5 Movies for Sickos I Saw Recently and Loved (Or Liked): Last Summer, MaXXXine, Longlegs, Café Flesh, and In the Realm of the Senses

It’s been a stinking hot ass summer in NYC (as usual) and I live in a fifth-floor Alphabet City walkup. Even with a brand-spanking new air conditioner, it’s stuffy in here! So I escape the heat by schlepping, panting and slicked with sweat, into movie theaters to try to soak up the not-quite-free AC. This is all to say I’ve watched a whole lot of movies lately. Rather than simply picking one and running with it, I wanted to crib yet another idea from Dennis Cooper’s blog and slam together a bunch (for Dennis, though, these usually highlight recently-read books). I originally was going to try to keep these reviews short, but fuck it, why? Scroll to the one you want to read if you don’t want to endure them all–I don’t give a shit! So, in the order in which I saw them, here are five films for sickos I loved…or liked recently:

Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer

There are a few films that have irreparably rewired my neural pathways. Most are unsurprising for dedicated readers: Pink Flamingos, Inland Empire, you get the point. But one I’ve never had the chance to gush about here is Catherine Breillat’s À ma sœur!, otherwise known by its direct-to-the-level-of-insulting English title Fat Girl. My memory of this film is so strong that it resembles a traumatic flashback. As I was drifting off in a late evening French cinema course on the top floor of NYU’s Paris locale at 56 rue de Passy in 2005, the crack of a murderer’s ax crashing through a car’s windshield shattered what was mere seconds earlier a disturbed yet sleepy and deeply français film about budding teenage sexuality with chubby sullen voyeur Anaïs (Anaïs Pingot) playing the grumpy observer to her hot older sister Elena (Roxane Mesquida)’s vacation sexual awakening. I was never the same again.

Breillat’s new film Last Summer (ou L’Été dernier) isn’t quite as blood-soaked, but it holds enough simmering psychosexual shock value to titillate and provoke in equal measure. Last Summer centers on Anne, played with Catherine Deneuve blonde iciness by Léa Drucker, a successful lawyer who we first see uncomfortably grilling a young female assault victim on her sexual history, preparing the girl for the kind of misogynist interrogation she’s in for on the stand. We know Anne is successful when she returns home to her fancy, schmanzy house in the Parisian suburbs, her pristine power-woman ivory wardrobe, her idyllic family life with bloated bore Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) and two adorable adopted daughters, and the wine glass perpetually affixed to her hand. The latter may just be some liquid armor defending against her two-great-big-humps-and-I’m-gone relationship with Pierre.

Everything changes with the arrival of surly 17-year-old rebel without a cause Théo (played by first-timer Samuel Kircher), Pierre’s delinquent son who moves in after attacking his teacher. Theo sits somewhere between Death in Venice’s most beautiful boy in the world Tadzio and Terence Stamp’s mysterious stranger in Pasolini’s Teorema. Except rather than driving the entire family mad in an erotic frenzy of Catholic longing, Théo only sparks Anne’s flame. And with his thick brown hair flopping into his bedroom eyes and his lithe young form, juxtaposed with her husband’s softening one, who can blame her? Breillat reveals the slow dance of Théo and Anne’s illicit courtship as they get closer and closer with small boundaries being crossed whether allowing him to give her a homemade tattoo or roughhousing in the lake like kids. So when they finally commit the transgressive sorta-incestual act, you, or at least I, found myself rooting for it. It helps that Drucker and Kircher are both gorgeous. Now kiss! There’s a reason why stepmom porn is so popular!

More than just a turn-on, the moment when the film clicked for me was a scene in which Anne and Théo drive home from the beach with the girls in the back of Anne’s Mercedes convertible, all to the blasting, pastoral-ripping noise of Sonic Youth’s “Dirty Boots” (worth noting Puzzled Panther recently released a fun new cover of the song). This song reappears later in the film, much softer, playing in the background while Anne and Théo make googly eyes at each other at a bar after Anne escapes her hubby’s snoozy friends. “Dirty Boots” stands in as an aural throwback as Anne rekindles her younger, more rebellious years, even though Drucker also plays Anne with a kind of ageless Kim Gordon cool. Still, the song exposes the naughty freedom she feels when in Théo’s presence, a sexual reawakening for someone who harbors, but rarely discusses, her own sexual trauma. However, there’s more to Anne than just pent-up middle age; when it all goes to shit (and it does), she also reveals herself to be as chillingly and coldly calculated as she needs to be to cling onto that richy-rich lifestyle.

