April 2: Get Me Another — A sequel or a movie way too similar to another film.

Eve Black (Candice Daly, Zombi 4: After Death, Cop Game) has moved from Kansas to the big city in the hopes of living with her sister, Tina (Karen Dahl). Instead, she finds Tina’s cooling corpse in a bathtub and a sprawling conspiracy involving NeuroVid, a media conglomerate that seemingly either runs this world or is this world. To solve the murder, Eve transforms into Dorothy, a taxi dancer at The Red Top, guided by the perpetually chain-smoking Lt. Rodino (Richard Steinmetz).

Liquid Dreams is a cocktail of a movie. Some Videodrome, some Wizard of Oz, some Dr. Caligari, lots of The Seventh Victim, some Café Flesh, some Cinemax After Dark and plenty Rinse Dream early 90s adult energy. This mix taste good and isn’t afraid to show bloody lips, BDSM imagery and static bursts of noise and video. Or to have John Doe from X be a cab driver.

This movie seems to reach into my brain for its casting. Bob the Goon, Tracey Walter? Paul Bartel? Mink Stole? Adult star Crystal Breeze? Don Stark, the next door dad from That 70s Show? What is happening?

NeuroVid is more than a building. It’s also a channel that gets inside your brain. The Red Top is like that, too, because the women who dance there all get the men worked up and taken to The Hot Box, where the endorphins are sucked out. Oh yeah, and now Eve is called Dorothy. Her first slow dance — she’s a taxi dancer now? — is with Bartel, who is obsessed with her sweaty feet. Once she sees what they do to him backstage, she’s horrified.

Eve/Dorothy is such a potential star that she’s fast-tracked into a Oz-themed porn that’s not really porn where a reactor (that’s what we call actors in the past future of Liquid Dreams) is dressed like a half-naked scarecrow, two men prance dressed as crows and she shows up as a seriously underdressed Ms. Gale as Mink Stole directs the action and the music and video screens demand that they seek freedom from the flesh.

Dorothy then starts dancing at Twilight, and if you become a star there, you’re asked to be part of The Ritual, which takes place on the top floor of the NeuroVid complex.

Everything is bathed in neon glow. The soundtrack is a rhythmic, industrial pulse that feels like a headache you don’t want to get rid of. All of the music is industrial. And this is such a reminder of that lost early 90s moment where erotic meant cold and thriller meant ritualistic.

Directed by Mark Manos, who wrote the script with Zack Davis and would go on to direct the dance sequences in Playboy: Farrah Fawcett and All of Me, this feels sadly prescient. Sure, this isn’t the future we got, but Daly sadly died 13 years later, found in a rundown apartment, her cause of death listed as polydrug intoxication complicated by severe steatohepatitis. Her boyfriend said that she was a victim of foul play.

This is the kind of movie marketed to the trenchcoat brigade but actually designed to make them feel deeply uncomfortable. It may have been sold as an erotic thriller, but what they got was a film filled with slick visuals and strange rituals, TVs screaming messages like gender is slavery and everyone is unapproachably gorgeous or fascinatingly grotesque. Again, I am obsessed with movies that people rented to goon to and ended up being enraged and upset by. It’s my vice. Watch this immediately.

You can watch this at the Cave of Forgotten Films or YouTube.