Toxic Relationships Build Self-Confidence And Other Unhealthy Life Lessons

Trigger warnings: This post includes references to sexual assault and abusive relationships. It also features photos of men kissing and Charisma Carpenter nude, but I can’t believe either of those things is a problem for readers of this blog.

Goddammit! I thought I had a good six months before I’d have to review the third 365 Days movie, but that was, like a lower subscription price or fewer transphobic comedy specials, just too fucking much to ask of Netflix. So, on August 19 the streamer dropped The Next 365 Days, and now, because I hopped on the bandwagon of reviewers shitting on this softcore sludge, I feel duty-bound to review it.

But first, let’s check out one of the first Fifty Shades of Grey knockoffs, 2015’s BOUND, from the studio that brought us the Sharknado franchise.

The Asylum was so eager to capitalize on the Fifty Shades sensation buzzing between pop cultures’ trembling thighs that it not only released the first Fifty Shades-inspired knockoff, the studio released it a full month before the first movie adaptation of E.L. James’ tragically popular porno books hit theaters.

Now, just because a movie is released by the Asylum doesn’t automatically mean it will be bad. They did give us Stuart Gordon’s King of the Ants, which is actually good, and the company has put out a few Christmas-themed movies that have a gotten five-out-of-ten stars or (slightly) higher on IMDb. The fact that Bound’s story did not include any supernatural elements also gave me hope as it would not be hindered by any shitty CGI. Plus, Bound stars Charisma Carpenter of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel. That’s a good sign, isn’t it? After all, she was quoted in 2003 as saying, “I’m not going to just do anything simply because the money is good. If I can't love a project, then I’m not interested.”

This is likely the expression Charisma had
when she got to page 5 of the script.

Then I watched the movie. Charisma lied. Or, maybe she agreed to take the part only knowing the movie’s title, thinking she’d be appearing in a remake of Lana and Lily Wachowski’s acclaimed lesbian thriller, only to realize too late that she’d been duped. But, most likely, her position changed as the years went by and the career momentum from Buffy and Angel began to wane. The only reason anyone appeared in Bound is the only the only reason the movie was made to begin with: to make a quick buck.

But while Bound is a cash-in on Fifty Shades, director and co-screenwriter Jason Cohn has done what he can to ensure that it isn’t a total rip-off. Michelle Mulan (Carpenter) is no naïve college student but a single mother with a daughter about to start college and a boyfriend, George (Mark McClain Wilson), who can’t make her cum.

Though maybe don’t feel too sorry for Michelle. Sure, she may have to use a vibrator to get off, but she also lives in a house the size of a Comfort Inn.

This is Michelle’s house. I call bullshit.

Daniel Baldwin, delivering the performance
you’d expect of him.

How is Michelle able to afford a mansion, and in Southern California, no less? She’s an executive for a real estate development company run by her father Walter, played by Daniel Baldwin (OK, you can go back to feeling sorry for her). But the company is not doing so well, and Walter’s right hand man Preston (“that guy” Michael Monks, cranking it up to 11) is pushing Walter to accept a bid to be bought out by a rival. Michelle is opposed to the sale, but she doesn’t yet have an alternative idea and is immediately dismissed by Preston, who’s an asshole. Lest you think Michelle has her father’s ear, Walter says he’s “inclined” to take Preston’s recommendation. “You said you wanted to sit at the table with the big kids,” Walter tells his frustrated daughter. It should be noted that all the other “big kids” are men.

So, Michelle might live in a mansion (yes, I’m going to keep harping on it, because it’s fucking  ridiculous), but she’s not respected at work, and she’s got daddy issues. And George can’t find her clit to save his life!

Ryan hopes Michelle will overlook his Big
Rapist Energy.

Then she meets Ryan (the late Bryce Draper, no stranger to Z-grade material), who makes eyes at her from the bar while she and her daughter Dara (Morgan Obenreder) are having dinner at what looks like a nightclub repurposed as a restaurant. Michelle ignores him at first, but only because she’s in the company of her daughter. After they get back home, she realizes she “forgot” her credit card and returns to the restaurant. Ryan’s waiting for her. After introductions, he invites her to have a cigarette with him. Michelle tells him she doesn’t smoke, to which Ryan responds: “Yeah, you do.”

