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“Give me a call next time you gotta take a tinkle!”
Shot on video and primarily in extra heavy claustrophobic close-ups in a cramped apartment, and thick with hateful dialogue, The Devil’s Bloody Playthings is the latest from writer-director William Hellfire, who made a lot of people very uncomfortable a few years ago with Duck! The Carbine High Massacre. Clearly, he’s not interested in putting on a happy face with his new films, which are produced through his company Electric Daisy Pushers. Hellfire definitely has a knack for reproducing the airless, one-step-from-insanity atmosphere of the roughest ‘60s sicko films – the liner notes compare his work to that of Michael and Roberta Findlay (the Flesh trilogy), and it’s an apt match-up, given how Hellfire seems to share a taste for slow-boiling sexual mania and self-obsessed characters who seem literally coated in a inch of slime. He also reproduces what some sleaze beasts might find tedious about old-school smut – reams of dialogue, amateurish performances (save for Selberg, who steals the movie), and magic-show level special effects – but if that really bothers you, I dare say you might have stumbled onto the wrong web site. Anyway, Hellfire and his horrendous crew have come up with one heck of a hate vibe movie with Playthings, and I’m definitely curious to see if they can do more.
Alternative Cinema’s DVD includes the original trailer, as well as a spot
for something else from the Electric Daisy Pusher factory called Orgasm
Torture in Satan’s Rape Clinic (which is glimpsed briefly in
Playthings). I’d give anything to be a part of the discussion between
Alternative Cinema and Best Buy over that title.
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Here’s a
blackhearted little sickshow that compares favorably to the nastiest ‘60s
sexploitation titles. Executive producer Zoe Moonshine (a regular on the
Alternative Cinema circuit) stars as Karen, a naïve young thing from South
Africa who falls into the clutches of hidden-cam pornographer Christine (Larocca)
when she answers an ad for an apartment. Christine is a grade-A bitch on
wheels who videotapes her roomies during, ahem, private moments (like
while taking a dump or diddling themselves) and then uses the footage to
blackmail them into being her slave. But when Christine pulls the I-Spy
routine on the new girl, she gets more than she’s bargained for; not only
does Karen seem to enjoy being humiliated and debased (like giving a
vigorous handjob to a creepo smut producer played by ex-Cows frontman
Shannon Selberg), she’s a psycho-sexual timebomb who’s primed for
kill-kill-kill. I suppose there’s a valuable lesson in all this about
learning everything you can about a new roommate before you torture them,
but that’s not really the point here.