One of the great universals of the horror movie is the way it plays on our ideas about sexuality. Stereotypes are probed for submerged fears and then turned into the stuff of nightmare. So, sexual predators become vampires and promiscuous teens are skewered by serial killers, while the waving tentacles and oozing orifices of bug-eyed monsters project our most polymorphously perverse sexual anxieties onto the screen.
Indonesia must be full of nervous men, as its cinema has thrown up some fantastically worrying images of rampant female sexuality, drawing on both traditional tales of supernatural terror and the anxieties of a society in rapid transition. Dangerous Seductress, directed by the indefatigable H Tjut Djalil, offers us an insatiable Evil Queen (with a truly amazing ability to catch arterial spray in her open mouth from some distance) who returns from the grave and takes over the curvaceous body of Susan, a young American girl staying in Jakarta. Susan's thrusting breasts become more of a threat than a promise, as she wages a war against men. While this film isn't quite as bonkers as Djalil's earlier efforts, it is awash with dodgy phallic symbolism, crazy special-effects sequences and cherishably awful performances from its American 'stars'.
Back in the West, the nearest our errant womenfolk can get to Goddess-hood is fooling around with witchcraft. So, in straight-to-video gem Sorceress, Erica (played by the walking softcore franchise that is Julie Strain) gets seriously naked, smears her uncannily large breasts with magical baby oil and pronounces some scary-sounding words - all in a quest to ensure that her man, rather than rival Linda 'Exorcist' Blair's, gets the plum job at the office. It all goes (literally) tits-up when Erica takes a tumble from the balcony and winds up dead. Not that that stops her: as terrified men everywhere will attest, there's no limit to the lengths to which an ex will go to ruin your life - even if it means taking over your new girlfriend from beyond the grave.
If women are vengeful, scheming bitches who never say die, what about men? Lamberto Bava's Demons 3: The Ogre (which has nothing to do with the previous Demons movies) is a fascinating study in gender relations in which an American family take a holiday from Hell in rural Italy.
Cheryl is a horror writer (working on a book with the worryingly Freudian title of A Drawer Full of Teeth!) who becomes increasingly freaked by the crumbling castle that is their holiday home. Haunted by childhood nightmares, she becomes convinced that a lustful monster lurks in the castle's cellars. The husband, being an unimaginative bully, dismisses her growing fears as the product of a silly housewife's sexual frustration, going so far as to rip up her work. Could he, we wonder, be the ogre? It's not often that a cheap horror movie so wholeheartedly enters the realm of a university Women's Studies course, but The Ogre does so with a vengeance. It echoes both Jane Eyre and Beauty And The Beast in its ambivalent look at female sexual fantasy and monstrous male rationality, and fills the screen with languorous close-ups of orchids in a way that Frieda Kahlo and Georgia O'Keefe would surely have appreciated. To cap it all, the film's end credits reveal it was shot on location in the appropriately named Castle of Arsoli.
Dangerous Seductress is available from Mondomacabrodvd.com priced $14.95
Sorceress I and II are available from Anchorbay.co.uk priced £14.99
Demons 3: The Ogre is available from Horrorvideo.com priced £5.99
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