Nurse Sherri

Sherri Bobbins

Nurse Sherri
aka Black Voodoo
USA 1978
Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Bizarre spoilers ensue.

Wow... that Al Adamson guy keeps surprising me. I watched Nurse Sherri on the same day that I watched his bizarre musical sci-fi sex comedy Cinderella 2000 (reviewed here) and, believe me, Nurse Sherri was an even stranger experience, tonally, than the former.

So if you look at the trailers for Nurse Sherri you will be sold a film about the demonic possession of a young nurse in the style of something like The Exorcist and... well, it’s certainly a horror movie of sorts but, for one thing, if you’re looking for a scary movie then this isn’t it. And for another, well, let me describe the first few scenes of the movie for you here.

First up we have another animated title sequence similar to those adorning the openings of a lot of Adamson’s films involving various photos and images moved around. And my first thought as I was watching this is that the score, which continues over various scenes throughout the movie, sounded way too old for a 1970s horror movie. At first I thought it was just library music except I also realised I recognised the tune. A quick trip to the IMDB confirmed my suspicions... the film seems to be needle drop scored with some of Dominic Frontiere’s music to the old sci-fi TV show The Outer Limits.

Anyway, the film starts with some scenes from many reshoots Adamson took part in to expand the character of an old ‘occult specialist’ who dies on an operating table early in the movie. There is a sequence shot in the desert where he and a bunch of ‘faithful’ friends of a dead person attempt to raise the person back from death over the space of a number of days. Alas, instead of raising the recently deceased gentleman, the guy collapses as if possessed. We then get his death scene at hospital as Nurse Sherri, played by Jill Jacobson, watches as her doctor boyfriend Peter, played by Geoffrey Land, fails to save his life. And this is where this horror movie takes a bizarre and strange turn...

Following on from this we have a full on naked sex scene where Sherri and Peter are at it for a considerably longer time than you would expect from a scene in any other horror movie. It’s not shy about what it’s showing either. Okay, I thought, this was a mite unusual but, then... after the two are recovering, Sherri asks the good doctor what his strangest sexual experience was. We then get a long flashback to him in his younger days, as he attempts to give a lecture to a class full of students while one of them is giving him a hidden blow job from under his lectern.Wait, what? After a while we go back to Sherri and Peter on the bed and then it’s his turn to ask Sherri what her strangest sexual encounter was... at which point we flash back again to a poolside scene where Sherri is seduced in a lesbian sex scene. Well, this has got to be one of the most ‘off the point’ horror films I’ve ever seen. This is all compounded by another scene when we get back to the hospital and a man is nervous about having an operation. So one of the nurses removes her clothing and starts sexing him up to relax him. So far, this had not been the spectacle of demonic terror I was expecting, to tell you the truth.

After a while, Sherri’s best friend Nurse Tara, played by the incomparable Adamson regular Marilyn Joi, turns up and goes to look in on an all star American football player who has been blinded. It doesn’t take long, of course, for her to remove her clothes and start boning up on the game with him.

Now, in between these unusual sex scenes, there are actually scenes which carry the demonic plot forward. Later scenes with flashbacks explain that the old man who died on the hospital bed has possessed Sherri, which kind of makes sense since every now and again she’ll accidentally let her demon show by talking in ‘croaky old man’s voice’ courtesy of some dubbing. However, we also see a scene from much later than the hospital scene where some bizarrely animated... I can only call it glowy slime sludgy stuff... crawls onto her body and kind of seeps into her. What this has to do with the old occult geezah I have no idea but pretty soon, presumably as a result of this bizarre phenomenon, Sherri starts turning up in unexpected places and doing strange and ‘plot questionable’ killings.

For instance, she’ll turn up at the mini ranch of a retired ‘cowboy hat wearing’ doctor and, for no reason whatsoever and in a scene which has played out, content wise, in at least two other Adamson movies... she sticks a big pitchfork through his back before driving all the way back to hospital again. And it goes on like this for a while, with little inserts of almost non-sequitur horror scenes, surrounded by scenes where everyone seems to think they are in a softcore, sexy nurse movie.

