Everything about 1989’s Dr. Caligari just screams L.A. in the 80’s. Much in it triggered various connotations in my mind of things I associate with that region in that era. Just a few of them are performance art, interpretive dance, spoken-word albums, underground comics, zines and the sets of Beetlejuice and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.
Oh, and porn. This was directed by Stephen Sayadian, co-writing with Jerry Stahl. These two previously gave the world Nightdreams and Café Flesh, two films of such an uneasy blend of kitch art and hardcore pornography as to likely make them too offbeat to beat-off to.
Caligari doesn’t have any hardcore elements, but it still has ample nudity, almost all of which is courtesy of our star, Laura Albert. It is no surprise her filmography is largely such roles as “Go-Go Dancer” (in an episode of Tales from the Crypt), “Blonde Stripper” (Toolbox Murders) and “Strip Joint Girl” (Road House). She definitely has the physique for such roles, but there’s a hint in this film of what she might have been capable of if given a part with more range. The problem with judging her performance here is it is so over-the-top.
Then again, everything and every performance here is so deliberately cartoonish that it is nigh impossible to distinguish between good and bad. Who knew camp could be the great equivocator?
I’m pretty sure Madeleine Reynal would be bad regardless of the dialogue or plot. Her mad scientist dominatrix bit grew tiring very quickly. The thickness of her European accent and the halting and awkward delivery of her lines suggests a female doppelganger of Udo Kier.
She’s the head of the mental hospital where Albert is committed by a husband (Gene Zerna) who is intimidated by the power of her libido. The institute is the Caligari Insane Asylum, which gets referred to multiple times as “The C.I.A.”, to ensure something that wasn’t funny the first time becomes deeply irritating through repetition.
Fellow inmates include John Durbin a as cannibal serial killer prone to giving long monologues in rapid-fire outpourings of syllables, as he details his curious appetites in the manner of an especially bad poetry slam open-mic. Consider: “Nothing as American as a soft supple American girl patty.”
Then there’s Barry Phillips as Cesare, a name which is a pointless callback to the 1920 film to which this movie cheekily posits itself as its sequel. Phillips has a few quirky pieces that brought to my mind the kind of performance art one might catch on Austin City Limits back in the day.
But the performer who seemed to be the most competent actor, almost despite the material, is Jennifer Balgobin. She has had an interesting career. I best remember her as the one of the punks in the group of Emilio Estevez’s former friends in Repo Man. She has carved out a weird niche for herself in cinema, having also been in Weird Science, Cherry 2000 and Contact.
And we should not forget Tequila Mockingbird’s performance as Door Tongue. No part of that previous sentence was my own invention. In one of the few genuinely surprising bits in the film, Albert fellates the exceptionally thick tongue that emerges from a door.
That moment is indicative of the type of adult fare here. It is far closer to the body horror of Cronenberg’s grindhouse prime than anything conventionally titillating. Another such moment is when her right arm becomes an exceptionally long and thick appendage that is suggestive of a phallus, and it is strongly implied she proceeds to sodomize Zerna with it. One of the few clever and even remotely stimulating moments occurs early in the film, when she imagines she is being orally serviced by a close up of the mouth of her alter ego as it appears on a grainy television. This is filmed from a perspective where the TV screen is between her legs as she thrusts her pelvis towards the screen. It is possibly the only moment in which film succeeds, and then it is all downhill from there.
As one can doubtlessly tell by now, I was not won over by this movie. And yet, I appreciate how it has a particularly unique gestalt, as a result of its commitment to certain design aesthetics and camp values. To me, it felt like a ramshackle assemblage of other unrelated comic sketches and performance art pieces, but it does manage to hang that material together on the frame of the happenings at a mental institution where the doctor in charge is more insane than her patients.
With even that said, I found Dr. Caligari to be too much weirdness for its own sake and, given the art I was familiar with at the time, I didn’t even find it that weird. If there is one curious aspect of it that lingers after the end credits roll, it is that it occupies an uncomfortable space between art film and porn, with a perpetual obsession with all things sex, yet having extremely little in it that is sexy. One could approximate the experience of the film by reading bad, sex-obsessed poetry on a small club stage while standing before a doorway that doesn’t have any right angles. There might not be any music in the film by Oingo Boingo (curiously, it is from future Los Lobos producer Mitchell Froom), but feel free to play that alongside your performance, as something seems to be appropriate about that. At least their own art-house endeavor, Forbidden Zone, was genuinely freaky.
Dir: Stephen Sayadian
Starring Lara Albert, Madeleine Reynal
Watched on Shudder