Infrasexum (1969), by Carlos Tobalina

Carlos Tobalina was a sage. He was The Man. He was the big kahuna, the primus unus, the Alpha and the Omega. I didn't think that I could ever get enough of Flesh and Bullets, and then, when all hope was lost, I found that for once I lived in a kind world. Fifteen years or so before Flesh and Bullets, the Neil Breen of the 20th Century turned out Infrasexum, his first movie, an ostensible look into the horrors of male impotence. And yet the resultant film was more, much more. You are not ready.

Peter Allison is a man with a unique problem despite his unique situation in life. He's a very successful businessman, and he has a stunningly attractive wife, and yet for some reason, he can't, uh, prime the old motor as it were. He can't loose his juice--can't sharpen his pencil. He has trouble making his dick hard is what I'm saying. So he decides to cut himself off from his business and family and go on a road trip in search of self-discovery. He ends making a small fortune in Vegas, then returns to Los Angeles, where he meets Carlos (played by Carlos Tobalina), who "turns [him] on to marijuana, LSD, and the hippie world." But still Peter can't find relief from his limpness, even as Carlos introduces him to the world of lesbian threeways. He becomes a painter, but his world is briefly shredded when two crooks learn of his wealth and kidnap one of his hippie girlfriends to try to rob him. When he refuses to comply, one of them tries to rape the girl, and when she resists, he stabs her and starts removing her intestines. Peter is able to escape the two and kills them in self-defense. Then, he goes to a park where he watches ducks have sex. After yet another failed attempt to bang a girl, Peter attempts to bang Carlos Tobalina. This doesn't work either--he's not into men, though not for a want of trying. At the end of it all, as in Psyched by the 4D Witch and other sexploitation movies, a psychiatrist shows up and magics it all better, suggesting that Peter have sex with someone who resembles the best sex partner he ever had. He also suggests he rejects the negative standards placed on him by his father, which we didn't know he had until this point. When this happens, Peter is finally free. The end.

It took a suitably demented eye to frame and photograph Infrasexum. This relatively straightforward tale zigs and zags in ways I wasn't prepared for. When it suddenly turns into a hostage/murder movie, for example, completely H.G. Lewis-esque gore, I am never ready. And, like Ogroff, this movie is always full of stuff which I never noticed on previous viewings. For example, it wasn't until the viewing which spawned this review that I figured out that Carlos was played by the director. That makes the stunningly tender scene where male-on-male sex almost happens even better than it was before. I also didn't notice that Peter visits the bisexual couple at Apartment 420; that the hippie fest he and Carlos go to features a stoned girl with a third eye painted on her forehead; or that said hippie festival also features a guy carrying around an adorable baby fox. These are all miraculous sights to see, glimpses back into another time.

This whole movie, in a sense, is a meditation on the hippie movement. In all likelihood, Carlos was just trying to make money off the hippies, just as many exploitation films at the time were, but that doesn't mean this film lacks time-capsule value. I'm pretty cynical about the hippies these days but little 18-year-old Mudman would have loved this. I can still feel a bit of the groove--while I no longer consider that white guys with embarrassing hair-clips bobbing their heads drunkenly with absolutely no understanding of where they are to be a symbol of freedom, it is still fascinating to watch people who have a seeming dearth of judgment for their peers acting like children and doing nothing productive in particular. In a sense I wish we still had that lack of judgment; but I also don't think that doing cartwheels through parks for hours is a particularly great use of time and energy when you're 25 years old, either. What I appreciate is that, for the most part, people are very nice in this film, and the movie tries to make a point that we--as in humanity--are not as bad as we seem. Peter is free with his money, Carlos is free with his drugs, the girls are free with their sex. And most of the judgment Peter faces for his impotence comes from himself, not from his partners. It would have been too easy to make yet another impotence-themed sexploitation movie where the person spends most of the movie being screamed at, but generally, Peter gets off pretty easy, his pain being more realistically internal than would be shown in a lot of similar films.

And I do really appreciate how the hippie free-spiritisms appear in the style of the film. Bloated with voiceovers, the movie really does play out like Peter's traveling journal, which makes it one of them road trip flicks I love so much. The light classical music sampled throughout the film gives it an artsy sentimental feel that makes me get all fuzzy inside. This really does help build the story of a man who is struggling to find freedom from a prison he's built for himself. It makes it seem tenderly psychological. I love it.

Of course, there is also the lovely trash.

Bad edits, cuts in the soundtrack, and incomprehensible dialogue all wrack the movie, pushing it straight into the Technicolor world of one of Doris Wishman's '70s movies (which I'll get to soon enough!). Peter dresses like a gay bullfighter for a startling percentage of the runtime. And, as Jess Franco will tell you, nothing says classy like a slow zoom towards the vagina of a corpse. Rest assured, we are absolutely still dealing with the director of Flesh and Bullets here. But this is him at his rawest. Gone is the drama of murdering another man's wife; instead, we are gazing into the id of a director/actor on his own personal trip into hedonism. It's almost like a documentary. Yet, still confined to the magically unrealistic world of fiction.

