“Appearances are deceptive. They hide the soul. And the soul… is a great mystery. We strive to unravel the souls of others… and protect our own… from external evil. Let’s forget everything… there’s only you and me… this space… and what lies ahead of us.”

Spooky Season #2

Opening with a quote from Freud that “subconscious sexual desires are closely linked to the sense of fear," how could the Latvian erotic horror-drama Spider not be the exact right choice to kick off my month of October-approved feature films? This unnerving story burns with a frenzied passion as its repressed young heroine, Vita (Aurelija Anuzhite) - a name that of course symbolizes life - experiences a sexual awakening after posing as…

Style and substance. This got me thinking about what I need from films to personally enjoy them. Maybe I’m more conventional than I thought I was, despite some of the weird and wonderful things I luckily get to watch, because without some element of a story, all the lovely visuals in the world can’t hold my attention, especially when whatever they’re tethered too is to abstract to follow.

Long story short. I found this mostly boring. A kaleidoscope male fantasy of female adolescence and sexual awakening (ladies, how likely were you to fantasise about walking through a garden in a sheer off-the-shoulder nightdress before crushing bleeding petals to your bosom?). But also, something about the church vs the arts, with…

Obscure Latvian fairytale horror coming of age story with a giant spider. The wayward plot focuses on Vita; a pretty young girl who becomes a muse for a weird artist and soon after she starts having nightmares focusing around a giant arachnid. The story takes a back seat to the nightmarish visuals and director Vasili Mass clearly knows the strengths of the film lie as he goes all out, despite the obvious budgetary limitations. The dream sequences are intense and imaginative, nicely lit with a full range of colour. Of course, the sex with spider scene is the most memorable part and it delivers in full erotic tentacled glory! There's more disgusting gloop than I was expecting overall and the…

1st Vasili Mass

Two sexual horror films in two days? Am I well?

Spider is a film of two halves. First is Vita's awakening at the hands of a man's gaze. Asked to pose as the Virgin Mary, she quickly becomes aroused and terrified by both her erotic potential and the man who would prey on her, hence the spider. The second is her escaping to the country only to find herself re-enacting the behaviours she'd been horrified by, both with a young man and his father. Mass wants us to experience Vita's trauma through Żuławski-esque freakouts, complete with that handheld roaming camera the Pole uses so well. But Spider never is anything beyond glassy and beautiful.

For one thing,…

LetterboXXXd After Dark #10

Halloween Edition #2

LetterboXXXd After Dark is an ongoing series focused on erotic cinema. Everything from mainstream efforts like Basic Instinct and Wild Things, the DTV career of Shannon Tweed, and landmark entries into the golden era of adult cinema will be covered. Thanks to theironcupcake for providing inspiration in the form of her excellent coverage of long-forgotten (by most but not by her!) erotic thrillers from the VHS days. 

Vita (Aurelija Anuzhite) is a deeply religious and stunningly beautiful teen who has agreed to pose for an aggressive, hypersexual artist named Albert (Liubomiras Laucevicius) who’s received a commission from the local clergy to paint a portrait of the Virgin Mary. When Vita visits Albert’s studio for the…

Zirneklis is a Latvian movie that possibly deals with the repression of someone's sexual urges. It plays out like a fairy tale with many nightmarish elements to it. Vita has nightmares that, among other things, involve a giant spider (!) raping her. When she leaves the city to stay with her aunt (who lives in a beautiful castle on an island) she takes them with her.

The biggest strength of this movie is the surrealism and dreamy atmosphere which is built by amazing cinematography and lighting. Lou and I were raving about how gorgeous the movie looks throughout the whole movie. It's exceptionally well crafted. They used a lot of soft-focus lenses and alike. Fans of early 80s Fulci or…

Supremely bizarre Latvian horror/erotic drama that feels like a sleazoid dreamscape's been infiltrated by goopy body horror insanity.
Total noggin scratcher but too damn weird to hate.

A creepy artist with a rat-tail has been commissioned by the church to paint a portrait of the Virgin Mary. He picks Vita, a teenage girl, to be his muse but once she gets settled in for the initial meet and greet, the artist foists his nightmarish inclinations on her. Vita manages to escape this orgiastic hallucinatory hellscape but her psyche has been infected, as spiders haunt her dreams and reality seems to be melting all around her. Her mother sends her to the countryside to regain her mental balance but the nightmares…

Mondo Macabro posted on their Instagram the cover of their release of this film, (I had never heard of it before) but they captioned it as “a pretty girl has sex with a giant spider!”
So I of course...
*reads caption... buys bluray immediately on ebay*
What does that say about me? Lol 😅

Anyway now that you all know I’m a weirdo and need to see all the weird and obscure films out there...
Basically pretty ginger-haired Vita is asked to model as the Virgin Mary by a local artist to help out a good cause, she agrees. She soon finds out that the artist has psychosexual ideas of his own & haunts her endlessly!

Spider was indeed a bizarre…