No, this is not Eugenie (AKA  Philosophy in the Bedroom). It’s also not Eugénie de Sade (AKA DeSade 2000). This is 1980’s Eugenie (Historia de una perversión), but yes, it’s another Jess Franco movie. It is a remake of the 1970 movie listed above and is also known as Erotismo. Franco danced with this subject many times, also making How to Seduce a Virgin.

Alberto de Rosa (Antonio Mayans, a Franco stock member) wants the young Eugenie (Katja Bienert, El tesoro de la diosa blanca), so he gets his sister Alba (Mabel Escano) to help by seducing her father and talking him into letting brother and sister take his daughter for, well, you can only guess.

Bienert is fine in this, but she’s also dealing with Maria Rohm and Soledad Miranda to live up to in Franco’s first two attempts. That’s not fair to her to be compared to them. She was also underage when this was made, which is something that would never happen today or at least we’d like to believe that.

This also has Lina Romay barking and behaving like a dog, so there’s that.

In Germany, most of the plot and character pieces are thrown away to make way for inserts from Triangle of Venus. For these Teutonic perverts, Jess Franco was simply not dirty enough.

Despite being approached several times with New York Times reporter Gerald Walker’s 1970 novel Cruising, William Friedkin (The Exorcist, Sorcerer and perhaps not as successfully, Jade) wasn’t interested. He changed his mind after an unsolved series of murders in New York’s leather bars.

Articles by Village Voice journalist Arthur Bell and NYPD officer Randy Jurgensen helped inform this film. The latter went into the same deep cover as this film’s protagonist, Steve Burns. Then, Friedkin learned that Paul Bateson, a doctor’s assistant who appeared in The Exorcist, had been implicated in the crimes while serving a sentence for another murder.

Friedkin did some of his research for the film by attending gay bars dressed in only a jockstrap, but by the time the movie began filming, he had been barred from two of the most oversized bars, the Mine Shaft and Eagle’s Nest, due to the controversy surrounding the movie.

Much like The New York Ripper and God Told Me To, this movie feels like one set at the end of the world — New York City near the close of the 20th century. Someone is picking up gay men, murdering them and leaving their body parts in the Hudson.

Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino)—exactly the type of man the killer has been after—is on the case. Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino) has assigned him to infiltrate the foreign world of S&M and leather bars. However, as the case progresses, he loses himself and his relationship with Nancy (Karen Allen).

Soon, he learns of just how brutal the NYPD is to gay men — even if they’re just suspects. And he finds himself growing closer to his neighbor Ted (Don Scardino, Squirm).

By the end, nothing is truly clear. While the killer may be Stuart Richards, a schizophrenic who attacks Burns with a knife in Morningside Park, it could also be Ted’s angry boyfriend Gregory (James Remar). After all, Ted’s mutilated body is discovered while Stuart is in custody. Or the real killer is still out there — perhaps he’s even a patrol cop (Joe Spinell). The truth is never told.

Spinell is incredible in this, which is no surprise. He used his real life for inspiration, as there’s a line about his wife, Jean Jennings, leaving him and moving to Florida with his daughter. His wife had just done exactly that before this movie was shot.

The actual version of this movie may never be released. Friedkin claims it took fifty rounds to get the MPAA to award the film an R rating. Over 40 minutes of footage was cut, which consisted of time spent in gay bars. The director claims that these scenes showed “the most graphic homosexuality with Pacino watching and with the intimation that he may have been participating.”

This footage also creates another suspect — Burns himself may have become a killer.

When Friedkin sought to restore the missing footage for the film’s DVD release, he discovered that United Artists no longer had it and may have even destroyed all the cut footage.

In 2013, James Franco and Travis Mathews released Interior. Leather Bar is a metafictionalized account of the two filmmakers’ attempts to recreate the lost 40 minutes of Cruising.

There’s a disclaimer at the start that says, “This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world, which is not meant to be representative of the whole.” Years later, Friedkin would claim that MPAA and United Artists required this, hoping that it would absolve them of the controversy that had been all over this production.

