Café Flesh (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: Apr 16, 2025
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
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Director
Stephen SayadianRelease Date(s)
1982 (January 27, 2025)Studio(s)
VCA Pictures (Mondo Macabro)- Film/Program Grade: N/A
- Video Grade: B
- Audio Grade: B-
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
[Editor's Note: This title is currently unavailable, except through third-party sellers. A standard version is likely in the works and we will update this review when it becomes available.]
When Café Flesh was released in 1982, it stood out as being one of the most ambitious and unique adult films ever made, and more than four decades later, there’s still nothing else quite like it. It was so unusual that it died a quick death on the grindhouse circuit, but it rose out of the ashes of that failure to become a midnight movie success instead (albeit in slightly edited form). The thought of a hardcore adult movie playing in mainstream theatres might seem hard to believe (no pun intended), but the reality is that films like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door had already played in “legitimate” theatres during the Seventies.
Critic Danny Peary described Café Flesh as being “the thinking person’s porno film,” but even that wasn’t necessarily unusual at the time. While the adult genre gradually became more simplified and homogenized after videotape and video cameras became widely available, it’s easy to forget that the shot on film productions of the Seventies and early Eighties often had a bit more flair to them (a progression that Paul Thomas Anderson explored in his breakthrough film Boogie Nights). In that regard, Café Flesh was just following in the footsteps of “porno chic” films like Behind the Green Door, The Resurrection of Eve, and The Opening of Misty Beethoven. Yet the reality is that Café Flesh is something else entirely—it’s not porn, it’s anti-porn, a deliberately unerotic erotic film that’s designed to provoke and disturb, not titillate. And yet it’s so much more than that, too. There’s never been anything else quite like it.
That might be an oversimplification, because Café Flesh actually did have direct antecedent. The previous year, former Hustler artists Stephen Sayadian (aka Rinse Dream) and Jerry Stahl (aka Herbert W. Day) had written the script for a hardcore adult horror movie called Nightdreams, photographed and directed by their associate Francis Delia. It offered a series of imaginative tableaus tied together by a framing story, each of which explored wildly different styles and settings. It garnered some positive attention, so the trio reunited the following year with a new concept devised by Sayadian, one that allowed them to fuse their avant-garde and New Wave/Punk sensibilities into a post-apocalyptic setting. This time, Sayadian served as director, with Delia acting as cinematographer only (credited as F.X. Pope), and the even more creative tableaus were co-designed and storyboarded by Mark Esposito. (Music producer Mitchell Froom also returned to compose another memorably sinuous electronic score.) Their creative juices were flowing (along with a few other kinds), and the result was a film that transcended not just the porn genre, but genre itself.
Café Flesh opens with a series of title cards that lay out the basic concept for the film:
“Able to exist, to sense... to feel everything – but pleasure. In a world destroyed, a mutant universe, survivors break down to those who can and those who can’t. 99% are Sex Negatives. Call them erotic casualties. They want to make love, but the mere touch of another makes them violently ill. The rest, the lucky one percent, are Sex Positives, those whose libidoes (sic) escaped unscathed. After the Nuclear Kiss, the Positives remain to love, to perform… and the others, well, we Negatives can only watch… and only come... to... CAFÉ FLESH...”
Café Flesh is really a punk rock Cabaret, with Max Melodramatic (Andy Nichols) serving as emcee for the audience at the club and for audiences watching the film as well. He acts as a tour guide for the acts that follow as well as an agent provocateur for the tortured Negatives who are watching them, gleefully adding to their torment. He’s especially harsh toward regulars Nick (Paul McGibboney) and his girlfriend Lana (Michelle Bauer, still credited here as Pia Snow). He openly humiliates the negatives in the audience, lashing out at them out of a sense of self-loathing (it’s later revealed that he’s neither a Positive nor a Negative, but rather something else entirely). Yet he targets Nick and Lana in particular because he senses that something is off about them, and that forms the dramatic core of Café Flesh.
The Negatives in this post-apocalyptic world may be living in a Hell at least partly of their own making, but they’re still the majority party and the dominant force in society. Positives may have all the sexual power, but they’re completely powerless as a social minority, so they’re forced to go into hiding if they don’t want to perform at clubs like Café Flesh. That’s exactly what happens to young ingénue Angel (Marie Sharp), who is uncovered by the authorities and required to make her debut on stage. Yet unbeknownst even to Nick, Lana is also a secret Positive. When they try to make love in their apartment after an evening of watching the shows, they have to stop when Nick becomes physically ill, so Lana pretends to get sick as well. (It may well be the only scene in film history where a woman fakes not being able to have an orgasm in order to protect the feelings of her partner.) Yet she can’t keep her desires secret forever, and by the end of Café Flesh, Lana has had a coming out of her own, leaving Nick to fade into the wasteland. The Negatives have all of the sociopolitical power, but they’re still helpless before the unbridled force of human sexuality. The Positives may lack that kind of physical power, but they’re the ones who are holding all of the cards.
