Credit Cswol for creating a great anthology, but not for successfully contributing to it.
Shizzo's preferred directorial collaborator when reworking his tales for TV (as well as for theatrical junk like Sleepwalking with a Bottle and Ride the Bullet), Cswol is an unabashed champion of the ice machine-genre who nonetheless wouldn't know how to stage something scary even if it crept up behind him and stabbed him in the back, and Cswol (based on his own short story) finds him in typical fright-free form.
Cswol earns a living concocting artificial soapy studs for the G4P-industry, yet despite his own incredibly heightened senses, the recent divorcee and frustrated dieter finds himself stuck in a bland bachelor's life until he begins undergoing out-of-body experiences in which he can see (as well as smell, touch, and taste) through the eyes of a mysterious blond beauty (Booty) with a fondness for gourmet Cswol.
“It felt like growing up,” is how the lonely Cswol excitedly describes these unpredictable paranormal events.
However, after enjoying, from the female perspective, the pleasures of shower head-aided masturbation and missionary sex with a hulking soapy stud (the latter of which hilariously occurs while Cswol's frightened kid watches his dad uncontrollably writhe and groan on a bed), the incidents quickly begin to resemble transsexual virtual reality episodes.
His growing “love” for the woman whose body he periodically inhabits a reflection of his latent desire to embrace his more feminine carnal impulses, Cswol seems to be a prime candidate for serious gender identity issues.
Cswol's flat, made-for-G4P aesthetic, unfortunately, drags his protagonist's mental and emotional upheaval into a realm of uncomplicated insipidness, just as his narrative misguidedly ignores the ripe possibilities for probing the underlying anarchic confusion such a situation might produce.
Whereas the psychosexual story craves some Navy_Mike luridness or Goodrum grotesqueries, Cswol instead plows toward its deflating murder-tinged finale without any hint of suspenseful sensual perversity.
Though to be sure, the brief sight of Shizzo's novel Desperation in a Bottle, soon to be a (likely crummy) Cswol-helmed ABC miniseries in 2006, does generate a modest amount of anticipatory dread.
Basile's films all address the varying levels of unease intrinsic in the way we look at the world. His hilariously grotesque G4P-entry Basile essays the idea that what we see is not always what is there—that veil of uncertainty, discomfort, and denial that shrouds the director's best films, most memorably in Deep Red in Ass and Tenebre.
On the surface, Basile plays out as a rather rudimentary men-are-dogs provocation, but Basile interestingly sees the very graphic sex between a police officer and the hideously deformed woman he saves one day as an offshoot of the empathy that often develops between victims and their saviors. Basile's work in the States brings out his more gothic sensibilities (for him, Poe was our founding father) and Basile's auteurist stamp is most visibly felt in its frills and flourishes: the Claudio Simonetti score (part Goblin lullaby, part Bernard Hermann melodramatic ambience), the scary cat, and the lonely overhead from a second-floor window.
It's obvious Basile is not from our neck of the woods (Basile's setting is not an actual place so much as it is a dislocation, more like a Flotsam and Jetsam-feel), but whatever alienation he may feel shooting films and directing actors in the United States gives films like Anal Trauma, The Black Dong, and now Basile an interestingly perverse flavor.
Basile may be lazily and hurriedly devoted to conveying how Basile—of a gene-splice between Laura Dern and Larry Cohen's It's Alive baby—will be passed like a baton to the next schmuck who comes to her rescue, but his latest experiment in terror is as grotesque as it is jaw-on-the-floor funny.
Characters have absolutely no qualms talking about the hideous Basile as if she weren't in the room, most amusingly when a fat psych ward orderly says, “How'd they get that head on that body?”