Luckily, Tara’s blinded football star patient had a voodoo priestess for a grandmother and, when everyone starts talking about how strange Nurse Sherri has been lately... like turning up with blood all over her hands and face and speaking like an old man... he tells them that they have to dig the old man up from his grave and burn his body to release his hold on the titular nurse. Which they do, just about saving Peter who is about to get hacked to death by Sherri, wielding two machete’s after she has just killed her carer. Why Sherri has so many framed photographs of different breeds of dogs in her apartment is never explained to anyone’s satisfaction nor, indeed, even questioned by anyone.

And although things don’t end as happily as they could for Sherri, most people in the movie get a slightly happier ending. It’s a strange film though and I honestly thought that Adamson had done another patchwork job on this one, where he’d maybe started off shooting a sexy nurse film due to Roger Corman’s recent success at kick starting that genre and then decided a third of the way through the shoot that they were going to do a horror movie instead but, no, according to the section of the accompanying booklet in Severin’s amazing Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection Blu Ray boxed set, the plan was actually to shoot a horror/sexy nurse hybrid from the start. So colour me baffled. Also, though, the description of the film mentioned in the booklet also mentions some scenes shot in 35mm which are curiously absent from this original 16mm cut of the movie... so I don’t know if those sequences are lost or have turned up elsewhere.

Either way, if you want to see one of the most tonally bizarre movies that Adamson has done (and if you’ve read some of my Adamson reviews lately you’ll know he directed or doctored some curious hybrids in the course of his career), then Nurse Sherri would be my recommendation for that kind of experience. Really pleased I saw this one.

The Playbirds

Softcore Giallography

The Playbirds
UK 1978 Directed by Willy Roe
Odeon Region 2 DVD

Warning: Yeah, this is going to have spoilers for those
of you who care about such things in these kinds of films.

Okay. So you may remember I reviewed the Mary Millington sex comedy Come Play With Me on here a little while ago (click here for my review). I remember being rather surprised by the lack of actual soft core pornography in it and amazed about the general tone of it which is, pretty much, the same as a Carry On movie. So... populated by loads of British character actors of the time but with sex and nudity inserted into the story. If you can call it a story.

Well, I thought that experience would have at least prepared me a little bit for watching Mary’s second big breakthrough movie, The Playbirds, which takes its name from The Playbirds magazines which were one of the cornerstones of producer David Sullivan’s porn empire, and which featured Mary as the regular figurehead/mascot. However, although the movie does have some sex and nudity scattered at intervals throughout the picture, this one is a complete sea change from the previous picture and it’s a much more sombre affair. In fact, given the small part that nudity and sex play in the finished product and it’s preoccupation with a police procedural plot as a serial killer murders centre spread girls from the magazine, I’m going to go right ahead and call it right here...

The Playbirds is, pretty much, the British equivalent of a giallo movie.

It really isn’t about sex... although that is the currency which it uses to forward the story. Instead, it follows a police investigation which becomes a giallo style whodunnit in exactly the same way that the Italian movies would fix it so it’s almost impossible to guess the identity of the killer... implausible jumps in logic included. Like The Playbirds, though, it stars a wealth of British characters who you wouldn’t expect to see playing in a movie of this... um... calibre.

The film follows the exploits of Chief Superintendent Holborne and his partner, Inspector Harry Morgan. Holborne is played by Glynn Edwards and, if that name is not familiar with you, he played the pub landlord on the TV show Minder for many years, as well as starring as one of the title roles in Burke and Hare (reviewed here) along with Derren Nesbitt (who also has a small role in this movie as one of the pornographers responsible for printing the titular magazine). And if you think that piece of casting is extraordinary, his partner Morgan in this is played by none other than Gavin Campbell and, for anyone who used to watch the TV show That’s Life with Esther Rantzen... oh yeah, that Gavin!

The two go around trying to patiently solve the murder of various girls who have all been strangled (mostly with no clothes on... it’s a Mary Millington movie, after all) by a man in a Sherlock Holmes style Deerstalker... and then numbered with lipstick on their foreheads by someone who presumably doesn’t like their involvement with The Playbirds magazine. The magazine, of course, is highlighted constantly in the movie and I’m sure Mary Millington can be seen in some posters in the background of the printworks in some shots, even though the character she is playing is not in any way associated with the magazine until the end of the movie. I’m not sure how early metatextual references like this started appearing in what are considered, technically, British softcore movies but I’m guessing this was one of the first.

