Week 7 (Aug 2 – 8) – Muscle Distribution Catalog
Muscle Distribution is an exciting new venture that’s hard to sum up with words alone, but if you dig into the catalog, you find a shape that’s more well-defined than any mission statement. Liz is keeping it hot for us. From Muscle’s website: Muscle is a new film distribution company with a heavy repertory slant from historian, programmer, and filmmaker Elizabeth Purchell. Borne out of an understanding of the role that accessibility plays in shaping cultural histories, we’re dedicated to complicating and expanding the canon by shining a light on works that either never received their proper due or that have unjustly faded into obscurity, and championing uncompromising new works by some of today’s most exciting underground filmmakers. We love scrappy, misfit films that don’t fit into any particular box.
Long before 60s counterculture sparked the cinematic revolution of the New Hollywood and porno chic, the shadowy world of clandestine erotica had already mapped out the outer limits of taboos. Among its most notorious artifacts? The Lustful Turk or Lascivious Scenes from a Harem.
This pre-Victorian epistolary novel was first published anonymously in 1828. Steeped in Gothic romance, orientalist fantasy and unbridled exploitation, the book chronicled the harrowing yet sexually awakening abductions of English heroines Emily Barlow and Sylvia Carey by Ali, the Dey of Algiers. Condemned as obscene by Lord Chief Justice Campbell in 1857, the text survived in the underground currents of literary history to become a foundational pillar of erotic fiction, inspiring generations of transgressive tales from Victorian penny dreadfuls to pulp classics.
By 1968, the convergence of shifting censorship laws and a burgeoning appetite for cinematic transgression finally brought this infamous piece of underground history to the silver screen. Directed by Byron Mabe with a screenplay by exploitation cinema titan David Friedman, the film adaptation transformed the decadent, century-old harem fantasies into a vivid visual reality. Stepping out of the forbidden pages of Victorian-era print and into the psychedelic glow of late-sixties cinema, the movie version of The Lustful Turk traded ink-and-paper epistolary confessions for unfiltered celluloid shock, cementing its place as a bizarre and fascinating bridge between 19th-century underground vice and modern trash-cinema culture.
English aristocrat Emily Barlow (Abbe Rentz) and her handmaiden Eliza (Gee Gentell) are sailing to India before Emily can marry Henry Carey. Captured by Moorish pirates en route, the women are dragged into the harem of Ali, Dey of Algiers, and Muzra, Bey of Tunis. Through breathless, constant letters sent back to Sylvia Carey (Crandall) in England, Emily details their harrowing subjection, awakening passions and eventual plans for violent payback.
While contemporaries like Radley Metzger were crafting classy, critically praised softcore art-house pieces, Mabe and Friedman took a much cruder approach. True to the source novel, the film relies heavily on a constant, relentless voiceover of letters being read aloud. Depending on your cinematic tolerance, this either adds a quaint, faux-literary charm or a mind-numbing wall of text that threatens to put you to sleep.
Shot with minimal fuss, the production relies on cheap thrift-store costumes including the fakest beards you’ve ever seen, makeshift harem sets (such as a conspicuously painted brick wall passing for an underground dungeon), and occasional blasts of intense primary-colored lighting to mask the budget. It was filmed in 1001 colors, after all, as the poster informs us.
Between the hilariously deadpan dialogue delivery and jaw-dropping narrative beats that culminate in a castration scene, this movie stands as a fascinating artifact of late-’60s sleaze. It’s from a time before hardcore and then the 80s video era, which gave way to the 90s and 2000s gonzo and today we have…OnlyFans and no art.
You can watch this on Cultpix.
