When Tony becomes tired of Hillary and impatient with her delay in releasing his album, he tries to dump her. But Hillary will not be thrown aside like he has done with other women (including his pregnant girlfriend) and threatens to implicate him in her murder of her husband. When she takes off for a trip, Tony beds and marries Hillary’s daughter, partially out of attraction and partially out of revenge, it is implied. When Hillary returns she still will not release him, telling him that they can have a mother-daughter menage. When he refuses, she wrestles him to the ground and bloodies him. In desperation, he pushes her over the fence and into the sea below.
In the final scene, Tony awakens on the beach, revealing the dream that is the framing device for the film. Suddenly he hears the voice of Hillary introducing herself as she had in his dream, turning the dream into a possible premonition.
Andrea (Dyanne Thorne) accuses the dumb-struckTony (Peter Carpenter) of interloping on her personal beach in Point of Terror.
Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne) continues her erotic reign of terror in Ilsa, the Wicked Warden.
In Blood Sabbath (1972), directed by one of the few female directors of the period, Brianne Murphy, Thorne plays an evil queen of the witches, Alotta. She disapproves of the relationship between one of her nymphs—Yyalah (Susan Damante)—and a Vietnam vet—David (Tony Geary)—who suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome. In order to be with Yyalah, he begs Alotta to take his soul. Alotta agrees, but has a hidden agenda which involves his damnation and possession by her. Thorne, a Las Vegas showgirl, demonstrates her sensual dancing techniques in a series of bloody rituals that includes a semi-naked dance before the decapitated head of a priest.
Thorne is now chiefly remembered in cult circles for the four films she made as Ilsa, the sadistic and sexually voracious warden. In the first movie, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, the camera fades in on a sex scene between Ilsa and a prisoner. The camera pans over her bedroom as she moans in pleasure. From then on, the film becomes an uncompromising journey into scenes displaying her brutality as the commandant of a Nazi prison camp, subjecting prisoners to shocking medical experiments, using them as tools for her sadistic pleasure and sexual passions. No man seems to satisfy her rapacious lust adequately.
The four films of the Ilsa collection—Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975); Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976); Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia (1977); and Ilsa, the Wicked Warden (1977)—have probably inspired more controversy than any other exploitation films of that period as they include such taboo subjects as golden showers and castration. What makes matters worse for most critics is that through all these films Ilsa is never given any acceptable psychological motive for her sadistic behavior. We are not aware of anything that has been done to her that would allow her the excuse of seeking revenge, which is so often the key factor in excusing brutal female violence in films. Usually if a woman castrates a man, it is because the man is a rapist or has committed some act of assault. However, Ilsa, in her supremely transgressive manner, castrates out of pure sadistic pleasure or out of anger that the man has failed to fulfill her properly. She is aroused by the power of the castration, balancing out her earlier moments of vulnerability when she was a slave to her pleasure in being penetrated.
However, at the end of each of the Isla films she is punished harshly for her transgressions and for breaking with Judeo-Christian values. She is even literally ripped to pieces by the prisoners at the end of Ilsa, the Wicked Warden. So despite the almost nonstop display of violence, lust, and gore, order is restored when Ilsa is depowered and the male heroes prevail.
The primary attribute of these films, which suffer from cheap effects and amateurish acting, is the presence of Dyanne Thorne. The part was originally offered to another actress, but she refused the part when she realized she would have to perform a urination scene. Whereas her costars might seem unsure in their performances, Thorne’s amazing physical presence, as well as her commanding voice, are absolutely convincing.
Today Dyanne Thorne is a minister in Las Vegas, specializing in outdoor quickie weddings.
Sybil Danning
—The Amazon Marches On
Austrian actress Sybil Danning is one more Nordic/Teutonic Amazon in a line of femmes fatales stretching back to Brigitte Helm. Like Pam Grier and Dyanne Thorne, Danning hit her stride in the exploitation films of the 1970s and 1980s. Although many of her roles are as a warrior woman, there are a number which showcase her inner femme fatale. Her first role in that vein was Cat in the Cage (1978).
Much repeated pose for Sybil Danning, emphasizing guns and sex.
