Don’t Look Now…

…but something horrible is sneaking up on you while you are busy fucking:

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Me Me Lai Bleg

One of the first rather nasty movies I got by accident as a teenager came from a very straightlaced video store in my very straightlaced Midwestern home town. (I grew up somewhere that was nowhere near as remote as where Bacchus grew up but still, Paris it wasn’t.) The video sleeve (we’re talking the heyday of VHS here) was only mildly lurid looking. The title was The Emerald Jungle. I half suspect my local video store proprietors may have confused with with The Emerald Forest which, by comparison, was a rather innocuous adventure movie.

Innocuous this video release was anything but. It was an off-the-deep-end movie, filled with gratuitous sadism, nudity, religious insanity, and rape. But these almost seem like a sideshow compared with the central theme of the film, which was cannibalism. Yes, I had in fact stumbled on an obscure U.S. release of Umberto Lenzi’s Mangiati Vivi. (Literally, “Eaten Alive.”) A core member of the canon of the Italian jungle cannibal genre, in which pretty much everything goes, as long as it’s exploitative.

(Subsidiary bleg: if anyone knows why, exactly, the Italian film industry produced not just a few movies, but a whole damn genre devoted to jungle cannibalism, I’d love to know why.)

One actress in Mangiati Viv I’ve had in my head, Me Me Lai. She shows up in a few jungle cannibal movies, often in fairly bizarre scenes. For example here she plays a young widow, forced by the leader of a religious cult to copulate with her late husband’s three brothers, “in order that the marital bond should be broken, leaving her free to marry again.” (No, I don’t understand it either.)

In the end, her character is captured by cannibals, killed and eaten. Don’t watch that scene anywhere near lunch.

In a similar movie, Ultimo Mondo Cannibale, this time directed by Ruggerio Deodata , she plays a native girl abused and dominated by oil prospector Robert Harper, played by the Italian actor perhaps best known for dubbing Darth Vader into Italian.

In the end, her character is captured by cannibals, killed and eaten. These jungle cannibal movies do get repetitive. In fact, I’m pretty sure the footage was taken directly from a different jungle cannibal movie.

Of course, Me Me Lai didn’t just appear in jungle cannibal movies. I remember her also from a movie called Crucible of Terror. There is, I suppose, a certain ASFR appeal here, as her character, instead of being killed and eaten, is made into a bronze statue in about the most horrible way you can imagine.

But unless you’re really into Me Me Lai or ASFR completism, I’d give this one a miss if I were you. In the hands of an Umberto Lenzi or better yet, a Lucio Fulci this one might have pivoted off its premise and been a minor horror classic. As it is, one might as well just called it Crucible of Terribleness. Unlike many of the movies that it has been my pleasure to blog about here, this one really lacks the courage of its demented convictions.

But I still think about Me Me Lai. She must have been a real trooper, especially in those jungle movies, where she’s naked or nearly so for much of her screen time, and acting amidst heat and humidity and insects — I’ve been to some of the places where her movies were shot, and believe me, it can be exhausting just to take a walk there. She comes across as quite the professional.

But little seems to be available about her, except that she was born in 1952 to an English father and a Burmese mother. After appearing in Lars von Trier’s The Element of Crime in 1984, she stopped acting and, as far as I can tell, disappeared from the public eye.

Hence the bleg: does anyone know what became of her?

Pleasurable Surprises

It is a privilege and pleasure to be able to commend to the attention of ErosBlog’s readers the new anthology Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories edited by Susie Bright. There are fifteen short stories here, sharing an ostensible thematic link to the gothic or at least the supernatural. There is an exquisite erotic idea at the core of every one of these stories, and that makes this slim volume a delight to peruse. If your imagination runs to the gothic, you will find plenty to fire it here.

I might quibble a bit with the characterization of the entries in this anthology as “dark erotic stories.” Some of them are a little dark, although if your idea of a dark story is something like “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and your idea of the gothic is exemplified by the sort of thing seen in my last post but this one you might find many of these stories actually somewhat on the cheerful, even somewhat uplifting side. That’s certainly what I felt at the end of Tsaurah Litzky’s “The Witch of Jerome Avenue.” (Perhaps I am too much in love with that story’s New York setting for my own good, and there also might be something in the final paragraph that I don’t fully understand.) Even Greg Boyd’s “Pandora’s Other Box,” which might be read as a cautionary tale of being careful what you go looking for in a strange city, hardly left me feeling terribly disturbed. There was more pleasure than horror for me here; the erotic certainly dominated the darkness, although the longest story in the anthology, Francesca Lia Block’s “Lay Me out Softly,” certainly did have its share of actual chills.

In a way it’s tricky to write too convincingly about an anthology like Bitten because for me what this sort of literature belongs to is a larger genre that for lack of a better term might be called the literature of extraordinary surprise. The protagonists of these stories are off encountering not just what they didn’t know was, but what they probably never imagined could be, until they encountered it. But unlike the stories of H.P. Lovecraft (whose stories might also be said to belong to the same overgenre, but who is perhaps the most anti-erotic writer there is, at least until Michel Houellebecq picked up his pen) the surprise isn’t horror, but pleasure. This is a good literary trick to pull off, and it’s pulled off here quite well. However, precisely because these stories do belong to a literature of surprise, it is also very difficult to write about them without generating spoilers, and I don’t want to do that to ErosBlog’s readers. So instead, all I can urge them to do is go buy the book.

I can, however, offer one sentence from my favorite story in the collection, Ernie Conrick’s “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan,” a tale which, in addition to being a very clever anatomizing of what lurks behind the exteriors of married middle-aged, middle-class professionals, expresses one of the most philosophically profound sentiments I’ve seen in a naughty story. (I might be biased in thinking so, because at roughly the same time I was reading Bitten I was also reading Ben Bradley’s Well-Being and Death. You can get a flavor of the latter by seeing Bradley’s “diavlog of death” with Roy Sorenson.) I think I can offer it without its being a spoiler:

The tragedy of existence, he mused, is not that it lasts too short a time but that it lasts too long.

Possibly wrong, although sometimes the opposite of a deep truth might also be a deep truth.

For bonus self-discovery points, I suggest reading the whole anthology and asking which stories moved you the most. You can then have a better sense of what kind of weirdo you are. (Dear reader, kindly do not ask me not to think that you aren’t some kind of weirdo.) And do also give Susie Bright’s recent reflections on supernatural erotica a look-in as well.