grace jones

Conan the Sequelian

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It would be ridiculous to claim that the sword & sandal genre is having “a moment” in Hollywood right now, given that two isolated examples do not equal a trend, and the two examples in question—Christopher Nolan’s epic Odyssey adaptation and Mattel’s failed He-Man reboot—are more of a “hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby” situation than they are brothers in arms. Regardless, spending so much time watching ripped men wield swords against wizards & monsters in theaters this year (over 300 minutes of combined runtime) had me thinking back to the ultimate icon of muscly fantasy cinema: Conan the Barbarian. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s casting as the sword & sandal comic book warrior Conan made for some gorgeous meathead action-fantasy imagery, and much of the original 1982 Conan the Barbarian film plays like high art as a result, despite its thoughtless participation in the lowliest of genre tropes. That mix of high & low makes Conan one of the quintessential examples of its genre, but what’s to be made of its two lesser-seen, lesser-loved sequels? Are they also high-art pop cinema like Nolan’s The Odyssey or are they ironic toss-offs with open disdain for their childish audience like the new Masters of the Universe? The answer, of course, is yes; they’re both.

As hyper-violent & hyper-horny as the original Conan film can be, the audience who most gleefully latched onto it were children in the same age range as its source-material comic book’s demographic. At least, that appears to have been the thinking behind its 1984 sequel Conan the Destroyer, which softens Conan’s sex & violence just barely enough to step down from an “R” rating to “PG” (in the precarious months just before the invention of “PG-13”). Conan is in live-action He-Man mode here, thrusting his giant sword against goofball monsters (like the pro-wrestler goblin played by a rubber-masked André the Giant), and picking up a goofball sidekick to crack wise along the way (Tracey Walter, whose performance splits the vast difference between Rob Schneider & Peter Lorre). Still, blood spews by the gallon from open wounds, and decapitated heads still fly across the screen, so Conan the Destroyer ends up playing like a remarkably gory kiddie feature. The highly sexualized casting of Wilt Chamberlain & Grace Jones as Conan’s companions on a mission to transport a young princess with her virginity intact feels like a winking joke that the movie’s school-age audience is too young to get. What they would get, however, is some insanely age-inappropriate violence, like in the climactic battle where Conan slowly rips the bleeding horn out of a yonic demon’s skull while it screams in agony.

While Conan the Destroyer exposes its school-age audience to adult-level bloodshed, the 1985 Conan spinoff Red Sonja exposes them to adult-level sexuality. Red Sonja technically isn’t a Conan the Barbarian film at all, since it’s adapted from a different property penned by Conan creator Robert E. Howard, and Schwarzenegger is officially credited as playing “Lord Kalidor.” Whatever, he’s Conan; the audience cannot be fooled. The only non-Conan thing about him is that he plays second-fiddle to the titular female lead, the red-haired warrior Sonja. Major kudos to series producer Dino De Laurentiis for managing to find an actress who could match Schwarzenegger’s cartoonishly wooden line deliveries in Brigitte Nielsen; Sonja & Conan make a lovely bonehead couple, especially in scenes where they use violent swordplay as an act of foreplay — teasing their mutual intent to “conquer” each other. The only problem is that there’s now a literal child onscreen jealously watching these foreplay bouts, acting as the audience surrogate and the would-be couple’s pint-sized sidekick. Also, the story starts with Sonja’s violent rape (which scares her off of men until she meets the godlike Conan), then goes on to include footage of a topless belly dancer and jokes about the child companion’s enormous penis. On paper, I’m not sure “misandrist rape-revenge saga” screams “kid-friendly adventure comedy,” but that’s exactly how it plays out, which is probably  the reason why Red Sonja is considered the nadir of the series.

