|
|
|
Misty
Mundae
Euro-Vixen Collection
|
|
U.S.A.
/ 2001-2003
Directors:
John Bacchus, Brian Paulin
Terry West, Ted W. Crestview
Starring
Misty Mundae, Darian Caine
Ruby Larocca, Katie Jordan
Barbara Joyce, Kelli Summers
Color / Not Rated
VAMPIRE
VIXENS:
84 Min.
MUMMY
RAIDER: 71 Min.
SATAN'S
SCHOOL FOR LUST: 76 Min.
ROXANNA:
79 Min.
Format: DVD (R1 - NTSC / 3-disc set)
E.I./Seduction Cinema
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Watch
a video clip
|
|
|
|
Misty:
Ban This Filth
Windows Media - 5.9 MB
|
|
|
Hold
your mouse pointer over an image for a
pop-up caption
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
She
doesn't like interruptions.
WAV
format |
32 KB
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Vampire
Vixens
|
|
|
|
2 |
Mummy
Raider
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
Satan's
School
|
|
|
|
4 |
|
Roxanna
|
|
 |
|
4
|
|
 |
|
9 |
|
DVD
Rating is for
entire set
|
|
|
•
"Action-packed" icon applies only to Mummy
Raider
• "Bare
Flesh" applies to all films
• "Extra Cheese"
applies to all films except Roxanna |
Ah,
Misty Mundae... You either love her or you just
don't quite understand what all the fuss is about.
Personally, I think she's adorable. My opinion
of most of her films I've seen to date is somewhat
less complimentary.
Seduction Cinema recently released
a three-DVD set bearing the name of this unlikely
sexploitation 'It Girl'. The titles contained
in the Misty Mundae Euro-Vixen Collection
are representative of neither her best movies
(Dr. Jekyll
& Mistress Hyde, The
Seduction Of Misty Mundae) nor her most popular
(Play-Mate Of The Apes,
Lord Of The G-Strings).
Instead, these are short films previously released
here in the U.S. but subsequently expanded with
new and/or additional footage to attain feature
length for home video and cable broadcast in Britain,
Europe and Japan. (Misty has recently begun to
make waves overseas as a B-movie starlet.) You
get two flicks on Disc 1, Vampire
Vixens and Mummy
Raider; Satan's School
For Lust and Roxanna
are given a disc to themselves. Plentiful extras
are spread across all three DVDs.
First
— and definitely
least — is Vampire
Vixens. The title
is somewhat misleading in that there's only one
vampire vixen in the movie, "Countess Dracoola"
(Tina Krause billed as "Mia
Copia", topless
in a K-Mart Halloween costume). Her servant is
an extremely dorky Renfield-type character named
Eugene (Zack Snygg) who's supposed to be funny
but isn't. (Unless you're maybe 8 years old, in
which case you shouldn't be watching softcore
lesbian sex flicks to begin with.) Misty's scenes
have absolutely nothing to do with the plot involving
Dracoola. She plays a college student experimenting
with lesbianism (when not having phone sex with
her boyfriend). To include her in the film,
Eugene occasionally spies on her and her galpals
through a window. The production
is as amateurish
and cheap as the acting
is atrocious, i.e., very. 100% of the so-called
comedy falls utterly flat. If not for Misty's
presence in a couple of stimulating scenes —
and a fairly hot one sans
Ms. Mundae featuring A.J. Khan and Katie Jordan
— I'd rate this sucker
100% Pure Dookie... It's really, really
bad.
The
second feature on Disc 1,
Mummy Raider, at
least tries to be as much fun as it is
bad — though still falls considerably short.
It's
just too tedious and cheap-looking for Misty to
save, and the expected lesbian groping is all
lumped together at the end instead of sprinkled
throughout. In its original form it's a 45-minute
Lara Croft send-up about Misty battling neo-Nazis
who plan to resurrect an ancient mummy and bring
about the Fourth Reich. Our heroine kills some
guards, rescues a
couple of hostages and gets it on with the other
ladies in the cast (Darian Caine and Ruby Larocca).
