Put On Your Raincoats | Blue Voodoo (Weston, 1978)
This review contains mild spoilers.
Because it’s October AKA Halloween (yes, it lasts for the whole month, whaddya mean it’s on the 31st), it seems appropriate that any pornos I’d watch would be appropriately spooky in the spirit of the season. More specifically, I try to seek out ones that would fall into the more fun strain of horror, rather than the roughies that porno-horror hybrids usually fall into. Armand Weston’s Blue Voodoo, starring the great Vanessa Del Rio as a voodoo priestess, sounds like it should be a safe bet. I’ve seen two movies from Weston, the film noir homage Expose Me, Lovely and the true crime roughie The Taking of Christina, and in both he was able to pull off the thriller elements with style. And Vanessa Del Rio playing a voodoo priestess and doing a Bela Lugosi accent to boot should make this an automatic good movie. Unfortunately, the rest of this keeps it from being as automatic as one would hope.
The plot here has a stripper played Serena being ripped off and dumped by her fiancee Wade Nichols, who milks her for ten grand and announces that he has no intention to actually marry her. Heartbroken, she turns to Del Rio for help, who summons the Black Widow by using her magic voodoo powers (by which I mean a lesbian sex scene). The Black Widow then shows up at the strip club where Serena works and orchestrates her revenge. She does this by enacting a number of sex scenes that do nothing to further the plot, and even worse, don’t have much of a horror element. There’s a sex scene with Jamie Gillis as a father and Lisa Marks as his daughter in a crib, which is probably too cheesy to take seriously but also, ugh, no thanks. You do get a good chuckle when Gillis appears unphased by the Black Widow.
"What's your name?"
"They call me the Black Widow."
"That's a nice name, goes with the outfit."
There’s also a Roman orgy scene with Robert Kerman, Joey Silvera and David Morris in togas, which achieves an unprecedented level of period accuracy as the actors shout in their Noo Yawk accents and demand champagne, which one of them remarks hasn’t been invented yet. Sex and violence finally merge in the final sex scene between Nichols and Samantha Fox, who refuse to stop fucking even as Nichols starts to bleed out from the Black Widow’s voodoo curse. You gotta respect the dedication.
This is a very early SOV production, and unlike some later efforts where the format is used purely for budget and expediency, Weston approaches this with an eye for visual experimentation, laying on the video effects to crude yet stylish effect (lots of superimpositions, and even picture-in-picture cunnilingus). A lot of this looks like a play or live performance shot for television, with a multi-camera setup doing coverage rather than the more deliberate visual storytelling of the other Weston’s I’ve seen. You can tell he’s aware of the inherent flatness of video, and he tries to compensate with stylized, stripped down mise-en-scene, using monochromatic backgrounds to occasionally atmospheric effect. There are a number of scenes that have a nice horror movie atmosphere, usually when the background is black and the fog machine is working overtime. And the Black Widow’s appearance, a naked lady with a cape and a knife, does make for an intriguingly spooky and sexy image. And of course Del Rio with her Bela Lugosi accent has her charms. I just wish more of the movie sustained these horror movie qualities.
