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Evelyn's (Linda Carrigan) brother Tommy (Dustin Blanks) has joined the
cult of Brother Love (Bubba Brian), and now she has hired private dick and
Vietnam veteran with a dark secret Jack Steele (Sean Tigert) to get her
brother back - and it's high time, too, because Brother Love is a Satanist
and he has chosen Tommy to be his next human sacrifice. Now throw a
quintet of bikers (John Enke, Larry Gamber, Dustin Edwards, Rob Baillet,
Steve 'Hobart' Ward) who rape everyone in their way into the mix, as well
as a professor dabbling in Satanism (Mark Leake) and his student Julia
(Megan Mundane) and let them all as well as Steele and Brother Love loose
in a forest searching for the definitive book on Black Magic, and then
have them fight not only against each other but also against a gang of
black-robed cannibalistic mystical monks, and you pretty much know what's
going to happen. In the end though, Steele makes it out alive and even
manages to save Julia. And while he might have failed to save Tommy, he
still gets Evelyn in the end ... In its original advertisments
as well as the pre-credit sequence of the film, it is claimed to be a
'lost gem' of a particularly sleazy Italian director named Antonello
Giallo (who of course never existed) who got expelled from his country for
making Pleasures of the Damned back in 1979. Of course, only a
few minutes into the film one can't help but notice that the film is not
from 1979-Italy but was made in the USA at a much later date (2005
actually) - and yet it's the perfect hommage to 1970's and 80's sleaze
films from both sides of the Atlantic, as it has got everything: People
with ridiculous hairdoes, mustaches and wigs, actors that are either too
wooden or too hammy for their roles and never show quite the right
reaction to whatever happens to them on-screen, dubbing voices that never
match the actor's mouth movements, are lightyears away from matching their
acting, and are so clearly studio-recorded it's embarrassing, a musical
score that varies between funky and soulless but does little to heighten
the atmosphere of any particular scene, a thin story that seems to have
lost its clue and is little more than a hanger for depravity heaped upon
depravity, gore effects that are as crude as they are sensationalist, ...
and I could probably go on forever with this list. But don't get me
wrong here, I'm not putting together this list to condemn this film, nope,
all of these shortcomings are not only purely intentional, they are the
whole point of the film, which is a loving hommage to sleaze films from
yesteryear, with all their virtues and vices. And even if Pleasures of the
Damned might seem a little too loud at times, at other times it hits its
targets perfectly, and at least to a trashmovie lover like me, the film is
pretty much as enjoyable (and a lot funnier) than all of these pieces of
sleaze of old. Recommended!
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