So who is Mary actually playing in this movie? Well, the film starts off with a model in a naked photo shoot and then, after a brief scene highlighting a racehorse which Holborne keeps betting against and which serves absolutely no purpose as a subplot of any relevance at all, although its referred to all the way through the movie, we first meet Mary walking the beat on the streets of London as Sgt. Lucy Sheridan. Yep, she’s a copper although, given her attitude and opinion of her majesty’s constabulary in real life, it seems a bit of an ironic role for her to have taken on. She’s also accompanied by a truly terrible theme song which is a shame since the movie was scored by David Whittaker, who worked on a couple of Hammer films and who also provided a pretty good score for The Sword And The Sorcerer. Mary keeps cropping up throughout the movie and even has an attempt at a foot chase at one point in the film but, for the first three quarters of the movie, she has more of a peripheral role until her unique talents are required to further the plot, such as it is, by the end of the movie.

And what we have is a movie set on the streets of 1970s London (which is always lovely to see, as I best remember it, back in the day) with character actors like the aforementioned cropping up. Also on the police force are Kenny Lynch (remember him?) and Holborne’s boss is played by none other than Windsor Davies (who you may remember as the Sergeant in the TV show It Ain’t Half Hot Mum). We also have Dudley Sutton in here, looking exactly the same age as he has for decades, playing some kind of bizarre and religious fanatic.

In between the police procedural scenes we have various Playbirds photo shoots going on as, presumably, an essential part of the plot. For instance, an occult theme is brought into the spreads and a shoot based, quite loosely I suspect, on shenanigans at The Hellfire Club is shown as one big orgy including a lady having sex with the underside of a rocking horse... surprised the BBFC let that through, actually. There’s also a witch being burned at the cross naked in a photo shoot scene too, which goes horribly wrong when the killer somehow manages to turn it into a real burning... although the way the special effects, such as they are, have been shot here may well mean you take a while to realise that this is actually what’s happened, it has to be said.

And we also have another nice tie in to the Italian giallo movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s in that one of the victims is found, by Gavin, in a room lit with both red and green lights. The effect of this, of course, is like a poor man’s Mario Bava has been on set so, yeah, I’m still sticking with this giallo parallel because it makes me wonder what kind of movies the director and cinematographer had been watching at the time. It does kind of compliment that style of shooting very well, especially in this scene.

And then we have Mary herself. The police get the idea to plant a girl working for Playbirds who will start at the massage parlours and then work her way into being the cover girl of the month so she can be bait for the killer. What this means for the audience, of course, is that we have Holborne and Morgan ‘interviewing’ hitherto unseen lady members of the police force by having them do a sexy strip routine so they can give the job to the most likeliest person to succeed. It’s almost like the film suddenly stops for a while so the director can showcase various ladies stripping for the audience... well... um... yeah. And, of course, Mary’s character wins hands down and it’s not long before she’s the magazine owners girlfriend... which I understand she more or less was in real life for a while, despite being married to someone else.

The really hilarious thing about this movie, bearing in mind the age of the film, is the police relying constantly on getting their leads by punching in information to be analysed in the ‘computer room’. And, yes, it’s a room full of cheap computers where nobody really looks like they know what they’re doing and with a printer which gives our heroes leads when the correct information is, somehow, or other, fed in. Let me tell you, though, those computers back in those days must have been absolutely miraculous. The police learn the identity of the killer thusly: They see a head looking out of a window on a photo and they get the computer to enhance and blow this up (not that you see any of this, of course). Once the shape is blown up they get the computer to take ‘x-rays’ of the face on the photo so they will reveal the bone structure of the person and then they compare it to the bone structures of x-rays of suspects in their computer records. What the f***? Quick, someone alert Microsoft and Apple now that someone has managed to figure out a way to take ‘x rays’ of a person from a still photograph. They need to get that patented fast.

The ending of the movie is almost as equally astonishing and certainly way more downbeat than you would expect from this kind of sub-genre. The killer is unmasked by the police and taken into custody. In the last scene of the movie we see Mary Millington answer a phone call from her police colleagues and receive the news that he’s just been locked up. How then, can he suddenly crash into her apartment and strangle her in a really downbeat ending, leaving her naked body floating in the bath. Does he have some kind of supernatural powers that we’ve previously not been made aware of over the course of the film? Seriously, this is just the kind of twisted, deranged anti-logic that lets a lot of gialli down and, sadly, this film does exactly the same thing. I have no idea how this ending can even work within the context of everything else we’ve been told but... well, there you have it.