Despite their dire reputations, I was mostly amused by Red Sonja and Conan the Destroyer. The only major disappointment, really, was that for kiddie version of Conan the Barbarian, they don’t make full use of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s talent for delivering groaner one-liners. There are a couple of jokes in Red Sonja that heroically go for the cheese, such as Arnold’s quip, “Tomorrow, I start my diet,” while crawling through a collapsed cave or “How’s the food around here?” when crashing a party in an enemy’s palace. For the most part, though, the wisecracking is left to the other sidekicks in his traveling parties, and no one comes near matching his comedic chops. There’s no reason why Conan the Destroyer had to have Conan punching out poor, innocent horses for the audience’s entertainment, but would it have killed them to have Arnold punctuate the gag with a deadpan line reading of “Quite horsin’ around”? Much like in the original Conan the Barbarian, he’s mostly used in the sequels as a visual symbol rather than a genuine acting talent, when he’d soon become one of the funniest comedic actors of his era, ironically or not. Neither of the Conan sequels go fully goofy with it, which leaves them trapped between violent action spectacle and kitschy kiddie fluff — a no man’s land for finding & pleasing an audience.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: A Night in Heaven (1983)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1983’s A Night in Heaven is an oddly forgotten studio drama about a bored Floridian college professor who cheats on her husband with a young student, who happens to moonlight as a male stripper.  Yes, a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype before I was born, and it’s somehow not a certified cult classic (yet), even though it helped popularize the eternal synthpop banger “Obsession”.  Here we have the rare mainstream picture that sincerely engages with and markets to female sexual desire, tempting its timid protagonist to step outside the complications & safety of her suburban marriage to enter a more dangerous, thrilling world of hedonistic excess.  In some ways, it softens the danger of her transgressions by making the object of her desire a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter, so I guess it all evens out.

A Night in Heaven was released decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper movies, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print obscurity instead of a regular rowdy-screening cult favorite.  However, considering that Disney now owns the 20th Century Fox repertory catalog and there are several shots of the hot twink’s exposed peen, maybe it’s less incredible than it is just shameful.  There’s nothing especially vulgar or raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to stripper Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front.  Still, it’s still shocking to see a retro movie so sincerely stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for Hollywood filmmaking.  It’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club movie with a softcore porno title was marketed to that eternally underserved audience, even if only as a fluke inspired by the fad popularity of Chippendales.  Unfortunately, there aren’t many other high-profile male stripper movies to recommend alongside A Night in Heaven as a result, but there are plenty of other contemporary movies set in 1980s strip clubs that match & complement its vintage sleaze aesthetic.  To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more 80s stripper movies that share in its distinctly retro grime & glamour.

Flashdance (1983)

A Night in Heaven’s biggest hurdle to earning long-term cult status might have been its short-term battle with Flashdance.  Adrian Lyne’s aspirational welder-by-day-stripper-by-night story of a wannabe ballerina making her way in The Big City overshadowed A Night in Heaven so completely that People Magazine dubbed the latter film “Flashdunce” in its review.  It’s not hard to see why.  While A Night in Heaven is charming in its internal identity crisis, swinging wildly in genre & tone from scene to scene, Flashdance knows exactly what movie it wants to be and leaps gams first towards that goal.  Flashdance is just as manically ambitious as its 18-year-old-with-three-jobs protagonist, hammering away at its early MTV fantasy aesthetic so hard in every scene that it’s practically a feature length music video.  When Jennifer Beals welds, she’s surrounded by fantastical splashes of sparks & purple smoke.  When she strips, the physical stage disappears to allow her (and her wig-wearing body doubles) to bounce around impossible otherworldly voids.  When she practices ballet, she doesn’t really.  She reinvents the artform of dance entirely, giving physical expression to a hip cassette tape soundtrack you’re directed to buy on your trip home from the theatre.  A Night in Heaven can’t help but look small & dorky next to the biggest strip club fantasy movie of 1983, partly because Flashdance is one of the coolest-looking movies ever made.

I’m saying all this as a general skeptic of Adrian Lyne’s signature works, too.  Flashdance delivers all of the messy, sweaty erotica of Lyne’s trademark sex thrillers, except with the bitter misogyny swapped out for high-style MTV escapism.  It’s unquestionably his best film, challenged only by Jacob’s Ladder.  It’s also very likely the best strip club movie of the 1980s, even if it has to pause mid-film to contrast its impossible high-art erotic dance gallery space against a much more realistic, grubby strip club where women actually take their clothes off for money.

