Man, they just don't make 'em like this anymore. I guess that statement pretty much sums up the bulk of what we review here, and hell, in some places, not only do they not make 'em like that anymore, they really never got around to making 'em like that in the first place. They are simply ultra-bizarre anomalies in the fabric of film reality, oddities that should never have been brought forth unto this world.
Sometimes, you encounter something that defies all logic and interpretation, exists entirely outside the realm of even fringe film making. On occasion, that film doesn't have the name Alexandro Jodorowski attached to it, but a lot of times it does. Weirdness can come from a variety of sources, and a seasoned aficionado of global bizarro film knows no genre is safe from producing a film that can only explained as the work of a schizophrenic on enough acid to freak out an elephant.
These days, pornography is not exactly a playground of creativity and weirdness. Oh sure they come up with some funny titles and maybe a few funny ideas. For the most part though, it's pretty mundane stuff that follows an all too predictable formula of identical blond silicone adds humping some guy who might also be the star of a late night AbFlex commercial, unless they are Ron Jeremy, in which case they may be advertising a grill that lets you cook entire cows at once. If you are lucky, maybe you run across a film of Kobe Tai growling like mad and writhing all around, but for the most part, it's safe to say porn just isn't very weird these days.
I find that distressing. It's a shame that a style of film making so solidly identified with the fringe, no matter how many mainstream folks imbibe behind closed doors, is so self-conscious about it's larger reputation that it won't take any real chances. As paradoxical as it may sound, porn has never been more socially acceptable than it is these days. And it's not because we're all a lot more liberated and hornier. It's simply because porn is a lot more boring.
It wasn't always this way, kids. There was a time when porn was not afraid to produce some freaky shit, a time when the makers of adult films even gave a damn about trying to come up with some sort of story, however bad, to serve as a basis for all the nudity and wild fucking. This magical era was the 1970s. They are a much maligned decade, forever forced to lug around the tarnishing albatross of disco, stupid fucking pantsuits, and KC and the Sunshine Band. It's easy to hate the 1970s, and few rational people would be tempted to debate you, especially after the sickening glut of disco revivalism and nostalgia that swept over us not too long ago.
Luckily, I am not a very rational person when it comes to many things, and I'm among the first to jump to the defense of the 1970s. There's no denying that the 1970s, like no decade before or since, was the time of some of the most kick ass action films, the most gory horror films, and the most fucked up bizarro films. Porn in the 1970s was delightfully free of self-consciousness and rules. They'd fucking do anything. If your movie calls for some old mother fucker running around with a raw chicken hanging off his dick, well then by God they'd do it. It was a glorious time, my brothers and sisters, when creativity ran wild and every excess was indulged. Let us bow our heads in a moment of silence as we remember a wilder time, when a fifteen year old with big boobs could star in her own porn movies, direct, and even open her own production studio without anyone catching on that she wasn't legally old enough to drive.
I'm certain that the porn industry of the 1990s would never touch a film like Hardgore with a ten foot, umm, pole. Luckily, Hardgore was made in the 1970s, when film makers really had no problem making movies where a woman masturbated with an ear of corn while the Devil danced around behind her, jerking off and squeezing his own testicles (for more of that action, check out The Devil in Ms. Jones). Free from the restraint and yawn-inspiring commitment to the mundane that runs rampant these days, the people behind Hardgore, who no doubt did more drugs than all the Rolling Stones combined, churned out one of the most mind blowingly bizarre films ever made.
Rest assured your conventions are all intact. The soundtrack is quality Bruno Mattei sounding lounge music. The acting is stilted. The dialogue is laughable. And of course there are scenes where the boom mic is dangling in the shot like John Holmes' wiener. I mean, just because you are coming from left field doesn't mean you can't respect the classics. The plot itself begins as pure porn convention -- a sexy young woman is admitted to a clinic where they promise to cure her of that awful disease, nymphomania. Naturally, the staff (ahem) of the hospital have some rather curious ways of treating their patients. I'm not sure if constant sex with an endless stream of beautiful nurses is a cure for anything, but I'm willing to undergo the test. All in the name of science, after all.
