Like Frankenstein’s Monster, Only Fuckable

The folly of men playing God has been a favorite trope in sci-fi and horror films, as far back as James Whale’s 1931 adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We probably have more to fear from God’s self-appointed enforcers (Google it; one link won’t do the subject justice), but our suspicions are more easily riled by those geeks in their labs, believing in evolution and telling us to wear masks, possibly because we all harbor memories of them ruining the grading curve in advanced biology back in high school. What other sinister things are the nerds up to, beside wrecking our GPAs and telling us to vaccinate our kids?

Hollywood knows: the scientists are building killer sex monsters!

Of course, that’s never the stated goal. In director Frank Nelson’s 1976 movie EMBRYO (a.k.a. Created to Kill), Dr. Paul Holliston (Rock Hudson) is just trying to save babies. He gets to put his research to the test after he hits a pregnant Doberman pinscher while racing home one rainy night. The mother isn’t likely to survive, but Holliston thinks he can save her puppies, transferring them to his handy artificial womb and injecting them with “Placentolactogen,” the growth hormone he and his late wife were developing before she was killed in a car accident.

Fetal Puppy Syndrome

Only one of the pups survives, but it’s enough to convince the doctor he’s made a major breakthrough. What’s more, the puppy grows at an accelerated rate. In mere days, Holliston has a full-grown Doberman—named Number One—that can get its own food out of the refrigerator and put the bowl in the sink when he’s done. Number One can also let himself out of a parked car and kill a stuffed dog barking terrier, but the doctor, inside a hospital convincing a colleague to surrender any spare fetuses he might have lying around, isn’t around to witness his experiment’s sudden violent aggression.

Rock Hudson is astonished that his career has come to this.

Holliston’s pal at the hospital comes through, donating the fetus of a pregnant woman who committed suicide (hey, she’ll never miss it). The doctor quickly gets to work, pumping the baby so full of Placentolactogen that, in less than five weeks, he has a full-grown Barbara Carrera, who presents herself wearing nothing but her hair, Lady Godiva-style. The softcore Muzak on the soundtrack hammers home the message that she’s now down to fuck. The doctor names her Victoria, because her survival is a victory for both of them.

Like Number One, Victoria is a super-fast learner, going from basic math to reading the entire Bible (“An interesting story, but not very logical”). The doctor takes Victoria’s distinct Latin accent in stride. Were the movie to address this I’m sure it would explain away Victoria’s accent with a reference to her deceased mother being of Latin descent, as if accents are genetic. Instead, we’ll just assume that all humans injected with Placentolactogen sound like they come from Nicaragua.

The doctor, by the way, does not live alone. His sister-in-law Martha (Diane Ladd) stays with him as a housekeeper, and it’s implied she might aspire to take her late sister’s place as Holliston’s second wife. Yet the movie wants us to believe that not once during the weeks that Holliston was experimenting on a fetus, and then a human child, did Martha wonder what he was up to. Did Martha ever hear a baby cry or wonder about the dirty diapers in the laundry? Nope, not one fucking time. There’s one close call, when Martha enters the lab with the adult Victoria hiding behind the door, knife in hand, but otherwise, she is oblivious to her new housemate.

Martha finally meets Victoria weeks later at a party thrown by Holliston’s son Gordon and his pregnant wife Helen (John Elerick and Anne Schedeen, doing her best Brenda Vacarro impression), Holliston introducing her as his new live-in lab assistant. Martha is less than pleased, all but muttering “bitch” under her breath when Victoria walks away. Roddy McDowall, as a snooty chess player (“Chess is one of the last bastions of male chauvinism,” he huffs) whom Victoria almost bests in a game, isn’t a huge fan of Holliston’s “assistant” either. It’s to the movie’s detriment that there is no scene of Roddy and Martha huddling in the kitchen talking shit about Victoria. Everyone else—including Dr. Joyce Brothers in a WTF? cameo—finds Holliston’s hot new assistant absolutely charming.

A party in serious need of cocaine.

Barbara Carrera is ready to learn.

After the party, Victoria surprises Holliston in his bedroom, letting him know she wants her experiences with intercourse to extend beyond the social kind. “I want to learn,” she says breathily, her nipples showing plainly through a sheer gown (Embryo may be rated PG, but it’s a ’70s PG). The popping of Victoria’s cherry is the beginning of the end, however, as one orgasm is all it takes for her to start experiencing some painful side effects. Now she’ll stop at nothing to get the 70ml of “pituitary gland extract” from an unborn fetus she needs to stay young and hot, even if it means endangering the lives of a pregnant hooker and Helen. Basically, she turns into [insert name of celebrity addicted to plastic surgery here] on the eve of his/her 40th birthday.