Let’s discuss Ryan for a moment. I get that the character is supposed to be self-confident and arrogant, with an air of danger—all qualities someone with a shaky self-esteem and a hankering for excitement might respond to. But Bound has the same problem as Darker Shades of Elise: its male lead immediately comes off as creepy and repellent rather than sexy and mysterious. Draper isn’t bad looking, but he doesn’t project the sexual magnetism his role requires. He’s not so fuckable that one would overlook Ryan’s charmless personality. I can see the desire to fuck Jamie Dornan or even Michele Morrone (were his character not a kidnapper, that is) being so strong one would ignore the warning signs, for one night at least; Draper is easier to resist.

Michelle doesn’t resist, however, and is soon letting Ryan go down on her atop her father’s desk…

“I can’t wait for him to ask where all the snail trails came from!”

… and accompanying him to a BDSM sex club, exposing her to the mild side of kink (no fisting, piss play or CBT here).

Cordelia discovers the Bronze is under new management.

Ryan’s attempt to fuck her in the alley outside the club, in full view of a guy in a leather face cage, gets a hard no from Michelle. Ryan shows he’s open to compromise and takes Michelle back to his place, which looks like they just re-arranged the sex club set. Though Michelle is cuffed to a chair and blindfolded, the BDSM trappings do little to raise the temp of this lukewarm sex scene. At least Michelle liked it, and soon thereafter she’s ditching boring, stable George for a man who gives strong serial rapist energy.

You just know the Asylum wanted to put a starburst on the
DVD cover, urging people to “See Angel’s Charisma Carpenter
nude!” Too bad Carpenter beat them to the punch by posing for
Playboy a decade earlier.

But Michelle’s improved sex life negatively impacts her career. She blew off an important meeting with the head of Elliot and Associates, one that could possibly stave off the sale of her father’s company, to take a tour of the wild side (“wild” if you think French vanilla is daring). A day or so later, she brings Ryan along to a company-sponsored fundraiser. Though the event appears to be held in the entranceway of Michelle’s home, they hire a chauffeur to take them there, and during the ride Ryan gives Michelle a clit vibrator that’s remote controlled, and guess who has the remote? 

“Oh, shit. This movie isn’t going to get any
better, is it?”

Ryan wastes little time abusing his privilege, revving up the sex toy during Walter’s speech about finding a cure for Alzheimer’s. Ryan later pulls her into a bathroom for a quickie, then insists she not fix her makeup before they rejoin the party, so she steps out of the bathroom with her lipstick smeared down one side of her face like “a messy whore.” And who should be standing in front of the bathroom door but fucking Preston, who introduces Michelle to Jesse (Noel Arthur), the head of Elliot Associates! It should be noted that Preston enjoys Michelle’s humiliation more than Ryan does.

Less amused is Walter, who chastises her for bringing a “drug dealing car thief” to the fundraiser (like Daniel Baldwin can talk). This is not only the first the audience learns of Ryan’s criminal past; it’s also the first time Michelle learns of it, and yet she never comments on this revelation or in any way seems concerned by her lover’s alleged criminal history.

This is Michelle and Ryan, two scenes later.

What ultimately brings an end to this toxic relationship is Michelle suggesting some role reversal. How about if she spanked Ryan? Ryan coldly tells Michelle to leave, then goes after someone even more vulnerable: Michelle’s daughter Dara.

Bound is neither as terrible as I thought it would be nor as fun as I’d hoped. Carpenter does what she can, but her performance seems less committed as the movie goes along, as if she realized midway through that there’s no polishing this turd, so why bother? Even with the f-bombs and nudity, it feels like a Lifetime movie, and not a particularly well-made one. The movie seems to have a particularly hard time grasping how time works: it’s nighttime when Michelle arrives home from work, but once inside her house the mid-day sun is shining through her kitchen window. Later in the movie, the camera shows the clock on Michelle’s office wall moving from 1:50 to 4:20 p.m., right before Michelle makes 2 p.m. lunch appointment for that same day. Michelle travels further back in time to drop by a Terrell Owens-hosted pool party (sure, why not) to see Ryan on her way to this 2 p.m. appointment, telling him she can only stay a minute because the restaurant where she has her meeting is 30 minutes away. It’s like a math word problem that only has wrong answers.