That’s because protests had started at the urging of gay journalist Arthur Bell, the aforementioned Village Voice writer whose series of articles on the Doodler’s killing of gay men inspired this movie. There were numerous disruptions to the filming, as protesters blasted music and loud noises at all filming locations, leading to hours of ADR to fix the ruined dialogue.

The Arrow Video 4K UHD release of Cruising features a brand-new restoration from a 4K scan of the original camera negative, supervised and approved by writer-director William Friedkin. It also includes a Friedkin-approved newly remastered 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio mix of the film. The release also includes archival featurettes and two commentaries by Friedkin.

There’s also new commentary featuring the original musicians involved with the soundtrack; Heavy Leather, an alternate musical score by Pentagram Home Video; deleted scenes and alternative footage; on-set audio featuring the club scenes and protest coverage; censored material reels; a theatrical trailer, teasers and TV commercials; interviews with Karen Allen, film consultant and former police detective Randy Jurgensen, editor Bud S. Smith, Jay Acovone, Mike Starr, Mark Zecca and Wally Wallace, former manager of the Mineshaft; Breaking the Codes, a visual essay surrounding the hanky-codes featuring actor and writer David McGillivray; Stop the Movie, a short film by Jim Hubbard capturing the Cruising protests; archival featurettes; William Friedkin’s BeyondFest 2022 Q&A at the American Cinematheque and an extensive image gallery featuring international promotional material, on-set sketches, and more.

It also has a 120-page perfect-bound collector’s book featuring articles from The Village Voice and The New York Times, essays from the film’s extras cast, an introduction from William Friedkin and an archive interview with Al Pacino. The set is enclosed in a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sister Hyde.

You can get it from MVD.

American Gigolo was always fascinating to me as a kid as my mother wouldn’t let me in the room when it was on. As a result, knowing that it was “dirty” made me want to see it even more.

Directed and written by Paul Schrader, it’s about Julian Kay (Richard Gere), an escort for rich older women. Now, we know this is a fantasy and I’m sure that affluent elderly ladies like to have a man, but I think we all know that most male escorts are for other men. But let’s get over that and explore the movie.

Along the way, he starts to fall for a senator’s wife, Michelle Stratton (Lauren Hutton), but soon finds himself being hired for a job he never does: BDSM sex with Mr. Rheiman’s (Tom Stewart) wife Judy (Patti Carr) while the old man watches. Julian tells fellow sex worker Leon (Bill Duke) that he never wants another call like that; Leon tells him that when he ages, these rich old ladies won’t want him any longer.

Meanwhile, as Julian satisfies Lisa Williams (K Callan), Mrs. Rheiman is murdered. Detective Sunday (Héctor Elizondo) believes that Julian did it, but his alibi — sleeping with another man’s wife — puts his sense of morality to the test. He refuses to say where he was and at each turn, evidence is planted and he starts to realize that he’s being set up.

I love this quote from Schrader: “The character in Taxi Driver was compulsively nonsexual. The character in American Gigolo is compulsively sexual. He is a man who receives his identity by giving sexual pleasure but has no concept of receiving sexual pleasure.” Indeed, one scene — in which Julian is full frontal nude, a rarity even today — he goes on about how being able to please women is the one thing that he knows makes him worthwhile. Schrader would revisit the themes of male sex workers in 2007’s The Walker.

The main reason I wanted to see this as a child was the music. Giorgio Moroder and “Call Me” by Blondie? Amazing. This also set the tone for style for the new decade, as Gere’s Giorgio Armani suits and Hutton’s Aldo Ferrante outfits established the look that so many would emulate.

The Arrow Video 4K UHD and Blu-ray release of American Gigolo has a 4K remaster from the original negative by Arrow Films, plus extras such as commentary with film critic Adrian Martin; interviews with Paul Schrader, Héctor Elizondo, Bill Duke, editor Richard Halsey, camera operator King Baggot, music supervisor and KCRW DJ Dan Wilcox and Professor Jennifer Clark; a trailer; an image gallery and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket. You can order it from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this film on Friday, Jan. 24 at 10:30 p.m. at the Guild Cinema in Albuquerque, NM (tickets here). For more information, visit Cinematic Void.

