Sometimes a mess is attractive. It takes some work to like things like this. I think they are conceived with no notion beyond delivering a soft porn product. In this case, all the matter is about ten long sex scenes of quite intense sex. They end (all but one) in the man's death. Its not obvious to me whether different actresses were involved, but it is supposed to be the same character. All this is trite and visually annoying. Franco and Sarno in their better times could at least have avoided boredom.
But the engaging bit is the story confabulated around this. It is intriguingly nonsensical, and in its way worthy of Ruiz. There are spoilers here but it hardly matters.
The main folding is this: a woman is undergoing therapy for "unease" and submits to hypnosis. During this, the analyst is horrified to have these murders recounted. We find at the end that the murdered men gangraped a schoolgirl and this is our hypnotized avenger. Only one boy in the gang demurred and he is the one who survived with only a memory of a fantastic sexual encounter with the adult.
The twist in this thread is that the final victim is the analyst himself, which explains his growing horror as the murders are described.
But there are odd overlays. The woman it seems is actually a host for the goddess Hera who gives her supernatural power and "explains" why the murders must be through or must involve, it isn't clear the sexual act. And why the act has to be unearthly. This is muddled, but tantalizingly so, as if there were some sort of ineffable dark logic we cannot comprehend. At the end, we discover that somehow this woman's husband and teen daughter have become infected with this Hera. Just how that works is equally baffling, but we see the husband masturbate and produce huge quantities of ejaculate. Its all inscrutable.
But here's the Ruiz bit. The husband is a filmmaker, and he is making a film that has precisely these elements. We visit a set and see one of the copulatory scenes in progress. Not much is made of this; it floats in the background, and the fold of the film within and the film we see is never explicit. But it is strangely, and puzzlingly seductive. The (uncredited?) actress of the film within has her hair dyed red.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
But the engaging bit is the story confabulated around this. It is intriguingly nonsensical, and in its way worthy of Ruiz. There are spoilers here but it hardly matters.
The main folding is this: a woman is undergoing therapy for "unease" and submits to hypnosis. During this, the analyst is horrified to have these murders recounted. We find at the end that the murdered men gangraped a schoolgirl and this is our hypnotized avenger. Only one boy in the gang demurred and he is the one who survived with only a memory of a fantastic sexual encounter with the adult.
The twist in this thread is that the final victim is the analyst himself, which explains his growing horror as the murders are described.
But there are odd overlays. The woman it seems is actually a host for the goddess Hera who gives her supernatural power and "explains" why the murders must be through or must involve, it isn't clear the sexual act. And why the act has to be unearthly. This is muddled, but tantalizingly so, as if there were some sort of ineffable dark logic we cannot comprehend. At the end, we discover that somehow this woman's husband and teen daughter have become infected with this Hera. Just how that works is equally baffling, but we see the husband masturbate and produce huge quantities of ejaculate. Its all inscrutable.
But here's the Ruiz bit. The husband is a filmmaker, and he is making a film that has precisely these elements. We visit a set and see one of the copulatory scenes in progress. Not much is made of this; it floats in the background, and the fold of the film within and the film we see is never explicit. But it is strangely, and puzzlingly seductive. The (uncredited?) actress of the film within has her hair dyed red.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.