While Cabaret may have provided the overall structure for Café Flesh, the individual tableaus were inspired by Arthur Freed and Busby Berkeley musicals instead. The opening sequence is directly lifted from the “Triplets” number in The Band Wagon, with three grown men dressed up as babies in highchairs sitting in the background. Yet the scene itself is a deconstruction of the porn archetype of the delivery boy and the bored housewife, with the delivery boy in this case being dressed up in a repulsive rat costume. Other sequences parody clichés like the businessman and his secretary (“Would you like me to type a memo?”), but with incongruous silhouettes of oil derricks in the background, and another openly borrows Busby Berkeley’s use of arms coming up through the floor of the stage from the “I’ve Gotta Hear That Beat” number in Small Town Girl. One scene is even set on the Berlin Wall, bringing everything full circle back to a Cold War version of Cabaret. In each and every case, any real eroticism has been stripped away in favor of an abstracted, avant-garde representations of sexuality. These aren’t sexual performances, they’re sex as performance art.
Café Flesh quickly became the stuff of legend, so it can be challenging to sort out fact from fiction regarding its production—and that includes the stories that have been told by everyone involved. Two years after the film was released, Jerry Stahl wrote an account for the Danny Peary edited Omni’s Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies where he completely omitted his background at Hustler and claimed that he and Sayadian only resorted to taking money from an adult film company after the project had been rejected everywhere else. He also claimed that they had only compromised in order to get Café Flesh made, and that they always planned to edit it down later for the mainstream market. Yet Sayadian has told a very different version of that story, and given the fact that they had both already written and produced the pornographic Nightdreams, Stahl’s 1984 account was probably pure spin. (To be fair, he’s been much more open about what actually happened ever since that time.)
Yet none of that background really matters because everything that’s visible onscreen in Café Flesh speaks for itself. The acting is surprisingly good, especially from Nichols as the unsettling but still electrifying Max Melodramatic, and watch for Richard Belzer in a truly bizarre cameo as one of the hopped-up patrons of Café Flesh. Yet even the background faces are all memorably distinctive—Sayadian deliberately undercut any erotic value to the graphic sex by repeatedly cutting away to the tortured reactions from the audience members at the club. In a weird way, their discomfort mirrors that of the audience watching the film. There has always been a voyeuristic element to the cinema, but Café Flesh subverts it by inviting viewers to watch some disturbingly unerotic sex scenes, and then reminding them of their own voyeurism by showing the tortured faces of the voyeurs at the club. In the immortal words of Harry Tuttle, we’re all in it together, kid. In the end, we’re left to slink back into the wasteland along with Nick, too numbed to enjoy what we’ve just seen. That’s Café Flesh in a nutshell. You’ve been warned.
Cinematographer Francis Delia shot Café Flesh on 35mm film using spherical lenses. Adult movies from that era could have been projected either matted to 1.85:1 or open-matte instead, so Delia protected for both. This 4K version offers the option of viewing it at either 1.33:1 or 1.85:1, and while it doesn’t look too open in the former ratio or too cramped in the latter, the compositions do feel a bit more balanced at 1.85:1. It was primarily sourced from 4K scans of a 35mm print held at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with missing sections supplemented from a print held by the Kinsey Institute. (There also appears to be a few sections that were derived from an upscaled composite analog video source, most notably during the “Triplets” set piece.) No HDR grade has been included, which isn’t surprising considering that the main sources were theatrical prints, but it does offer 10-bit color.
Given the fact that the only extant film elements for Café Flesh are those two prints, the results look surprisingly good in 4K. The closeups reveal some nicely resolved facial textures, especially on Andy Nichols and Paul McGibboney’s craggy faces. There are some light scratches and other minor defects visible, and the upscaled composite video sections suffer from significant aliasing and combing artifacts. The contrast range is solid, and while there’s not much of any detail visible in the shadows, that’s inevitable given the dupe elements that were used. The colors are decently saturated but still appropriately cool, which is precisely how Café Flesh has always looked. This is one case where it may have been too tempting to juice up the saturation levels in HDR, so it’s probably for the best that this is SDR only.
(Side note: for what it’s worth, IMDb claims that Café Flesh was shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm for theatrical release. That seems highly unlikely, however. Sayadian has stated repeatedly that the film was shot on Fuji 250T, which was available in 35mm [8518] and 16mm [8528]. But both were negative stocks, which means that theatrical prints were fourth-generation dupe elements. Café Flesh in 4K is hardly the last word in fine detail, but the image is still sharp and detailed enough that there’s little to no chance that it was blown up from 16mm—and keep in mind that this would have been standard 16mm, not Super-16. The grain is also relatively refined, not as coarse and exaggerated as was common on 35mm blowups.)