Let’s get this out of the way: Brian De Palma, much like Giallo, was heavily influenced by Hitchcock. In fact, when an interviewer asked Hitchcock if he saw the film as an homage, he replied, “You mean fromage.” That said — Hitchcock died three months before the film was released, so that story could be apocryphal (it’s been said that the famous director made this comment to either a reporter or John Landis).

What is true is the interview that De Palma did after Dressed to Kill (Rolling Stone, October 16, 1980).  The director claimed, “My style is very different from Hitchcock’s. I am dealing with surrealistic, erotic imagery. Hitchcock never got into that too much. Psycho is basically about a heist. A girl steals money for her boyfriend so they can get married. Dressed to Kill is about a woman’s secret erotic life. If anything, Dressed to Kill has more of a Buñuel feeling.”

However, I’d argue that this film has more in common with Giallo than anything the “Master of Suspense” directly created. That’s because—to agree with DePalma above—this film does not exist in our reality. Much like Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, it exists in its dream reality, where the way we perceive time can shift and change based on the storyteller’s whims.

Yet what of DePalma being dismissive of Argento in interviews, claiming that while he saw the director as having talent, he’d only seen one of his films? Or should we believe his ex-muse/wife Nancy Allen, who claims that when she told DePalma that she was auditioning for Argento’s Inferno, he said, “Oh, he’s goooood.”

Contrast that with this very simple fact (and spoilers ahead, for those of you who worry about that sort of thing, but face facts, this movie is 37 years old): DePalma rips off one of Hitchcock’s best tricks from Psycho: he kills his main character off early in the film, forcing us to suddenly choose who we see as the new lead, placing the killer several steps ahead of not just our protagonists, but the audience itself.

And yet there are so many other giallo staples within this film: fashion is at the forefront, with a fetishistic devotion to gloves, dresses, spiked high heels, and lingerie being displayed and removed and lying in piles all over an apartment or doctor’s office. This is the kind of film that makes you stop and notice an outfit, such as what Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson, Big Bad Mama, TV’s Police Woman) wears to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the blue coat that Liz Blake (Nancy Allen, Carrie, Strange Invaders) wears to meet Dr. Robert Elliot (Michael Caine, how could we pick any movie other than Jaws 4: The Revenge).

Then there are the music cues from Pino Donaggio, who also scored Don’t Look Now, Fulci’s The Black Cat, and Argento’s Do You Like Hitchcock? The film not only looks the part, but it has intense sound, too.

We also have characters trying to prove their innocence, investigating ahead of the police. Or the son of the murder victim who wants to discover why his mother really died. Or her doctor, who has an insane patient named Bobbi who has stolen his straight razor and demands that she give him more time than the rest of her patients. All of them could be the killer. Giallo gives us no assurances that just because we see someone as the protagonist, there’s no reason they couldn’t also be the antagonist.

Let’s toss in a little moral ambiguity here, too. Kate is a woman who is bored with her life. She’s raised a son and seen her marriage lose any hope of sexual frisson. Liz is a prostitute — no slut shaming here, she’s a strong businesswoman more than anything  — but she’s also a practiced liar, as a scene shows her deftly manipulating several people via phone to get the money she needs to buy stock based off an insider tip she receives from a client. Dr. Elliot is obviously attracted to Kate but claims that his marriage prevents him from having sex with her. Yet it seems like he has secrets beyond informing the police of the threats of his obviously unbalanced patient, Bobbi. And then there’s Peter, Kate’s son, who has no issues using his surveillance equipment to spy on the police or Liz. If this character seems the most sympathetic, remember that he is the closest to the heart of DePalma, whose mother once asked him to follow and record his father to prove that he was cheating on her.

Finally, we have the color palette of Bava’s takes on giallo mixed with extreme zooms, split screens and attention to the eyes of our characters. The blood cannot be redder.

The film opens with Kate in the shower. While the producers asked Dickinson to claim that it’s her body, it’s really Victoria Johnson (Grizzly) as a body double. Her husband comes into the shower to make love to her, but she finds it robotic and not the passion she feels she deserves. Directly after, she tells Dr. Elliot that she’s frustrated and attempts to seduce him, but he rejects her.