The nipple clamps of vengeance.

To the movie’s credit, it doesn’t pretend its story is a romance, acknowledging that Ryan and Michelle’s relationship is abusive. In a scene in which Michelle returns to the sex club for some independent research, a dominatrix warns her that Ryan isn’t in for the kink; he’s a predator. “People like Ryan give people like us a bad name.” Bound’s messaging is still a bit dicey, suggesting that abusive relationships are merely character-building. Nevertheless, it was fun to see Michelle finally beat shithead Ryan with his own cat o’nine tails, though I still felt she was a little too merciful. It’s a scene that would’ve benefitted with the addition of a crocosaurus.

Torn Between Two Kidnappers

Bad as Bound is, it at least has a story to tell, with a beginning, middle and end within a compact 90 minutes. There are now three movies in the 365 Days franchise and there’s not a complete, cohesive narrative among them. THE NEXT 365 DAYS is like trying to fuck while drunk: it never gets good, and it never finishes.

In This Day’s climactic gun battle, Laura (Anna-Maria Sieklucka) was shot by her husband/kidnapper’s ex-girlfriend Anna, whereupon Nacho (Simone Sussina)—not a gardener but the son of a rival Mafia family—shot and killed Anna. Massimo (Michele Marrone), a.k.a. Scowly, then shoots his twin brother Adriano (also Marrone), a.k.a. Twitchy. At the beginning of The Next 365 Days, it’s revealed that Adriano, who took a bullet in his shoulder, is dead, while Laura, whose liver was aerosolized, survived, suffering only a barely perceptible scar and a bad dye job. When Scowly checks on her, she wakes up and immediately she wants to fuck. 

Americans struggle to get insurance coverage
for insulin but Laura is provided false eyelashes
while recovering from a near-fatal wound. Healthcare
really is so much better in Europe.

Remarkably, Massimo urges Laura to cool it; she’s still recovering, after all. Laura storms out of the bedroom in a snit and joins her pal Olga (Magdalena Lamparska, even more annoying this time out) on the patio, because I guess Olga now lives with them permanently (for those who give a shit, Olga has “changed her mind” about marrying Domenico, though I don’t know if that means she is or isn’t marrying him and the movie never clarifies the matter). Olga tells Laura they were all afraid of losing her and Laura says she’s grateful to have a second chance. Then Olga says what I was thinking: “More alcohol! I can’t look at that hair sober.”

In stunning turn of events, a makeover montage does not follow. Instead, the movie cuts immediately to the after, when Laura, hair done and wearing a sexy black dress, interrupts Scowly’s meeting with his fellow gangsters and asks her beloved kidnapper to see her when he’s done. Though Scowly was just hours earlier refusing to give Laura a hot meat injection for fear it might put her back in the ICU, he immediately excuses himself from his meeting to go fuck the bejesus out of his horny wife (time code 10:20, but it’s not really worth it).

What’s up with that tarp? Are Scowly’s loads so huge
the walls need protecting?

But just when it looks like the couple are about to rekindle that moment in Laura’s initial captivity when she said, “Fuck it, he’s hot,” she gets a call from Nacho, who, interestingly, also kidnapped Laura, albeit in a friendlier fashion. Laura later spots Nacho at a nightclub but is intercepted by Scowly before she can say hello. Later, Scowly accuses Laura of cheating on him with Nacho, plus he’s pissed that she didn’t tell him about being pregnant. Laura snaps that she lost their baby because of his enemies. It’s so sad to see a criminal and his victim fighting. 

Laura Torricelli: Businesswoman.

There’s an attempt at make-up cunnilingus later, but Scowly intuits (through taste?) that her thoughts are elsewhere, and he’s correct: Laura is fantasizing about Nacho eating her pussy. And so begins the cold war between the Torricellis. Since the lives of these “characters” revolve almost exclusively around fucking, Laura and Scowly must find other ways to pass the time while giving each other the silent treatment. Laura, remembering she was given a fashion house for Christmas in This Day, decides to throw herself into her business, while Scowly pursues other interests: jacking off in the shower and snorting cocaine.

