Singapore Sling

Wait. What just happened? There was a Greek detective muttering to himself, Sam Spade style. Then there were a couple of women, wearing lingerie and goggles, burying their chauffer in the rain. A secretary’s intestines were being dumped into the sink. Then it got kind of weird. I think I just finished watching Singapore Sling.

It’s like a porn movie you’d see playing in one of your nightmares. There’s plenty of sex; but it’s all mixed up so that you see sex with guns, sex with vomit, sex with knives, sex with piss, sex between mother and daughter, sex with eloctroshock therapy paddles strapped to the temples, sex with the mummified corpse of your father. What the hell do you even call sex with the mummified corpse of your father? Paternecrophilia? Do I have to make up new words just to describe this thing?

Seriously, the plot, so far as I can make out, is that a detective (played by Panos Thanassoulis, who kind of looks like a young Gerard Depardieu) goes looking for a woman named Laura and tracks her down to an old house occupied by a crazy mother (Michele Valley, who sounds kind of like Ornella Muti) and daughter (Meredyth Herold, who sounds kind of like Amanda Plummer). He doesn’t know that they already killed Laura and, in short order, he’s tied up and tortured until he agrees to participate in their strange fantasy lifestyle. I think. Or maybe Laura isn’t really dead and she’s just posing as the crazy daughter. Or maybe they’re not even mother and daughter. Or maybe he isn’t a detective after all. I mean, we never learn his real name and both women just call him Singapore Sling.

Occasionally, the characters look right into the camera and talk to me. Sometimes they lapse into Greek for no particular reason and sometimes the Greek is subtitled. Sometimes it isn’t. It’s funny and scary and disturbing and weird enough to keep me guessing. I’m not sure what to make of this film. But I’m watching it again.