Salon Kitty and L'Empire des sens

Salon Kittyⁱ and L'Empire des sensⁱⁱ are both based on real events, be it the faux prostitutes in the faux brothel run by the SS or the syphilitc preteen whore who cut off some dude's penis and wore it around for a few days. They're both coproductions, Italo-German and Franco-Japanese respectively. They're both batshit insane, meaningless drivel, disjointed footage incomprehensibly linked together. It's not a matter of "non-linear narrative", it's not a matter of "breaking with convention and exploring" bla bla. It's simply a matter of apes sitting around a box, playing Mahjongg with lengths of film.

Salon Kitty is the better movie in the pair because it displays a coupla dozen young Italian girls lined up and ordered to strip who therewith proceed to do as told without any femcrap. This is valuable, as such, but it does not last. The scene moves immediately into a 1970s version of "wild acuplation" the likes of which words can't ever do justice to. Suffice to say that ridiculous nonsense of the sort wasn't matched until the "technological" rom-coms of the early 2000s.ⁱⁱⁱ The rest consists of "pimp acting" in the style of Willie Dynamite^iv ; the net result strictly vindicates any claims the very inept Brass may have in the exquisite jewel that is Caligula : Guccione made^v that thing.

L'Empire des sens goes on and on and on tediously monotonously the same, it's like Solaris with tits. Nothing happens, at any point. In fact, the whole item is so mindnumbingly dumb, a better educational reel for the abstinence-only UStardian nonsense could scarcely be devised.

Neither script makes any sense whatsoever. No characters, or even shambling hairballs that could be somehow, however contortedly, misinterpreted as characters are included^vi. There are no events in the common sense of that term, nor in any strictly definable sense whatsoever. There's no causal link, logical or otherwise, permitting the mind some kind of navigation from outtake to outtake. There's just nothing fucking there, Jesus Christ almighty who the fuck gives these idiots food and where do they find the actresses!

Bleargh.

1. 1976, by Tinto Brass, with Ingrid Thulin, Theresa Ann Savoy [↩]
2. 1976, by Nagisa Oshima, with Tatsuya Fuji, Eiko Matsuda [↩]
3. You know, when Hollywood decided to introduce email into their jelly. [↩]
4. You know, where facial contortion intensity and amplitude is the measure of internal life and in any case the actor's work. It's like any other black-collar profession, really : the better basketball player is the one that jumps higher, the better rapper is the one that sounds closer to a monkey and the better 'sploitation actor is the one that manages to contort his face into the least recognizably human form. [↩]
5. This is as fine an example of "executive meddling" rescuing a work from the swamp of idiocy into the tower of genius as anyone could ever ask for. [↩]
6. For bonus points : the "nazi" sluts speak randomly Italian or Spanish. Or sometimes German. Like, the same 20something clueless ditz will suddenly be talking in another woman's voice in an entirely different language at native speaker's fluency. Because, obviously, they forgot to dub some portions. I'm talking this fucking bad, they literally forgot some bits here and there and wrapped regardless. [↩]