“He smelled of blood, sweat and fear. He excited me.”
–Meredyth Herold, Singapore Sling
Occasionally, one comes across a truly original, cinematic one-off that has no genre antecedent. Such is the case with Nikolaidis Nikolaidis’ SINGAPORE SLING, his 1990 neo-noir nightmare, now released on DVD by Synapse Films. If one could wrap one’s mind around the idea of Pier Paolo Pasolini (SALO) directing Otto Preminger’s great 1944 film noir classic LAURA, (which this sends up!) with a generous assist by underground filmmaker Curt McDowell (THUNDERCRACK), with some cribbage from the Marquis de Sade, you may have an inkling of the cumulative yuck-factor of this high gloss sick-fest. Like the eponymous cocktail of the title, the movie’s stately concoction of horror, humor, and eye-dropping perv is an acquired taste. SINGAPORE SLING offers no comforting middle ground.
The catalogue of offenses almost seems like a dubious achievement: sadism, lesbian incest, erotic regurgitation, cannibalism, golden showers, bondage, fruit masturbation (I am not joking!), vagi-stabbing, necrophilia, torture, and murder. The film lets the viewer know what they are in for with its first shots of Mom (Michele Valley) and Daughter (Meredyth Herold), digging a grave in the rain, dressed in lingerie and garters. They have just knifed to death their chauffer: in an aside to the camera (both Mom and Daughter address the audience in turns), Daughter explains that, when he was alive “Father did the killing and mommy and I would plant decorative and aromatic flowers on the graves.” Singapore Sling, a gut-shot private eye, spies on the twisted duo, sure that his lost love Laura, a servant girl employed at their home, has, in fact, met with foul play.
It’s not long before Sling becomes the women’s prisoner, subjected to insane sex and torture games as the psychopaths (who possess his diary) attempt to ascertain the motives for his arrival. In between grilling the hapless gumshoe, Mother and Daughter vacillate between whether to bury him in the garden with their other victims, or keep him around, treating him to bouts of electro-shock sex, along with plentiful dollops of vomit and urine. The film also includes a squirm-inducing dinner scene that plays like a feminist take on THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.
There are, as in many noir movies, a number of double and triple-crosses and fiendish plots before the film winds down to its Freudian PSYCHO-inspired finale. In between, we are treated to ghastly set-pieces such as the decidedly daft and erotopathic daughter (played with a truly chilling combo of innocence and cruelty by Herold) simulating sex with her mummified father as she talks to the audience about her abuse at the hands of murderous dad, and the fiendish duo eviscerating a freshly murdered servant girl on to the kitchen table, set to Rachmaninoff!
If the plot sounds like nothing but unabashed shock, it is, if nothing else, leavened by an absurd off-the-rails sense of play. The director, in past interviews, claimed he was making a comedy, and that is borne out by the over-the-top thesping. Herold, with her pixie-cut locks and ingenuous, little girl delivery (interrupted by constant pre-orgasm hiccups), and Valley, with her Egyptian garb and her eccentric propensity to repeat the overly arch dialogue in French, certainly seem to be in on the joke. Thanassoulis as Sling, spends most of the film silent and semi-comatose. It’s difficult to appraise the performances within the context of the loony, good-natured barbarism (some of the movie reminds me of the ultra black humor and sexual taboos of Underground Comics from the ‘60s and ‘70s), but you have to love a film where the protagonist, after a bout of water-torture with one of his captors, utters one of the movie’s best lines: “I’m beginning to think there might be something wrong with me.”
If there is a fourth player in this three-hander, it has to be Aris Stavrou’s striking chromatic black and white photography, which, no matter what jaw-dropping depravity is being enacted, provides the evocative look of the noir thrillers of the ‘40s. The lensing during many of the exterior night shots in the villa’s garden remains particularly impressive.
Mention should be made of Nikolaidis’ use of sound. Aside from a couple of classical pieces of music, the audio track pretty much consists of the non-stop thunderstorm against which the action is set. This adroitly amplifies the general sense of mania and claustrophobia, given that the film’s action is, with the exception of a few exteriors in the villa’s garden, set within the confines of the mansion. A quibble: there is no doubt that the pace could have benefited from some tighter editing: some of the gross out sequences (such as Daughter’s masturbatory frolic with a kiwi) are just shy of being interminable. Even at a relatively slim 112 minutes, the movie occasionally feels a tad padded, and a little less self-indulgence might have helped the overall tone of nightmarish bravura.
With US shock-meisters like Eli Roth (HOSTEL PART II) threatening to become parodies of themselves, it’s a genuine pleasure to stumble across something so sensibility-shredding and outre as SINGAPORE SLING. As much of a pitch-black parody as it is, the film (thanks to Nikolaidis’ complete control of the artifice) offers a warped and loving tone poem of lyrical, night-world connections with its heady juxtapositions of chains, lace, rain, quivering palm fronds, blowing curtains, blood and night. Even at its most heinously atrocious, you come away feeling the love that the director has for a bygone genre, its nihilism and No-Exit narratives. Buried in the excess, the film does seem to be making some muddled point about Freedom, but disturbing-movie buffs will likely cheer the narrative’s nasty voyeurism and the director’s preoccupation with the deification of death.
It is an honest to God mystery why this film was not packaged as a Midnight Movie: SLING cries out for an art-house revival, and some of the images and mise-en-scene are incredible: Daughter lying at the feet of her mummified father in the family tomb, exulting in a gust of autumn leaves, and a masterful piece of cross-cutting between Singapore Sling digging his own grave, and a three-way bondage menage’ all set to a haunting choral requiem. One can only hope that Synapse picks up Nikolaidis’ follow up ‘noir/psychological horror homage, SEE YOU IN HELL MY DARLING (1999).
The Synapse Flms DVD boasts a superior anamorphic widescreen transfer, with English/Greek Language and occasional English subtitles. Extras are slim: a theatrical trailer and still gallery. One of the problems with the DVD include the previous and new subtitles for Sling (whose narration is in Greek), and the new subtitles occasionally crop the action in the lower frame.
Nikolaidis passed away September 5, 2007.
SINGAPORE SLING (1990). Written and directed by Nikos Nikolaidis. Cast: Meredyth Harold, Michele Valley, Panos, Thanassoulis.