Entry 69: Cafe Flesh (1982)

Cafe Flesh (1982)

Dir: Rinse Dream (Stephen Sayadian)

"The creators of Nightdreams present a film so hot, it has no place in a world with a future."

Well folks, we've arrived at entry 69...I'm sure you're expecting me to highlight some sort of gonad-pumping, sweat-licking, multiple-orgasm receiving fuck flick, and...Well, you're half right.  Journey with me now into the post-apocalyptic future, where we'll get a front-row seat at Cafe Flesh.  

In post-nuke America, 99% of human society have become "sex negatives," poor souls who are reduced to violent retching when attempting physical contact.  The remaining 1% are "sex positives," forced to copulate on-stage in clubs to feed the desires of the leering negatives.  The most popular and exclusive of these clubs is Cafe Flesh, where wiseass M.C. Max Melodramatic (Andy Nichols from Nightdreams, who reminds me a little of David Johansen and is GREAT here) holds sway over the crowd, taunting their radiation-born sexual disability while presenting a series of bizarre, cabaret-style fuck tableaus.  After a performance in which a housewife is 69ed and fucked by a milkman dressed like a rat while three grown, bearded men (one of whom is in blackface) dressed as babies in high chairs look on while pretending to cry, we are introduced to Cafe Flesh regulars Nick and Lana (Pia Snow, who gave up on adult films a few years after this and became "scream queen" Michelle Bauer), a "negative" couple.  Angsty, pissed-off Nicks complains bitterly about his lot and fantasizes about the days when he and Lana were able to make the beast with two backs, while Lana accepts things as they are and enjoys the milieu of Cafe Flesh.  The two are introduced to Angel (porno actress Marie Sharp), a sexy negative from Wyoming on her first trip to the big city.  Lana gets all hot and bothered when she hears that legendary positive Johnny Rico (Kevin James, the porn star, not the blithering idiot from the Paul Blart movies, here playing a character with a name stolen from Heinlein's Starship Troopers) is coming to perform at Cafe Flesh, but Nick just sees it as another frustration.  After Max (dressed in drag as Little Bo Peep) taunts Angel from the stage ("Here's something to make Uncle Foamy stand up and tap dance!  What's your name, sugar puss?"), we're treated to a boardroom-inspired scene in which a guy in a suit with a giant pencil for a head fucks the shit out of a secretary on a desk while a naked, spectacled clerk with enormous breasts drones "Do you want me to type a memo?" over and over again.  Nick gets jealous when club owner Moms (Tantala Ray, from the John Holmes flick Suburban Satanist) offers Lana a job coordinating the stage routines and working with the positives.  Feeling guilty, Lana attempts to have sex with him, but he gets violently ill.  During a government raid, virginal Angel is revealed to be a positive and dragged off to perform, and bored, gallant Nick decides to rescue her.  The next day...HOLY GODDAMN SHIT!  TVs Richard Belzer (every fucking Law & Order series ever) shows up as a fucking jive-talking ("I'm not his agent, bitch; goddamn!  My eyeballs is scorched!") club patron...I wonder if he still keeps this on his resume?  I'm pretty sure Ice-T's seen this movie; I wonder if they ever talk about it?  Anyway, Nick's rescue attempt fails, and Angel shows up again at Cafe Flesh as a performer, slid back and forth on a table as if in a cheese slicer between two guys dressed in black and white with black nail polish, while disembodied hands snap in time with the music.  Angel brags to Nick and the immensely turned-on Lana about her new lifestyle, and Lana goes into "the back room" to talk to Moms.  At this point, Johnny Rico shows up (looking A LOT like Ric Ocasek in a bright blue suit).  After Johnny does some on-stage pussy eating and salad tossing, Lana, egged on by Max, reveals herself to be a positive and joins Johnny onstage.  She has a bed-shaking girl-on-girl encounter with Angel, then Angel is removed from the stage and Johnny has his way with her.  As Johnny cums on Lana's ass, Nick looks on in despair while Max laughs...

Cafe Flesh is the ultimate anti-porn porno movie.  After the success of Nightdreams (which, despite it's often bizarre imagery, still set out to titillate), director Sayadian and writer Jerry Stahl (Twin Peaks, Bad Boys 2, here credited as Herbert W. Day), crafted a film that intentionally called out and alienated it's dolphin-flogging porno-theatre target audience.  The sex scenes are uncharacteristically short and ugly for a porno flick, and they're often intercut with jarring shots of the leering, emaciated faces of the negatives (they look like extras from a Cure video, and their often-blank expressions would make this a great double-bill with Gimme Shelter), a thinly-veiled surrogate for the XXX cinema audience.  Obviously, inner-reflectivity wasn't what the dolphin-floggers were looking for, and this quickly tanked in adult theatres, but was resurrected as a midnight hit in arthouse theatres and found an even wider audience when it was edited down to an "R" and sold to HBO during it's early days.  The soundtrack by Mitchell Froom (who would go on to write the fucking fantastic Crowded House song "Something So Strong" with Neil Finn) is goddamn fantastic, as well.  A classic not only of porn, but of post-nuke cinema, as well; worth seeking out!