The plot line for Café Flesh is as follows:
"In the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse, 99% of the survivors are Sex Negatives - they become violently ill if they attempt it. The minority Sex Positives engage in carnal theater for the entertainment of the Negatives at Cafe Flesh. Everyone is excited about the arrival at the club of the famous Positive Johnny Rico, and one Negative woman is beginning to question her negativeness as she and her boyfriend grow more distant from each other."
Or if you prefer:
"In the future, humans are divided into Sex Negatives and Sex Positives. The negatives get sick if they have sex so they go to Cafe Flesh to see positives who are forced to perform on stage for the negatives. Lana is a positive who everyone thinks is a negative and she must decide whether to come clean or not."
What piqued my interest is not that it is pornographic (no, seriously) but that it looked like a 1980s New Wave/Art Deco explosion. The post-apocalyptic/dystopia netherworld aspect was also very intriguing (it's Blade Runner meets A Clockwork Orange meets Tit Banging Fever). Also, it didn't hurt that it starred the late great Kevin James but more on him later.
You get the idea. What's nice about the movie is that the women are actually attractive (attractive like they look like real people, real attractive people, and not melting candles with tits). The downside is that the body hair on both sexes makes you queasy after awhile. I have absolutely no idea what it was about having a wizard's beard for a muff that turned people on but it is just so foul and greasy. I actually fast forwarded pretty much all the sex scenes (no, seriously) because they were too gross but I give kudos to the direction of the sex scenes. Unusual and pretty cool, you just have to try (and most likely fail) to get past the extreme forestation.
And now for Kevin James...
Here he is in Café Flesh as Johnny Rico, the sexiest and the coolest of the Positives.
That's the 80s for you. Dude fucks with sunglasses ON! Remember that episode of Ready or Not where Busy's brother calls into that sex radio show to talk about how his weirdo girlfriend only wants to fuck him when he's wearing a beret and sunglasses? I remember thinking that shit was so ridiculous (and it is) but I kind of get it now. Get rid of the beret, keep the Raybans and that's hot. It's like fucking someone who Bret Easton Ellis created.
Later in 1982 he made Taboo II, a sequel to the infamous film where everyone, ahem, keeps it in the family. While fucking your mom, dad, brother, sister, and uncle is decidedly unhot, Kevin James definitely is. Look at how he goes from hot dude boning a chick while wearing sunglasses to button-up shirted, boy-next-door (his character's name is Junior!!) who tries and tries and eventually succeeds in fucking his sister. I really don't want to explain how I know all this (please don't make me) but yeah, I heart me some Kevin James and even though he was definitely in need of a down there trim, I take it upon myself to find and consequently acquire the movies that he is in. But they have to be MOVIES.
Back in the day porn used to tell stories. You would go to a theater and watch people get their rocks off in between a "compelling" storyline and there was presence of an actual budget. Porn stars made a small handful of movies a year, usually, but now it's like this: Sasha Grey made 51 films in 2008 (I'm not sure how many are compilations, repeats, whatever but I'm sure not that many). Now no offense meant to her at all, that girl rules. I have met her in person, shared a small scene with her in a non-pornographic film (Smash Cut - I speak, I have one line, wheeee!) and had a small back and forth with her on Myspace (have you seen her in The Girlfriend Experience? Great, great film), but these days you get a room, a beach-front property, a van, whatever, some "actors", a camera, and you've got your movie. Home video took a giant shit on the porn industry, man. Now I sound like I'm a porn connoisseur and I'm really not. I've got myself a Bachelor's in Film Studies and I took a class where we watched a bunch of old school porn-type films and they were indeed films. The acting was bad but really not THAT bad, most of the guys were ugly as sin (not much has changed), and like I said before, soooo much hair, but they were watchable! They could be analyzed as something akin to a piece of history and not just penetrate, hump, splat.
Anyway, Kevin James died in 1987 of testicular cancer and I'm sure he went out a fucking champ.
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