More depressed than before the appointment started, she heads to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite being surrounded by inspiration, such as the statue of Diana by Saint-Guadens, West Interior by Alex Katz and Reclining Nude by Tom Palmore (a tip of the hat to the amazing I Talk You Bored blog for an insightful take on the film and the research as to what each work of art is), she absentmindedly writes entries in her schedule. Planning the holiday meal gets her through the mindlessness of her life, flowing penmanship reminding her to “pick up turkey” instead of slowing down and appreciating not just the artwork around her but the people. There’s a young couple in lust if not love. There’s a young family. And then, a man with dark glasses catches her eye before brazenly sitting down next to her.

We are used to male characters chasing after female characters who aren’t defined by anything other than being sex objects. Instead, we have Kate pursuing the man, making the first, second, and even third moves until we realize that she was just following the man’s breadcrumbs.

Of note here is that color plays an essential role in the scene, as do expected manners. Kate is a wife and mother. She is who society expects to have virtue, and she is clad in all white, but her intentions are anything but pure. She finally has what she wants—the thrilling sex life that she may have only read about in trashy paperbacks.

This scene is a master class in pacing and movement. Imagine, if you will, the words on the page: Kate follows a mystery man through the museum. And yet, those are just eight words. We get nearly nine minutes of wordless pursuit, yet it never grows dull.

Finally, Kate follows the man out of the museum, but she loses him until she looks up and sees her glove dangled from a taxi. But blink, and you miss death in the background as Bobbi blurs past the camera.

When we catch up with Kate, it’s hours for her but seconds for us because this movie is a dream universe. She wakes up in bed with a stranger. There’s a gorgeous camera move here as DePalma moves the camera backward, an inverse of how a lesser director would have treated this scene. Instead of showing the two lovers tumbling through the apartment and removing clothes at every turn, we see Kate reassembling herself to move from her fantasy world to reality and toward her real world, which will soon become a nightmare. The camera slides slowly backward as she gets dressed, remembering via split-screen and sly smile how she doesn’t even remember where her panties have gone. She’s still wearing white, but under it all, she’s bare, her garments lost in a strange man’s house. A man whose name she doesn’t even know.

So now, as she emerges from realizing her sexual fantasies, she feels that she must make sense of it. She wants to write a note to say goodbye but doesn’t want to overthink it. Maybe she doesn’t even want it to happen again. And then she learns more about the man. It starts with his name and then becomes more than she ever wished to find out: his health report shows that he has multiple STDs.

Kate leaves the apartment and makes her way to the elevator, where she tries to avoid anyone’s eyes. In the background, we see an ominous red light, ala Bava. Bobbi—death and punishment for sin—is coming.

The death scene — I hold fast to my claim that The New York Ripper is close to this film but made by a director who doesn’t have the sense to cut away from violence — DePalma stages his version of the shower scene. But more than Psycho, we’ve come to identify with Kate. She’s a woman fast approaching middle age who wants a thrill, and yet, she’s punished by disease and death. She didn’t deserve this, and her eyes pleaded not to the killer as much as they did to the camera. And to us.

Here’s where we have to wonder aloud about DePalma’s long-discussed misogyny. This film was protested by women’s groups, who stated in this leaflet that “FROM THE INSIDIOUS COMBINATION OF VIOLENCE AND SEXUALITY IN ITS PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL TO SCENE AFTER SCENE OF WOMEN RAPED, KILLED, OR NEARLY KILLED, DRESSED TO KILL IS A MASTER WORK OF MISOGYNY.” Is DePalma guilty of the slasher film trope of “you fuck, and you die?” Maybe. Perhaps if she had remembered her marriage, at best, she wouldn’t be here. At worst, she wouldn’t have forgotten her ring in the stranger’s apartment and would have survived.

The way I see it, the death of Kate allows us to make the transition from past protagonist to new heroine, as the doors open post-murder to reveal a grisly scene to Liz and her john. The older man runs while Liz reaches out to Kate, their eyes meeting and fingers nearly touching. Kate’s white purity has been decimated by the razor slashes of Bobbi, the killer. As their transference is almost complete, Liz notices Bobbi in the mirror. Remember that we’re in a dream state? Time completely stops here, so we get an extreme zoom of both the mirror and Liz’s face. She escapes just in time, grasping the murder weapon and standing in the hallway, blood on her hands as a woman screams in the background, figuring her for the killer.

