2000: The Year in Bedlam
The following marks the inaugural entry in a new and ambitious project: an overview of my favorite films from each year, starting with 2000 and working my way backward
CITY OF THE BROKEN DOLLS
A strange collection of grainy black and white photos, mostly of injured Japanese women
RAIN
An unabashed throwback to the type of high-class, speculatively-charged porn lit that flourished in the late 1960s and early 70s
THE TIGHTER IT GETS
Robert Moore was a prolific contributor to the famed smut book outfit Olympia Press and its offshoot Ophelia, under whose imprint the present book appeared
THE MARK
For sleaze fans this is a title of special interest, a hilariously overwrought Greek sexploitater from 1977
IT DOESN’T SUCK: SHOWGIRLS
Here we have a wholehearted defense of SHOWGIRLS, director Paul Verhoeven’s notorious 1995 hymn to stripper life
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
One of the freakier seventies porno features, a particularly odd and striking piece of cinematic dementia.
Looking Back on Some Bad Influences
Here you’ll find a slew of wild, goofy, unpredictable and absolutely first rate reading.
THE MARTYR
THE MARTYR is easily one of the most wrenching and upsetting novels of any sort to emerge from a decade that saw more than its share of disturbing fiction.
MADAM SEX THIEF
Reading this delirious relic from the glory days of erotic fiction, it occurred to me that there exist very few fictional treatments of the horrors of castration. The only serious contenders I can think of are Jim Thompson’s THE NOTHING MAN and EAT THEM ALIVE by Pierce Nace, and MADAM SEX THIEF outdoes both in grossness and outrage.