But the predictability ends there. It turns out that not only are all the nurses horny bisexual nymphos themselves, but the doctor and his staff (ahem) are all a bunch of Satan worshipping, orgy having cultists! Right on! Before you know it, lesbian sex gives way to scenes of bizarre rituals, masked minions of Lucifer, and gore. Yep, gore. They didn't pick the title of this movie out of a hat, you know. So now you have lesbian sex, Satanic rituals and orgies, bloody decapitations and castrations, and you know what? That's only the beginning.
You'll sit through this whole movie wondering what it could possibly come up with next, and chances are they won't disappoint you with the results. Satanic orgies are punctuated by necrophilia, and then by dead women coming to life while a fleet of flying dildos with sparklers in them shoot fake sperm at our lovely heroine as they dart about the room. You get an evil Satanic dildo of horror that heats up and shoots out smoke, causing the cutest woman in the whole movie to writhe in pain and yell, "It burns! Call my mother!"
Call your mother? The fuck? I can think of a lot of things I would yell if I had a Satanic dildo of fire stuck in me, and "Call my mother!" is so far down on the list that it's not even worth bringing up. It might be different if her mother had been in the movie at any point, but no. She just sort of randomly brings her up as Devil smoke pours out her crotch. Hey, it was the 1970s.
The Devil himself, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, shows up to orchestrate a massive orgy, get a blow job, and do a little decapitating. Maybe it wasn't the Devil, I don't know. At the very least, it was a spokesman or official representative of Hell. Satan got a lot more action back in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he was too busy with heavy metal music, and nowadays Christian fundamentalists are so vile and hateful that it really overshadows anything Lucifer could through at us.
I think this movie kicks ass. It's a total mindfuck that will arouse you one scene, then come at you with guys getting their wee-wees chopped off while Iron Butterfly type psychedelic music goes wild in the background. I think my favorite thing about 1970s porn is that there are no skinny-ass, fake boob having stars. Nothing is less attractive than that. The folks here are all real, complete with the perfect amount of baby fat, actual butts, and no silicone. If I'm going to watch porn -- and of course you know I would never ever watch that filth, but I'm being hypothetical -- I want to see real people with real body parts. It's more attractive to be a little bit doughy but all natural than to be ninety pounds, with 50 of it being the fake shit in your boobs.
I'd like to think this movie will gross out and offend a lot of people. How often does someone decide to mix splatter gore with hot porn? Not very often. I know y'all these days are shocked by nothing, not so much because any of us are more open minded than ever before; but rather, it's simply because we're a lot more lethargic, apathetic, and desensitized. Part of what makes porn fun is that it offends so many people. And Hardgore will probably even offend some porn fans, especially those weak-ass new school kids who have no idea just how fucking bizarre the shit was in the 1970s.
You will scratch your head. You might hide your eyes. You might feel that special urge and take matters into your own hands. No matter what you do while you're watching this movie, the fact remains that it's one delightfully baffling, totally insane romp boiling over with hardcore sex, nudity, orgies, blood, gore, flying attack dildos, cool-ass jazz music, sexy nurses, weird looking guys, the Devil and his minions, and some other stuff I can't even explain. As for me, I loved this movie so much that I don't even hide the fact that I own it. It's a true testament to a dirty film when you don't even try to hide it by labeling it Ninja Death Trap IV or putting in the back behind all the other videos. 
What do nerds love? Doctor Who! And what else do we love? Dirty pictures! So my brain pretty much exploded the day I found out former Who sidekick Katy Manning dabbled in the nude end of the spectrum...with a Dalek no less!
Indeed, that was a great day. But I couldn't help wondering what John Pertwee would have thought...
