cleaner (Marie Antoinette de Robespierre) disinfect the scene.

In a world that has produced cinema like Salo, Sweet Movie, the films of Joe D’Amato and Jess Franco, not to mention Last House On Dead End Street, Forced Entry, Waterpower, Armand Weston’s The Taking of Christina and The Defiance of Good, as well as any number of films by Japanese creatives like Sade Satô, Hideshi Hino, Daisuke Yamanouchi or Hisayasu Satô:, I wonder how shocked anybody can be any more.

What works here isn’t the movie as much as the psychodrama created around it. I miss ballyhoo and selling movies; Metropolitana has gone all out to get people to watch this, often on what seems like a one-on-one basis. That’s commitment. What he made feels like a test for the audience to get through or perhaps one where the viewer reflects on all the things their eyes have seen.

For all the talk toward how shocking this is — and I hate comparing movies to other movies, but here I go — this didn’t destroy me like Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible, which puts the viewer through hell thanks to its unblinking eye as we watch people be ruined and yet still retain a storytelling arc, much less one in reverse. It feels closer to the Nick Zedd Cinema of Transgression era, perhaps without the eye of a Richard Kern.

Often, films like this — I’m looking at you, A Serbian Film — cloak their transgressive nature in a square-up reel explanation that they’re making a political statement or commenting on how the world treats people. Yet they want to have their cake and fuck it repeatedly while you watch, too, and then kill said cake.

I want to understand what Metropolitana wants from this and what he’s trying to say. At the very least, you have to give it to him to not only go full frontal nude on camera, but to wear a t-shirt of his last film while doing so.

As they say, always be selling.

You can watch this for yourself on Fawesome.