Mondo Macabro: Café Flesh (1982) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Mondo Macabro

Back in 2016 I had my first brush with the uncategorizable provocative neo-German Expressionist surrealist jaunt that is Stephen Sayadian and screenwriter/novelist Jerry Stahl’s 1989 remake of the iconic 1920 silent psychological horror epic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  Shortened to Dr. Caligari and given a limited theatrical release before being forgotten, it was an outlandish outrageous neon-fluorescent yet dark and vast oddity that initially fell on deaf ears before gaining traction over the years as a cult midnight movie.  While Mondo Macabro revived that film on 4K UHD after years of being a tape/laserdisc only item for lucky finders, another far bigger midnight movie sensation from the same filmmaker in 1982 gradually started to resurface in the modern cult cinephile landscape with Stephen Sayadian’s ultra-cool-and-hip dystopian pornographic science-fiction epic Café Flesh. 

 
Made under the pseudonym Rinse Dream while screenwriter Jerry Stahl worked under the pseudonym Herbert W. Day with original synthesized jazz music by notable music producer Mitchell Froom who also later scored Dr. Caligari, Café Flesh is like if David Lynch or Richard Elfman set out to make a hardcore film with artistic merit.  The result is something completely uncategorizable that’s closer to outlaw cinema than a stag film.  Set in a post-apocalyptic future following the aftermath of World War III, survivors of the nuclear holocaust have evolved into two kinds of people: sex Negatives who die if they try to copulate and sex Positives who put on a burlesque live theater show for the Negatives in a fallout-shelter made into a club called Café Flesh.  Hosted by Max Melodramatic (Andy Nichols) in a wide variety of costumes and stunningly realized artificial set pieces including but not limited to an oil field littered with industrial wells while a sex scene involving a man wearing a pencil head for a mask unfolds next to a nude typist. 

 
In between each sex scene, created with outlandish Dadaist subversive glee designed to undermine the proceedings and corner viewers into thinking twice about the money shots in this frankly anti-porn exercise, a narrative involving a married couple Lana (Michelle Bauer) and her husband Nick (Paul McGibboney) who become regular attendees of the café.  After brushing with the clubs owner Moms (Darcy Nychols) who runs a strict ship with the café, it begins to emerge Lana in fact is a sex Positive who is hiding her arousal at the situations playing out onstage to avoid hurting Nick’s feelings.  From here, we cross paths with a wide variety of wild setups including a sex scene staged with striped characters wearing telephones for masks while six tuxedoed arms sticking out of the floor snap their fingers in unison to Mitchell Froom’s poppy dark jazz tracks which got a standalone album release under the name The Key of Cool.

 
Made for $90,000 and lensed on 16mm in ten days by future Dungeons & Dragons second unit director Francis Delia under the pseudonym F.X. Pope, Café Flesh was released in two versions, one in its original X rated form running seventy-six minutes while a toned-down R-rated cut was prepared as well.  While it didn’t take off with the porn crowd given how aggressively strange and subversive it was at all times including but not limited to a strikingly dark if not apocalyptic aesthete, it quickly evolved into one of the few porn film productions to tap into the midnight movie market as a real film and not just mere smut.  Showing a lot on its mind from then-Reagan era fears of nuclear war, the outbreak of the AIDS virus and nostalgia for the 1950s linking it with the same excoriating impulse driving Lynch’s regard for small town Americana, Café Flesh by design is a chilly, often gritty sardonic smashing of the barriers dividing mainstream cinema and artistic pornography with neither audience completely able to assess how to take it.

 
A hot VHS tape and laserdisc seller for many years being among a handful of adult films that pushed into actual film discourse rather than titillation, for decades Café Flesh was on a 1999 interlaced DVD which diluted the still-striking power of Sayadian’s wholly unique imagery.  The kind of film where he had almost total creative control as long as he still provided the money shots, something he figured out a way to subvert as well, it eventually became a labor of love passion project for boutique label Mondo Macabro when demand for the film shot up following their UHD release of Dr. Caligari.  In 2025, following extensive efforts to rebuild the film into a watchable print stemming from a wide variety of sources ranging from a single surviving 35mm print held at the UCLA Film and Television Archive to videotape elements to fill in the missing gaps, the long awaited 4K UHD disc release of Café Flesh was finally unveiled in a lavish new edition jam packed with extras and a booklet of original essays.

 
Offered in two aspect ratios, open matted 1.33:1 and masked theatrical 1.85:1, to be able to watch this film at all with picture quality this pristine and crisp is a movie miracle the powers that be incredibly pulled off.  While the occasional use of tape sources is much more noticeable in the 1.85:1 version, both offer unique visual experiences for the seasoned as well as uninitiated viewers.  Early buyers were treated to a collectible slipcover that’s among the best and most creative ever done by the boutique label and filmgoers unaware of this Tim Burton by way of F.W. Murnau artist working in theatrical poster art for The Funhouse and The Fog as well as occasional music videos now have a chance to deep dive into a still anarchic, still transgressive, still brilliant mind blower of outlaw cinema.  

Pornographic or not, nothing even remotely like Café Flesh was ever attempted again except maybe by Sayadian when he ventured into the videotape field.  Dr. Caligari represented an earnest attempt to break away from the hardcore elements of Café Flesh though as a cinephile into provocative boundary pushing surrealism I still lean towards this intentionally toxic poison pill to pornography to create a wholly new, extraterrestrial kind of movie that’s still flying under the radars of many adventurous cinephiles.  I can see a double-bill of this and the equally uncategorizable sex-laden sci-fi provocation Liquid Sky completely melting human brain matter out of the ears.

--Andrew Kotwicki