Well, so-called erotic thrillers. In all honesty, I haven't seen that many owing primarily to the fact that I'm not going to pay for those premium cable movie channels, but the few that I have seen often employ very liberal definitions of both the word "erotic" and "thriller." In fact, though I've seen one or two that were erotic, I don't think I've ever found one to be especially thrilling, no matter how hard they try to convince me that watching an insurance claims investigator staring at Shannon Tweed through a window is edge-of-your-seat stuff. No, most of them are pretty boring when it comes to the thrilling aspect. And as for eroticism, since most of them feature women with grotesquely swollen fake boobs, it's about as erotic for me as watching some twisted little kid (or grown adult, for that matter) rub a couple of Barbie dolls together. No thanks, baby.
So what causes me to give the odd saucy feature a chance when I would be better off just watching some crazy old hillbilly sex film from Something Weird? I don't know. Bad judgment, I reckon, not that watching hillbilly sex movies is exactly a sign of better judgment. Some people make a hobby out of reviewing erotic thrillers, a task best gone about with a healthy sense of humor since you'll need that far more than a rapidly firing libido. I'm not really interested in becoming an expert on the world of erotic thrillers, partially because I would get tired of constantly typing "erotic thriller." Is there another term for these movies?
Anyway, we proceed with the knowledge that when it comes to these skin flicks, we are on unstable ground. If we're going to review one here, let's say simply for diversity's sake, how could we possibly make things even worse? I know! Let's watch an erotic vampire film! Yes, the erotic vampire film. Almost as popular with no-budget filmmakers as the "serial killer on a spree" film. Both genres usually think they are smarter than they actually are, which is a bad assumption since most of them are dumb as toast. I've seen a lot a vampire films, and I've hated just about all of them, all for the same reasons.
I hate that all the vampires have silly "gothy vampire" names like Galen and Tristain and Validek. Who the hell has names like that? Just once I'd like to see a vampire named Chuck or Steve. I hate that they all have dialogue that sounds like it came straight out of a morose middle school student's fanfic. I hate that the vampires are all rock 'n' rollers and Goths and parade around in leather pants and leather overcoats and those patent leather thigh-high boots that are only worn by comic book super heroines and hookers. I'm sure not every vampire feels the need to dress like Marilyn Manson. Some of them probably want to dress like that dude from The Darkness, or like Bruce Springsteen. Now really, what's scarier? A vampire who adopts the predictable "black leather goth rocker" appearance, or one who comes at you in a shiny spandex "space robe" or a pair of faded Levis and a work shirt?
But more than any of that, I hate that vampires are so often portrayed as whiny, bad poetry-reading (again, of a quality best ascribed to moody high schoolers who do weird spacing and line breaks in their poems) wimps. Even Dracula often gets portrayed this way, Bela and Chris Lee not withstanding. Look, the man was a Romanian warlord who scared the goddamned Turkish army away, which is not an easy thing to do. Apparently it requires lining your borders with the severed heads of your enemies. You don't do things like that if you look like some frail delicate flower from the pages of Propaganda magazine. Give me a vampire with muscles, for crying out loud! And please spare me the pathos. If I have to sit through another "woe the lonely darkness of my eternal soul" speech, I'll go crazy. I always liked Keifer Sutherland in Lost Boys because he really dug being a vampire, which I think would happen pretty often. If I had to be a monster, I'd be a vampire, but one of those vampires who just grows fangs when he vamps out. Not one of the ones that turns into a weird looking bald dude with contact lenses and blue skin. I know if I was a vampire I might be freaked out at first, but I'd eventually get over it and discover the benefits of things like eternal life, flying, hypnotism, and the ability to turn myself into a bat or some mist. And I certainly wouldn't waste away my nights dancing to bad techno music in warehouses that have been converted into industrial dance clubs. I'd be too busy doing things scaring the leader of North Korea and other cool vampire things.
Anyway, it would beat being a wolfman.
So erotic thrillers are usually bad. Vampire films are usually bad. Mix the two together and you have a front row seat to some of the ripest dialogue ever written, if nothing else. Embrace the Darkness II tells the involving story of a young woman who gets turned into a vampire and spends most of her time in a dance club owned by a couple of well-tanned fellow vampires. I guess the ancient legends never got around to addressing things like tanning salons and "Glow, by J-Lo." The head vampire is reformed erotic thriller staple Catalina Larranaga, who has put her naughty past behind her and is looking to build a legitimate acting career on the ol' Hsu Chi model. Well, good luck to her. I think I saw her in a commercial for Office Max or Office Depot. I don't know why all those places have to have their logo in the same font and color. Some day, someone will open an office supply store with a blue and green color scheme in one of those futuristic typefaces, and that'll be that.
