Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!
Director Zoltan G. Spencer also made The Satanist and Terror at Orgy Castle. This time, he’s telling the story of the Hand of Pleasure, a secret organization of robotic women under the command of Dr. Dreadful (Spencer). He looks like the kind of thing if you saw it outside your home, you’re be terrified, wearing one of those old plastic see-through masks of an old man. Then again, he does say “Please excuse the mask… my face is the greatest horror of them all!” He wants to have his women sleep with spies and learn their secrets while a Sherlock Holmes-looking man — also old — tries to figure out what is happening.
Joe (William Howard, Brides of Lucifer)is one of those spies and his spying consists of watching strip club dancers and sleeping with Jill (Terri Johnson, Blood Sabbath). They end up at the doctor’s wax museum, where he claims “If my sex-transference machine can turn a woman into a man-hating robot, just think what it will do to a man!”
There’s unsynced sound, softcore performances that are so fun that everyone is smiling even when they’re whipping and choking the life out of each other, crazed narration, music that feels like it came from another dimension that we can only dream of listening to more of, stock footage, female and male full frontal, a hero that ends up making love to several women at once at the end even stacking them up as they pass out, a brainwave scanner that seems like something Cobra’s Dr. Venom would make yet only have a metal strainer to use and evil robot women who kill with their pleasurable mouths.
This movie is as wild as you’d hope and also filled with glorious padding, from nude bathing scenes that may still be playing and horse races. I’d go watch it right now if it was in a theater.