Stirba is reborn after absorbing the energy of a young, beautiful victim, in Howling II.
Diane (Sybil Danning) in lingerie clouds the judgment of the protagonist in They’re Playing with Fire.
In Cat in the Cage (the film is based loosely on Poe’s story “The Black Cat”), Danning as Susan is first viewed by the audience as she floats to shore aboard a luxury yacht with strains of Middle Eastern music filling the soundtrack, evoking exotic visions of sirens. Surrounded by her sickly husband—Rachid (Frank DeKova)—and his crew, the shots ref erence Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) on her own ailing husband’s yacht in The Lady from Shanghai. Her cool demeanor and sly sensuality does not, however, go unobserved, particularly by her chauffeur and, we later learn, lover Ralph (Mel Novak).
Susan’s homecoming is none too pleasant. The possessed cat Samson continues to attack her and follow her throughout the house; her vengeful stepson Bruce (Behrouz Vossoughi) has returned from the mental hospital; and her servant Ezil (Ursaline Bryant) looks on her with suspicion and distaste. But Susan is intent on ruling the household again, as she did after she caused the death of Rachid’s first wife. She demands that the cat be destroyed, puts both Bruce and Ezil in their place with verbal lashings, and sets about to secure her future by eliminating Rachid with the help of her lover.
Between bouts of sadomasochistic sex with her chauffeur and encounters with the demonic cat, Susan forms a plan. Harvey takes Rachid fishing and drowns him, later sinking the boat. When he is found days later, he tells the story of a shipwreck. Although the police are suspicious, there is no evidence to arrest the pair. However, strange occurrences begin to spook Susan, including the murder of Harvey. In order to form an alliance with Bruce, who she thinks might be behind the events, she tries to seduce her stepson but he rejects her none too politely. Susan then is murdered by a masked intruder, which we later discover is the mentally disturbed second son of Rachid.
The seduction by femme fatale Diane (Sybil Danning) of her student Jay (Eric Brown) is overwhelmingly hot in They’re Playing with Fire.
In They’re Playing with Fire (1984), Danning is Diane Stevens, an English professor at a small Los Angeles college. The film opens on a lesson she is teaching on, appropriately enough, Shakespeare’s Macbeth. When she begins to discuss the Bard’s supreme femme fatale, Lady Macbeth, and how she manipulated her husband to kill the king so she might be queen, the eyes of the protagonist—Jay (Eric Brown)—light up as he stares in admiration at his future Lady Macbeth. Seeing his admiration, Diane asks him to help her out by varnishing her boat at the marina. Even though he knows she is married to the psych professor, Michael (Andrew Prine), he cannot deny her.
At the boat Diane seduces Jay and then later gets him to agree to participate in a scheme to frighten her rich in-laws out of their home and into an institution. Her husband Michael is also involved in the scheme, although he does not know how deeply Diane is involved with Jay. Like so many husbands and lovers of femmes fatales, Michael can no longer satisfy his sexually voracious wife, evidenced in a scene where he begins to make love and then stops apologetically, and so she searches out lovers with youthful stamina and unquestioning loyalty like Jay.
Stirba (Sybil Danning) watches with lust in her eyes as her minions perform perverse acts of sex for her entertainment in Howling II.
The scheme to frighten the in-laws backfires as Jay is chased away
and the two women murdered by an unknown assailant. The suspicion of course falls on Diane, being the femme fatale of the piece. Jay cannot accept her as the murderer and so looks for evidence to incriminate Michael. Unable to exonerate her, he tries to cut off his relationship with Diane but she easily lures him back with a flash of flesh and lingerie. As it turns out, Diane is not the guilty party but it is Michael’s deranged brother. In the final scene of the movie, Diane, now the recipient of Michael’s fortune, drives up to the gas station Jay works at in her red sports car and scoops him up, squealing off to another adventure.
