The opening scene is offensive enough: An ancient ritual deep in Africa where a primitive tribe practices bestiality. They tie a woman to a mystical tree where a black panther shows up in the middle of the night to have sex with her.
This is pretty obvious stuff for a film made in 1982.
They’re much more subtle and sophisticated now, but still peddling the same old crap.
I’m thinking these are the same primitive African tribes who had sex with monkeys as a matter of common practice and started the whole AIDS epidemic, which now inflicts 30 million people world wide, overwhelming every health care system in the world and with them, civilization herself. The primitive tribes control Hollywood now.
The next sequence of scenes takes place in New Orleans, a city where all things are possible and accepted. In so doing, we are subconsciously impelled to accept another vile act: Brother-sister lust, probably leading to incest. It’s okay so long as it’s between two beautiful people, is the message here.
In the next sequence, we see a prostitute walking the streets of New Orleans and stepping into a room to service a John (who turns out to be a black panther, that assaults her and injures her leg). Poor whore.
We pity her and all who ply her trade. A brief glimpse of bare breasts quells any qualms and, by emphasizing her vulnerability, overwhelms us with sympathy for the prostitute and her little daughter at home needing a baby sitter while her Mom fucks strangers for a living.
In the next scene, the New Orleans zoo people arrive and trap the beautiful black panther in the hotel room and shoot it up with a tranquilizer gun, sedating it. The room has bars on the windows. We pity the trapped wild animal.
We hate the powerful man who comes to bring the panther to the zoo where the animal — and the man it really is — to be locked away behind bars forever. We hate the cruelty of man. We yearn for the animal to be free so the man inside can be free, to go home and to have incestuous sex with his own beautiful sister in the city of sin.
All this takes place in less time that it took you to read these few words. Our whole spiritual ethos is turned topsy turvey by imposing vile animalistic acts in a breathtaking landscape — first of beautiful Saharan sand then of beautiful Hollywood actors — that make it all seem oh so okay.
What a terrible injustice, that man has been forced by hateful religion to lock away our primitive sexual desire to pleasure beautiful animals and beautiful people, at will. Gays have every right to indiscriminate sex; bisexuals to indiscriminate sex with either sex.
Who cares about the gruesome genetic consequences of incestuous progeny? It’s the here and now that counts. And besides, if you use a condom it’s quite okay.
Hollywood is about forever “seeking new dramatic situations.” A drama that doesn’t violate some fundamental premise of civilization isn’t fit to be made. This film violates several, and thus the all star cast it was able to attract — actors, actresses, director, producers.
In the thirty years since this film was made they have all become superstars. Of course, they proved early on they have what it takes to make it in Tinsletown — no soul whatsoever and an abject hatred of civilization itself. Kudos to them all.
These days, after fifty years of denigrating every civilized virtue of man, I’m waiting for the day when a film that espouses conservative values is so breathtakingly radical that it introduces a “dramatic new situation” for Hollywood to deem worthy of the silver screen.