At this point, the film switches its protagonist. Unlike the films of David Lynch, like Mulholland Drive, this transference is not a changed version of the main character, but her exact opposite. Kate wore white, was older, and had a marriage and child, yet she slowly came to feel like an object to the men in her life. Liz wore black, was young and single, but was wise to the games of sex and power. She isn’t manipulated, turning the tables on men by using their needs for personal gain. Kate may have seen sexual fantasy as her greatest need, but for Liz, it’s just a means to an end.

Kate and Liz are as different as can be. For example, Kate goes to the museum to find inspiration. Liz only sees art as commerce, and she spends plenty of time explaining to Peter how much money she could make by acquiring a painting.

Dr. Elliott discovers a message from Bobbi on his answering machine (these machines and the narrative devices they enable must seem quaint and perhaps even anachronistic to today’s moviegoers). Once, Bobbi was his patient, but he refused to sign the paperwork for their (as the pronoun hasn’t been defined, so I’ll use they/their) sex change. In fact, Dr. Elliot has gone so far as to convince Bobbi’s new doctor that they are a danger to herself and others.

The police, however, have arrested Liz, and Detective Marino (Dennis Franz, TV’s Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue) doesn’t believe a word she has to say. There’s a great moment here where Liz goes from wide-eyed ingenue to knowing cynic in the face of Marino’s misogynistic tone. Meanwhile, Kate’s son Peter (Keith Gordon, Jaws 2, Christine) uses his listening devices in the station to learn more about his mother’s death than the police are willing to let on.

He begins tracking Liz, obsessively noting the times that she comes and goes from her apartment. He’s doing the same to Elliot’s office. But he’s not the only one tracking people. Bobbi has been stalking Liz, including a sequence where our heroine goes from being chased by a gang of black men to talking with an unbelieving police officer to Peter saving her from Bobbi with a spray of mace.

Because Peter has seen Bobbi also emerging from Dr. Elliott’s office, so he joins forces with Liz to discover who she is. That means that Liz uses her chief weapon — sex — to distract the doctor long enough to discover Bobbi’s real name and information. We learn that Liz’s mental sex game is as strong as her physical attributes here — she says that she must be good to be paid as well as she is. She knows precisely the fantasy Dr. Elliott wants to hear. But perhaps she also knows the fantasy that the mainly male slasher/giallo viewer wants: the woman submitting to the killer holding the knife.

Peter watches outside in the rain when a tall blonde pulls him away. Has he been taken by Bobbi? No — Liz returns to have sex with Dr. Elliott; he has been replaced by the killer. Bobbi lifts the razor as Liz helplessly crosses her arms in front of her face for protection. But at the last minute, the blonde who grabbed Peter outside is revealed to be a police officer, as she shoots Bobbi through the glass. That shattered pane also breaks Bobbi’s illusion and mask, revealing that Dr. Elliott is the man under the makeup and clothes.

The killer is arrested and goes into an insane asylum; Dr. Levy explains that while the Bobbi side of his personality wanted to be free, the Dr. Elliott side would not allow them to become a true woman. Therefore, whenever a woman broke through and aroused the male side of the persona, the female side would emerge and kill the offending female.

Inside the mental asylum, a buxom nurse attends to the male patients. The room is bathed in blue light, a cool lighting scheme that echoes Mario Bava’s films. The movie has moved from a dream version of reality to a pure dream sequence. It intrigues me that Carrie and Dressed to Kill both start with a shower scene and end with a dream threat to the surviving secondary heroine.

Within the asylum, Dr. Elliott overcomes the nurse and slowly, methodically, folds her clothing over her nude form. As he begins to either dress in her clothes — or worse, molest her dead body — the camera slowly moves upward as we realize that there is a gallery of other patients all watching and screaming. This scene reminds me of the gallery of residents watching a doctor perform surgery, yet inverted (have you caught this theme yet?) and perverted.

