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The stain on the carpet, the skillet on the skull: "Sexual liberation—just look at what it brought us!" The Blands of Los Angeles, the aesthete who refuses to sell subpar wine (Paul Bartel) and the nutritionist in medical whites (Mary Woronov), as proper and repressed as can be. (Antiseptic décor, separate beds, gold-trimmed jammies, "I don't mind a little hugging and kissing...") Around them a sea of hedonism, starting with the scarlet-hued swingers party down the hall. Bumping off debauchees while collecting cash for a dream restaurant becomes the couple's business, fetishists turn up at their doorstep and leave in duffel bags. A matter of performance, instructs the sweetly domestic dominatrix (Susan Saiger), a costume for every fantasy as Woronov turns herself into strict mommy, bound fräulein, Minnie Mouse. "Nobody can say we don't earn this money." The combat of squares and kinksters is a critique of the Eighties revival of Fifties conservatism, virtually a definition of independent filmmaking under the circumstances. Murder as a middle-class business, a mock-noir triangle courtesy of the larcenous locksmith (Robert Beltran) with connections to the dog food industry. Buck Henry in kimono and Edie McClurg in furs at the orgy hosted by Don Steele, corpse disposal set to Los Lobos' "Diablo Con Vestido Azul." A different kind of death race in "a story of Hollywood today," for the transgressions Bartel has the unshakable Buñuel calm. (His home-movie mise en scène revels in its erotic-scabrous wit: Mrs. Bland's seduction with dollar bills adorning her sprawled bare figure, a jacuzzi crammed with electrocuted revelers like a wilted potted plant.) "Friendship and security" behind a most charming misanthropy, a happy ending for the old-fashioned cannibals. ("There is a vast difference between their manners and ours," as Montaigne has it.) With Ed Begley Jr., Richard Paul, John Paragon, Richard Blackburn, and Billy Curtis.
--- Fernando F. Croce |