Most of the film is set in the perpetual glow of summer, only dimming when Théo and Anne scamper off to fuck in his stanky teenage room or in the shed. It’s so sunny that it reminds me of the brightness of certain Scandinavian filmmakers like Ruben Östlund or Kristoffer Borgli. This makes sense as Last Summer is a remake of a 2019 Danish film by May el-Toukhy, Queen of Hearts. The original is moodier with the boy, Gustav, looking more like a young Lex Fridman who carries his anger and pain openly, rather than resembling a doomed droopy-eyed twink who sauntered off the pages of Dennis Cooper’s new Flunker or his cinematic collabs with Zac Farley like Permanent Green Light. Queen of Hearts is also significantly darker and, with its morbid conclusion, more moralizing about the stepmother, also named Anne, acting as the definite pursuer. True to form, Breillat doesn’t permit her audience to have this kind of easy moral clarity or escape from our own desire and complicity. This is reflected in her unwaveringly still shots during Anne and Théo’s sex scenes, focusing on Anne’s agonized, vein-popping O face. And though there are a couple of moments that veer straight into pure camp such as my favorite shot with a shirtless Théo standing in the window between Anne and Pierre at breakfast (subtle!), what seems frothy is actually, in Breillat’s hands, much more subversive.

Ti West’s MaXXXine 

MaXXXine should be my favorite film of the year. It seemingly has everything: Mia Goth, smoggy smutty Hollywood Boulevard porno theater peep show sleaze, a giallo-inspired black-gloved killer, Argento cherry-red blood splatter, gun-sucking, high-heels stomping on a Buster Keaton impersonator’s balls (the movie just may have shot its load with this early scene), Satanic Panic, a Nightstalker red-herring, Mia Goth, a soundtrack that includes ZZ Top’s trash anthem “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” a bruised and sweaty Kevin Bacon overacting, horking coke cut up with a SAG card, a doom jazz score by Tyler Bates, cinematography that authentically mimics scummy VHS B-movie aesthetics, glimpses of the hardened and exploitative Hollywood studio system, delusional refrains about being a “fucking movie star,” Mia Goth…Yet, something about Ti West’s third and (hopefully not) final film in his X trilogy comes up short and I’ve been struggling to wrap my brain around exactly why ever since watching the movie.

The film starts out promising with a deranged title card quoting from one of the preeminent movie monsters herself, Bette Davis: “In this business, until you’re known as a monster, you’re not a star.” MaXXXine traces Maxine Minx (Mia Goth)’s pursuit of monsterhood—or stardom, whichever you prefer—in an attempt to conquer Hollywood much like she’s already conquered the porno industry given all the drooling looks she receives from scrungy crew members on the studio lot. After a short black and white clip of Maxine as a child performing for her televangelist daddy, repeating his—and her—famous catchphrase, “I will not accept a life I do not deserve,” we initially witness adult Maxine auditioning for the slasher sequel The Puritan II. This scene mirrors the failed, much-memed “But I’m a STAAAARR” audition in West’s previous Pearl but with a twist: Maxine nails this audition, welling up with tears talking about Satan’s influence. She knows it too, stomping out of her audition to shout at the other girls: “Y’all might as well go home!”

What at first seems like a film about Maxine clawing her way to fame becomes bogged down as she’s tossed into a meandering thriller plot that includes being hounded by Kevin Bacon’s seedy Louisiana private investigator John Labat who blackmails her with proof of her…being the final girl in X (?) and a pentagram-branding serial killer offing all her fellow sex workers and friends after they attend swanky parties in the Hollywood Hills. All the while, Maxine also has to placate her new wooden hardass Puritan II director Elizabeth Bender, played by Elizabeth Debicki, who seems to exist solely to spit out clichés like, “You’ve made it to the belly of the beast,” or toot her own horn about making “a B movie with A ideas,” a description I assume is a wink and a nod from West himself (blech). This scuzzy calculating entertainment leech type was pulled off much better by Jane Adams in The Idol, which says something as I’m seemingly the only person who liked that show!