In Howling II (1985), Danning plays Stirba, queen of the werewolves. She is a polymorphously perverse sorceress who metaphysically controls a worldwide clan of werewolves from her lair in Transylvania. The filmmaker use the iconography of the fetish world to present the decadence and perversion of the werewolves and their queen. The techno-punk musical ambiance surrounding the orgies of the werewolves, even accompanied by a club band; the leather costumes of the participants; the incorporation of sadomasochism and bestiality into their sex (they turn into werewolves when copulating); and the use of religious and ritualistic decor all contribute to an aura of perversity and excess.
Sybil Danning with gun in publicity still for They’re Playing with Fire. Yes, size does matter.
Sybil Danning still in fine form at age sixty, with lackey (Bill Moseley) in tow, as the manipulative Nazi camp commander in the mock trailer homage to Dyanne Thorne’s Ilsa films—“Werewolf Women of the SS.”
To further exacerbate this ethos of perversity, Stirba seeks to unite sexually and spiritually with her brother Stefan (Christopher Lee), who has sworn to destroy his sister, who he refers to in the prologue as the Biblical “Whore of Babylon.” His confrontation with her in the climax is filled with ambiguity. She uses her beauty and power to draw him to her, telling him that he could never resist her (implying an earlier incestuous relationship). As they draw closer, he thrusts the silver stake into her; but as they spin about in a light show of energy, her voice is heard saying that finally they are together forever.
In 1989 Danning was cast in the role of writer Pamela Dare in the TV series Superboy. Her alter ego is as a succubus who sucks the life from her victims. She kidnaps Superboy’s love Lana Lang in order to lure Superboy into her clutches.
Recently, director/writer/musician Rob Zombie cast Danning, at the age of sixty, as a cruel and sexually rapacious Nazi camp commander (in a homage to the Ilsa films) in the mock trailer (“Werewolf Women of the SS”) he created for the Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriquez sleaze-fest Grindhouse (2007).
Ornella Muti
—Sloe-Eyed Femme
Italian actress Ornella Muti appeared in her first femme fatale role at the age of fourteen, starring in the political film The Most Beautiful Wife (1970). Based on a true story, Muti plays the teenage Francesca whose self possession and exotic bedroom eyes drives the local Mafia honcho to desperation. She teases him and makes demands on his love, wanting from him independence and true respect. The frantic Mafioso in response kidnaps and rapes her in order to shame her family, thereby forcing her into marriage. His plan backfires when Francesca, emboldened by the experience, defies the Mafia by filing charges against the man.
Always ready to break taboos, director Marco Ferreri chose Muti for the key role in his much-banned film The Last Woman (1976). Muti plays the sexually liberated youth Valerie who becomes involved in a freewheeling sexual liaison with macho single father Gerard (Gerard Depardieu). Their lovemaking is intense and varied, leaving both satisfied. But as time progresses, Valerie becomes weary of Gerard’s male insecurities and penis-oriented braggadocio. She begins instead to bond with his baby boy, taking him to bed and allowing him to explore her body. She even stops making love to Gerard, who responds by becoming depressed and angry. In a climax which caused the film much trouble with official censors, Gerard takes a knife and castrates himself, realizing as a man he is no longer of use in this new female-ruled nuclear family.
Glamour photo of Ornella Muti from the 1980s.
Ornella Muti as the spoiled Princess Aura, with comic-book background, from Flash Gordon.
In 1980 Muti played the petulant and sexually voracious Princess Aura in the comic book-style international production of Flash Gordon. The filmmakers dress Muti in various revealing costumes—red spandex, a harem dress, futuristic lingerie—and linger on close-ups of her long black hair and slanted blue-green eyes. Aura expects the various men in her life to accept her sexual whims. She keeps the upright Flash (Sam Jones) a sex prisoner while romancing her jealous lover Prince Barin (Timothy Dalton), who she informs of her sexual conquests. Even when she is whipped, while dressed in red spandex, on orders from her evil father Emperor Ming (Max von Sydow), she will not give up her well-built boy toy Flash.
Odette (Ornella Muti), both coy and manipulative. who always gets what she wants, from Swann in Love.
