A browse through my library the other day brought to mind a possible inspiration for the hyperspatial cinctures that play such an important technological role in the parascreenplay Where Am I? If you’re not up to speed here, the hyperspatial cinctures were devices that allowed someone to section off a part of ver body without harm — blood, nerve sensations, etc. would continue to flow across some sort of hyperspace, so you could put your limbs in one place and your trunk in another. Quite the mad science bondage toy. Potentially quite dangerous, as Dolly Gibson would find out.
Well, it turns out that these mad science devices have a magical antecedent in cinema, from the wild Hong Kong movie Erotic Ghost Story 2 (1991). (*) Want to take a guess as to what’s going on in the scene below?
Yes, you got it right. An evil demon has kidnapped a pretty peasant girl and cloven her magically in half, copulating with her lower half, while her upper half complains of lack of satisfaction.
This movie has a hell of a lot going on in it. Sure, it’s not great by any reasonable cinematic standard, but it does have lots of energetic softcore sex, copious male and female nudity, demon sex, underwater sex, very creative use of a swing, and even an A.S.F.R.-like scene in which one of our heroes is frozen naked in a giant block of ice.
He gets better, though.
Why oh why don’t we have movies like this in English-language cinema? Lots of unapologetic sex integrated with goofy-fun mad science/magical effects inside an actual story in which we do care, at least some, what happens to the characters? Granted there are a few, like Invasion of the Bee Girls. But where is our Robotrix? We need more of these, dammit!
I guess that’s a large part of the reason I ended up writing parascreenplays. More ordinary people can have movies that enact sexual fantasies, but thaumatophiles like me have to fantasize even the movies…
(*) Chinese-language title 聊斋艳谭2, which in pinyin I believe would read liáo zhāi yàn tán èr. Unfortunately my feeble attempt to excavate a literal translation generates gibberish: “chat fast beautiful Tan two,” so not only do I get too few movies, I suck at Chinese also. Darn.