If it seems like I know a lot about Ms. Larranaga for a guy who claims not to know very much about erotic thrillers, it's only because she falls into my healthily large category of "guilty pleasure." If I don't watch that many of these films, the ones I do watch often star her, and she's actually kind of worth paying attention to. To get the obvious points out of the way, yep she's hot. But she's hot mainly because she's not a blonde and has no silicone jiggling about and defying gravity. Plus, honest to God, she's a good actress, though that's not so much on display in this film thanks to the "Yea, though we be creatures of the night" style of dialogue she has to spout. Anyway, she has the chops to make it as a real actress in B-movies, though so far her only genre role was in a giant snake movie called King Cobra.
Oh yeah, here her name is Lizzie, because you know, Lizzie Borden and all.
Her plaything is, I suppose, the partial answer to my vampire prayers. Though the actor's name is the thoroughly vampirey Tristen (Tristen Coeur D'Alene, to be complete), his vampire character's name is simply Jack. Good ol' Jack the Vampire. And he's also pretty buff, which is a nice change. Unfortunately, he wears leather pants and a shiny long Matrix overcoat with no shirt (or with a mesh t-shirt from time to time), so he needs to work on his wardrobe. I always figured the best way not to attract the attention of vampire hunters would be to not walk around looking like a vampire. This Tristen fellow seems to be channeling Russell Crowe's voice, though the acting talent and charisma got lost somewhere along the way. Still, as far as beefcake actors in erotic thrillers go, he's not awful and has a better haircut than most of those guys.
The pretty young thing they take under their wing is Renee Rea as Jennifer, who hasn't been a vampire long enough to be issued a cool vampire name. She's not exactly a good actress, but she's not exactly bad either, and she's at least cute and has a silicone-free torso. Together, the trio of vampires hang out in their private goth club, which they keep private so they can invite in good looking "food" while avoiding the proliferation of fat chicks in white face powder insisting you refer to them as Cassandra that tend to pile up in most real goth clubs. It seems to me to be a bad idea to do all your vampiring in the same location night after night, but what do I know? They're at least careful about not killing their victims or turning them into vampires, because they don't seem to want to share their stuff.
Most of the movie consists of scenes of people dancing to generic techno music, then going into an uncomfortably chilly looking back room to have sex and get bitten. In between, awful vampire dialogue abounds, including the inevitable scene where Jennifer hesitates at saying "vampire" and results in Lizzie rattling off the dozen or so names she knows for nosferatu. There's also a grizzled vampire hunter, a Van Helsing of course, who looks like he was hired because he was the bum closest resembling Chris Kristoferson in the Blade movies. I always get Chris Kristiferson mixed up with Christopher Cross, and it would have been better if they'd tried to hire a guy who looked like Kriss Kross, those kids that made ya jump, jump!
Eventually, since we need some sort of conflict, the happy triangle will be torn asunder by the fact that Lizzie is sort of a vampire snob while Jennifer and Jack are basically nice people who just want to dance to bad music and wear uncomfortable outfits. Low-budget vampires sure are lucky they always live in Los Angeles. It'd be a real pain to wear those assless leather pants if you were a vampire in the northern Denmark. Anyway, the vampire hunter also shows up to talk with a Southern accent and be earthy.