In 1981 Muti reunited with director Ferreri for another transgressive movie: Tales of Ordinary Madness. Based on stories and poems by Los Angeles poet Charles Bukowski, Muti plays Cass, a self-destructive prostitute who picks up the alcoholic writer Charles (Ben Gazzara) and makes him her property physically and emotionally. Charles is intrigued when they first meet in a bar and Cass puts a large safety pin through her cheeks. He then takes her home where the next morning Cass leans on the sill and presents her rear for Charles to worship. In their next encounter, she appears dressed in a designer gown (implying that she is a high-class call girl) and calls him her “slave,” ordering him in front of his friend to lie on the floor and take off his pants. Later in the film, she even marks his forehead with her makeup, telling him that he belongs to her. As he falls deeper into love, he tells the viewer, “I was in over my head.”
But Cass’s self-destructive tendencies resurface with a vengeance. Charles tries to save her by taking her to a motel on the beach and making love to her repeatedly on the sand as the tide goes in and out. But she leaves him again. When he returns home she is in his bed, bleeding. She tells him she has closed “it” forever. He examines her body and finds she has used the safety pin on her labia. He removes it and then breaks down emotionally. Cass commits suicide by slashing her throat, thereby freeing the drunken writer.
The Girl from Trieste (1982) bears a strong resemblance to Tales. It also stars Muti and Gazzara in a very similar relationship. This time Gazzara is an artist, Dino, who falls for his muse Nicole (Muti) when he sees her being rescued from the ocean. He loans her his blanket; and when she returns it, leaving herself nude, they make love.
Like the character of Cass, Nicole has her own demons or as the bartender on the beach tells Dino more directly, “She’s trouble.” For Nicole is a pathological liar and a schizophrenic. Nevertheless, Dino falls deeper into her web of sensuality and emotional complexity. He photographs her while she sleeps nude. He draws her continually—making her the model for his character “Beauty.”
While she seems to share his feelings of love, she also has a need to be lusted over and loved by numerous men in order to assuage the sense of loneliness she feels. In a posh restaurant with Dino, she slowly removes her black stockings and shoes to the outrage of the other patrons. After finding Dino with his ex-girlfriend, she removes her panties and sits in a café with her crotch exposed—star—ing angrily out into the distance as men circle her lustfully. Eventually, Dino finds that Nicole has been intermittently institutionalized. His answer is to run away to Italy, unable to confront her.
But when Dino returns he finds himself drawn back to her. He decides to save her by supplying her with security. She moves in with him and he promises to marry her. But even these acts cannot prevent Nicole’s bouts with schizophrenia. She sees hundred of imaginary cockroaches in the bathroom and panics. She cuts off her long beautiful black hair after Dino compliments it. She runs out into a rainstorm and cries uncontrollably. Finally, she returns to the sea where he had first met her. While he sits drawing,
she stares at him angrily while lying topless on the sand. Then she turns and walks out into the sea. As he looks on in terror, she turns once more to look at him and descends into the deep, never to return.
Swann in Love (1984) is based on one part of Marcel Proust’s epic of love, remembrance, and the French upper classes, À la recherche du temps perdu, set at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Swann is a rich effete bachelor who spends his time collecting art and visiting with his upper-class friends who accept his company even though he is Jewish. Swann, like Proust (we first see him in bed writing, which is where Proust wrote most of his epic), narrates his story in a nonlinear fashion, weaving memory with present-time action.
This reserved and emotionally detached man (Jeremy Irons) finds himself drawn to a courtesan named Odette (Ornella Muti), who resembles a woman in a reproduction of a fresco by Botticelli, which he keeps safely locked away in his display cabinet. Odette’s heavy-lidded eyes and her sensual languor, like that of the woman in the fresco, fascinate the collector. He tries to resist the appeal, often telling his close friends like Baron de Charlus (Alain Delon) that he can take her or leave her. In one scene he breaks down, whipping the grass in the park with his cane and calling her a “whore” (not to her face of course) and regaling himself for his “stupidity.” The images of the film, however, belie his often-violent affirmations of his distaste for Odette. The repetition of a single image of him worshipping her breasts (which are covered with orchids) and breathing in her scents as he shivers reinforces the depth of his obsession, no matter what he might claim to others.
Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies Page 15
