April 28: Nightmare USA — Celebrate Stephen Thrower’s book by picking a movie from it. Here’s all of them in a list.

I’ve been super into John Hayes’ films lately. Jailbait Babysitter, The Hang-Up, Rue McClanahan’s debut film Hollywood After Dark, End of the World, Garden of the Dead, Grave of the Vampire, the Tales from the Dark Side episode “The Madness Room,” Dream No Evil…speaking of that last film, in which a woman grows up in an orphanage dreaming of the day her father will return, forever living outside the other children around her, only leaving to be a faith healer in a circus…well, it’s incredible. Sure, there’s no budget, but it has such a strange vision, powered by Hayes’ issues with his own childhood.

Six years later, he made this movie, one of the few times — if only — that the same director made an R-rated film and then remade it as an adult movie, using the name Howard Perkins.

Rosemary (Sharon Thrope, Sodom and Gomorrah: The Last Seven Days) is a teacher trapped in a cycle of sexual repression and father-fixation that would make Freud scribble notebooks full of findings. She never knew her father, grew up in an orphanage and barely cares about her boyfriend John (John Leslie, born in East Liverpool, Ohio and one of the Golden Age of porn’s most recognizable stars). They emerge from a theater showing Let’s Do It Again and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and while he has sex on his mind, as all men do, she couldn’t care less.

She’s leaving for three years to be a teacher and tells him blandly, “I’ve got to say goodbye to my father tonight.” Their lovemaking is barely that. It’s perfunctory. He soon departs and turns to a sex worker named Unis (Leslie Bovee) to fulfill his needs. This must be a regular thing, because he’s given her many of Rosemary’s outfits so that he can do what he really wants to do to his virginal girlfriend and can’t bring himself to unleash. He worships her from behind while calling Rosemary’s name. Once he finishes, he throws his money at her, leaving her unfulfilled and complaining about her back.

She tries to find her father in the flophouse where he lives. Instead, she runs into Mick (Ken Scudder, Thundercrack!) and Kate (Monique Cardin), who assault her at knifepoint. She runs away, only to return three years later, as her father has died and she wants to reconnect with Mick.

Rosemary goes to the funeral home along with John, who is now a police officer, to identify the body, bringing along her students Tracy (Candida Royalle, who pretty much created feminist adult) and Marsh (Melba Bruce, Alex de Renzy’s Femmes de Sade).

She muses, “It was such a nightmare to be a child. Now I’m the adult. Sex is always so degrading, so unclean. I’ll teach my girls all the good things. To be pure in mind and body.”

These girls are part of a cult that worships sex and soon end up making it with the funeral director (John Seeman), who has a small apartment filled with horror movie posters (Dracula, Frankenstein, King Kong, The Black Cat). As Rosemary and John watch — and they chant about eternal wombs — she finally finds an erotic stirring, and she allows him to dry hump her before going back to Mick, whose rough ways finally get her off. He gets a job, stops drinking and treats her right. Guess what? She hates it. He responds by nearly strangling her to death before John tries to save her life. He gets knocked out, and Mick leaves, promising that the next time he sees her, he’s going to kill her. No wonder she takes sapphic solace in the dual arms of her students.

Rosemary stares at herself for long stretches in the mirror and hears the voice of her father, begging her to not bury him because he’s still alive. During the funeral, fog appears everywhere, a demon emerges, the music gets discordant, and everyone in her life — John is now in a relationship with the woman who sexually replaced her, Unis — makes love to her as Rosemary screams, “Daddy! Take me away from this place!” The end is just pure sadness, as she’ll never escape, as the smoke and strange voices engulf her utterly.

This is not an adult Rosemary’s Baby, despite the title and horrible poster. It’s even weirder and better than that. In Nightmare U.S.A., Stephen Thrower wrote that this is “…a brutal sex drama that stands as one of his (Hayes) most disturbing films, with strong echoes of the family trauma theme that incessantly colored his career.” A lot of that is because Hayes was raised by an alcoholic uncle and an ancient grandmother, while his sister Dolores was sent to a convent, emerging only to have multiple children and descend into fanatic religious behavior. 

If Dream No Evil was a melancholic, circus-tent meditation on a missing father, then this film is the pitch-black, grimy realization that some things are better left buried.

You can watch this on CultPix.