March Watchlist

My current movie watchlist is over 800 titles long. In an effort to stay organized and chip away at the never ending sea of titles, each month on the 1st I pick 20-40 from my giant list and put them into a monthly list. I then make it my goal for that month to watch as many of those 20-40 films as possible.

For the sake of fun, sometimes I will curate the monthly list by a vibe or theme I make up. To celebrate my departure from TikTok content creation I thought I could watch a collection of movies that would have been difficult for me to discuss on the platform due to their subject matter. So March is the month of softcore, sexploitation and shock value.

29 needles is the film on my March list I am the most excited about. Released in 2019 and labeled as both body and folk horror, the vague synopsis describes a man named Francis who uses pain to hold back his “inner demons”. The trailer looks terrible, by no means does the film appear to be made well or even very good. The sound design is poor, the score is ill fitting tonally and there are random clips of someone in an animal mask–a hallmark for horror films that aren’t very confident in themselves or their stories. But this is the kind of trash I like, needles and blood and fetishism. I was not able to track this down online at all, so I did buy a blu ray on eBay.

Shockingly I have never seen Party Monster (2003), but it seems right up my alley. Revolving around club kids in the late 80s and early 90s, Party Monster features bright candy hues, glitter and beautifully caked on foundation. Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green and Chloë Sevigny are all in the movie and the idea of them playing club kids is very intriguing to me. The whole ordeal is also based on a the true story of Michael Alig who was a club promoter and “ringleader” of the club kids. In 1996 him and his roommate killed another young adult in the scene over a drug dispute.

I must confess that I did already watch this one after midnight on March 1st (I wanted to get an early start on the list). Come With Me My Love is a 1976 adult film by Doris Wishman, who was one of the most prominent female directors in the nudie and sexploitation film movements. She is often cited for her use of mild but suggestive language and cutaway scenes of unrelated images in her movies to allude to erotism during times of censorship in film. A couple years ago I got to see a screening of her film Indecent Desires and thought it was one of the strangest and most delightful things i’d ever seen. I was drawn to this film of hers–or rather porno–because of the premise; a man in the 1920s catches his best friend and wife having sex, promptly killing them both then himself. Fast forward to the 70s, a single young woman moves in and the man’s ghost still lingers in the apartment, making love to her nightly in her sleep. This is just straight up porn, but I did expect some story. Unfortunately it was just hetero sex every 5 minutes with various configurations of characters. Now i’m not one of those gay people that doesn’t like or cannot stand straight sex in film, i’m not a baby. But the sex in this movie was just particularly ugly and unsightly, and I usually love the full bush 70s style sex in movies. Some of the lows included no attempt to dress the 1920s characters at the start of the film in any semblance of period accurate clothing, the high was seeing Annie Sprinkle–a famous pornographer, feminist, queer activist and sexologist–as one of the performers and engaging in the only strictly girl on girl scene in the film. Despite my distaste for it I did sit through the entire cum soaked 74 minute runtime on the only website I could find the film on in its entirety; Xvideos.

Corpse Mania is a Chinese exploitation crime thriller from 1981, and a film that i’ve been meaning to watch for the last year. It usually ended up low priority on previous lists but i’m determined to make time for it this month. I’ve only read the short one sentence synopsis online, but that was enough to pique my interest. It’s about a necrophilic serial killer who is targeting sex workers at a brothel. The cover features a masked man and what looks to be a decaying corpse, more than enough to get me to watch anything. In the way of exploitation films or any films featuring scary sexuality and murder, I mainly have see American, French or Japanese films. I’m very curious to see what stylistic differences might be present for a film of this nature made/set in Hong Kong.

Green Porno is a 24 minute offering from 2008 featuring a series of short films inspired by the way different insects mate or have sex. On Letterboxd Isabella Rossellini is on both the cover and banner in different insect costumes, so I’m assuming she plays an insect in all the shorts included in the film. I love bugs and sex movies so this is a perfect intersection for me.

Teruo Ishii is the director of Shogun’s Joy of Torture, I film a rather enjoyed. After researching him I came across Horrors of Malformed Men which claims to be “the most notorious Japanese horror film ever made” and it’s said to have been banned for decades. The last time I tried introducing the internet to his films everyone got really mad at me for promoting “torture porn” and exploitative films or something gay like that. I like exploitation films (which are made on purpose to be exploitative on….purpose), that’s like my whole thing. Don’t come to the sleazy movie factory and then get mad when there are sleazy movies there. Made in 1969, Horrors of Malformed Men is about a medical student getting lured to an odd and mysterious island after escaping an asylum. An island ruled by a mad scientist and filled with “malformed men” running rampant. The banner on Letterboxd features a bunch of people in silver body paint so, color me intrigued.

I’m huge into nunsploitation. It started with an almost unreasonable obsession with The Nun, from the conjuring universe and was exacerbated after seeing The Devils by Ken Russell. No one is strong enough to see a gaggle of nuns grinding bare pussy on a life-size wooden crucified Jesus without coming away a changed woman. Many exploitation films claim to be the craziest or filthiest, and Images in a Convent from 1979 is no exception. The tagline is “THE MOST EXPLICIT NUNSPLOITATION FILM EVER MADE”. The plot is pretty formulaic for the sub-genre; nuns pleasuring themselves and each other within the confines of convent walls, and the ante is upped when a strange man arrives and brings with him the presence of Satan. I’m interested to see if it really is all that explicit.