And herein lies the problem: Ti tries to cram way, way too many plot points, too many cinematic throwbacks to fully land MaXXXine. The film is part De Palma, particularly with its Body Double Freddy Goes to Hollywood club moment, part Argento, part Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, and part tacky Hollywood filth like Hollywood Vice, Hollywood Boulevard (starring Factory member and Gerard Malanga’s whip-dancing partner Mary Woronov who also appears in West’s The House of the Devil), and Robert Vincent O’Neil’s Angel series. The latter is perhaps the most relevant with Maxine’s cohort of misfit friends and supporters like Moses Sumney’s video store worker Leon and Giancarlo Esposito as her agent Teddy. Even though West’s cinematic devotion is clearly genuine and I, too, revere all of these references, that is way too many parts! X and, especially, Pearl, which I consider a modern masterpiece, build on the legacies of the films that inspired them and contribute to the genre in which they’re influenced. MaXXXine doesn’t. Because of this, it exists more as a tribute whose main strength is hopefully motivating audiences to seek out the originals.

Not that the originals will be any less slightly disappointing than MaXXXine. Who can say they feel completely satisfied by the big reveal in Argento’s Deep Red? Or fully invested in the, at times, punishing Angel, despite Suzanne Tyrrell’s Sharpied eyebrows? Or, this pains me to say, as into the plot of De Palma’s films as their pitch-perfect aesthetics? MaXXXine is no different—as an eye-pleasing, fanatical tribute to 1980s trash, it’s a fun romp but not much more. Of course, it should go without saying that Mia Goth is the main attraction here, excelling as the captivating ever-survivor who frequently refers to her ability to protect herself (“Do you know what happened to the last person who tried to kill me? I crushed her fucking head!”) while also offering a peek at the residual PTSD left over from that tragic Texas porn shoot in X. Her performance drives everyone else, except for stiff Elizabeth Debicki, to ham it up too. This is also purposeful, exposing how the residents of Los Angeles are so showbiz-poisoned that they chew up the scenery at all times. Hell, even Bobby Cannavale’s Detective Torres is in a perpetual audition for the role of himself. And when the obvious killer is revealed, his maniacal Marshall Applewhite/Jim Jones impression is something to behold. Everyone in MaXXXine is playing a role and, as Maxine shows with her concluding line, she might not give hers up so easily.

Oz Perkins’s Longlegs

Longlegs is set in the 1990s—Oz Perkins won’t ever let you forget it with a comically ginormous glamour shot of Bill Clinton looming above Blair Underwood’s Agent Carter’s FBI office. By setting the film in the 90s, Perkins purposefully puts the movie in direct chronological conversation with its influences from the same decade, many of which have been yakked about ad nauseam in other reviews of this viral, ingeniously marketed horror. These include The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure. Longlegs does feature the same grim, brown color palate of these investigative procedurals, as well as just maybe cribs the bloody murder-by-proxy twist of Cure (though Longlegs trades Masato Hagiwara’s gloomy detached killer Mamiya for Nicolas Cage’s…well…extreme Nicolas Cage-ing). However, Perkins’s film reminds me more of the early (and best) days of The X-Files. It’s not just the charismatic pairing of a woo-woo, potentially batshit detective and a skeptical one. The X-Files’ early 90s seasons, particularly in their monster-of-the-week episodes, precisely balanced storylines that are both unbelievably absurd and so damn freaky that I vividly remember them decades later. I’m thinking of episodes like Squeeze with the ductwork-crawling bile-slurping Eugene Victor Tooms (Doug Hutchinson) or the giant sucker Fluke Man in The Host. No matter how wacko and unrealistic, I was in.

Similarly, despite not living up to the promise of being “the scariest movie of the year,” or whatever Neon’s PR people are running with, Longlegs is a satisfying mix of camp and creep with scream queen Maika Monroe playing Agent Lee Harker who is, well, a little off. Emotionally detached and flat-faced even when palling around with Agent Carter’s cute and curious daughter, Agent Harker is on the same brilliant but weird FBI agent spectrum as Fox Mulder or Hugh Dancy’s Will Graham in the TV version of Hannibal. And after being introduced to religious nut mummy Harker, played by Alicia Witt who some may recognize as Donna Hayward’s little ginger sister in Twin Peaks, we may see why. Even still, Agent Harker has some vague otherworldly powers, which is why she’s brought onto an uncrackable case concerning groups of families who are all massacred by daddy, who, then, turns the weapon on himself. These murders, shown in a flashing slideshow of grisly crime scene photos, are connected by some bizarre coded writing, signed by a mysterious figure “Longlegs.” The twists and turns get much more convoluted from here and Perkins throws every spooky and uncanny trope into the mix: nuns, bad plastic surgery, stranger danger, glam rock, hoarders, DOLLS…