Stripper (1986)

There aren’t many 80s stripper movies that demand to be taken as seriously as Stripper.  The semi-staged hangout documentary was directed by Pumping Iron producer Jerome Gary, presenting a sincere portrait of North American strippers as artists & craftswomen doing their best to make a living.  The six women profiled on camera are all seemingly genuine & passionate in their explanations of why they strip for money, interviewed in front of a blank Sears family photo backdrop to help dampen the subject’s inherent salaciousness.  At the same time, the documentary is structured around a stripper convention’s fictional Golden G-String competition that’s inorganically staged for the camera, so that the women have a goal to achieve beyond day-to-day survival.  That in-film kayfabe likely mattered a lot more to serious film critics of the 1980s, which is likely why it isn’t as widely canonized as its bodybuilding equivalents in the Pumping Iron series.  Its flagrant dishonesty matters less & less in a post-reality TV world, though, where its mixture of high artifice & subcultural anthropology feels distinctly ahead of its time.  Modern audiences are well used to parsing out what’s real and what’s kayfabe in semi-documentary television, and it’s fascinating to see that format pioneered in such a distinct subcultural context at such a distinct era in the stripping profession.

Stripper is just as self-conflicted in its tone as A Night in Heaven.  It wants to present its titular profession as just another working-class side job, providing a borderline wholesome public service that’s been an American pastime since the old-timey saloon days of its sepia tone photographs.  It can’t help but lean into the glam & smut of its 80s strip club milieu, though, and the only inclusion of male strippers among its hot-babe interviewees are the drunk oglers who join them onstage in sarcastic pantomime.  On a documentary level, it’s about as academically rigorous as any random episode of HBO Real Sex, but it still makes for great peoplewatching & anthropological texture if you’re willing to peer beyond the sheer veil of fantasy in its onstage strip routines.

Vamp (1986)

It’s a shame that there aren’t many other male-stripper movies of the era to lump in with A Night in Heaven, since that’s the major detail that makes the film special.  A Night in Heaven was released in an era when light-hearted erotica was defined by frat bro boner comedies like Animal House, Porky’s, and Revenge of the Nerds, when most sex objects depicted onscreen were women, not student-by-day-gigolo-by-night college age twinks.  So, if you’re going to pair A Night in Heaven with one post-Porky’s boner comedy about strippers, you might as well watch Vamp: the one where a gang of neon-lit vampire strippers led by Grace Jones torture the horndog frat boy protagonists.  Often cited as a prototype for From Dusk til Dawn the way A Night in Heaven is a prototype for Magic Mike, Vamp is a cutesy horror comedy that can only ogle women’s bodies for so long before those bodies transform into bloodsucking ghouls and turn the tables of power.  In a way, it’s got the same older women preying on younger men sexual dynamic of our Movie of the Month, but the “preying” just happens to be a lot more literal & monstrous.

There’s nothing especially innovative or unique about Vamp, at least not once you get past Grace Jones’s centerpiece strip routine (which features set & body paint designs by legendary artist Keith Haring).  It’s basically a David DeCoteau movie with a proper budget, a pure-80s novelty.  As a vibe check of what audiences most stripper media served in that era, though, it’s at least a pleasant novelty – not least of all because that audience’s frat boy avatars are punished for their sins by one of the coolest, most powerful women to ever grace the stage.

-Brandon Ledet

Grace Jones: Bloodlight & Bami (2018)

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Both the concert movie and the musician’s hagiography are difficult to pull off with any cinematic finesse. With few exceptions like Peter Strickland’s concert footage of Bjork’s Biophilia project and the bizarre tale spun by The Devil & Daniel Johnson, the musician’s documentary is usually flatly crafted, relying on the audience’s interest in the subject to meet the filmmakers halfway. The recent Grace Jones documentary Bloodlight & Bami curiously splits its time between both troubled mediums, the concert movie and the musican’s hagiography, and opens itself up to both’s follies in the process. Its concert footage is no-frills, matter-of-fact documentation of recent Grace Jones performances in Dublin, exerting only a minimal amount of artistic energy into an occasional crane shot in-between its more static edits. Its interview footage, which comprises most of the runtime, is the exact kind of meandering, low-fi/low-effort hangout energy that can sink a musician’s profile in for-fans-only tedium. Somehow, though, the movie transcends these limitations in medium and offers something that feels like a rare, unearned blessing: Grace Jones. Jones saves Bloodlight & Bami from any potential tedium by simply being a living, breathing phenomenon. The movie requires massive patience, but her mere presence makes it frequently fascinating, if not essential viewing. We are extremely lucky to have access to Grace Jones at all, in any form, something Jones herself seems to know more than anyone else in the world.