The whole thing supposedly takes place in a Berlin
warehouse, most of which looks like somebody's
garage. The mummy is actually fairly decent but
only appears briefly and doesn't really do much
of anything. Misty is tres cute 'n' sexy,
though, running around in tight leather hot pants
and halter top (when she isn't topless or buck
naked), sporting Pippi Longstalking braids and
packing a pair of semi-automatic pistols. For
the European cut reviewed here, 25 minutes or
so of footage from Lust
From The Mummy's Tomb is woven in as a
'flashback' — Misty
recalls her first encounter with a mummy, a rather
pathetic one with a giant bandaged boner.
Amusingly, she has a pronounced British accent
only in this 'flashback' sequence (since her character
in Lust From The Mummy's
Tomb is English). At the beginning and
end of the flick we're treated to the same slo-mo
shots of Misty looped over and over ad nauseum.
Satan's
School For Lust (Disc
2): Misty plays virginal Primula Cooper,
shipped off by her dad to the rather ominously
named Diablo School for Girls. Seems she's shown
up a little early for the new semester — there's
only one other student present on campus, her
weird, goth-garbed roommate (Ruby Larocca). Meanwhile,
the school's headmistress, Miss Beezle (Barbara
Joyce), sexually molests and then murders a nosy
reporter (Kelli Summers) investigating Diablo's
connection to a rash of missing girls. Primula
may well be the next student to mysteriously vanish...
Miss Beezle has set her up for a date with the
Devil (Darian Caine), who's already been visiting
the girl in her dreams.
Misty
Mundae in a schoolgirl uniform —
yeah! (Had she been born 25 years
earlier, she would've been perfect for those "Schulmädchen
Report" flicks made in Germany during the
1970s.) But there's more to it than that, as Satan's
School puts the emphasis on horror instead
of goofy comedy in between the lesbian canoodling.
(The script is still too ludicrous to be taken
even semiseriously.) Some moody lighting and photography
help establish an eerie vibe that's only occasionally
undermined by the cheapness of the production.
Additional scenes were shot to bring the film
up to feature length, the most significant being
Mundae and Caine's steamy tryst in the school
gym.
Roxanna
(Disc 3): Originally conceived/shot as a 36-minute
pseudo-remake of the 1970 Nick Philips grindhouse
flick of the same name, Roxanna
has been expanded to almost twice that length
by the inclusion of footage from another 're-imagined'
Seduction Cinema project, Pleasures
Of A Woman, and bookended with additional
scenes. The collation works much better here than
the attempts made with Vampire
Vixens and Mummy
Raider — it's
certainly less obvious. (Well, aside from the
fact that Darian Caine plays two different people
in the longer cut.) The revamped version presents
the Mundae footage as the first of two psychiatric
cases of "sexual repression" and drug
abuse reviewed by doctors (Kelli Summers, C.J.
Marino); the scenes from Pleasures,
featuring sexy Julian Wells as a pill-popping
woman with a serious shoe fetish, make up the
second.
In
Misty's portion of the expanded film she plays
the title character, a bored young woman whose
dull, dead-end relationship takes a dark twist
when her slacker boyfriend turns her on to cocaine
and the idea of sex with women. (He wants to watch
and participate, naturally.) After snorting some
blow and getting it on with a party girl (Katie
Jordan) for his voyeuristic enjoyment, Roxanna
finds that she can't stop thinking about lesbian
encounters... and getting more cocaine. Her descent
into addiction (to both nose candy and
Sapphic sex) is rapid, turning her from mousy
wallflower to raging coke whore faster than you
can lay out an Eight-Ball. The boyfriend is no
longer invited to the girlie show ("Shut
the fucking door, asshole!"); Roxanna
is more than willing to muff-dive on a lesbian
drug dealer (Caine) when she finds herself short
of cash. Tragedy inevitably
ensues.
Alas,
Misty drops out of sight for the remainder of
the (expanded) film as another 'case' is reviewed.
