You can do a lot of things with fingerless gloves, a gold belly chain, plastic vampire teeth, and Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got To Do With It.” Sexandroide is one of them.
Oh boy! This movie is called SEXANDROIDE! It’s French and it was filmed with a camcorder! Watching it might be like watching What’s Happening!! while eating ice cream tacos with The Incredible Hulk on my birthday. Or like shopping for Bigfoot paperbacks with France Gall before meeting Oliver Hardy for pizza at Aurelio’s. Or like listening to Brian Wilson talk about his new socks after beating The Fonz at racquetball. This movie might be another Ogroff. It could be another Devil Story. What I’m trying to say is that Sexandroide could potentially be the most important experience of my life.
Ten minutes in, a woman has her period on a toilet in a public restroom. The lady’s legs are spread. Her ass bumps the rim. Blood flows. She’s wearing high heels and she’s naked.
Somehow, none of this was erotic.
Comprised of three unrelated vignettes, Sexandroide feels like a sideshow performer’s demo reel as envisioned by a mail order fetish company. So imagine that. And then imagine that not being good. In the first sequence, a woman sits in a bar. She’s obviously about to have her period on a toilet. But before that can happen, a guy in a room uses a voodoo doll to torture the lady telepathically. It’s pretty much what happened in Doris Wishman’s Indecent Desires, but with more barfing in the sink, muff shots, and eyeballs being removed. And toilets. In story number two, a different woman walks down some basement stairs. She continues to walk down the basement stairs. She walks down the basement stairs some more and then reaches an altar. A skull emits green smoke. A man in a hood appears. The woman takes her clothes off. The man tortures the woman. There are nails pushed through nipples, bottomless fire-dances, knives carving faces, and nails pushed through tongues. Then a rose bleeds. Where can you go after you make a rose bleed? Right. You can walk up a staircase, instead of walking down.
By this point, I was exhausted. I wanted to light Sexandroide on fire. The guy in story number two looked and walked like Gary Busey. I kept saying, “THE BUSE IS LOOSE!” and hoped that that would get me through until the tape ran out. It didn’t. But thanks to the third segment, there was no need to worry. A woman mourns in a funeral parlor. Suddenly, a coffin opens! It’s a vampire! The woman gets her clothes violently ripped off before getting dry-humped and bitten. Of course, she returns from the dead to perform an erotique dance to Tina Turner’s “I Might Have Been Queen” and “What’s Love Got To Do With It.” Because that is what happens when a vampire bites you in France.
The “reality” of this movie is ultimately what kills it. The first two segments are literally Grand Guignol stage plays caught on tape. Only, they’re not fun. Sets are filthy, the post-dubbing mic is way too close to people’s mouths, and acts of violence lack creativity and excitement. They’re over the top in the wrong way. Much like Ogroff, the film steals iconic visuals from stuff like Pieces and City Of The Living Dead. But unlike Ogroff, there’s no incentive for us to care. However, something magical happens when humping a medieval chair is combined with famous American pop songs and dimestore vampire make-up. The final segment of the film does everything right. It’s absurd on purpose, with dirty old man jokes (the vampire keeps popping his head out of the coffin to stare at boobs) and a hilariously dumb ending. The gross-outs were balanced with humor. And fun. After the last segment, I couldn’t understand why anything happened. Or why I watched it happen. I felt confused, displaced, and satisfied. Sexandroide needed more of that. And by “that,” I mean a vampire woman rubbing her bare crotch across a filthy floor while Tina Turner flawlessly pulls off a sweet-ass key change.