Embryo is basically a 1970s take on a 1950s mad scientist movie. (MoriaReviews.com sources an even earlier—and uncredited—inspiration, the 1928 German film Alraune.) Though he’s phoning it in, Hudson makes the movie watchable, but even his star power can’t keep Embryo from looking like a made-for-TV movie (only Carrerra’s bare breasts assure us it isn’t). Ladd has been in worse movies, but she’s wasted here, asked to do little more than look annoyed and serve coffee. Carrera does OK despite being is miscast, though her nude scenes will make more of an impression than her performance.

Penis Slugs and an Exciting Fetish

Nearly 33 years later Embryo’s plot was revived in 2009’s SPLICE. (Or, 81 years later Alraune’s basic plot was again recycled, but I’m henceforth sticking to my Embryo/Splice comparison. Let’s just accept there’s nothing new under the sun.) Though it is a rehash of an old story, director Vincenzo Natali was allowed to do what so many studios are now afraid to do: avail himself of an R-rating, making a movie reminiscent of the earlier work of fellow Canadian David Cronenberg. Guess it helps to have Guillermo del Toro as an executive producer.

Our protagonists are Clive and Elsa (Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley, respectively), genetic engineers at Nucleic Exchange Research & Development, or NERD (groan-inducing wordplay like that just re-enforces the Cronenberg comparisons). In the opening scene we see the couple, who are also romantic partners, birth something that looks like a cross between a slug and a malformed penis. It’s introduced to a previously birthed, much smaller-but-who’s-judging penis slug, the female. The two penis slugs—named Fred and Ginger—immediately extend long, petal-tipped tongues from their urethra-like mouths, swirling them around each other in such a way that they form a pink flower between them. It’s almost pretty. “They’re imprinting,” says an awestruck Elsa.

When penis slugs meet.

Fred and Ginger are the result of splicing DNA from multiple species, and they can be used to produce medicinal proteins. Clive and Elsa are eager to move on to the next phase of their research, incorporating human DNA, but the corporation funding their work—represented by a somewhat sinister Simona Maicanescu—wants to get Fred and Ginger on the market as soon as possible. The lab’s ass-kissing boss, William Barlow (David Hewlett of Stargate: Atlantis, as well as Natali’s earlier film, Cube), readily concurs.

Clive and Elsa aren’t so accepting of the decision and immediately head to the lab for an experimentation montage. The end result is something that resembles a sentient testicle, but that’s only the placenta. What bursts out kind of resembles a shaved, earless cat with two digitigrade legs. It’s kind of cute, actually. Like Holliston’s experiment in Embryo, Clive and Elsa’s “baby” develops rapidly, taking on more humanoid characteristics but still distinctly alien. She looks nothing like Barbara Carrera. They name her Dren, nerd spelled backwards (Natali and his co-screenwriters Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor might have reconsidered that name had they watched Farscape).

Sarah Polley lures her creation with her tasty, tasty fingers.

Dren’s existence begins to put a strain on the scientists’ relationship. Earlier they discuss having a baby. Clive wants to start a family; Elsa, who had a miserable childhood, does not. Yet it’s Elsa who is eager to bond with Dren, though she seems to treat her more like a pet than a child (some of her teaching techniques are reminiscent of Dr. Joan Crawford’s in Trog). Clive, feeling the strain of having to keep Dren secret, wants her out of their lives. He discovers Dren has amphibious lungs when he holds her head under water. “How did you know?” Elsa asks. “You did know, right?” Clive says yes, but his eyes say something else.

Separated at birth: Delphine Chanéac as Dren; Björk in the video for “Hunter.”

Because their co-workers at NERD are more curious than Diane Ladd, and because they can’t exactly stick a wig on Dren and introduce her as a new lab assistant (she does sort of look like Björk; Icelanders have tails, right?), the renegade scientists need to get Dren away from the lab. Fortunately, Elsa just happens to own a plot convenience: a farm that she inherited from her mother. It’s at this farm that we begin to see Elsa exhibit behavior that invites more Joan Crawford comparisons. Elsa is a perfectly loving parent when Dren is docile and compliant, but she loses her shit when Dren acts out. Then again, what are we to expect when it’s revealed Elsa’s childhood bedroom was more like a cell in a Turkish prison. Elsa’s was not a happy childhood, and yet she held on to this farm, a place that was a living hell for her, paying the taxes and utility bills instead of putting it up for sale before her mother’s body was cold? This strains credulity more than the creation of Dren...

