MONDO KEYHOLE (1966)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Though I've always thought the majority of director Jack Hill's films were good basic sexploitation fare, I never suspected he could make a film able to mythologize an aspect of sex, such as, in this case, the act of rape-- even though he may have written the famous BIG DOLL HOUSE line, "You get it up or I'll cut it off!" Possibly Hill's directorial collaboration with John (MERMAIDS OF TIBURON) Lamb provided some creative cross-pollination, though nothing in Lamb's oeuvre comes close to this mini-masterpiece.

Howard Thorne (Nick Moriarty) has no proximate reason to be a serial rapist, for at home waits his hot wife Vicki (Adele Rein, although the voice was that of Luana Anders), who's always more than willing. However, what Howard desires is the thrill of "man and woman locked together in violent combat," as he himself explains in a voice-over. In fact, he displays a somewhat muddled knowledge of Freud when he calls such combat "the classic scene, the primal conflict," which was probably Hill having fun with the hackneyed (even in 1966) Freudian phrase "primal scene." Howard turns an indifferent shoulder to his willing wife, even when she wears a Bardot wig. In a related scene, a secretary at his workplace who went out with him (possibly while he was still married) calls her boss a "cold fish."

Does Howard's propensity have anything to do with his work? After all, he does run a small company devoted to selling all sorts of sexy paraphernalia through the mail, such as dirty magazines and recordings of "torture sounds." Howard apparently also finances the filming of some cut-rate sexploitation movies (like the one Hill and Lamb are making, no less). But Howard doesn't get off when his pet director stages a scene in which a trio of performers (one male, two female) take turns flagellating one another. Howard particularly doesn't like being told that the guy being whipped deserves it because he's a rapist, because it suggests to Howard that this will be his fate. Howard *could* hypothetically also deal in paraphernalia that might reinforce his fantasies of the "natural" conflict between men and women, which he thinks of as a false mask created by "civilization." But Hill and Lamb don't show us any confirmation of male power-fantasies at Howard's workplace. Rather, even though Howard has successfully violated several women, all implicitly too embarrassed to go to the police, Howard is more or less aware that he's forged his own doom.

At one point Howard has a premonitory dream. He's sitting near a swimming pool in what he thinks of as "Okinawa," though he has no special associations with that Japanese island. Sexy Vicki is there in her bathing suit, and all the other people around the pool are also sexy girls in swimwear. Slowly Howard realizes that all the unnamed girls are his former victims, and they swarm upon him and try to drown him in the pool. Vicki alone comes to his defense, but the girls fend her off, so all that saves Howard is that he wakes up, though he still doesn't know why he dreamed of Okinawa.

The viewer finds out a little way down the line, after the serial criminal makes the first of two big mistakes. Instead of hewing to his successful practice of randomly stalking women on the street, he responds to a personals ad in a newspaper, suggesting that the person behind the ad may want rough sex. Haughty blonde Carol (Carol Baughman) meets him, and almost immediately rejects him. Howard not only rapes her, he whips a few times as well. But unlike Howard's other victims, Carol has her own resources for revenge. She calls upon an acquaintance, a female karate student billed as "The Crow" (Cathy Crowfoot), to gain vengeance. BTW, we see that the dojo of the Crow is labeled "Okinawate," meaning "Okinawan karate."

Howard's second mistake is that he tries to shit where he eats. Vicky plans to go to a big costume party for sexy models, implying that maybe she used to be one such, and she invites to their house a friend named Charlene. The moment Howard sees Charlene, he wants to rape her too, so he dons a Halloween mask and crashes the party. But at the costume bash, Vicky dons Charlene's wig, and because of her mask Howard doesn't recognize her when he enacts his little hobby. Suffice to say that Howard loses the support of the only woman who really loved him, and that puts him in the hands of his tormentors.

Apparently Carol and the Crow trail Howard, for when he exits the party, Howard, having learned nothing from his cock-up, sees the sexy Crow girl and stalks her as well. Crow beats him down with her karate and the two women drag him to a torture-den, much like the one in the movie-set, and the movie ends on the strong likelihood that they will inflict on him a hell of punishment for the remainder of his life.

In a side-plot, miserable Vicki actually gets deliverance at the hand of a "devil," a partygoer dressed as Dracula. In a comic Bela Lugosi accent, the guy conducts Vicki through the "five circles of hell" comprised by the wild sex-games of the costume party. Yet none of the partygoers are committing criminal acts, and indeed "Dracula" gives Vicki closure by offering to make real love to her. The party-people, like the film-director, have control of their sex-fantasies and don't go around committing assaults to get their jollies. 

According to a DVD review Jack Hill's commentary track called MONDO his "softcore art film." Whatever his motives in making the flick, Hill came closer to the aims of art in terms of associative freedom. The film satisfies my criteria for symbolic concrescence in assorted ways. The best such scene appears at the end, when we see the S&M figure of The Crow allowing her whip-stock to sway from side to side, in rhythm with the pendulum on a nearby grandfather clock, but a clock without hands. Hill and Lamb set up this conceit in the commentary of the egotistical smut-film director, whose project also contained a clock with no hands. According to the director, the clock is there to remind the victim of the torture that no time will truly pass while he is punished, just an endless ticking of a meaningless clock. 

Not symbolic, but a funny malapropism in subtitling: the learned Dracula-guest makes reference to a "Bridge of Sighs," by which he almost surely meant the Venetian Ponte del Sospiri. The subtitling has the fellow allude to a "bridge of size."