So, yeah, the movie is mostly a load of old cobblers, to be honest, but it’s certainly also entertaining to be watching all these distinguished character actors prop up a soft core porn film which, in itself, seems to be less about porn and more about being a thriller. Certainly a curio in both cinema in general and also, I suspect, in the soft porn genre. As such, I would kind of tentatively recommend it to film goers who have seen just about every kind of movie and want to see something just a little bit different to what they would comfortably expect a producer and director to be able to get away with. Certainly, it’s not a rerun, by any means, of Come Play With Me... the two are like chalk and cheese. So whatever you say about The Playbirds, it certainly isn’t cashing in on the success of the former film.  One to... possibly... look out for.

Come Play With Me

Carry On Up The Millington

Come Play With Me
UK 1977 Directed by George Harrison Marks
Odeon DVD Region 2

Oh dear.

Come Play With Me is one of those almost legendary films which people my age kinda grew up with in the background without ever actually having seen them at the time. I remember walking past the posters to this and other British soft porn movies such as The Playbirds and Rosie Dixon, Night Nurse when I used to go to school, passing by the cinema as I went my merry way. I also read a fair amount recently about this production in the excellent book Come Play With Me: The Life And Films Of Mary Millington by Simon Sheridan, who also does the liner notes on this sparkly Odeon restoration of the movie (Sheridan’s excellent book is reviewed by me here).

However, it has to be said that, although I knew a little bit about the nature of the movie... British softcore, comedy, a few small appearances by Mary Millington, some famous names etc... nothing could prepare me for the absolute joy/horror of watching this thing. It’s unbelievable and, I suspect, very hard to attempt to describe here. It’s hard to believe that this highly successful film still holds the record for the longest non-stop engagement ever in British cinema history... although I can see a little of its appeal, to be sure, and there were other factors playing a part in that final statistic.

The film starts off with an absolutely terrible title song that, in itself, would probably want to make most people switch off whatever device they are playing this thing on and run for the hills... and I say that being an absolute lover of terrible songs in movies. However, as soon as the credits song is done with, the film does something very interesting which immediately caught my attention. That is to say, one of the most unusual pair of establishing shots I’ve seen presented on film. Two simple shots of London are shown in rapid succession, one cutting straight into another but... they’re both at dutch angles (maybe as much as 45 degree angles) and both the opposite orientation of each other. Doesn’t really do it any favours as a lead in to the next scene but it’s certainly eye catching, that’s for sure.

Then, after that, we get a scene where we get the Deputy Prime Minister, played by TV stalwart Henry McGee, briefing his people on a mission in search of a load of forged £20 bank notes. The government are not the only ones looking for the printers of these bank notes, however. So are the local mob, who the two main protagonists of this movie, the note forgers Cornelius Clapworthy and Maurice Kelly, were working for... until they decided to run off with the plates. The mob is headed by Ronald Fraser, who makes his home in a Soho night club. So of course the very next scene is a lovely lady doing a reverse strip on stage and it’s pretty much the closest thing this film comes to eroticism in its entire running time... that is to say, the only time any sexual content is taken with the remotest bit of seriousness. His left hand man, played by Tommy Godfrey (yeah, you’d know him, for sure, if you saw him) reports back that the pair have ‘scarpered’ and he’s ordered to pursue.

Our two heroes, who are in so much trouble with both their own people and with ‘the law’, are played by the director, George Harrison Marks (as Clapworthy) and comedian Alfie Bass (as Kelly). They decide to lay low in a ‘down on its luck’ Health Farm for a couple of weeks while they print enough money to get them someplace else. The Health Farm is run by Irene Handle, who plays Lady Bovington, and her assistant McIvar, played by Cardew Robinson (who I was convinced throughout the whole movie was being played by Rod Hull... he’s a dead spit for him in this in both looks and action).

