Week 171: Café Flesh

I used to have this movie on a Beta tape, but someone took it while I lived on Lexington Street in the late 1980s and I never saw it again. I’ve looked for it at various times at video stores and on netflix (ha), but no one ever seems to carry it. This movie is the only porn movie I’ve ever seen that is also a great sci-fi movie, an even better art movie, and on top of that, it has a killer soundtrack.

I’ll give you the set up. Post nuclear holocaust. 99% of the population, the sex negatives, has been affected by radiation and can not have sex, interaction with others in any sexual way induces vomiting and pain. The 1% of the population not affected, the sex positives, are now by law required to perform in front of audiences. Cafe Flesh is one of the clubs where the positives perform on stage for the negatives in the audience (or watching at home). The stage performances put on by the positives are not your everyday porn material. Incredibly stylized, and with a superb Kraftwerk-type electronic soundtrack the performances come across as a perfect balance of performance art and porn. Titillating and self-referential all at the same time, this is the few movies I have seen that keeps genre conventions while simultaneously offering a critique of them. I’d say that is difficult to do in most genres, in porn even more so since it’s success is strongly based on not destroying the fantasy that has been set up.

The story revolves around a boy and a girl who are in love, but are both negatives so while they are attracted to each other, every time they try to act on the attraction, they go into sick convulsions and vomiting. So they hang out at Cafe Flesh to distract themselves from each other. But there is more, since this movie actually has character development and plot twists, and it’s truly just as interesting during the non-sex scenes. The acting is barely above porn standards, but what it lacks in acting it makes up in set designs, soundtrack and story.

That’s what I remember of this movie which I haven’t seen in 20 or more years, so it is very possible that I am all wrong about it and it’s just terrible.

Yesterday, though, looking at the “La Tetona de Fellini” blog, cinema’s basement according to it’s tag line, I found a review of Cafe Flesh. And I’d like to see this movie again. In part to see if it is as good as I remember it being, but mostly to listen to the Mitchell Froom soundtrack a little closer. And lo and behold, at the bottom of the blog review there is a link to download the movie. Unfortunately I don’t know how to use e-mule, but it made me realize that in or modern internet times, the movie can probably be downloaded somewhere. And sure enough… So sometime in the future I’ll let you all know if it is as good as i remember it or if it was just one long delusion based on illusions of some sort or other.

[Ha, looking at the credits on imdb, turns out Richard Beltzer makes an appearance as an audience member. It was also co-written by Jerry Stahl of Permanent Midnight fame.]

PS – Just got me a copy of Mitchell Froom’s The Key of Cool (the soundtrack LP to Cafe Flesh). And no, I did not buy it on ebay for $80 on vinyl.