Sixteen Tongues

Sometime in the future two people are hiding in an S&M motel: Adrian Torque (Crawford James) should now be dead. He is a renegade cop whose skin was reconstructed out of the sixteen tongues of fellow officers who died next to him in a terrible explosion. He is not a Frankenstein only on the outside, but he is also slowly driven mad by a never-ending stream of tastes. Adrian is not your average cop. The opening scene shows him interrogating a prisoner, then he forces him to perform graphic fellatio on him before blasting his brains against the wall.

Ginny Chin-Chin (Jane Chase) is a female assassin who has a clitoris implanted on her eyebrows; every blink triggers her incontrollable impulses. She stays in a room with her hacker girlfriend (Alice Liu). Their lives are about to collide with Adrian Torque.

Unfortunately Sixteen Tongues falters on the technical side. This movie would have benefited enormously from a more elaborate (not expensive) "mise en scene," simply because of its claustrophobic nature and stylized ideas. After all, this is a film set in the future. I'm not saying that it needed a bigger budget. Sometimes stunning cinematography can disguise a low budget. After an impressive opening credit sequence the visuals lose strength. The lighting is poor, or let's better say non-inexistent, for a big part of the film. The lampshades in the rooms are just not enough to keep the image clear of video noise. Maybe it is the ultimate realistic lighting, but it just doesn't looks good. However, the flickering blue light from the TV in Adrian's room is adequate and atmospheric.

The camera-work is uneven. Sometimes it is imprecise in its framing and sloppy in its movements. I like darkness and/or hand-held shots, but only when it is purposefully intended for a specific reason, with some kind of stylization behind it, to achieve a determinate goal.

The sound mix needs some equalization; mostly the voice-overs are sometimes hard to hear. But the music is pretty effective, adding greatly to the dark cyber-punk atmosphere. The opening and end credits tracks are both pretty good.

The actors all look like they are supposed to. Adrian is tall, tough looking. Virginia is cold and sensual at the same time. Although there are some weak moments, the acting is passable for the most part.

On the other hand, the sets evoke the seedy atmosphere of the location very effectively. The hallways are filled with porn photos. There is some of A Clockwork Orange's resonance in an ice machine shaped as two buttocks, the ice spurting from between them into the glass, and a doll with her legs spread over Adrian's TV. The S&M costumes, special effects, make up, gunshots are pretty well done for microcinema standards. The intricate animated sequences depicting web surfing deserves special mention. The live action scenes should have had this level of elaboration.

The pacing of the film suffers from some well-written, but sometimes extended voice overs. They serve the purpose of providing the background stories for the characters as well as some interesting concepts, but less is more. I would have rather have the film find a low budget, yet effective way of "showing me" rather than "telling me" some of its ideas.

But at the end, the power of this film lies in its ideas, original plot, and characters. If you are able to put the technical flaws aside, it succeeds tremendously in creating a uniquely grotesque world invaded by porn and genetically-altered people. In this world you have to swipe your credit card to be able to shut off the never-ending porn ads on your TV, or to use tap water or to take a shower.

There is a tasty amorality permeating all of the characters. If you think the protagonists are deviant, wait till you meet some of the guests from this motel. Despite what I said about the visuals, there are many memorable images. One comes to mind now: A penis ejaculating blood on a female chest. It left me wondering how life outside the motel in that world would be like.

One feels the script was written without any kind of self-censorship. Scooter McCrae doesn't seem very concerned about being assimilated by Hollywood, as it should be. In that sense, Sixteen Tongues takes full advantage of being a microcinema movie. It is not afraid to shock or disturb you with it's graphic sexuality, violence, and bold ideas.

Sixteen Tongues is a sci-fi thriller set in a dystopian and highly sexualised future. It's written and directed by sometimes film-maker Scooter MacRae, best known for his feature debut 'Shatter Dead' which won him the Best Independent Film award at the Fantafestival in 1995.

The plot concerns two female lovers living in a motel room in the near future. Ginny is an assassin, genetically engineered and implanted with two clitoris's (clitori?) on her eyelids to curb her psychotic impulses, while her girlfriend Alik is a hacker who's searching for the scientist who created Ginny and for the man who killed her brother... So far so cyberpunk, but things get even more brutal when a rogue cop moves into a room down the hall. Adrian is a violent and ruthless man, although considering that he's had sixteen tongues grafted onto him after a near fatal explosion one can see why. Said tongues are sending multiple taste sensations to his brain and it's driving him insane. After a chance meeting by the ice machine Adrian and Ginny form a sort of bond over their respective abnormalities and things progress from there. Over it's 80 minutes the film slowly builds-up tension and ends with a deadly confrontation in the corridors of the Saphio Motel.