...or the idea that anyone would choose to drive a Gremlin in the 2000s.

Clive isn’t exactly Father of the Year. Like Holliston, he crosses some boundaries, but Clive also brings an exciting fetish into the mainstream [link very NSFW]. There’s also a key tonal difference in how the two movies handle the sex between scientist and, um, subject that makes Splice a bit more disturbing. Because Embryo treats the adult Victoria as a sex object from the get-go, the movie and the audience can bypass any pesky questions about the morality of this relationship (not that anyone watching Embryo is going to think about it that hard). In Splice, however, Dren, besides being a unique species, is presented as being like Clive and Elsa’s daughter, adding an extra layer of “eww!” (or “ahh!,” if that’s your fantasy). Regardless of whether or not you think Clive has committed incest, he’s definitely cheated on Elsa. 

Adrian Brody’s O (I-fucked-up) face.

Things soon take a more tragic—and rapey—turn in the final act, as the movie abandons psychological nuance in favor of straight-up horror, winding down to a sequel-bait ending—or so it would seem. According to Natali, he just liked the idea of leaving things open-ended; he never intended for there to be a sequel. (That Splice under-performed at the box office probably ensured the studio didn’t try to persuade him to change his plans.) With Hollywood being more interested in creating franchises than telling stories, even way back in 2009, I simply forgot that ending movies on a question mark was still a thing.

I had wanted to see Splice when it first came out, but the film was released in the U.S. in June 2010, when I, along with much of the rest of the world, was struggling to stay afloat during a global recession. Dropping $10 on a matinee ticket just seemed irresponsible. Thankfully Splice is currently on Netflix in the U.S.*, during another economic downturn, no less (this movie just might be cursed). Despite its link to financial catastrofucks, Splice is still worth checking out, especially if you like your sci-fi horror to  have a few extra I.Q. points, are nostalgic for Cronenberg’s 1980s horror movies, or just enjoy watching sex scenes featuring human/animal hybrids. Those who enjoy ’70s schlock can find Embryo streaming on various sites, with the version on Tubi being the least shitty looking of the bunch.

*This is a prime sponsorship opportunity, NordVPN. Just sayin’.

Even Ten Minutes is Too Long

Our sexual fantasies and our public selves don’t always match up. Incest doesn’t become any less icky with the “between consenting adults” or “the incestuous couple is hot” qualifiers, yet it was the fastest growing trend in pornography in 2018. I have, delicately put, responded to porn videos that I otherwise find disgusting (I have a complicated relationship with the work of Aarin Asker). It’s the taboo that’s exciting. So, the idea that women, even those identifying themselves as feminists, would have rape fantasies or fantasies in which they’re dominated by men, isn’t that far-fetched. It’s when these taboo sex fantasies are inflated into romances that #MeToo becomes #WTF?

One of the earliest mainstream movies to give life to this uneasy coupling of rough muffin buttering fantasy and gauzy romance was the 1986 film adaptation of Elizabeth McNeill’s novel, 9 ½ WEEKS.

From one angle, it reads like the outline for a by-the-numbers Playgirl short story: An attractive woman, successful in her professional life but unfulfilled sexually, meets a handsome, wealthy man who treats her to sumptuous dinners, shopping sprees with no spending limits, and thrusts her into sexual realms no other man had ever dared to, consequently giving her some of the best—perhaps the only—orgasms she’s ever experienced.

Sounds hot! But this is also the outline for a typical Lifetime thriller: A successful career woman meets a handsome, wealthy man who showers her with compliments, woos her with fancy dinners and expensive gifts, and pleasures her with mind-blowing sex. But her prince soon reveals himself to be less charming, treating her like a child, isolating her from her friends and family, demanding she wear what he wants her to wear, punishing her if she disobeys his instructions. The sex games become less playful and more uncomfortable. He is her master and she, his willing slave. Will she come to her senses before it’s too late?

A still from 9 1/2 Weeks, or
a 1980s perfume ad?

The two outlines don’t exactly mesh, do they? I haven’t read McNeill’s novel (there are only so many hours in the day), but based on what I’ve read about it, the Lifetime thriller outline better describes it. The novel was significantly darker, playing out more like a psychosexual horror story than kinky erotica. But “psychosexual horror story” just wasn’t the sort of shit studios were willing to risk financing in the 1980s, so a twisted romance is what we got.