And, of course, Satan. Satan has been the star of a lot of horror this year, from The First Omen to Late Night with the Devil. However, rather than Catholic cults attempting to impregnate nuns with the antichrist or talk show hosts summoning Satan for ratings, Satan—or here, “the man downstairs”—is channeled by Nicolas Cage covered in so much botched prosthetics he looks like if Vicki from The Real Housewives of Orange County allowed herself to go grey. After playing against type as the subdued straight-man schlub in Dream Scenario, Cage outdoes himself, leaning into as much psychotic villainous ridiculousness as he possibly can get away with. And thank God—Longlegs may be my favorite on-screen character this year. Every moment he appears is both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply insidiously unsettling, starting with his initial introduction in the snowy white 1970s, telling a young girl, “It seems I wore my long legs today.” Whooo-ok! His uneasy performance has echoes of Ted Levine’s Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs if Bill traded “Goodbye Horses” for glam rock as seen in Longleg’s display of Lou Reed’s Transformer and a poster of Marc Bolan (lyrics from T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” open the film). And yet, Longlegs is something else completely, a baffling, instantly iconic character that only one blasé teen hardware store cashier seems completely unimpressed by (“the gross guy is back”). In fact, it’s such a striking performance that I keep annoyingly referencing one memorable scene in which Longlegs hollers in his car: “DADDYYYYY, MOMMMMYYYY! UN-MAKE ME AND SAVE ME FROM THE HELL OF LIVING!!!” Who hasn’t had drives like that?

But I would be remiss if I painted Longlegs as the only antagonist. He’s just the messenger. Satan haunts the entire film (Perkins is no stranger to Satanic imagery either as seen in his boiler-worshiping The Blackcoat’s Daughter, starring Kiernan Shipka who also makes a surprise appearance here). The film is shot dizzily with many random doorways, windows, and portals collected in singular shots, creating a sense of unease as if anything could pop out at any moment. The jumpscare monsters mostly don’t though. Instead, horned shadows lurk, appearing only to fade again in mirrors, reflections, hidden in the foggy woods. And likely many other places that I missed while chuckling about Nic Cage. Longlegs is a film that likely rewards repeated viewing and it’s one of the only this year that I left the theater immediately wanting to see again.

Stephen Sayadian’s Café Flesh

The first thing director Stephen Sayadian (aka Rinse Dream) did when his face appeared on screen for a pre-recorded, post-screening Q&A, relegated to the virtual world after our own CrowdStrike nuclear meltdown grounded his plane, was apologize and thank the Metrograph audience for having the fortitude to withstand the aggressively mechanical sex scenes in his 1982 porno cult classic Café Flesh. I’m glad he did. I thought I was the only one who found these explicit sex scenes to be some of the most un-erotic I’ve ever seen! It wasn’t just the perplexing, artfully staged fuck tableaus like a lonely housewife jacking off the long erect tail of a rat milkman in front of her three irradiated triplets, each banging on their high chairs with a femur. All that Cold War cocksucking and cunnilingus and dystopian dry-humping were so frigid and repetitive that you understand why the bomb had to be dropped just to get some heat! And pray that when the big one does come, you’re one of the lucky Sex Negatives!

A dirty picture that makes the audience feel bad about sex, Café Flesh is set in a post-nuclear wasteland in which the bomb has rendered 99% of the population Sex Negatives who are so sickened by sex that they hurl at the lightest of caresses. The remaining 1%—the Sex Positives—serve a duty to joylessly perform public sex acts at the atomic cabaret Café Flesh. More than the aforementioned raunchy rodent, the other sex scenes are universally bonkers, set to the swirling noir synth sleaze of Mitchell Froom’s berserk score. My favorite? A pencil man boinks a telephone-wielding businesswoman while a nude blasé blonde secretary repeatedly pretends to type on a typewriter and turns to the camera to ask: “Would you like me to type a memo?” These performances visibly move the faithful denizens or “erotic casualties” of Café Flesh, as the camera presents close-ups of their post-apocalyptic punk and derelict faces grinding their teeth, bugging their eyes, heavily panting, or silently crying with impotent ecstasy, covered in flaccid flop sweat. The ringleader of this erotic circus is schmaltzy MC Max Melodramatic (Andy Nichols) who is, at once, charismatic, threatening, and annoying, appearing in a range of costumes from a deranged Little Miss Muffet in his “Sunday best” to a disembodied skull in a cage spitting out Hunter S. Thompson quotes while wedged under a naked siren lady.

