Time for another Compare and Contrast. This time I will be looking at Fred Olen Ray's "Bikini Chain Gang" and Jose Ramon Larraz's "Black Candles".

Bikini Chain Gang is a light hearted take on the Women in Prison (WIP) movies. Featuring a mix of B movie actors and pornstars, it manages to be fairly entertaining. There are numerous sex scenes that all parties enter into cheerfully and willingly. The bad guys are ineffective and non-threatening, so they are never taken very seriously.

Black Candles (whose original title would translate as something like "sexual rites of the devil") seems like a more serious movie but the plot is ludicrous and makes no sense at all. At times I seriously wondered if the director (who is also credited as the writer) just made it up as he went along. The sex is much more intense though the actors don't all look good naked and (shudder) we do get to see just about all of them without their clothes on.

So the films are very similar in that they both shortchange the plot to make room for the sex. They both use very familiar plot devices from their respective genres. Bikini uses the barest bones of the" innocent girl sent to prison" plot and only has to hit the highlights to keep the story moving along. Candles uses the old "coven of witches trying to keep their cult secret" plot but can't maintain any consistency. In the end we have no idea of what it is that the witches even want. This bothers me more than it probably should but I like to at least pretend that I pay attention to what the actors are saying even in soft core sex films. I still wonder if the translation got really screwed up because I couldn't really get the relationship right between the main characters.

Where the films really differ is in their attitude. In Bikini the bad guys are not very good at being bad and don't seem particularly dangerous. In Candles while I am confused at their motives, you got to take them as being potentially dangerous after they kill off one of the stable guys. Bikini is mostly brightly lit and shot pretty much in talking head style. No odd angles or tricky camera shots. Candles at least has a few clever camera shots and a fair number of moody sets, but really was produced in much the same way as Bikini; rent a good location and film there. Fred knew he was not making art and did not try real hard to make Bikini more than what it is, a silly sex movie. Larraz on the other hand seemed determined to make profound statements and managed to make every thing overly dramatic. Mind you, it is not like he spent that much more money other than the obvious higher cost of film versus video but you get the feeling he was trying to make art.

There is a similar tone difference in the sex as well as you might expect. Where the sex in Bikini is somewhat frivolous, the scenes in Candles are intense and border on violent in some cases. Part of this goes to the director's intent. Fred is basically showing us two people pretending to have sex for our amusement. Larraz is trying to get across the intensity of the act. It's a little like the difference between watching the Harlem Globetrotters play basketball as opposed to the Knicks. While the both are superficially the same, the Globetrotters are attempting to amuse the audience whereas the Knicks are trying to win the basketball game. With the former you are laughing along with the guys, and with the latter you are caught up in the intensity of the struggle. At least Larraz hopes that you will get caught up in it, for me it was not all that inspiring.

Which brings me to the second big divergence in the films. I mentioned this briefly in my review of Candles, the difference between beauty and sexuality. American audiences equate sexy and pretty. Clearly this is not always the case, but in general we like to see good looking people have sex as opposed to not good looking people. To be fair, if you take the question, "Who would you most like to have sex with" and substituted any other activity such as "Who would you most like to play golf with" or "play guitar with", you are going to get an idealized answer. Most people are going to answer that they want to play golf with Tiger Woods or guitar with Eric Clapton. If you are going to go for the full fantasy, then you pick the best even though you can still have a great time playing golf with the guys from the office or jamming with your buddies. Sex is the same way, if we are going to fantasize about it we are going to go with the best. That is why Fred spent most of his money on getting some beautiful women for his movie. Larraz on the other hand hired women noted for their sexuality. Helga Line who plays Fiona was 51 or 52 when Candles was filmed. I will grant you that she is very attractive but the reason the director wanted her for the part was that she looks like she understands sex. A younger girl might look like she is playing around, maybe not sure of what the result of her actions might be. You never for a moment doubt that Helga is fully aware of what she wants or that she is willing to do what it takes to get what she wants. Except that the film never really gets around to telling us exactly what that is.

Candles was released about the same time as "Six Swedes on a Campus" and a few years after the British films like "The adventures of a Taxi Driver". Some of these Spanish and Italian films took themselves very seriously, while the Swedes films (which frequently featured Brigitte Lahaie) didn't take themselves seriously at all. The British films would normally portray the over-sexed heroes as missing out on Love, but that never really slowed them down. Bikini and Six Swedes are very similar despite being made 25 years apart, so you can't really claim that the differences between Bikini and Candles is that they are from different eras. To me, the biggest difference is that the Larraz seemed to be trying to make a serious movie while Ray had no such delusions and therefore, I liked Bikini more. Candles has such a poorly drawn plot that instead of being art, it is pretentious. Movies that expect me to take them seriously had better have something to back it up and Candle does not. I guess this speaks to my basic philosophy on films and why I have this site. Movies like "300" leave me cold. We are supposed to take it as great filmmaking when at best it is cliche ridden posturing (something I referred to as a polished turd).

It just comes down to honesty to me. Fred is simply doing his job making silly time-wasting movies for guys. Perhaps Larraz was really doing the same and his audiences understood what he was doing but if so, it is lost on me. Of course, you also have to consider the number of really horrid Jess Franco movies that I have sat through so it is entirely possible that I am misdirecting some anger here.

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