QT QUATTRO - Night 4 - SEX NITE - SUCCUBUS, SEX ON THE RUN and Father Geek's Brilliant Short Film

SEX NIGHT at the 4th Annual Quentin Tarantino Film Festival.... night four.... depravity begins to set in... The various attendees begin getting a bit... familiar. We begin to notice a certain... pheramonal shift... To sate these desires... Quentin has decided to bring forth... SEX NIGHT.

The first thing you would notice is that everyone was wearing rubber pants and nipple clamps... Except Quint, who had leather chaps and a jock strap. Moriarty came with all his regular Cronenberg quack medical devices. And me? I arrived in a diaper with an enlarged cherry flavored pacifier.

I was rather disappointed when Quentin took the stage and had on just regular khaki shorts and a t-shirt... nothing quite as ribald as Dorothy Parker’s bullet bra and corset... damn those silk seamed stockings of hers rule.

Everyone brought throw pillows and the Alamo’s contribution was free de-lousing... that powder burns a little... I felt all tingly.

Anyway... Quentin took the stage under the auspices of being the rod raising legend... and the shrieks of girls at night screaming... ‘take it off’. Then Quentin thanked the corporate sponsors for “allowing us to have sex here tonight.”

You could see Mouth eyeing Quint who was eyeing some popcorn... and Annette looked at the popcorn, hoping it had... extra butter... and Johnny Wad was reading his bible.... (select MAD magazine/Little Annie Fanny moments ensue)

Quentin relates a lobby tale about how a person came up and asked... “What are we supposed to gain from these films tonight?” To which Quentin said, “Well... They’re sexy.” And the person responded to Quentin with, “Well, there has to be more to them than that?” and Quentin retorted with... “Let’s not start getting greedy here. On Sex Night Sex is enough... If you get scintillating conversation... Great... but on Sex Night Sex is enough. And you willll be getting SEX tonight!”

He then went on to talk about Jesus Franco (who I believe has more film credit pseudonyms than anyone in history). To Quentin... he feels that the way everyone likes to think of Ken Russell... Jesus Franco really is. Now I believe I’ve only seen one Franco film before and that is the fantastic VAMPYROS LESBOS.

Now... I believe there was a slight miscalculation in Quentin’s introduction to SUCCUBUS... He got the audience in a... ready for kinky... sex sex sex sort of mood. I believe the audience was expecting something a bit harder than they got... much like the pre-hype did to EYES WIDE SHUT... if the media had been properly handled on EYES WIDE SHUT... the audiences would not have gone in expecting hot and heavy Tom and Nicole sex... and what needed to be stressed was that SUCCUBUS was an erotic experimental art film.

The film really isn’t about characters or storylines... it’s about impressionistic dreaming and eroticism. I really dug the film. Now I know... some of you will bring up THE CELL... others will bring up SUSPIRIA... Well, THE CELL by trying to marry a traditional reality based detective crime thriller with the surreal nightmaristic world... well for me it was OIL and WATER... they didn’t mix well for Me. In SUSPIRIA... It is an excellent vision of a nightmare world... just not my nightmare world.... it didn’t capture me.

This movie did. WHy?

First off... I love the impressionistic word association verbal foreplay moments. There were these scenes where two characters are talking... but instead of sentences... instead of paragraphs... It’s quid pro quo... statement of a word... your one word reaction to that word. Example: HITCHCOCK.... eye.... BUNUEL... death... etc...

I felt this was an ingenious way of boiling down the verbal flirtations of men and women. Many of those first meeting conversations are intellectual probings... sharing and seeing the reactions to common knowledge. In 2 minutes of this, you have seen the entire base structure for a 2 hour movie like BEFORE SUNRISE... none of the pretty flowery pretenses... just the subjects and their instant reactions. Wonderful.

The sexual moments of the film are brief and not particularly.. get your rocks off hot... what they are though is provoking.

The lesbian scene with the woman and her mannequin was surreal and exquisite. The LSD orgy shows exactly how weird and off this universe can be... the puppet bulldog barking... an image I will not soon shake.

