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
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She doesn't like interruptions.
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Buy it online
at Alternative Cinema
Review by
B. Lindsey
Vampire
Vixens
 
  2
Mummy Raider
 
  3  
Satan's
School
  
  4
Roxanna
    
4
     8  
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 (Lord of the G-Strings & Spiderbabe). 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 the 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

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