A Jamaican-born pop singer who made huge waves in the 1970s & 80s through the androgynous sexuality of her high fashion imagery just as much as through the strange tones of her post-reggae music, Jones is a long-established legend. Early in Bloodlight & Bami, Jones is swarmed by intensely dedicated fans after a performance—strangers who greedily drink in her every word & physical motion as if she were a deity. That’s not the Grace Jones this movie is about. You can glimpse her attention-commanding power in the interspersed concert sequences, where she models various exquisite headpieces & black lingerie while singing to an appreciative crowd of hundreds, like a demonic Eartha Kitt. Most of the film, however, is an effort to humanize the pop culture icon, hanging out with her between gigs, often at home with family. The high production value of the concert footage is clashed with the serene calm of Jones’s return trips to Jamaica, framed in a cheap digital haze. The conversations captured in this off-stage downtime range from small talk with strangers & petty disputes with session musicians to deeply painful reminiscing of childhood abuse & long-dead romances. There’s no historical hagiography of Grace Jones’s top-of-the-pop-world heyday, only a document of her current art as a stage performer & her current relationships with an inner circle who knew her as a person, not an avant-garde deity. The movie is in no rush to impress you with the enormity of Jones’s achievements or legacy, relying instead on her natural charisma to hold your attention as the digicam footage gets distracted by images as inconsequential as a car mirror ornament or a flashing streetlight. It’s a gamble that takes for granted that audiences’ minds won’t wander off in its long moments of quiet, one that mostly pays off.

As entertaining as her music can be, Grace Jones is most distinctly impressive as a visual artist & a performer. It seems counterintuitive, then, to strip her of all her visual gloss in a documentary that often looks like it was filmed on a flip-phone. Jones is, to this day, still a phenomenal performer, even shown hula hooping in high heels while singing a vocal-intensive stage number, never missing a beat. Director Sophie Fiennes also has an early credit as an art department contributor for The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, one of the most exquisitely staged films I can name, so it’s presumable her eye for visual craft is at least somewhat comparable to Jones’s. The aggressively low-fi, meandering aesthetic that guides most of Bloodlight & Bami must be understood as a deliberate artistic choice. Jones is stripped of the gorgeous lighting & costuming she wears like armor onstage (the headpieces are so extravagant that there’s a “hats by” credit included in the opening title cards) to demonstrate how naturally fascinating & culturally essential she remains without them. Even when she’s not making bawdy sex jokes about the mussels she’s eating for dinner or explaining to an ex-lover why all men should be penetrated (at least once), she naturally commands attention. There’s a fierce, no-bullshit way she carries herself that makes her come across like an undeniable force of Nature, even when she’s just waiting around in a recording studio for stubbornly lackadaisical musicians to arrive or lightly bickering with her mother. Even including the more immediately arresting concert footage, the most fascinating sequence of Bloodlight & Bami is a lengthy montage where Grace Jones applies her makeup in the hours leading up to a performance, oblivious to the world outside her mirror. She compels the eye.

Late in the film, Jones boasts that even without costumes or amplification or even lights, she would still be able to entertain her crowds alone, in the dark, with nothing enhancing the spectacle of her being. Bloodlight & Bami is proof of the veracity of that claim. If you want a document of Grace Jones the otherworldly icon, the 1982 concert film Grace Jones: A One Man Show is likely much more useful than the stripped down, low-fi hangout rhythms of Bloodlight & Bami. This movie is more proof that she does not need production spectacle to make her fascinating & idiosyncratic. Those qualities come to Grace Jones naturally and we should be grateful to be blessed with her existence in any form we can get it. Even when presented in the most plain, genre-burdened version of the musician’s documentary imaginable, one where she’s shown in as pedestrian of a light as possible, Grace Jones still feels like a divine gift we do not deserve.

-Brandon Ledet