Kim Basinger is Elizabeth, the aforementioned attractive woman. Elizabeth owns a successful gallery, but she’s been adrift in her personal life since her divorce. It’s established right away that Liz is sexually unadventurous, something conveyed by costuming (Elizabeth has a penchant for baggy sweaters) and more directly in dialog, such as when she accuses her roommate and business partner Molly (Margaret Whitton) of being “gross” and “perverted” for suggesting Liz owns a vibrator. That all changes when Liz meets John (Mickey Rourke), a handsome Wall Street broker who arouses her dirty tickle*.

Younger readers might be wondering what “Mickey Rourke” and “handsome” are doing in the same sentence. Hard to believe now, but before he fucked up his face with boxing and plastic surgery, and well before time took its toll, Rourke was actually kind of hot. He didn’t exactly do it for me, but, yeah, I could see why he was cast as the male lead of an erotic romance. Of course, 9 ½ Weeks could just as well starred present-day Mickey Rourke given that it is just one of many, many examples of movies that purport to appeal to the desires of female audiences yet only showcases the bodies women (you ladies just want to see tits, right?).

This is as naked Mickey gets for the entirety of 9 1/2 Weeks.

Looks aside, it’s not entirely clear why Liz puts up with John beyond a couple of dates. As played by Rourke—whose performance falls somewhere between Ben Affleck at the height of his early 2000s douchey-ness and a late-caree,r not-giving-a-shit Bruce Willis—John radiates more smarm than charm. Even if Elizabeth can see past John’s personality, and even if he’s found her G-spot, I still wondered why she didn’t break things off after he pays a carnival worker to leave her parked atop a Ferris wheel while the worker takes a coffee break. She at least responds appropriately when John tells her to face the wall and raise her skirt for a spanking: “Who the fuck do you think you are!?” Alas, she stays, persuaded by John’s phenomenal cunnilingual skills. It’s not until he subjects her to the roving hands of a Latina hooker that Liz loses her shit and runs away, hiding out at a Times Square sex show (no, really).

 Yentl for Protestants: Gentl.

I remember 9 ½ Weeks being hyped prior to its release as pushing the boundaries of what could be shown in an R-rated film. Indeed, the movie had to be cut to avoid an X (and appease fucking test audiences). Now, no one was expecting to see Kim’s split Basinger or Rourke’s erect Mickey, but when the film was finally released it was hard not to find its sex scenes… underwhelming. To director Adrian Lyne’s credit, the sex scenes are quite stylish, but of course they are. Style over substance is Lyne’s thing. (Lyne’s on set emotional manipulation of Basinger is less praiseworthy, even though it worked to the film’s benefit.) The scene where John teases a blindfolded Elizabeth with an ice cube is effective, and Elizabeth masturbating while reviewing art slides as Eurythmics’ “This City Never Sleeps” plays on the soundtrack is another standout scene. Other scenes, like the “sploshing” scene in which John feeds a blindfolded Elizabeth, or when Elizabeth cross dresses, are just silly. But more often than not, 9 ½ Weeks pulls its punches. It’s a movie that shows John and Liz purchasing a riding crop but never shows the couple using it.

No Means No—Unless He’s Hot, Hung and Rich

9 ½ Weeks doesn’t quite succeed as erotica, but it’s not a terrible film, just a tedious one. Screenwriters Patricia Knop, Sarah Kernochan and the late Zalman King (yes, he of The Red Shoe Diaries) don’t sidestep the toxicity of the Elizabeth and John’s relationship, even if they don’t quite sell their attraction beyond she’s pretty and he buys her things and makes her come. Elizabeth has agency, gradually surrendering her free will for love until she realizes that this relationship is costing her soul.

Poland’s answer to E.L. James.

Such character arcs are beyond the grasp of 365 DAYS, a Polish-made Fifty Shades of Grey knockoff currently streaming on Netflix. (I know Fifty Shades would be the more obvious companion to 9 ½ Weeks, complete with a Kim Basinger connection were I to review the whole series, but to do so would require renting the Fifty Shades movies, something I refuse to do. Besides, other people have done a more thorough exploration of both the books and the movies. You can experience one man’s pain for your pleasure here.)

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most of the basics of storytelling, such as character development and plot, are beyond the grasp of 365 Days, a 114-minute rape fantasy that asks its viewers to accept a woman’s abduction and subsequent captivity by hot-tempered gangster as the springboard for a steamy romance.

“Imagine a strong alpha male who always knows what he wants. He is your caretaker and your defender. When you are with him you feel like a little girl. He makes all your sexual fantasies come true. What’s more, he’s one meter, 90 centimeters tall, has absolutely no body fat, and has been molded by God himself,” our heroine, Laura (Anna Maria Sieklucka), tells her girlfriend.

“Did God mold his dick, too?” the girlfriend asks.

