marrow #18 | posted 15 may 2025
horror movie that's a director recording audio commentary over his late 70s erotic drama (and its behind the scenes footage). no 4.7 imdb rating could keep me away from it. it should have though.
i was not gonna make this review into a whole separate post at first; i wrote my fuming overlong paragraph for the may artlog and was gonna leave it at that (plus probably ranting at a friend on the first possible opportunity). but i kept thinking about this damn movie and getting more and more mad at it, so i figured it was best to make something more coherent.
here's a summary: director stanley durall has been invited to record audio commentary for the bluray release of his first movie, god's lonely woman, an erotic drama from around 1978 [1] that was banned at the time. two things of note: 1) we're not watching that bluray, but his live recording, and 2) this is not the movie itself, but a new cut that also mixes in behind the scenes footage. i think both these choices are bad, but they turn out to be the least offensive choices of the whole thing.
retelling nested narratives is a pain, but during the making of the movie durall has allowed and perpetuated abuse (sexual, physical and psychological) of the two actresses, isabella (the protagonist) and candice (14 years old), much of it documented in the movie itself, leading to both of their suicides (candice's on set, during filming, and isabella's at some point afterwards). we the audience (but not durall himself) get jumpscare-y visions of isabella and candice, which i'll be calling their grudges. in the present, he's locked in that booth, and later hears weird creepy noises until isabella's grudge starts talking, traps him in the movie, and gets her revenge by cutting his dick vertically with scissors.
you'll notice i haven't talked about what god's lonely woman is about. we'll get to that.
now here's the thing. that summary doesn't sound that bad. what it omits however is the fact this movie lacks any sense of subtlety or restraint whatsoever, to its extreme detriment. durall isn't just an egocentric, racist and sexist man who terrorized the actors he worked with, he's an extreme caricature of that, from minute one. the cartoonishness of his speech immediately detracts from the movie's horror, getting into bad parody territory, and it only gets worse from there.
the bulk of the film is a gauntlet of escalating violence, much of it as part of god's lonely woman's plot as that movie becomes durall's vendetta against isabella. here's the main beats: candice (again, 14 years old, an age that's not entirely implausible but in context becomes just another instance of over-the-top evil), after being sexually abused by the cinematographer, leaves the production, and later hangs herself from a tree during filming (something initially hidden from isabella). isabella is drugged with lsd after refusing to act on shrooms for a dream sequence (btw she's pregnant). a black actor, isabella's friend, speaks out against what's happening on set and gets blacklisted from the film industry. isabella, a vegetarian, is force fed meat by an actor, who harasses her afterwards (bts footage). she's drowned by another actor. she's raped by the two actors [2], in what was originally the "controversial" ending of the movie, and which is mercifully cut from what we're watching (though imo it's too little too late after the aforementioned force feeding and drowning).
and as for the jumpscares that vaguely break the movie up, they are very oddly spaced and placed, being more frequent at the start instead of at the end, and do not build tension. in some ways they feel almost like a replacement for giving these women agency: it's a reminder of their anger, that this man did effectively murder them, but it's just not that effective when the director is basically boasting about what he's done without even trying to hide or euphemize it.
that's the thing: both with what's being depicted and the commentary, the movie consistently aims for shock value and while i suppose it does achieve that, it's such a juvenile take on the abuse that goes on in the movie industry. because while everything that happens here is plausible separately, the sheer pace and amount of it is absurd, and doesn't make for good horror. there's no sense of creeping dread as small actions compound and snowball into an increasingly horrifying whole — not when one of the very first things we learn is the sexual abuse and subsequent suicide of a teenager.
moreover, the movie being widely panned at the time and the director very obviously not taken seriously by the industry, it fucks up a very basic thing about the way these things happen in real life. abusive directors are so often auteurs!! half the issue is that they're "too important" to be held accountable!! durall thinks he's an auteur and it's funny (?) that he's very obviously not, and it just doesn't work that well.
and my second and equally important qualm with a little more flesh: we never get any sense of what god's lonely woman was about. worse than that, the footage isn't even good! not like "oh this was a bad movie even at the time" (although it was, textually), because i've watched a million bad 70s movies. i mean it's not convincing in the slightest. i have seen zero budget youtube skits that look more like a movie than this.
for starters, it does not look like the 70s in any way, shape or form. the costumes are dreadful: an actor wears cropped skinny jeans, the bellbottoms look terribly cheap, facial and chest hair is all wrong. there's a single actual set, a house, and it doesn't look too good either. despite a half hearted attempt at vaseline soft focus that comes across more as a vignette blur post-processing effect, it does not look like it was shot on film.
but also it does not look like a movie. half the scenes are are just insanely long static shots of people talking (except you can't hear them of course). it's supposed to be an erotic drama but there's no erotism. it's not that it misses the mark and ends up unsexy, but that it doesn't even try to have erotism, a choice that simply boggles the mind. why make a movie about an erotic drama if you're not interested in erotism? in fact, why make a movie about a movie if you're not interested in filmmaking at all?
sam ashurst is a podcaster and it shows: he was so focused on the audio commentary that the footage becomes secondary to it. scenes last 10 entire uncut minutes because they're just something for you to look at while listening to it, like an aquarium. and i cannot stress enough how uninterested he is in his fake movie. the titular god's lonely woman moves through a series of allegorical encounters with figures such as temptation and gluttony (yeah i forgot the others already), that she dismisses, as the devil tries to corrupt her or something. it's pretty unclear and while that's not an awful premise for an erotic movie, you can't make a 75 minute feature out of premise alone.
at times, this movie feels uncannily like a ripoff of immortality, despite coming out a whole two years earlier [3]. the only reason why i'm not angrier at it is that a similar premise has been executed masterfully, so i don't feel orphaned.
the game not only has great attention to detail, making the movies look accurate to their time periods, but each of the three movies has a coherent story, even though we don't get all of it. ten random minutes of ambrosio will tell you more about the movie than the entirety of a little more flesh, and it's not because of the dialogue, but because immortality is actually interested in movies and their production. the themes of sexism (particularly in the movie industry) are present and much better executed, and marissa being a properly fleshed out character (and de facto protagonist) makes it so she's not a mere vessel of violence. and it even has something similar to the grudges. so yeah. go play that game if any of this shitty movie sounded appealing [4].
[1]: dated through a reference to watching eraserhead (1977) the year prior. in his voiceover, durall makes several references to other films and directors (especially auteurs) so we know sam ashurst (the writer and director of this movie) has in fact watched other movies before, making the film-within-a-film's quality bizarre. but i'm getting ahead of myself.
[2]: of note: it's emphasized both of these actors are just some guys he found (and highly praises!), one of them being previously unhoused after escaping jail for murdering his wife, the other a drug dealer. i bring this up because not only is it another instance of cartoonish evil, it feels quite off putting how the movie seems to hold the position that these men's sadism is linked to their unhoused and addict statuses, which is uh. not good.
[3]: funny enough the game was announced just three months after this movie. i have no reason to believe it's not coincidence but it's a funny one. i could check if someone got me the design works book... bats my lashes cutely. ← the book seems to be in some sort of development hell and doesn't even have an updated shipping date yet.
[4]: and if you still want to watch a little more flesh, it doesn't seem to be streaming online anywhere, but you can buy the bluray or find it on ok.ru. there are no captions for it whatsoever though.