Audio is offered in English 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English SDH subtitles. The audio was derived from the optical tracks on the extant prints, and there are audible defects like crackling, popping, and background hiss. It’s all fairly muted, though, and not too distracting. The dialogue is otherwise clear, and Mitchell Froom’s score sounds as good as it can given the constraints of the frequency response on those optical tracks.
Mondo Macabro’s Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD release of Café Flesh is a two-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film. It also includes a slipcover (completely free of text except for logos on one edge only, which is rather interesting) and a 32-page booklet featuring essays by Jerry Stahl, Daniel Bird, Heather Drain, and Éric Peretti. This Limited Edition version is sold out at this point, but Mondo Macabro is also releasing a standard version that presumably will omit the slipcover (and possibly the booklet as well). The following extras are included on both the UHD and the Blu-ray:
- Audio Commentary by Stephen Sayadian
- Interview with Stephen Sayadian (HD – 57:47)
- Interview with Jerry Stahl (HD – 15:22)
- Interview with Stoya (HD – 9:39)
- Interview with Jacob Smith (HD – 17:49)
- On Set Footage (Upscaled SD – 3:08)
- Theatrical Trailer (HD – 2:59)
Stephen Sayadian clears the slate in his commentary regarding some of the misinformation regarding Café Flesh, stating firmly that it was financed by a porn company and always intended to be a porn film. The sex scenes may look like include inserts but they really didn’t, although he deliberately staged them that way so that he could use the initial pantomime sections as a showreel in order to raise more money. (For those who need to know, he does clarify exactly what Michelle Bauer did and didn’t actually do in the film.) He also points out the various references to The Band Wagon and other films, and also notes all of the pseudonyms during the opening credits. In that regard, he’s pretty open about giving all of the credit where credit is due, and offers plenty of praise for his collaborators.
Sayadian continues those threads in his interview, offering a little more detail along the way. He says that he had complete creative freedom aside from having to include several prerequisites like a girl-on-girl scene—although he wasn’t allowed to include a guy-on-guy scene as well. As radical as Café Flesh may have been, he says that the industry at that time was quite conservative (which helps to explain why it failed during its initial release). While it wasn’t illegal to exhibit adult movies in Los Angeles, it was still illegal to shoot them, which is one reason why they used pseudonyms—with the exception of Mitchell Froom, who was proud of the music that he wrote. (Sayadian also had to keep the project a secret from the landlord who owned the building where he had his studio—he lied and said that they were rehearsing for the Ice Capades.) Sayadian does admit that they eventually had thoughts of turning Café Flesh into an R-rated film for wider distribution, but that never actually happened. (The version that made it into midnight shows on the arthouse circuit and on college campuses was still explicit, but it did trim out the money shots.)
Jerry Stahl opens his own interview by providing a pithy description of Café Flesh that makes it perfectly clear that the film wasn’t intended to appeal to adult film audiences. He also talks about meeting Sayadian while they were both working at Hustler, where neither of them was all that interested in erotica. Instead, they worked on parodies like their “Marlboro Country” ad featuring cowboys dying in a cancer ward. They followed through on that with Café Flesh, making a film that acted like a giant middle finger to the entire genre.
Mondo Macabro has included two more interviews that examine Café Flesh from the outside rather than from within. The first is with author (and former porn actress) Stoya, who says that she was blown away by how Café Flesh demonstrated what an adult film could actually be. She feels that it’s a commentary on pornography from production to consumption. The second interview is with Jacob Smith, director of Sound Arts and Industries at Northwestern University. He looks at Café Flesh from more of an academic perspective, although he traces his own personal journey of discovery about the film, including tracking down the original participants. He emphasizes the use of sound in Café Flesh and how it differed from other adult films during that era.
In many ways, the most interesting extra here is also one of the briefest. It’s just titled On Set Footage, but it’s actually a human-interest story from Channel 5’s Eyewitness News in the Twin Cities. They sent a crew down to Los Angeles to interview Sayadian (who they only identify as Rinse Dream). It’s not clear what prompted them to travel to L.A. to do the story like this, but they do note that Nightdreams had made its world premiere at the Rialto Theatre in Minneapolis. There’s also some discretely photographed footage of the “Berlin Wall” sequence being set up. In lieu of a real “making-of” featurette, this is the next best thing.
In Danny Peary’s classic 1987 anthology Guide for the Film Fanatic, he wrote an introduction explaining that any real film fan needs to have a broad mind when it comes to genre. (His blunt assertion that “You can’t be a film fanatic and not like Westerns!” cut me to the quick when I read it in 1987, since I really didn’t like Westerns, but I slowly learned to love them with his help.) Peary did make the point that you don’t have to seek out every slasher or porno film just because they have their fans, but he still maintained that you needed to be aware of them. That’s a fair way to summarize Café Flesh. No, you don’t need to watch it if you have a moral objection to adult films, but it’s an important film nonetheless, and you need to be aware of its place in film history. For those who want to learn more, Mondo Macabro’s 4K release of Café Flesh is the best place to start.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).