Cafe Flesh

When Café Flesh was first released in 1982, it really stood out from the crowd. With it's sci-fi story line and peculiar setups, audiences had seen nothing like it. However, porn has evolved quite a bit in the last 20 years, making Café Flesh look a bit dated, pretentious, and even soft by today's standards. Nevertheless, it stands as one of the most influential films in modern porn.

The film is set in a post apocalyptic world where 99% of the population is incapable of having sex. Specifically, they suffer from intense nausea when attempting to have sex, as an odd side-effect from the nuclear fallout. Therefore, the remaining 1% are to have sex on stage so the others can reminisce. Café Flesh is one such club where the "negatives" gather around to watch the "positives" perform in some truly unique stage shows. The story focuses around a negative couple who frequent the Café as a surrogate expression of their physical love.

At times, the film exhibits symptoms of an identity crisis. Is it trying to be a good porno, a sci-fi tale, or a social commentary? Unfortunately, the script spreads itself too thin and never achieves competency in any of those areas. Much of the action gets diluted in a story that is unnecessarily complex and time consuming. Furthermore, there are several characters who simply get too much screen time. Max, the club's host, is one of the most annoying characters. He gets on stage and rambles as if he's spinning a heady convoluted riddle, before announcing the next act. Are we (or the club's audience) supposed to derive a deeper meaning from his rants? How does this further the story? I only see it as valuable film time which could have easily been excised in the interest of another sex scene. Character development is necessary if the time invested leads to a certain pay-off, but why waste the time fleshing out characters who are such flat archetypes?

While the film's premise is original and somewhat engaging, many of the sex scenes don't really hold up to modern expectations. First of all, they're very short and offer little variety. Any given scene only lasts a few minutes and features one or two positions. There's also too much effort exerted in trying to be different. All of the sex scenes are sporadically intercut with (often recycled) reaction shots from the mutated audience members. We already know the scenes are taking place in front of an audience, so are all of these stock shots necessary? Besides, cutting away from a sex scene to a pale mutated face in the audience does little to enhance the heat.

In the most bizarre scene, Terri Copeland is ravished by a milkman dressed in a rat costume. In the background, three men (dressed as babies) sit in highchairs and synchronize their mechanical movements to the music. Meanwhile, the rat man does a little dance before Teri undresses and allows him to smell her body. Before long the two drop to the floor in a sixty-nine position and service each other orally. Terri manages to give an impressively affectionate blowjob while the rat man nibbles away on her clit. She eventually gets some missionary penetration for a few strokes before the rat man pulls out and makes a mess in her pubic hair. I'm not exaggerating, the penetration sequence of the scene only lasts for a few seconds before the guy blows his load...I guess the nuclear exchange killed off the porn studs. In all, the scene only lasts for five minutes with a ton of reaction shots of the audience and those annoying baby men in the background. Out of that five minutes, probably only half of that is of the actual sex act. It's certainly strange and even innovative given the context, but I'd stop short of calling it hot.

For a VCA produced DVD, Café Flesh doesn't represent the best of their catalog. The film used for the transfer was in pretty poor condition with plenty of scratches and other deformities. Since the entire film was shot in relative low light, the image quality of the transfer is difficult to judge. There's occasional pixel botches in the darker colors, but most of this is in the background and not readily noticeable. Surprisingly, there's even a few weird skips where it looks like either the film was damaged or something went wrong during the transfer. The audio is very average, but has fewer noticeable defects than the visuals. For such an important film, the DVD has no significant extra features. Of course, there's the photo gallery, cast bios, and the usual generic stuff, but nothing really informative.

Overall, the film plays like a mix between Behind the Green Door and an early Talking Heads video. Those looking for the roots of "new wave" porn will probably find something to enjoy in Café Flesh. However, recent directors like Gregory Dark, Michael Ninn, and Antonio Passolini have improved upon this genre of adult filmmaking to the point where this early classic looks trite. In fact, modern fans will find much more to enjoy in Passolini's sequel than they will in the original.

If Rob Black heists riffs from Greg Dark, then Dark, too, is guilty of stealing from the first master of new wave porn, Rinse Dream. Cafe Flesh, Dream's classic, and still one of the best porn films ever made, gets the grand treatment from VCA for its DVD release. Looking better than it ever has, this digital remaster is crisp, clear, and incredibly detailed. It sounds great as well, having lost a lot of the blown, badly-mixed audio that marred the videotape. In fact, if there's any criticism at all, it's that we might have wished for a new print to be struck for this remaster; but Bob only knows where the camera negative is stored, or what state it's in. Still, that's a complaint. The disc is killer.

The minimal extras are understandable given the film's age. A few stills are all we get. More chapter stops would certainly have been appreciated, however.

This one has always been a bit different from the rest:
One reviewer described it as the 'only porno film where you ff the sex to get to the plot'
In fact this is the film's shortcoming: The sex is intentionally cold and the scenes short and plain weird. Check out the housewife and the 'mouse' (or is it a rat?) in the first scene, while her 3 brats (actually grown men in terrifying makeup) are looking on and sulking because there's no food on the table!

The story of the film is already well-known (99 % of the world's population is sex negative, ie. gets violently ill when they have intercourse, the rest HAVE to perform for the hungry crowds)
and the film is one of the only porn movies where the premise is actually well realised in the finished product.
Andrew Nichols makes a weird and funny Max Melodramatic, VJ of the 'Café Flesh' (in a very slimy way!), the other actors are mostly OK too.
The plot is not really resolved at the end, though, and without wanting to spoil anything, I do think that the film is over without having ended, if you know what I mean.
Not one for the raincoaters in any case...