Meanwhile, a government official meets with a low life contact who is trying to get a handle on where the two are and it’s a sign of the changing times when, at a cafe, the contact buys two cups of tea and a big iced bun and it costs him... 17 pence. Oh yes. I remember the 1970s. The days when we weren’t being completely ripped off left, right and centre. I wish I was still back there. This sub plot of the government official is picked up again later in the story, although it has absolutely no purpose within the plot at all other than to pad out the running time of the movie... it never catches up to the rest of the main cast and I suspect that’s because it was maybe shot later and thrown in after. The two agree to meet later and they meet, of course, at the same ‘Burlesque’ night club owned  by Ronald Fraser’s character... well, I guess you’ve got to keep finding ways to get the naked girlies in somehow.

Talking about girls... it’s not long before we meet a bus load of strippers, including Mary Millington, brought home by the rich, playboy son of the owner of the Health Farm. They are introduced by a song ‘Pretty Girls’ on the soundtrack and... well... just when you thought you’d heard possibly the worst song ever written for a movie on the credits sequence, here comes this song to prove you wrong. When the son hears the sad state of affairs at his mother’s Health Farm, he comes up with the bright and successful idea of employing the young ladies to be sexy Health Farm attendants and... the plot pretty much finishes there and the rest of the film descends into a kind of English farce.

It’s a movie filled with absolutely gazillions of well known comedians and character actors of the time... people who were not normally expected to be in this type of movie... or at least the perception of what this type of movie is from members of the British public who hadn’t actually seen it. The sex scenes are softcore and really not up to much. Mary Millington’s ‘massage and irrigation’ scene is quite funny but that’s mostly due to the absolutely outrageous exclamations from her male victim... err.. patient. She does have an exuberance about her that’s hard to pin down and I’m kinda glad I’ve got her next feature, The Playbirds, to watch sometime soon.

The film is full of silly sped up romps with naked ladies and gentleman who are either naked themselves or in good old, British style, stripy pyjamas. The closest thing I can liken it to would be a Carry On film (not a series of movies I like, to be honest) but with loads of nudity added into the mix. The director, George Harrison Marks, is even more of a British eccentric playing Clapworthy than many of his co-stars here, with his big eyebrows and wig (at least... I really hope that was a wig) and one of the absolute ‘OMG’ highlights of the film is where he and Alfie Bass are trying to escape the less than tender ministrations of the girls and suddenly break out into a musical song and dance routine, with the sexy nurses of the Health Farm providing some inappropriate smiles and trying their best to keep up with the choreography.

There are some real curiosities about the movie, above and beyond all the other unbelievable shenanigans that are worth mentioning here. For instance, some of the scenes contain some bizarre rapid cuts in the middle of conversations and one wonders if these are because somebody just flubbed their lines in certain scenes and the editor is less than successfully trying to cut around it. And another thing which I can only assume is another post-production error is when the government agent is looking at a man singing on Brighton pier accompanied by a pianist. Although the piano player is plonking away heavily at the keys, all you can hear on the soundtrack is the sound of the guy singing. What? I can only presume the pianist was playing a deliberately silent piano and that some accompanying music was supposed to have been dubbed on at a later date... but they just never got around to it and used the ‘wild sound’ instead.

Come Play With Me is, it has to be said, a pretty terrible movie... but it’s also an immensely enjoyable one. It does, for me, fall into the ‘so bad it’s good’ category and in addition to the ‘how did this thing ever get released’ vibe to it, it’s also nice to see the famous Mary Millington in action. Also nice to see the streets of Soho more or less as I remember them as a kid, when I was a child model working in London back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It’s not a film I could say is particularly a masterpiece of cinema but... well, look. I watched three movies the day I saw this and this one was head and shoulders above the more serious stuff I saw in terms of entertainment value. I am going to show this one to most of my friends at some point because it’s almost impossible to describe and needs to be seen to be believed. And that’s about as good a recommendation as this one’s going to get from me I think. An enjoyable romp which probably shouldn’t be as much fun as it actually is. Looking forward to The Playbirds, now, for sure.

Female Vampire

When in Romay...

Female Vampire
1973 France/Belgium
Directed by Jess Franco
Redemption BluRay Region A/B/C

This is one of those eurocinema films you see when you’re young and the imagery stays with you for years... although it’s not exactly the greatest movie ever made. This was one of Lina Romay’s earlier films with the director and of the 120 movies she made before her death last year, the majority of them were made for her lover Franco... taking up “muse duty” after the tragic death of Franco’s equally famous figure of inspiration, Soledad Miranda (perhaps best known for the starring role in two of his movies in particular, Vampyros Lesbos and She Kills In Ecstacy). That Romay was a self confessed exhibitionist meant a match made in heaven for her and Franco and the images of her walking around this film and coming towards the screen out of the fog wearing just a hooded cloak (which manages to reveal everything about her) and a black belt will probably stick in the minds of most red blooded young men who come into contact with this film at an early age.