The film is bizarre... definitely not for all tastes... There were those that I talked to that absolutely hated the film... others that were bored... As a matter of fact, the only person that I talked to that fully appreciated the film like I did was Dorothy Parker... who must now marry me. hehehe

It should also be noted that when SUCCUBUS showed at CANNES in 1969... Fritz Lang saw the film and really really liked it.

Alright... now before SUCCUBUS there were some trailers that were very cool...like THEY CALLED HER ONE EYE... a Dutch sex revenge style film that I really really want to see... the trailer has an eye patch wearing shotgun wielding black leather wearing badass.... Very cool trailer.

HOWEVER... Between SUCCUBUS and SEX ON THE RUN... The trailers were... a bit harder.

The first trailer was for BEYOND THE GREEN DOOR... First off, I was stunned to actually be seeing this trailer... I mean... if you know anything about the history of Porn, this film... alongside DEEP THROAT.... was hugely acclaimed at the time... Playing at museums, universities... everywhere. The film stunned people. And it wasn’t just fucking and sucking... I mean... it had some weird ass Fellini-esque moments going on in it... Very strange.

There were other trailers... I really can’t say I remember. However, the grand highpoint of the entire night was the inclusion of FATHER GEEK’s Filmic Masterpiece.

I’m hoping on presenting the audio of the audience’s reaction to this 16 mm 2 minute film that Father Geek created 6 months before I was born as a young independent filmmaker in Austin, Texas. The audience set in silent stoic anticipation.... The film began.... people watched in silence... and like Scorsese’s THE BIG SHAVE... there comes a moment that can never be forgotten. Something... in all likelihood.. You’ve never seen before.

When the moment came... The audience erupted in a cavalcade of applause... screams of “MAESTRO!!!” and “BRILLIANT!!!” and “SPEECH SPEECH SPEECH” For an almost equal length to his masterpiece the audience applauded and buzzed... People amazed by the imagery now burned for all time into their consciousness.

So... all you people out there, bow down and pay respect to Father Geek... After the night was done... Quentin even said that he does not believe he’ll ever be able to shake that imagery. It can not be described... it, like all great provoking works of art, must be seen to be fully appreciated.

Now... the next thing that came back was SEX ON THE RUN... Now Quentin hadn’t seen the film until this very year... but he remembers first hearing about it at the time in 1976 because... the very first issue of PLAYBOY that ever came to him at his house.. the first subscription issue... had a big spread on all the girls that were in the film. And a boy does not forget his first Playboy.

The film stars Tony Curtis... and because of that... I was expecting the tamest most demure of sex comedy romps...

That being said... Let it be known throughout the land that there exists a film called SEX ON THE RUN which contains some of the all time greatest T&A&B (for those unfamiliar with TAB... it means Tits and Ass and Bush)

Before the film, Quentin went on and on about how this had to be a film that Tony Curtis adored deeply. I thought... ah, yeah, lots of scantily clad Euro-Babes... NO... NO NO NO NO...

Dudes... Tony Curtis is the MAN! This film cements him as being waaaay cooler than Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and that whole group. Tony Curtis made this softcore pretty damn funny flick at a low ebb of his career... but folks... if this be the low ebb... then damn damn damn, let’s all have low ebb career moments.

The girls in this film are the absolute finest Euro Babes of the seventies. Tony Curtis plays two roles... Casanova and this convicted gambler cheat... Hijinks ensue... There are issues of impotency, 3 nuns exploring one another, Strip Craps... all sorts of fun. And literally, Tony Curtis has never ever looked happier or more pleased on screen. Tony... you is da man!

Oh.. It should also be noted that there is an alternative title for the film called, “SOME LIKE IT COOL.”

Sex night ended and we all fell into the lobby where some of us hung around for about an hour talking about all manners of goofiness. Father Geek’s opus spawned all sorts of questions as young filmmaker types wanted to know how they too could accomplish this startling effect on screen... Quentin was commenting upon the brilliant name of the club in Father Geek’s film... and how he’d love to use that same last 10 seconds in one of his films some day... Yup folks.. Ol Father Geek... He be a-mazing.

Then we moved on to my Fortune Cookie Paranoia Conversation. Which I will not repeat here... it’s something I have to verbalize... And then... at about 4a.m. we all ran from the theater to escape into our own dreamlands....