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Category:    Home > Reviews > Drama > Erotic > WWII > Fascism > Power > Murder > Sex > Comedy > Italian > Documentary > Porn Chic > Politics > F > Black Angel (2002/aka Senso '45/Cult Epics DVD)/Cheeky (2000/aka Monella)/Frivolous Lola (1998/Arrow Region B Import Blu-rays)/Linda Lovelace's Loose Lips: The Last Interview (2014/MVD Visual DVD)/Suc

Black Angel (2002/aka Senso '45/Cult Epics DVD)/Cheeky (2000/aka Monella)/Frivolous Lola (1998/Arrow Region B Import Blu-rays)/Linda Lovelace's Loose Lips: The Last Interview (2014/MVD Visual DVD)/Successive Slidings Of Pleasure (1974/Kino/Redemption Blu-ray)



Picture: C+/B/B/C/B Sound: C+/B-/B-/C+/B- Extras: C+/C/C/D/C+ Films: B-/B-/B-/C+/C+



PLEASE NOTE: The Cheeky and Frivolous Lola Import Region B Blu-rays only work on machines that can handle that version of the format, with Cheeky now out of print and Frivolous Lola still available our friends at Arrow Video in the U.K. and can be ordered from the link below. You can read about the new Cult epics 4K edition here:


http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/16462/Backwoods+Double-Feature:+Common+Law+Wife



Here is a rare cycle of upscale erotic titles, starting with three by Tinto Brass, one on an icon of the XXX industry and an artsy take on the subject by a French New Wave writer/director...



Brass' Black Angel (2002/aka Senso '45) retells the Senso story in a very sexually overt WWII circumstance and does not compromise on the politics or ruthlessness of the Nazis (see our coverage of the 1954 Visconti Senso on Criterion Blu-ray elsewhere on this site) with older, married Livia (Anna Galiena) instantly attracted to outrageous, ambitious and powerful-at-a-young-age Nazi lieutenant (Gabriel Garko) along with being bored with her husband, who is still a good man with her best interests in mind.


Instead of just the erotic, Brass is more starkly honest about the politics of power, fascism and madness in the final months of the Axis Powers and the Nazis. Running a healthy 124 minutes, the film never bores, is as good as any release here and is worth going out of your way for. It also has a fine score by the legendary Ennio Morricone.


On Blu-ray from the U.K. and the second time we are covering them in import editions, Brass' Frivolous Lola (1998/aka Monella) and Cheeky (2000/aka Monella) are being issued in nicely upgraded and expanded editions by Arrow U.K. That makes them more involving. To repeat our synopses before, Monella (1998/aka Frivolous Lola) has Lola (Anna Ammirati) and her fiancee/baker Masetto (Mario Parodi) dealing with the oppression of 1950s Italy, but while he wants to wait until they get married to have sex, she is not waiting and finds other men, including her mother's new lover Andre (Patrick Mower of the British spy series Callan, among others.) While Transgressions (2000) is easily the best of the films here, with the very sexy Carla (Yuliya Mayarchuk) trying to find an apartment in London for her boyfriend, but finding all kinds of other men who are more interested in her, plus a few women. Brass manages to bring his 1970s style into the modern time without loosing any of its classical sense or look, which is not easy to do: he throws away his usual pretenses.


All three Brass films show us he is a better director than Caligula (a compromised work, reviewed on Blu-ray elsewhere on this site) hardly epitomizes what he is capable of and Angel is as good a film as any I have seen of his to date. It is also nice to see a filmmaker who takes the erotic seriously at a time when it has become too much a joke these days. I recommend all three.


All three offer Original Theatrical Trailers, new English subtitles for the Italian dialogue and the Blu-rays add booklets with essays & illustrations, while Angel adds a promo, Making Of featurette, Photo Video Gallery and separate section for the entire Original Soundtrack.



More of a compilation release than a comprehensive work, Linda Lovelace's Loose Lips: The Last Interview (2014) takes footage from what was the XXX star's last interview and cuts in all kinds of other footage to talk about the lady and her legacy. The core interview was conducted by Legs McNeil, but if the dramatic Lovelace film (reviewed elsewhere on this site) had a lack of exposition, this gets into tacky territory when some of the interviewees start calling Lovelace a liar and criticize her life; a cheap thing to do since she is no longer with us to defend herself. The result is exploitive, slanted and a little misogynistic, but there is enough here to justify seeing this one once.


There are no extras either (no surprise), but you can see more about Linda in action in a censored version of Deep Throat and the amusing Linda Lovelace For President, go to this link:


http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/7521/Deep+Throat+(1972/Umbrella+Entertainment/PAL



Finally we have Alain Robbe-Grillet's Successive Slidings Of Pleasure (1974) with Jean-Louis Trintignant, Isabelle Huppert and Michel Lonsdale in a mystery of sorts about a young woman (Anicee Alvina) who may or may not have stabbed her roommate Olga Georges-Picot) to death, but instead of a mystery film, we get surreal, visually ultra-constructed scenes that examine the character of the people involved as well as their sexual desires all the way to the plastique side of fetishes. If this were any colder, this would be totally unerotic, but Robbe-Grillet delivers an ambitious-but-mixed-bag of ideas, images and unfortunately, one too many obvious and predictable moments and even twists. Till, this is the film he was making and it succeeds unto itself, if not overall. It is at least interesting enough (especially with some of its cast) that it too is worth a look.


Extras include trailers for other Robbe-Grillet films, a promo for the Blu-rays our & on the way and a 33 minutes on-camera interview with Robbe-Grillet on this film and more.



The three 1080p digital High Definition Blu-rays here look good for their age including the 1.78 X 1 Brass titles outperforming the import PAL DVD versions of their respective films and the 1.66 X 1 color image on Pleasure is the oldest of the three and Kino has done a fine job with a transfer from the original 35mm camera elements, so this is good news all around here. The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on Angel also comes from a fine print and made me wish for a Blu-ray version, but this very well-shot film could not look better in the format. Unfortunately, the same presentation on Linda is a mix of rough old film and old video footage with newer footage having more motion blur, staircasing, aliasing and other flaws that hold back performance overall.


As for sound, all three Blu-rays offer lossless PCM 2.0 sound in their native languages (2.0 Italian Stereo for the Brass films, 2.0 mono for Pleasure) and pretty much sound as good as they ever are going to. Angel has lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 Stereo options with the 5.1 slightly edging out the other, but would likely shine further in a lossless presentation. Linda is about its equal with lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 sound that is stereo at best.



The Cheeky Blu-ray is out of print in this edition, but you can order the Frivolous Lola Import Region B Blu-ray while copies remain, among other great exclusives from Arrow U.K. while supplies last at this link:


http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/



- Nicholas Sheffo


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