As a horror film it’s not much good, truth be told, but as a softcore exploitation movie with little dialogue designed to inflame the lusts of all those with a vampire fetish... well it does pretty well on that count (or countess).

The story, such as it is, tells the tale of Countess Karlstein, a mute vampire who sustains her life by giving fellatio or cunnilingus to her sexed up victims (depending on whether she happens to be sexing up a man or a woman, obviously) and then sucking the life force out of them from their respective “naughty bits” when they reach orgasm - a much shorter, toned down version with people wearing clothing and where the Countess gets her vampiric fix by sucking blood from more traditional, self made orifices, was released in some countries as the inappropriately titled, given its highly censored nature, Erotikill.

The film is very much like the more classic Vampyros Lesbos in many ways, but there’s a lot less going on here and, while this makes use of references to Karlstein’s family (which was probably as close as they could get the more famous vampiric name of Karnstein without having copyright issues, is my guess) and even has references to Franco’s earlier Dr. Orloff movie, this doesn’t share the same kind of substance as Vampyros Lesbos, which could easily pass for a not bad parody of Bram Stoker’s Dracula book (or stage version for that matter).

Still, the film is quite hypnotic and not just for the fact that most of the running time is taken up with female nudity, sex and a touch of badly restored S & M (with still material missing from the original shooting, I suspect, as Romay’s character is pre-wounded before we get to the main body of those scenes). Although I imagine the budget for this movie wasn’t what Franco would have wanted, it seems that the inspiration behind some of the shot designs are every bit as thoughtful as some of his other classic works. It’s just that there are vague distractions when a hand held camera is used, for instance, when you suspect the director would rather have used a proper tracking shot for certain sequences. Still, you can still make out the intentions behind the shots and a lot of it is very good.

You also have present Franco himself, as a kind of light weight/minor inconvenience Van Helsing type character, and it’s far from unusual for Franco to save money on his productions by casting himself. One story tells of him shooting himself in close up on a shot for a movie once while operating the camera himself (reaching around it) at the same time.

The presence of cult genre actors Luis Barboo (The Case Of The Scorpion’s Tale, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, The Wind And The Lion and Conan The Barbarian etc.) and Jack Taylor (Dr. Jekyll y el Hombre Lobo, The Ghost Galleon and Tender and Perverse Emmanuelle etc) make for another tick box for lovers of this kind of movie too... each of them turning in serious performances for a less than serious movie.

The scoring is pretty decent, although Daniel White’s music is less funky than some of the stuff you might equate with this director. There really does need to be a proper soundtrack CD of this score sometime... it’s really quite infectious and captivating.

So... a brilliant movie of little consequence, although I have to say that the Redemption BluRay I have here surprised me a little in that something seems amiss in terms of quality. I can’t work out if it’s the original source print that the BluRay has been mastered from that’s just absolutely crap in places (especially the opening sequence of Romay emerging from the fog in a forest) or if it’s the actual transfer that’s at fault and, while I’m pleased to have this version and it’s extras, I have older films which look a whole lot better than this on my BluRay and so I did wonder if I’d have been better not purchasing and sticking to my old Region 1 DVD edition from Image Entertainment. I’m fairly new to BluRay so maybe I should start being a bit more discerning when it comes to trusting who is doing what and from which available materials they are doing their “what” with in future.

Anyway, this doesn’t effect the slow burn, cumulative quality of the film any and, if you’re a fan of gratuitous nudity and beautiful women with a touch of somewhat pretentious vampiric angst thrown into the mix and some fairly questionable acting from Lina Romay on this one, then you’re probably going to be able to watch this movie on its own terms for what it is. For novices into the world of Jess Franco, too, I would say this is worth a look, although it’s not quite in the league of such works as Vampyros Lesbos, She Killed In Ecstacy and Countess Perverse (reviewed here). The iconic imagery, however, should pull you in a bit and make you seek out some of this man’s other works. If you do that, let me know what you think.