Super-horny Julian Wells introduces Darian Caine
(playing, as noted above, an entirely different
character) to the joys of pharmaceuticals and
lesbian love. Eventually Wells brings in another
woman (Syn DeVil) for a three-way. The story more
or less sputters to conclusion as the female doctors,
now thoroughly turned on, get busy with each other.
The end. (Summers, a very pretty blonde, now goes
by the name "Suzi Lorraine".)
While
I'd lean towards giving the 36-minute version
of Roxanna a film
score of '5' I can't rate the longer Euro Cut
quite as high. The grafted-on Pleasures
footage goes way overboard on the shoe
fixation (Caine's thigh-high boots are nice, though!)
and the acting in the wraparound segments is horrendous.
That said, Roxanna
— in whatever incarnation
it's presented —
marks an interesting departure from the sophomoric
spoofs E.I. is best known for. It's a commendable
stab at a genuinely serious erotic film,
something I've been happy to see the company attempt
again with such releases as Lust
For Dracula and Seduction
Of Misty Mundae. (It's a matter of personal
taste, of course, but I'd much rather watch erotica
inspired by the likes of Franco and Sarno than
low brow, Troma-style sex comedies.) Misty gets
a chance to play against type as she degenerates
into a foul-mouthed, coke-addled bitch. Also,
the psychedelic opening theme music is pretty
damn groovy — I'd
love to have it on CD. (Howza 'bout a "Best
of Seduction Cinema" soundtrack compilation
disc someday?)
|
|
|
|
The titles comprising the
Misty Mundae Euro-Vixen Collection are
full-frame, shot-on-video microbudget productions
but generally fare quite well within their niche.
Colors look fine; bugaboos such as artifacting
and pixelation are never a major problem. Audio
quality is likewise good except for certain passages
of dialog in Satan's School
For Lust which are almost too muffled to
discern because of poor live sound recording.
Disc
1's extras are two making-of featurettes, Vampire
Vixens: Behind The Scenes (18 min.) and Mummy
Raider: Behind The Scenes (34 min.). These
are 'fly-on-the-wall' camcorder pieces providing
an interesting view of low budget guerrilla filmmaking
in action. Of the two, the less structured (and
skin-filled) Mummy Raider featurette is
best.
Disc
2: Two scenes deleted from Satan's
School (one of them, a five minute sequence
that originally opened the film, quite frankly
needed to be snipped) plus
eight trailers for E.I. titles, all showcasing
Misty. (Hmmm. I detect a theme to this set...)
These include the forthcoming Chantal
and Sinful,
slated for DVD release sometime in 2006-7.
Disc
3: This is an entirely different animal than the
previously released stand-alone version, so if
you already own that disc I'd still hang on to
it. (For one thing, the original Nick Philips
film is not included here.) The 'Euro-Vixen'
edition of Roxanna
comes with an all-new audio commentary by
E.I. honcho Michael A. Raso, which serves as a
commentary for the set as a whole. Within
the framework of questions posed to him
by Seduction Cinema fans
on the internet, Raso discusses the Misty phenomenon,
the making of the original films and their subsequent
reconstruction/expansion, as well as many other
aspects of E.I. as both business and production
studio. A
short overview of Misty's work in a college filmmaking
group, Factory
2000: The Early Days, includes rare clips
of her in some rather bizarre 'strangling fetish'
shorts. (See her in a super-short pixie 'do!)
Skin To Scream (17 min.) is a fun promotional
video from 2003 touting Misty just as she was
breaking out as a bona fide cult movie star. A
cheeky cable TV profile of Misty from U.K.'s Channel
4 runs some three minutes. (Watch the video clip
linked above.) Misty Mundae: 2004 Interview
(15 min.) sees the busy young actress chatting
about her final E.I. productions (Bite
Me!, Shock-O-Rama,
Sinful) and desire to transition
to more mainstream fare. There's also a blooper
reel of outtakes from the 2003 featurette.
Rounding out the package,
an illustrated booklet of liner notes by Carl
T. Ford waxes enthusiastic on Misty's international
appeal and briefly comments on the four films
in the set.
11/22/05
|
•
Home
| Reviews | Top
•
|