The rest of the movie is devoted to Laura trying to decide between two kidnappers. Since those are the only two options (the third, more sensible option of escape, followed by intense therapy, is never on the table), it should be a no-brainer: Nacho. Sure, he kidnapped her, but he at least made it appear like he was rescuing her, and he’s way more pleasant, besides. Also, in all the sex scenes in which Nacho appears (three in fantasy, one real), he seems to be a more giving lover (Scowly fucks like he’s late for an appointment). Alas, The Next 365 Days can’t make it that easy, or that final. I’m saddened to report that this one also ends on a cliffhanger, meaning there could be fourth one of these things.

Massimo Torricelli: Pud pounder.

That the possibility of a fourth installment of this supposed erotic franchise fills my heart with dread should tell you all you need to know. The Next 365 Days isn’t quite as offensive as its predecessors, but only because the movie brushes the circumstances of Laura and Scowly’s first meeting in 365 Days under a cum-stained rug and never acknowledges them. Plus, this franchise gets less and less engaging each time out so by this point I couldn’t even work up the energy to be mildly annoyed by its fucked-up sexual politics.

If you think getting drunk and screaming a lot
is funny, then you’re in for a treat: The Next
365 Days features 30% more Olga.

About the only thing The Next 365 Days has going for it is featuring more Nacho—or rather, more nude scenes from Sussina. If you were to just watch the scenes with him and Sieklucka together, you might even mistake this movie for being the erotic romance it’s pretending to be. It’s a good thing, too, because Marrone has noped out of doing any nude scenes for this one, and Sieklucka gets naked less frequently. Had directors Barbara Bialowas and Tomasz Mandes (really, it took two directors?) not included some sex scenes involving superfluous characters and/or extras the movie would be in danger of having a whole 20 minutes go by without any simulated humping. If you think that’s a complaint, it’s not. I’ll take gratuitous sex scenes over pointless montages—or “comic relief” from Olga—any day. Unfortunately, whether people are bumping uglies or slow walking into a restaurant, it’s going to be soundtracked to irritating Europop with godawful lyrics like: “Kiss me like a stranger/Come and taste my flavor/You don’t need no chaser/Just vibe on my danger.” There are no fewer than 27(!) songs featured on the soundtrack. The original cast recording of Evita only had 23, and that’s a fucking musical.

The “Good Parts”

Psych! This is as far as they go.

22:30: In the VIP room of a nightclub, Laura fondles Scowly’s crotch while an exotic dancer performs. She then joins the dancer on stage, acting like she’s about to treat Scowly—and the audience—to some girl-on-girl action, only to dismiss the dancer so she and Scowly can have some hard-pounding (but fully-clothed) sex.

A box lunch with Nacho.

30:19: Laura dreams of Nacho going down on her, and the scene really does Sussina’s ass justice. The scene transitions into Scowly eating out Laura for “real”, but Marrone keeps his pants on for the scene.

Scowly suspects this meal isn’t for him.

“Quack like a duck!”

39:00: Scowly goes with some of his Mafioso colleagues to a fetish club where lines of coke are served on trays like hors d’oeuvres. He makes out with a silicone-inflated club girl but can’t bring himself to cheat on Laura. The camera instead turns its attention to another guy in Scowly’s booth having a three-way with two latex- and leather-clad women.

41:35: Laura walks in on Emily, the lead designer at her fashion house, getting rammed from behind by a hunky model.

Emily and her boy toy pad the run time.

52:10: More fantasy sex with Nacho, this time featuring a full menu of positions: rear entry, missionary and cowgirl, all performed in smoke-filled studio under a tent of bamboo garden netting and lit by a flashlight.

Laura fantasizes of Nacho while the audience has fantasies
of the producers of The Next365 Days hiring a
lighting technician.

1:08:23: Real sex with Nacho. You know Laura is really with Nacho because you can actually see what’s going on.

Laura about to get covered in hot Nacho sauce.

