Grindhouse Theater: Mystique (1979)

Georgina Spelvin once again delivers a tour de force turn as Alma, a famous photographer retreating from life in her secluded beachside property when she's diagnosed as suffering from an otherwise unspecified terminal illness. Haunted by reveries of photoshoots past, she spots scarlet-cloaked Cosima (played by Samantha Fox) trespassing one day and, intrigued by the girl's otherworldly appearance, invites her in for tea. Soon they embark on a whirlwind lesbian liaison, scissoring to their heart's content, though it quickly dawns that the scheming, manipulative Cosima harbors ulterior motives.

WIP Films review: I consider Mystique to be a sort of lost minor masterpiece of the porn chic era. For starters, the film is an 'unofficial' lesbian reworking of Thomas Mann's classic novella Death in Venice which was written by Roger Watkins of The Last House on Dead End Street fame. Apparently, to Watkins' lifelong chagrin, director Roberta Findlay (who directed the film under the pseudonym Robert W. Norman) did not credit him as the writer and he felt that the female director was trying to steal his work. Like Visconti's Death in Venice adaptation, Mystique features music by Gustav Mahler, as well as his spiritual nemesis Richard Wagner. In fact, the lead character is named Alma (named after Mahler's wife), while the quasi-villain is named Cosima (after Wagner's wife, who famously had problems with Mahler due to his Jewish background).

Mystique is surely not a work that one watches as a masturbation aid (though I'm sure there are some people out there that will find something arousing about it), as the sex is largely unerotic and rough (including a two guy on one girl gang rape scene in a bathtub). Also, the film features more plot/storyline than your average fuck flick. Mystique is rather artful and cultivated and has a fairly dreamlike essence that is accentuated to its beachside setting and classical romantic score, not to mention incessant dream-sequences (both pornographic and non-pornographic). In fact, the film oftentimes blurs the line between dream and reality and concludes on a rather angelic note.

grind

A grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly shows exploitation films. It is named after the defunct burlesque theaters located on 42nd Street in New York City, where 'bump n' grind' dancing and striptease were featured.

In the film Lady of Burlesque (1943) one of the characters refers to the burlesque theatre on 42nd Street, where they are performing stripteases and bump and grind dances, as a "grindhouse".

The introduction of television greatly eroded the audience for local and single screen movie theatres, many of which were built during the cinema boom of the 1930s. In combination with urban decay after white flight out of older city areas in the mid to late 1960s, changing economics forced these theatres to either close or offer something that TV could not. In the 1970s these theatres were put to new use as venues for exploitation films, either adult pornography and sleaze, or slasher and dubbed martial arts films from Hong Kong.

Grindhouse films characteristically contain large amounts of sex, violence or bizarre subject matter. One genre of film featured were "roughies" or sexploitation, a mix of sex, violence and sadism. Quality varied, but low budget production values and poor print quality were common. Critical opinions varied regarding typical grindhouse fare, but many films acquired cult following and critical praise. Double, triple, and "all night" bills on a single admission charge often encouraged patrons to spend long periods of time in the theaters. The milieu was largely and faithfully captured at the time by the magazine Sleazoid Express.

By the 1980s, home video and cable movie channels threatened to render the grindhouse obsolete. By the end of the decade, these theaters had vanished from Los Angeles's Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard, New York City's Times Square and San Francisco's Market Street. By the mid 1990s, these particular theaters had all but disappeared from the US. Very few exist today.