Bobbi emerges once again, and because she is dead, she cannot be stopped. Liz is bare and helpless in the shower, and nothing can protect her from being slashed and sliced and murdered — except that none of this is real. She awakens, screaming in bed, and Peter rushes in to protect her. And for the first time in the film (again, thanks to I Talk You Bored for noticing), she is wearing white.

Many find this a hard movie to stomach due to its misogyny. I’ll see you that and tell you it’s a misanthropic film that presents all of humanity, male and female, negatively. The men in this film are actually treated the way women usually are in films, as either silent sex objects (Warren Lockman), sexless enemies (Kate’s husband), shrill harpies that need to be defeated (Detective Marino) or sexless best friends who provide the hero with the tools they need to save the day (Peter). Seriously, in another film, one would think Peter would have a sexual interest in Liz, but despite her double entendres and come-ons, he remains more concerned with schedules and numbers and evidence.

Bobbi, the combination of male and female, comes across as a puritan punisher of females who benefit from sex, either emotionally or monetarily. Or perhaps they are just destroying the sex objects that they know that the male side of their brain will never allow them to become. Interestingly, Bobbi’s voice doesn’t come from Michael Caine but from De Palma regular William Finley (The Phantom of Phantom of the Paradise).

What else makes this a giallo? The police seem either unwilling to help at best or ineffectual at worst until they tie things up neatly at the end. And the conclusion, when the hand emerges not from the doorway — but the medicine cabinet — to slash Liz echoes the more fantastic films in the genre, such as Suspiria, All the Colors of the Dark and Stagefright, where reality just ceases to exist. At the end of all three films, the heroine has confronted the fantastic and may never be the same.

In the first, Suzy narrowly escapes from hell on earth and emerges laughing in the rain. Is she happy that she survived? Has she achieved a break from reality? Is she breaking the fourth wall and laughing at how insane the film has become, pleased that the torture is finally over?

In the final scene of All the Colors of the Dark, the fantasy world is all a ruse, yet our heroine, Jane, is now trapped in the dream world. She can tell what will happen before it does; she knows that her husband has both slept with and killed her sister, but he has saved her from a fate worse than death. Yet all she can do is shout, “I’m scared of not being myself anymore. Help me!”

In Stagefright, the final girl walks out of the scene and out of reality as she defeats the killer. She has transcended being an actress to removing herself from fiction.

In all these films, the characters are not unchanged by their experiences with the dream world. In Dressed to Kill, the final dream sequence renders Liz truly frightened for the first time in the film. It’s the only time we see her as vulnerable — even when faced with an entire gang of criminals on the subway, she retains her edge. As Peter reaches out to comfort her — the only sexless male in the film and not just a sublimated one like Dr. Elliott — she recoils from his touch before giving in to his protective embrace.

In the same way, the film changes us. It has thrilled us, made us think, or even made us angry. True cinema—true art, really—makes us confront what we find most uncomfortable. Sure, we can deride and decry many of this film’s choices, but the fact that I’ve devoted days of writing and over three thousand words to it speaks to its potency. Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far.

PS—I’ve often discussed—in person and on podcasts—that I experienced so many R-rated movies for the first time via Mad Magazine. I’m delighted I could find the Mort Drucker illustration for his skewering of Dressed to Kill.Dressed to Kill (1980)

The Seduction is director and writer David Schmoeller’s follow-up to Tourist Trap. While that film exists in its own strange universe, where Chuck Connors just so happens to have psychic powers, this is based in the real—well, not always—world of Los Angeles. According to star Morgan Fairchild, Schmoeller was inspired by a story about a viewer stalking a TV reporter.

Jamie Douglas (Fairchild) has finally broken through and become an anchor on the local nightly news. Things are good — people like her — and she has a boyfriend named Brandon (Michael Sarrazin). The problems start when she begins to receive calls, letters and gifts from a man named Derek (Andrew Stevens, preparing to own the 1980s erotic thriller genre but not before he’d go from being a psychosexual deviant to chasing one with Bronson in 10 to Midnight). Soon, he also bothers her friend Robin (Colleen Camp) and drops by work to bring chocolates; Jamie, if anything, is too friendly and gently turns him down.