1:19:08: Laura in the shower. No sex, just titties. (You’re welcome, straight male and lesbian readers.)

1:27:57: Laura is in a ménage à trois with Scowly and Nacho. The guys work their way down Laura’s body, then pause to look into each other’s eyes…and kiss! To the actors’ credit, they fucking go for it. Yes, there is tongue, and not just a little bit. Alas, just as the scene is getting interesting, Laura wakes up, because of course it’s just a dream. 

OK, now I’m interested.

If there is in fact going to be a fourth movie, I can only hope Scowly and Nacho will make my dreams come true by going all the way. But this is the 365 Days universe; nothing that interesting would be allowed to happen.

The end? That’s about as likely as Sussina and Marrone fucking
on camera.

Short Takes: ‘All Day and a Night’ (2020) ★★ 1/2

Writer-director Joe Robert Cole’s All Day and a Night starts off strong, with its lead character Jahkor (Ashton Sanders from Moonlight) sneaking into a house and confronting a man and his girlfriend with a pair of Glocks pointed at their heads. “Jah” is seething with rage, but he’s also scared, and you sense he’s just as likely to turn and run as pull the triggers. It’s that moment of apprehension that makes the violence shocking, even as you see it coming.

But All Day and a Night’s weakest moment immediately follows. During Jah’s sentencing hearing, the mother of one of his victims makes her statement, demanding to know why Jah did what he did. It should be a heart-wrenching scene, but it instead comes off like it was lifted from an episode of Law & Order. And then the voice overs start. “People say they wanna know why,” says Jah, “but they really don’t.” Cue the flashbacks.

Just as I was beginning to fear I was in for a two-hour PSA against gang violence, the movie corrects course. Cole’s script and direction remain kind of wobbly, however, as the Black Panther screenwriter not only shows us why Jah ended up behind bars, also tells us, just to make sure we get it. Jahkor’s harrowing childhood—getting bullied in elementary school; getting abused at home by his father, JD (Jeffrey Wright), who beats Jah for allowing himself to be bullied—really doesn’t require the extra explanation. It’s not a surprise that by the time Jah is in his late teens he and his friend TQ (Isaiah John) are holding up guys in their East Oakland neighborhood. TQ embraces this outlaw existence, idolizing local celebrity Thug’ish Trex (James Earl), who very much lives the gangsta life he raps about. Jah merely tolerates Trex, not wanting anything to do with his drug dealing but hoping that Trex will help Jah launch his own rap career. Jah then leans that his girlfriend Shantaye (Shakira Ja’nai Payne) is pregnant. Surprisingly, he’s happy about the news and, after hitting a series of brick walls, gets a job working at a faux Foot Locker.

But a low-level retail job doesn’t pay enough to support one person, let alone a family. It’s practically inevitable that Jah would end up working for gang boss and criminally underdeveloped character Big Stunna (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), yet Cole still feels the need to explicitly tell us that this choice is no choice at all. “There’s whole neighborhoods that know more about life inside prison than out,” says Jah in yet another V.O. “Generations of men and women, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, uncles, aunties, cousins, all of us, all part of the same fuckin’ story on fuckin’ repeat. Makin’ this into a life while everybody on the outside looks in, pretending they could do better.”

All Day and a Night features some solid acting, especially from Sanders, Wright and, as Jah’s mother, Kelly Jenrette, as well as some vibrant cinematography. But while the movie is compelling, it never quite hits as hard as you expect it to, mostly because while Cole has decided on the central theme of the school-to-prison pipeline that traps so many young Black men, he never lands on a central story. Much of All Day and a Night is about Jah’s being doomed to a life of crime (i.e., “the same fuckin’ story”), until suddenly it’s about his mending his relationship with his father when he ends up in the same prison as JD. By the end I felt as if I’d watched two B-stories that never quite added up to a single, satisfying film. 