“The devil did,” replies Laura.

Laura fails to bring up that the “strong alpha male” in question, Massimo (Michele Morrone, who can also be blamed for some songs on the soundtrack), also kidnapped her while she was vacationing in Sicily, held her prisoner, tied her up and molested her on a plane (“Sometimes fighting is futile.”), and repeatedly threatened her with physical violence. Also, he’s a Mafia boss who traffics drugs and kills people (but it’s OK, the man he kills is a sex trafficker). Then again, he got her away from her worthless boyfriend and he’s got that devilish dick. All is forgiven!

What makes 365 Days and its inspiration, Fifty Shades, especially repugnant is they conflate abuse with BDSM, rape with rapture.

You would be forgiven for thinking 365 Days was written by a 45-year-old incel while he was under house arrest for violating a restraining order, but no, it was written by a woman. Polish cosmetologist-cum-author Blanka Lipińska, perhaps realizing she could never be the next Olga Tokarczuk, decided to became Poland’s answer to E.L. James instead, writing her own trilogy of dirty books with regressive/offensive sexual politics. I haven’t read any of Lipińska’s novels as they have yet to be translated into English (also, I don’t want to), so I can’t speak to their quality or how close the movie adaptation follows the book. However, Lipińska is credited as a “screenwriting associate” and even has a small cameo in the movie, so I’m going to assume the author is at least OK with how the movie turned out. I’m also going to assume that, based on 365 Days, that Lipińska is the sort of woman who would respond to a friend asking for help out of an abusive relationship by asking what the friend did to provoke the beatings.

Queer Eye for the Stockholm Gal.

There is a small kernel in the existing story that could have, had the screenwriters seized upon it, made 365 Days a lot less problematic. One of Massimo’s henchmen, Domenico (Otar Saralidze), befriends Laura, kind of (this is a movie where shopping montages set to annoying Europop are used in place of character and story development). Had Laura and Domenico formed a romantic bond, with the plot hinging on Domenico helping Laura escape, then 365 Days could have been a palatable romantic thriller. It would definitely be a more exciting one. Instead, the Domenico character is little more than Laura’s occasional chaperone. Guess he didn’t have that satanic cock that Laura craves.

What makes 365 Days and its inspiration, Fifty Shades, especially repugnant is they conflate abuse with BDSM, rape with rapture. If imagining a swarthy, God-built Italian stud ripping your designer panties off against your protests and pile-driving you into multiple transcendent orgasms is what it takes to paddle your pink canoe down river, more power to you. But don’t try to convince us his threatening violence, confiscating your phone and holding you prisoner is romantic. A good rule of thumb: if your story requires a trigger warning for survivors of sexual abuse, your story is not a romance.

There is a sequel for 365 Days planned — Lipińska crapped out a trilogy, after all — so maybe the narrative redeems itself as it goes along, but I doubt it (reportedly, the other books in the series are just more of the same). The one positive thing about this movie compared to its American counterparts is it doesn’t hold back on the explicitness of its sex scenes (no backlit, fully clothed humping here). There’s nothing hardcore, as some reviewers have implied, but it’s definitely in NC-17 territory, unlike some other movies I could mention. And, while their characters display no discernibly human traits, Sieklucka and Morrone are easy on the eyes. So, out of a desire to cater to readers’ prurient interests while also sparing them the chore of watching this piece of shit, here are the time codes for movie’s “good parts”:

10:45 – Laura pleasures herself with a pink vibrator intercut with a scene of Massimo getting blown by a flight attendant. (Warning: even out of context, it’s impossible to pretend the B.J. is consensual.)

43:30 – Laura takes a shower, and Massimo joins her. No sex, just nudity, including some full-frontal flashes from both actors.

51:40 – Laura sexually teases Massimo, then tries to leave the room before closing the deal. Massimo responds by shackling her to the bed and then summoning another woman. The other woman, dressed in generic dominatrix gear, slinks into the room and proceeds to suck off Massimo while a bound Laura watches.

An ass molded by God himself.

1:06:53 – Laura wakes up and smells the Stockholm Syndrome, finally “consenting” to sex with Massimo, the pair going at it for six-plus minutes, a sequence that’s as sleazy as hardcore porn without actually being hardcore.

1:17:30 – A quickie in the bathroom.

1:32:10 – Rear entry while overlooking Warsaw.

You’re welcome.

But, seriously, you’re better off just watching a hardcore porn flick than this glorification of date rape.

Here’s a link to go to in case you or someone you know is a victim of domestic violence: thehotline.org

*I owe Georgina Spelvin a dollar for the phrase “dirty tickle.”