The 3.2/10 rating on IMDb.com speaks volumes about the films reception into the mainstream, but there's plenty of fantastic ideas and creative imagery for those who wish to look closer and who aren't put off by micro-budget cinema. Sixteen Tongues is set entirely within the Saphio with no exterior shots whatsoever, no doubt to save money as well as create a look and an atmosphere. The halls are decorated entirely with pornography and the televisions play it on a loop, using your credit card is the only way to shut them off, or indeed to get water, ice, light, etc. The hotel is populated by an appropriately creepy cast of S&M freaks and bums that the main players interact with but ultimately disregard. In short it's a realised world these characters inhabit.

While I'd like very much to praise the vision of the film-maker and to highly recommend this film to anyone interested in apocalyptic film, I really can't. The execution of the film, the sound, the acting, the effects are all lacking. The lighting is bad, actors lines are often mumbled and there's an overall sense of a low budget hampering what could have been a very well done little thriller. The pornography, while an interesting idea and a good visual technique, seems forced and as a lot of other reviews say, you feel more than a little dirty after watching it. The saving grace is probably Ginny, a sympathetic character played surprisingly well by Jane Chase.

However... If you've seen MacRae's previous work and can see past the films technical flaws then you might discover Sixteen Tongues to be real gem, unusual, unsettling, violent and something quite different.

In better hands Sixteen Tongues could have been a real gem. Ferrara maybe, or Cronenberg, or better yet some slime crusted, fork dicked hybrid of the two, Ferrara's pointed grime and Cronenberg's art and smarts. Sadly writer/director Scooter McRae isn't fit to shine the balls of either of the aforementioned, let alone a super-being made of their best qualities, but he comes up with a pretty watchable slice of underground trash nonetheless. Things even start rather well, opening credits laid over blue tinted extreme close ups of body parts mixed with strobe lighting, it sets up the films central theme of body overpowering, magnified, perverted, we see belly as plain, breasts as heaping dunes, flesh as landscape. And where the body is not just vessel for the mind in the world but world itself, what place is there for the mind? Then pretty much the first scene of the film is a freaky disfigured guy taunting a hooded prisoner before raping him in the mouth and shooting him in the head. Regrettably after this auspicious opening the film settles into a somewhat slow, repetitious groove and I'll wager many will find it deeply tedious. The plot switches to a female assassin and her hacker girlfriend shacked up in an incredibly seedy hotel (here you have to pay to turn the porn off), they argue, screw and pursue a nebulous vengeance, matters coming to a head with the arrival of the earlier disfigured gent. It all ends in suitably violent fashion which will either come as a relief or a fitting finale depending on your patience. Me, I liked it well enough. Starlets Jane Chase and Alice Liu are mostly naked during the film, and while both are shot and made up to look kinda dorky and unappealing they got at least the ghost of a rise out of me. Also both of them (as well as Crawford Chase as the sinister disfigured dude) perform with commitment, the ennui they bring feels organic rather than an unintentional side effect of the film-making, their dulled tones, flares of tired anger, blurts of frenzy, it works in a gritty sort of manner. The general design is effective too, cheapest hotel imaginable but with pornographic trapping everywhere, even the odd full on mannequin. Everything works together to put across notions of body, mind and control, ideas that are not especially developed, rather interesting tones, together a lulling, darkly ambient experience. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to anyone that isn't a devotee of underground cyberpunk themed trash, but to those on the same wonky wavelength (myself for example), its a nice little watch. 6/10.

The story goes as following: in an SM hotel, where walls are full of porn ads and the TV screens porn the whole time, stay 3 different people, who all must deal with their problems. The first is Adrian, a cop who was severely injured in a blast. His skin was replaced with the material from the tongues of 16 people (hence the name of the movie). Because of this he can literally taste his own clothes and everything he touches. The second is a female hacker, Alik, who's constantly accessing the Web in search for information. Third - Alik's lover, the assassin Ginny. She must deal with the urge to kill and with the artificial clitorises that are situated under both eyelids making her orgasm every time she blinks.

In short: I liked it. If one can see beneath the adult rated surface and won't be repulsed by the huge amount of sexual images then what we've got is a very solid cyberpunk movie. It resembles to Gibson's stories - several different tales which become one in the end, the technology, as crazy as it is, is just a by-product, it doesn't strive the story. Not much happens, we just get to know the characters, get to see why they do the things they do.

On the weekends, all I wanna do is kick back, a brew in hand, maybe some smoking material, and pop in a sick, twisted, mindless movie into my DVD player. Makes the time pass pretty quick and puts a huge smile on my face.

But I have to tell you, in recent years, there's been a dry spell when it comes to cult films. I don't know why, but every little dingbat wannabe with a video camera tries to (re-)shoot their favorite, big budget movie. This gets tired very quickly, let me tell you.

But I gotta say that I recently came across this movie a couple of months ago. It's from the same guy that made "Shatterdead" which I loved back in the day. Only this time he's doing sci-fi and, boy, is it nasty! It was a perfect weekend movie. It's got hot, naked Asian girls, gory makeup, and guns. Oh, did I forget to say it's got hot Asian chicks! It's totally perverted.

I haven't seen something like it in a long time. At least someone's still out there making cult movies.