A Kennedy Era ‘Melrose Place’

For all the racy passages in L.A. 46, what
got me hard was the revelation that the
luxury building at the center of the book’s
action had rents as low as $275*.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I don’t seek out books set in expensive hotels or apartment buildings, but they always seem to find me. I was hunting for a vintage paperback copy of Day Keene’s Joy House on eBay (OK, another book that has a piece of real estate in the title, but it’s a single-family residence, not a multi-family), despairing that I couldn’t find any copies under $150, when I found two other Day Keene titles that looked wonderfully lurid, and for the combined price of $15. One of those novels was 1964’s L.A. 46.

The title refers to the postal zone for West Hollywood (this book was written ahead of the introduction of the ZIP code), specifically the stretch of Melrose between Doheny and La Brea. And in that area is the Casa del Sol, a luxury apartment building open to anyone who can afford it, be they psychiatrists to the stars, high class call girls, or small-town hicks with big city dreams—all are welcome so long as they don’t have pets or children.

Casa del Sol’s no children policy means the newly pregnant Eva Mazeric and her husband Paul, both WWII refugees, will have to find a more child-friendly place to live, but this is the least of Eva’s troubles. And Eva, though beautiful and seemingly happy, has had a lot of troubles in her young life, from losing her family during the Soviet occupation of Hungary to enduring (and, sometimes, guiltily enjoying) sexual abuse while in displaced persons camps and with a foster family. What’s got her so despondent that she seeks out the help of psychiatrist—or “sickey-ackey”—Dr. Jack Gam, who resides in the Casa del Sol’s penthouse, is learning that her older brother, whom she never knew, is still alive and living much, much closer than she’d like.

Dr. Gam has problems of his own. One of his patients, movie goddess (and Marilyn Monroe analog) Gloria Ames, has died of a drug overdose, putting Dr. Gam on the radar of police looking for answers and news media hungry for Hollywood scandal. So, he’s a bit preoccupied when Eva shows up for her appointment, and easily irritated when Eva can’t bring herself to discuss what’s got her so upset (“So, what’s your problem, Eva?”) Eva cuts the appointment short, apologizing for wasting the doctor’s time. Dr. Gam’s failure to gain Eva’s confidence, not to mention the suicide of his high-profile patient, has him wondering if he’s in the right line of work. The reader will also come to wonder about Dr. Gam’s aptitude for his profession as he comes across less a compassionate healer than a professional mansplainer.

Another Casa del Sol resident having a shitty day is “second-rate fighter” Marty Romero, a.k.a. Marty the Wonder Boy. When he’s not in the ring, Marty spends his days sexually harassing all the women in the building, including plump matron Mrs. Katz. Even his own mother can’t stand him. Finally sick of Marty’s shit—and taking care of Marty’s neglected wife Alicia and son Pepe —Mama Romero informs her son during one of his visits that he won’t be leaving alone; he’ll be taking Alicia and Pepe with him. And if he doesn’t? Well, maybe the boxing commission would be interested in hearing about how Marty threw his last fight. Then, just to make it clear she’s out of fucks to give, Mama Romero tells her son she wished she’d aborted him (“A goose quill I should have used before I brought such a son into the world.”)

As the book progresses, Eva falls apart, Dr. Gam falls for Eva, and Marty flips the fuck out. But while the bulk of L.A. 46 revolves around Eva, Dr. Gam and Marty, there are a host of other characters residing at Casa del Sol, far too many to be developed properly in a 250-page book. Those other characters include Lili Marlene, a one-time child star now earning a living as a stripper; Ernie Katz, a retiree whose business in New York didn’t always operate within the law; Colette, a high-priced call girl; has-been film director Mike Melkha, who spends his days drinking on the lanai and blaming his flops on a public too dumb to understand his work (sounds familiar); and Grace Arness, a model who, per the back cover copy, “pursued a strange kind of love.” Only Ruby Morgan, a rebellious teenager (exempted from the apartment complex's no child policy, evidently) living with—and desperately trying to get away from—her older sister and brother-in-law, gets a full-fledged story arc. 

