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Between Dante's purgatorio di luxuria and Bergman's vacant inferno (The Devil's Eye) lies the titular spinster, hungering for flesh in Gerard Damiano's dirge for the spirals of desire. (By contrast, Deep Throat is a fizzy limerick.) It opens with oppressive drabness, a slow zoom out from a rainy cityscape to a bare apartment where Miss Jones (Georgina Spelvin) contemplates her sallow self one last time before settling in for bathwater and razors. The Hereafter is a rented cottage, a liminal chamber into which she wanders to learn that her wrist-slashing has stained an otherwise spotless life. Facing damnation one way or the other, the virgin opts for "a life engulfed, consumed by lust," the blandly bureaucratic gatekeeper (John Clemens) allows it, if only to break the monotony. First, deflowering with "the Teacher" (Harry Reems): "I've waited for you for so long," she murmurs, alone in the darkened frame with a rapidly rising phallus. The wanton binge continues, leaving no orifice unturned yet always with undercurrents of emptiness and desperation (howling wind echoes through a Sapphic rubdown, a session of watery onanism appropriates Morricone's fuzzy guitars). At the center is Spelvin, stark and humid, an exhausted chorine turned into a wondrous lewdling—gliding from despair to ecstasy and back for a pitiless close-up camera, practically a porno Falconetti. The bluntly Sartrean coda, with the haggard heroine diddling herself for a disinterested cellmate, gives a withering view of the search for pleasure in the dungeon of cinema. "Touch me, damn you, pleeease!" With Marc Stevens, Levi Richards, Judith Hamilton, and Sue Flaken.
--- Fernando F. Croce |