Needless to say, there aren't exactly a lot of scares in this movie. A couple too-close shots of a guy's wobbling scrotum is about as scary as this movie gets. The story is painfully dull and a perfect example of why all these erotic thrillers are so uninteresting. They never push the envelope, not like the old drive-in movies that were often less explicit but far more interesting simply because so many of them were so cracked in the head. This movie, like just about all others of its ilk, does everything you expect it to, or slightly less. This is the sort of thing that gets written in someone's sleep, and even if the movie is just an excuse to show lots of naked people, my response is that there have been other movies with just as many naked people but much better stories. I mean, you have vampires in bad S&M gear. Can't you have them do something more interest than dance and sit on the couch when they're not having sex? You know, they can fly and stuff, and turn into wolves and bats and, if the old Bela Lugosi Dracula film is accurate, armadillos. Shouldn't the night come when one of the characters says, "You know, I'm actually not in the mood to dance, have sex, then sit on the couch tonight. You wanna go freak out some stoners or something?"
Yeah, I know. Who watches an erotic thriller and complains about the plot? The same sort of guy who complains about how bad the writing in Playboy has become.
Still, some of it is worth watching just for the dialogue alone. It's really quite awful and overwrought. As I said, Catalina Larranaga is a decent actress with her clothes on or off, but there's not much she can do with this stuff but roll with it and collect her paycheck. Like the dialogue in any erotic thriller than yearns to be taken seriously and as something more than just nudity on parade, it's laughably ham-fisted and overblown in its attempt to seem semi-intelligent. Hey, points for trying, but in the end it still sounds like something out of a teenage girl's vampire diary.
And the dialogue alone isn't hilarious enough to carry one through the sheer boredom of the "dance-sex-bite" pattern that the film follows. The only real example of interesting "erotic vampire" movies I can think of would be the films of Jean Rollin because, frankly, the man is completely cracked in the skull. Though he often has even less plot than Embrace the Darkness II and has much worse actors, his films are inventive, experimental, and full of psychedelic insanity. He's willing to take a chance, and though you can easily discount his films as pompous, pretentious, or flat-out crappy, at least he's trying something unique.
Speaking of the sex scenes, there are indeed quite a few of them, all surprisingly explicit in what they'll show. You expect full frontal female in these movies, but I was a bit surprised by the number of male genitalia on display here. Don't know if this is common or not, or if it was just this film's attempt to be more daring since wieners somehow equal avant garde art these days. Want to make your arthouse movie seem serious? Show someone's penis. Actually, even what they show of the women and the simulated friskiness is more explicit than what I thought you could do in these movies.
The people are attractive, but really, it does get tedious after a while. The sex scenes, while hot at first, are all pretty much the same thing over and over, with the exception that people are wearing fangs and occasionally drip blood out of their mouths. Which is another thing - vampires always drip blood out of their mouths. Why is that? I've been pretty lusty about some of the food I've eaten, but I've never writhed around and drooled out creme brulee or chewed up bits of filet mignon. But vampires always have to pull away from their victim with blood dripping out of their mouths and smearing their face. If they like blood so much, maybe they should make an attempt to keep it in their mouths instead of getting it all over the place. I've had some nasty cuts in my day, and I know you can suck on a wound (I never knew exactly why we do this, but plenty of people do), even a fairly bloody one, without splattering it all over your face and drooling it all down the front of your new frilly Renaissance shirt. I mean, I don't want sound like a mom, but come on. You think after thousands of years, a vampire would learn how to keep its food in its mouth.
Things like vampire manners are more interesting than this movie. I guess erotic thrillers just aren't my thing, even when they contain vampires and a guy faking Russell Crowe's voice. There are at least three titles in the ongoing saga of Embrace the Darkness, but I don't think I'll rush out to find the other two. I really only watched this one because it had Catalina in it, and she makes it worth it. That woman is just beyond description. And the rest of the tits and ass are all right as well. If you're just looking for a movie that will let you touch yourself in special ways and special places, then I suppose this is OK for that. It's saucy enough. As far as vampires go, you'd do better with Hammer films, Bela Lugosi, or that scene in Kungfu from Beyond the Grave where Dracula swoops down out of nowhere and flutters around like a moth, much to the annoyance of Billy Chong. And if you want better erotic vampires, well let's see. Jean Rollin is a lot more insane and interesting. You're better off with him, though some may argue that you're never well off with Jean Rollin. And to be fair, his vampires often have even sillier outfits than the vampires here.