A Banker Going Down on Mama and
Other Unsettling Childhood Memories

Day Keene (née Gunard Hjertstedt), better known for his hard-boiled crime thrillers like So Dead My Lovely and Home is the Sailor, is not an author you’d expect to write a melodramatic potboiler. Then again, he was the head writer for a few radio soap operas, so maybe it’s not that unexpected. He certainly had the talent to write this “Peyton Place of the West Coast,” to quote the cover’s ill-fitting teaser copy. (Peyton Place was notorious for exposing the sleazy underbelly of a genteel New England town, while Los Angeles’ trashy side was never much of a secret. Adultery, rape, incest and abortion in 1950s small town America? Shocking! In Los Angeles? That’s a slow Tuesday, even in the 1950s.)

And Keene goes for it, peppering L.A. 46 with several scenes of sexual debauchery, like Ruby’s sister Vera recalling a moment from their childhood, after their father had died and her mother faced foreclosure from the bank. To save the family farm, the girls’ mother gives in to banker Mr. Cronkite’s sexual advances, telling him she won’t enjoy it. Unbeknownst to Mama, her daughters are spying on the action through a crack in the window shutters.

[Vera had] seen animals serviced. She’d listened to her father and mother for years. But this was the first time she’d seen a man and a woman close coupled and the sight of Mr. Cronkite’s rigid protruding flesh, huge out of all proportion to the rest of him, first disappearing into then emerging briefly from the hairy patch between her mother’s thighs, had at the same time so excited and disgusted her that despite Ruby’s protests she’d had to leave the window and be sick.

It had gone on like that all afternoon. Every time she stood barefooted in the hot dust outside the window, the man from the bank had been beating his lean flanks and scrawny buttock even leaner. Then toward the late afternoon when she peered through the crack in the shutter, she thought Mr. Cronkite had gone. At first all she’d been able to see was her mother laying with her back arched and her head thrown back and her eyes closed and her lips drawn away from her teeth as she made small, animal sounds in her throat. Then looking on down between the massive breasts and equally massive thighs and drawn-up knees, she’d seen the top of Mr. Cronkite’s bald head rising and falling industriously, like a banty rooster pecking corn.

It’s not exactly spank-bank material, but still fairly explicit for a book penned in the early 1960s. Keene is just as detailed in his writing of Eva’s childhood sexual abuse, which had me wondering if these scenes were meant to be titillating or just shocking? It’s also interesting to note that it’s only when the sex is coerced or transactional that Keene provides more graphic descriptions. Good, clean romantic —or at least consensual—sex usually happens off page.

I don’t know if Keene was judging readers looking for smut by making the more explicit sex scenes the novel’s more unsettling situations, but he definitely judges some of his characters. As much as I’d like to say he’s surprisingly progressive, many of Keene’s depictions are very much in alignment with people of his generation. So, expect plenty of sexism and homophobia, with just a soupçon of casual racism. Though he writes of Grace, the “lesb” model, with some empathy, she is presented as someone who is broken and therefore needs to be “fixed.” More disheartening is that Grace also thinks there’s something wrong with her. When Ernie Katz comes to her aid after she’s been raped, Grace says: “I’d almost wished I enjoyed it. You don’t think I want to be the way I am, do you?” This attitude is mitigated, somewhat, by Katz, who tells Grace that she should be able to live with her “problem.” “People have lived with worse,” he says, later adding: “What can you expect from a world that was made in six days?” Grace’s rape, BTW, goes unreported because she fears it could cost her her job should it get in the papers. So, yeah, there are some fucked-up attitudes here.

But Keene also skewers some of the attitudes of his (and our) time, particularly regarding the media, represented in L.A. 46 by one of its residents, John Johns, a TV pundit whose name telegraphs that he's not meant to be taken seriously. Though Johns regularly spouts his “liberal” views on air (his editorials are only mildly progressive; readers today would be forgiven for mistaking him for a moderate Republican), his only deeply held belief is that the more controversial his positions, the greater the ratings. He’s nothing more than a rabble rouser. He even conspires with his wife to invite Marty’s poor wife and son over to their apartment for brunch, not out of genuine kindness but because it builds up his own image as the compassionate liberal, not to mention there’s the added kick of pissing off the neighbors. (“Are you certain you don’t believe some of that stuff you broadcast?” Johns’ wife asks.)