In case you can't tell, I really, really like this movie. Boobs and butts galore, plus a little blood, and a strange journey into a strange mind. Don't miss it.

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Satan's Touch (1984), by John Goodell

One of the sets of arc words recurring throughout Satan's Touch is that "poker is a game of deception." Well, so is filmmaking. You take a bunch of images of real things and make them into things that are untrue. But Satan's Touch plays the deception game better than all others: the title alone, in addition to the box art and the first few minutes, will lead you to believe that this is a horror film. But oh, no. Satan's Touch is much more special than that. Satan's Touch is better than anything you could ever win in a Vegas casino. As the movie's recurring song keeps singing...take it from me, take it from me, we've hit the jackpot.

The film tells the story of Jim Parrish, a middle-aged grocery store owner from Crocus Hills, Iowa who is one day made the target of Satan himself. Satan looks like the Gem Fusion of Bob Ross and Kenny Loggins, and occasionally enters the film to answer his car phone and make quips like, "Earthquakes? Of course we do earthquakes. No, no...acts of God is just an expression." He decides to give Jim the horrible, horrible curse of winning every single gambling game he plays. He also sets Jim up with a set of raffle tickets for he and his wife to go to Las Vegas! Jim soon obtains a small fortune, but of course this does not go unnoticed by the casino's owner, who appears to be Stan Lee. He and his staff spend most of the movie trying to figure out Jim's system, which you'd think would make them want to kill him. Instead, the threat to Jim's life comes when it's exposed that one of Boss Lee's minions is trimming pennies out of the casino's computer, causing him to go rogue and try to kill the casino's cybersecurity lady--Jim essentially just gets in the way, and earns a tranq dart for his trouble. When Jim decides to end it all by folding four aces, Satan ditches his "victim" and Jim is able to prove that he can lose. This is enough for the casino to let him go, and Jim is freed from Satan's unexpected kindness forevermore.

Yes, this is a gambling thriller-cum-anti-gambling melodrama marketed as a horror film. As you might expect, everything is all the over the place. The movie starts out almost like an anachronistic '80s PureFlix movie, with Jim using a Christian argument to try to dissuade one of his customers, an old lady, from being a kleptomaniac. And both Jim and his wife believe that gambling is sinful. This is backed up by the fact that the gambling is facilitated by Satan himself. But again, Satan never brings Jim to any actual harm, and Jim's method of escaping his unbeknownst demonic pact is to stop playing, which would be a problem if it wasn't for the fact that he never displayed any signs of self-abuse through his gambling. All throughout the film he makes only small bets and remains entirely innocent and humble in his winnings. He doesn't even come close to corruption, and the violence in the film comes from circumstances entirely independent from him and Satan. Gambling is a positive force in this universe, even when it is powered by the devil.

Consider: the heads and employees of the casino are shown to be good people. While the boss is unfriendly towards Jim for taking a lot of his money, he never threatens to kill him--he just makes a blackmail tape, which is of questionable value anyway, since Jim's answers to propositions of extramarital affairs amount to roughly, "nah, but thanks anyway." When the conflict shifts to the shady bastard who skimming their dough, it is clear who the film favors. Sure, they cheat people, but they do so in a friendly way. There's an incredibly strange sequence at the start of the film, which just keeps going just when you think it's stopped. A severely inebriated man complains to a bouncer that he can't win at the slot machines. The bouncer offers to introduce him to a machine which "always pays out," which turns out to be the snack machine. After that, he offers to take him to a phone so he can call a cab, but this turns out to be a broken pay phone which eats even more of his money. Finally, another bouncer takes him to a change machine, where he's overjoyed to find a machine that at last pays out, even if it's just turning his bills into coins. It is one of the most bizarre sequences I've seen set to film, and it presents the staff of this casino as jolly jokers. Oh, those lovable scamps...stripping people of everything they're worth.

But on a more serious note, this movie seems at times to be a documentary on casinos, and that probably ties in with the protagonistic portrayal of powers that be at the casino. It's worth noting John Goodell's only other credit was on the 1974 cinema verite documentary Always a New Beginning, about the education of brain-damaged children, which was nominated for a fucking Oscar. So it's no wonder that there are a lot of shots of cards, chips, and bills being spread about, alongside lengthy Vegas-streets peoplewatching segments, and pseudo-interviews about the fine points of cybersecurity in the gambling business. It's pretty incredible.

There's always just a lot of weird shit that happens, even outside of the Satan stuff. This is a movie whose idea of realistic dialogue is, "I haven't enjoyed an all-night poker game like that in a long time!" Similarly, at the start of the movie, we have shots superimposed over larger shots of the exterior of Jim's grocery store, and a spinning roulette wheel. I will always appreciate pointlessly artsy composition like that. Finally, in the last scene, someone shuffles a deck using magic tricks, complete with Casio stings that sync up to his hand gestures. With these mixed in with everything else, Satan's Touch is an ineffably fun movie that only slightly drags, unworthy of the hate it's received in its scanty reviews over the years. Horror fans may want to take a rain check, however, unless you can keep your mind open.

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