K___, M______ and I play a Christmas exchange game. Each has to lend the other a DVD, book or other artifact, which is to be returned after Christmas.
K____ exchanges an original video of Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS, and a copy of the original Mummy and the The Devil Thumbs a Ride; The Norton Anthology of English Literature and Tony Hillerman’s People of Darkness.
I offer K___ Le Sexe qui parle and Astrid Lindgren’s My Nightingale Is Singing (1984). For M_____ it was Serge Gainsbourg‘s CD compilation Du Jazz dans le ravin (1996).
I watched Ilsa.
As with most of these exploitation films, they play with archetypical tropes, themes and fears. One of the fears that Ilsa deals with is ejaculatio praecox, the fear of achieving orgasm before a woman has reached hers. Actually, this is the first fictional work I’ve encountered to deal with that theme. A secondary theme — linked to the first — is castration anxiety.
Somewhat related, here are some examples of impotence in fiction.
If you haven’t seen it yet, Jorg Buttgereit’s brilliant film Der Todesking features an homage to Ilsa by way of a video one of the characters watches.
I watched The Devil Thumbs a Ride.
A pleasant surprise: the film was taped from BBC2, off the programme Moviedrome. In the late eighties and early nineties I used to try and catch every episode of Moviedrome. The Devil … was taped from the second series, hosted by Mark Cousins. I missed that series.
The Devil is about a robber who catches a ride. Other films within the ‘hitch-hiker turns out to be psychopathic killer‘ category include The Hitch-Hiker, The Desperate Hours, Detour and most recently The Hitcher (which is set for a remake in 2007).