Overall, L.A. 46 is better-than-average trash fiction, with Keene steering this Kennedy era Melrose Place toward a violent conclusion worthy of the crime thrillers he’s more famous for. And it’s Keene’s crime fiction that I’ll continue seeking out, though I think I’ll just have to make peace with the fact that if I want to read Joy House and still be able to afford groceries I’ll have to settle on the more reasonably priced (and decidedly less cool looking) Stark House edition. What else can I expect from a world made in six days?

*That’s a boner-killing $2,411 in 2022 dollars, but possibly still worth wanking over depending on where you live.

Short Takes: ‘Crazy Desires of a Murderer’ (1977) ★★

When Netflix did away with its star rating system in favor of the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons, they did away with nuance. You either like a movie or you don’t, no in-between. Other streaming services followed suit: Hulu has like/dislike buttons, and now Tubi viewers have a chance to give a movie an up or down vote. The problem with this system is that most movies—or any entertainment media—don't fall within such a neat binary. Netflix recently added a two thumbs-up button, which helps a little, I guess, if you want to let Netflix know that you really, really like The Gray Man (I’m sure a couple people do), but if Netflix and other platforms really want an idea of what audiences think of their content, they need to add a shrug button.

All that to say director Filippo Walter Ratti’s Crazy Desires of a Murderer (a.k.a. I vizi morbosi di una governante), merits a 🤷. It’s not terrible, but it’s not particularly worth watching, either.

Illeana (Isabelle Marchall, who kind of looks like Emilia Clarke if she were a ’70s porn star) returns from vacationing with her friends, bringing them—plus a couple of guys she met while in Asia—back to the family castle for the weekend, much to the consternation of her wheelchair-bound, slightly-senile father Baron De Chablais (Stuart Brisbain Colin), a collector of Asian art and artifacts (none of this Asia stuff is pertinent to the plot, BTW). Dad is quickly wheeled off to his room by the housekeeper Berta (Annie Carol Edel), leaving Illeana and her friends free to guzzle champagne, play sexy charades and fuck. But the fun quickly ends when Illeana’s friend and doppelganger Ilsa (Patrizia Gori) gets stabbed to death and her eyes dug out of her head.

Crazy Desires of a Murderer, released in 1977 but reportedly (or perhaps I should say obviously) made much earlier, employs plenty of familiar tropes—mentally unbalanced siblings, secret entrances, secret agendas, grave robbing and red herrings galore—without doing anything particularly clever with them. Its pacing is slow, and its body count meager, though the murders are fairly bloody, if not particularly well executed (the grue effects in this movie are only slightly more convincing than what you’d find in a Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter flick). Perhaps more shocking than the graphic eye-gouging is a sex scene in which a poofy-haired drug smuggler (Roberto Zattini) molds a candle into a make-shift dildo to use on Gori, giving new meaning to the term “candling.” It’s also the most memorable scene in this shrug of a giallo.

Short Takes: ‘Lisztomania’ (1975) ★★★

While the films of the late Ken Russell can usually be found at the intersection of OMG! and WTF!, Russell sometimes drove the OMG head-on into WTF, resulting in a fiery collision of Jesus fucking Christ! And so Lisztomania came to be.

There are many things I could say about Lisztomania, like it’s exactly what you’d expect from the director of Tommy… if he’d injected mescaline directly into his eyeballs then listened to the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Liszt: Les Preludes/Orpheus/Tasso while simultaneously watching Behind the Green Door and The Benny Hill Show; that it’s Amadeus by way of Zardoz, but not so restrained; that it’s a period piece that makes 1836 look like 1976 and vice versa; that while the movie is set in the world of music and has some musical numbers, it is not really a musical, it just looks like one; that it features a cameo by Ringo Starr as the motherfuckin’ Pope; that its humor is alternately crass and juvenile (gas-spewing ass sculptures) or just silly (one of Liszt’s lovers urges the composer to join a monastery, saying: “You can become a Franz-ciscan!”); that while it’s ostensibly about an imagined rivalry between Franz Liszt and Richard Mahler (Roger Daltry and Paul Nicholas, respectively, and both appearing to be having a great time), Lisztomania’s story is more about set pieces than plot, and that’s OK because one of those set pieces is this:

 And really, that’s all you need to know to decide whether this one’s for you.