Mondo Trasho is one of the only John Waters films I haven’t seen, and as a self proclaim super fan I need to remedy that soon. Coming out in 1969 just one year prior to Multiple Maniacs (one of my favorites), Mondo Trasho show us the bizarre day two people experience before a hit and run occurs, where one subject is perpetrator and the other is her victim. Leading up to the collision the subjects experienced visions of the Virgin Mary, being sexually assaulted by a foot fetishist and receiving a strange operation–to name just a few happenings. John Waters is too sleazy for some, I do hold negative opinions about the queer pearl clutchers who can’t find the humor in something like Divine being sexually assaulted by a giant lobster puppet in Multiple Maniacs. I don’t see the value in moralizing something not only fictional but also so absurd, intentionally ridiculous and slapstick. Come on…it’s funny. Nonetheless I think John Waters is a genius and a gift to us all.

Cruising, the 1980 Al Pacino movie where he plays a detective infiltrating the gay S&M scene-is one of the most epic movies ever. But it wasn’t written in an extremely homoerotic or particularly dark fashion (though there was lots of potential), so it leaves something to be desired. A void only another gay sexy crime thriller can fill, Hard from 1998 seems like just the thing to satisfy that craving. A cop and his partner hunt down a serial killer who targets gay male sex workers. But the cop harbors a secret; he is closeted. I couldn’t find this anywhere online, even my usual sketchy streaming platforms. Thankfully I live in a beautiful movie loving city and my local dvd and video rental establishment with a huge catalog happens to have a copy of this.

Takashi Miike is the director of one of my favorite films of all time; Audition. I’ve explored his films a bit more and seen One Missed Call, The Happiness of the Katakuris and Ichi the Killer-all of which I have enjoyed. But Visitor Q from 2001 is a strange film that keeps popping up for me. In forum discussions, disturbing movie lists, you name it. I’ve heard of the film’s depictions of heavy themes such as drug use, incest and the like. I for one never shy away from the exploration of taboo subject matter in movies, and I don’t think it’s necessary in 95% of cases to moralize movies, and i’m lowballing it at 95%. Plus, I hear it’s really good. It revolves around a dysfunctional family riddled with drug abuse and violence, one day a stranger named “Q” enters their lives, changing them for the better.

I’m sure many of us have heard stories of the host clubs in Japan. Clubs with female hosts who cater to a male customer base or clubs with male hosts who cater to a female customer base. The role of these hosts is to use their charm and physical attractiveness to get clients to spend a lot of money to hang out with them. The clubs will usually be restaurant style and encourage patrons to continue buying drinks, tipping hosts and ordering food to maximize time spent with their favorite host. Hosts will even exchange contact information with customers and reach out frequently, encouraging them to return to the club. Hosts will flirt and provide engaging conversation. Shinjuku Boys is a 1995 documentary about a club in Shinjuku where all the hosts were trans men (some may have been butch or under the transmasc umbrella). Many of the hosts felt that because of their identities they couldn’t make a living anywhere else. The synopsis notes that many of the women visiting the club had relationships with the hosts but never publicly due to societal pressures to marry cis men and have children. I don’t see a ton of queer films or docs that focus on trans men or trans masculine identities so lately i’ve been seeking them out. As someone with many trans people in my life that I love and adore I think it’s important to seek out that representation and share it when I find it.

On that subject, Linda/Les & Annie is another queer documentary focusing on a trans man. I will give the disclaimer that it was made in 1989 and the person who recommended it to me said not all of it aged well, i’m not sure if that’s in reference to any terms used or sentiments shared. I think with queer media we can acknowledge how understanding, spread of information and language all change and evolve and grow. But I think queer history is important and we need not write off older pieces of media because we judge them with a modern lens. It’s all important, and young queer people need to be better at contextualizing that. This 32 minute film is unique in its informative style. Les Nichols was one of the first (if not the first) trans man to get a certain type of bottom surgery called a Metoidioplasty. This involves creating a penis about 4-6 cm in length using the often hormone enlarged clitoris, and usually maintaining the rest of the vaginal anatomy. This is a good option for some due to its lower cost and less invasive nature compared to a phalloplasty. This procedure enables someone to urinate standing up as well. The film refers to Les’s anatomy as “dual genitalia” and includes medical photos as well as interviews. The centerpiece of the film is a very intimate look at Les’s first night trying out his new genitalia with Annie Sprinkle, yeah, they have sex for real. I mentioned Annie earlier in this article but she has contributed a lot of queer positive and pro feminist sex media to the world, and is queer herself. She married her partner in 2007 and they are still together. This is a great film to me because I think seeing real trans sex like this is hard to come by outside of a fetishized porn category. I imagine what it might’ve been like pre-reddit forum days, if a person wanted this information and didn’t know anybody else who was trans. How do you know how things work, how they felt to experience or even what they look like? This is an important watch for any queer film lovers/ seekers, trans people or anybody like me who loves them.

This has been described as a love letter to fetish porn. It centers around the rise and the fall of a gay porn studio called “Palm Drive Video”, but in a broader sense explores how the couple who ran it helped battle the aids crisis through the promotion of kinky sex. There have been many docs, essays and wonderful interviews discussing how intimately connected things like the gay leather scene or fetish play were to the aids crisis. When touch and intimacy felt like rolling the dice, or a death sentence; new ways to play and connect were popularized.

I actually don’t know too much about this film, just that it is 16 minutes long and “examines the human relationship with food by showing breakfast, lunch, and dinner”. I’m very interested in explorations of food in relation to human connectivity, emotions, and behavior. That’s why Tampopo is one of my favorite films. It looks like this was primarily made in Czechoslovakia and the UK and has no dialogue. Should be an interesting 16 minutes!

-My full March watchlist can be found on my Letterboxd