These performance scenes are woven together by a loose narrative concerning grumpy, pouting pent-up Sex Negative Nick (Paul McGibboney) and his partner Lana (Michelle Bauer) who harbors a sensual secret that it just takes one sunglasses-wearing cool cat Johnny Rico (Kevin James) and his 10-inches to uncover. Beyond Nick and Lana, the supporting characters are just as amusing: the Rocky Horror Riff-Raff-like doorman Mr. Joy, the virginal Sex Positive from Wyoming, Angel (“I want to DO it all the time!”), a jumpy uncredited appearance of comedian and Law and Order: SVU star Richard Belzer (“I’m burning up! I’m fried!” And he is), and the true revelation, porn star Tantala Ray as Moms. Moms is the owner of this fine establishment, “the June Taylor of the Nuclear Set,” who was formerly Mildred Smith, a beautician in the suburbs. Clearly, the blast zone is treating Moms well with her teased The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black-birds nest black hair and bedazzled show-girl bodice. Every line Ray loudly spits out is a pure camp delight, even just greeting Nick with a booming nasally, “Good evening, NICHOLAS!” More than Ray’s singular delivery, Café Flesh, written by Sayadian and his frequent collaborator Jerry Stahl, is genuinely and purposefully funny. This isn’t too surprising as Sayadian was a creative director at Larry Flynt Publications, responsible for some of the silliest and most subversive parody ads at Hustler. It’s also aesthetically stylish with precisely posed and curated shots that elevate the film to some sort of art.

But let’s not get too heady. If we want to take Café Flesh somewhat seriously, the film taunts its audience with our own voyeurism, which accounts for some of Sayadian’s delight in turning us off. Much of Max Melodramatic’s monologues can be applied to the audience ourselves: “Could anything be sweeter than desire in chains!” or “I know what you want and what it’s like when you don’t get it!” And some audiences didn’t get it. According to Sayadian’s Q&A, when Café Flesh was first screened, grumpy blue-balled porn theater patrons stormed the box office demanding a refund. A triumph in and of itself. And a bit understandable if the goal was to rub one out. But for a midnight movie spectacle for the mentally unwell, as it has been for decades now and hopefully will continue to be with its new 4K restoration from its two remaining copies at UCLA and the Kinsey Institute, it’s orgasmic.

Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses

A romance film for the criminally insane, it would be a shame to ruin too much of the shock, awe, and many surprises of Nagisa Ōshima’s notorious 1976 In the Realm of the Senses, the unmatched sickest of them all in this post and one of the most gloriously batshit films I’ve ever seen. Censored in Japan, banned in the US upon its release at the New York Film Festival, and the subject of much other international pearl-clutching, this folie à deux of fucking is best experienced nearly blind, as I did. Based on a real-life murderess Sada Abe who cut off her lover Kichizō Ishida’s frank and beans and carried them around with her for days in 1936, In the Realm of the Senses asks where a couple can go after they’ve exhausted every sexual act possible as most of the film sees Eiko Matsuda’s alluringly wild-eyed and insatiable Sada Abe and Tatsuya Fugi’s hunky and nearly tireless Kichizō Ishida in a perpetual embrace, when Sada isn’t obsessively caressing and singing into his, soon-to-be-hers weenie. Clearly, the only answer to the banging monotony is to keep ratcheting up the erotic experimentation: inserting and pooting out an egg from her cooter, snipping and devouring pubic hair, slapping, and eventually, strangling each other for kicks. And at the climax–a hack job sawed a psychotic fit of perverse possessiveness, the audience in my Metrograph screening rapidly turned from titillated giggles and guffaws to involuntary groans and screams, including from me. Cinema terrorism doesn’t get any better than that.