After he doesn’t stop calling her, Jamie learns that Brandon- a photographer- lives next door. He walks right in and starts taking photos of her. Her boyfriend beats him bloody, and when they talk to a cop named Maxwell (Vince Edwards), they learn that there’s not much they can do. As for Derek, he’s already bothering Robin, demanding that she talk to Jamie for him.

A doctor tells her that Derek is infatuated but to a degree that makes him psychotic. Would you say, mental enough to hide in the closet and go one-handed while she takes a bath? Oh Derek, can’t you see that a model named Julie (Wendy Smith Howard) is in love with you? Why did you tell her that you’re engaged?

Jamie starts to realize that Derek could be the Sweetheart Killer, a serial murderer that she’s been reporting on. He goes so far as to change her teleprompter while she’s on the air, leading to her having a breakdown in front of the entire city. Brandon tries to comfort her in the hot tub, but he’s soon killed by Derek mid-coitus; as our killer buries him in his front yard, the cops put Jamie on hold. On hold! Who is working there, Father Tom from Amityville II?

This is when Jamie goes full-final girl, blasting at Derek with a shotgun and starting to stalk him right back, repeatedly calling him and telling him how bad she wants him. As he comes back to the house to attack her, he runs into Julie, who tearfully announces that she knows that Jamie doesn’t really love him. He blows right past her — he has murder and sexual assault to do — before she turns the tables and becomes aggressive with him, begging him to have sex with her, revealing his impotence. Angered beyond all hope, he attacks her, just in time for Julie to announce that she’s seen Lipstick and wasn’t that part cool where the rapist got shotgunned?

This has a decent horror pedigree, as it’s the third film produced by Irwin Yablans (Halloween) and Bruce Cohn Curtis, who also made Roller Boogie and Hell Night.

The Seduction is a scuzzy film; I have no complaints. Yet it still has a theme song, “Love’s Hiding Place,” sung by Dionne Warwick! This song was written by the film’s composer, Lalo Schifrin. He may have written the Mission: Impossible theme but got no respect from the credit crew on this, as they spelled his last name incorrectly.

It left me wondering how so many early 80s American Giallo movies have the only nude appearances by major actresses. I’m looking at you, Blind Date, with Kirstie Alley going bare. I was shocked to see multiple nude scenes by Fairchild in this with nobody double being used. Bonus points for the script, which has Colleen Camp’s character declare, “Art, fart!”

Double word score for Lucan star Kevin Brophy appearing, Tom DeSimone’s brother Bob being in the cast as a shutterbug, and Fairchild’s sister Cathryn Hartt as a teleprompter person.

Triple overall score for this being the last Avco Embassy Film.

IMDB BS footnote for this one: “Apparently, veteran actress Bette Davis really liked this movie, and after viewing it on cable television, she allegedly sent the movie’s star, Morgan Fairchild, a congratulatory letter complimenting her work on the film.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing on Saturday, January 4, at midnight at the Little Theater in Rochester, NY (tickets here) and Friday, January 17, at 7:30 PM at the Little Theater in Rochester, NY (tickets here). For more information, visit Cinematic Void. 

Despite being approached several times with New York Times reporter Gerald Walker’s 1970 novel Cruising, William Friedkin (The Exorcist, Sorcerer and perhaps not as successfully, Jade) wasn’t interested. He changed his mind after an unsolved series of murders in New York’s leather bars.

Articles by Village Voice journalist Arthur Bell and NYPD officer Randy Jurgensen helped inform this film. The latter went into the same deep cover as this film’s protagonist, Steve Burns. Then, Friedkin learned that Paul Bateson, a doctor’s assistant who appeared in The Exorcist, had been implicated in the crimes while serving a sentence for another murder.

Friedkin did some of his research for the film by attending gay bars dressed in only a jockstrap, but by the time the movie began filming, he had been barred from two of the most oversized bars, the Mine Shaft and Eagle’s Nest, due to the controversy surrounding the movie.

Much like The New York Ripper and God Told Me To, this movie feels like one set at the end of the world — New York City near the close of the 20th century. Someone is picking up gay men, murdering them and leaving their body parts in the Hudson.

Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino)—exactly the type of man the killer has been after—is on the case. Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino) has assigned him to infiltrate the foreign world of S&M and leather bars. But as the case progresses, he begins to lose himself and his relationship with Nancy (Karen Allen).

Soon, he learns of just how brutal the NYPD is to gay men — even if they’re just suspects. And he finds himself growing closer to his neighbor Ted (Don Scardino, Squirm).

By the end, nothing is truly clear. While the killer may be Stuart Richards, a schizophrenic who attacks Burns with a knife in Morningside Park, it could also be Ted’s angry boyfriend Gregory (James Remar). After all, Ted’s mutilated body is discovered while Stuart is in custody. Or the real killer is still out there — perhaps he’s even a patrol cop (Joe Spinell). The truth is never told.

Spinell is incredible in this, which is no surprise. He used his real life for inspiration, as there’s a line about his wife, Jean Jennings, leaving him and moving to Florida with his daughter. His wife had just done exactly that before this movie was shot.

The actual version of this movie may never be released. Friedkin claims it took fifty rounds to get the MPAA to award the film an R rating. Over 40 minutes of footage was cut, which consisted of time spent in gay bars. The director claims that these scenes showed “the most graphic homosexuality with Pacino watching and with the intimation that he may have been participating.”

This footage also creates another suspect — Burns himself may have become a killer.

When Friedkin sought to restore the missing footage for the film’s DVD release, he discovered that United Artists no longer had it and may have even destroyed all the cut footage.

In 2013, James Franco and Travis Mathews released Interior. Leather Bar is a metafictionalized account of the two filmmakers’ attempts to recreate the lost 40 minutes of Cruising.

There’s a disclaimer at the start that says, “This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world, which is not meant to be representative of the whole.” Years later, Friedkin would claim that MPAA and United Artists required this, hoping that it would absolve them of the controversy that had been all over this production.

That’s because protests had started at the urging of gay journalist Arthur Bell, the aforementioned Village Voice writer whose series of articles on the Doodler’s killing of gay men inspired this movie. There were numerous disruptions to the filming, as protesters blasted music and loud noises at all filming locations, leading to hours of ADR to fix the ruined dialogue.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Jake and Elwood Blues (John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd) went from a musical comedy sketch on Saturday Night Live to a $30 million budget mission from God as they careers of the Not Ready for Prime Players left New York City and set out for Hollywood.

There was a bidding war for this movie. After all, SNL, Animal House and The Blues Brothers album were all huge. Belushi was suddenly the star of the week’s top-grossing film, top-rated television show and singing on the number-one album all at the same time.

Universal won and what they got was a new writer in Aykroyd who wrote a long script that director John Landis was still writing and didn’t have a final budget until well after shooting started, at which point Belushi was already going wild in Chicago, drinking and drugging up a storm while cars were crashed everywhere and money was pretty much set ablaze.

It doesn’t matter. This movie is still remembered long after its star and all that money have gone away.

Raised in an orphanage and taught the blues by Curtis (Cab Calloway), the brothers became blood when they cut their middle fingers with a guitar string from Elmore James, the King of the Slide Guitar.

The past is important in this film, as Aykroyd demanded Calloway, James Brown, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin to be cast and get musical numbers. Universal wanted younger acts and disco stars. They lost.

The story is simple. The brothers want to raise money to save their orphanage. That’s it. That’s the story. The rest is a road movie full of comedic scenes that you can basically come into any time that you want.

They could have filmed what happened during the making of the film and had just as great of a film. For example, there was an entire bar on set, The Blues Bar, staffed with drug dealers. And on one night shoot, Belushi disappeared. Aykroyd looked around and saw a single house with its lights on. He walked over and the owner of the house said, “You’re here for John Belushi, aren’t you?” He had walked into their home, asked if milk and a sandwich, and went to sleep. This is why he was nicknamed “America’s Guest.” Belushi was also called “The Black Hole” because he would lose his sunglasses after nearly every scene.

Beyond Paul Reubens, Steven Spielberg and Carrie Fisher, there’s a secret Colleen Camp cameo. Look for her Playboy poster in Ellwood’s cell.

I remember this movie running so many times on HBO in my youth and watching it nearly every time. I could watch it right now, even after watching it to write this.