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Sartre is the basis, "the look" and Nausea are adumbrated for an exhaustive excoriation of voyeurism. Porno holocaust: The world "after the Nuclear Kiss" is a smoky vault, humanity is divided between sallow, lust-impaired New Wavers and the handful of "Sex Positives" who perform for them in the titular underground joint. The razzing emcee (Andrew Nichols) quotes Dr. Johnson and gets off on the audience's hopelessness. "Go play in the fallout!" Among the "erotic casualties" are the depressed former jock (Paul McGibboney) and his closeted Sex-Positive wife (Michelle Bauer), they try their luck with an embrace until he gets violently sick, she fakes queasiness to be by his side but is increasingly inflamed by the café performances. Flesh turns blue under phosphorescent bulbs, sex is mechanistically unappetizing—a rodent's elongated snout on the milkman who schtupps a housewife, a giant pencil's noggin on the businessman who shags a secretary. Exchanging raunchiness for the reflexive desolation of watching other people fuck, Stephen Sayadian offers a sick-Eros reading of Frank's Alas, Babylon concurrent with Querelle and Liquid Sky. Poisonous neon, slanted shadows, painted grimaces. New attractions include the virgin from Wyoming (Marie Sharp) who thoroughly enjoys her onstage ravishment, and the legendary superstud (Kevin James) whose protruding crotch enthralls the famished heroine. "You don't mind if I get profound, do you folks? There's a message somewhere in here." An arrestingly self-annihilating hardcore revue: When the need for sex is coupled with the inability to feel, the final cum shot virtually doubles as a burst of tears. With Tantala Ray, Dennis Edwards, Dondi Bastone, and Paul Berthell.
--- Fernando F. Croce |