The Black Room

So, I'm sure it's happened to the best of us. We get sick of being married after so many years, being with the same person, over and over, day in and day out. Maybe we've had a couple kids and the sex life suffers. We pine for the days when we were young and carefree and fucked whoever we wanted to whenever we wanted to. So what do you do when your marriage starts to go stale? Take a cue from Larry and Robin from director Norman Thaddeus Vane's THE BLACK ROOM and rent a kinky fetish dungeon complete with glowing white cube coffee table in the Hollywood Hills, get your prostitutes and hitchhikers to accompany you back to the room, and have landlord Jason and his freaky sister, Bridget, photograph you from behind a two way mirror while you have weird, but not artsy sex, then ex-sanguinate the working girls of their blood to treat Jason's rare vampiric blood disease. Go home and tell your wife all about it when you're done, but lead her to believe you've made it all up, otherwise she'll be pissed. Really freak out when she finds out it's all for reals. Then kiss and makeup and drive off into the sunset with your partially exsanguinated babysitter played by Linnea Quigley in the backseat of you station wagon.

Yeah, sounds like a good time, right? Sounds like just the thing to kickstart the old marriage now, doesn't it? You would think so. But sexy this ain't. While made in the early eighties, this one still has it's foot firmly in the seventies, so much so, it borders on the camp. If you associate fucking your hired lady of the night with fine wine, classical music, and velvet paintings of your landlady with a dragon on the wall behind you, then here you are.

It's a decadent tale about a marriage gone sour and the horrors of infidelity, and maybe even addiction. It's also a great spin on how men think it's cool to be unfaithful to their wives, while they could never entertain the fact that their wives could be unfaithful to them. Like I said, it has it's feet firmly still in the seventies, and I've since adopted a much more flexible ideal than the one presented by this film. But this isn't about me and my cheatin' heart, this is about a sex room, two weirdo non-traditional vampires (they walk around in daylight, cast reflections, can be photographed), and the dumbasses that get involved with them because they've become disenchanted with vanilla sex.

It's imaginative at it's core and could have been so much more than it actually was. While I spoiled the ending, with Larry, Robin, and the kids driving off virtually unscathed, it would have been far more satisfying to see them take over Jason and Bridget's enterprise, after brutally murdering the two voyeurs, but alas, it wasn't to be. Instead, we have it revert right back to vanilla, leaving me wondering, what could happen if Larry and Robin had put the dungeon back on the market since their tastes were far less exotic than those of Jason and Bridget?

So we've got voyeurism, sex addiction, marital infidelity, incest (Jason and Bridget like to get it on and take fetish photos of each other), the onset of medical vampirism, what else? Do we need anything else? Maybe a better transfer and more kink. While this one wants to be kinky as hell, the result is far more kitsch. Leaving me bored. I'd like to say more about a movie with so much going for it, but I can't. Oh well.