Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel Reviews

A comedy noir of the ultra-cheap variety, shot at the deserted Flamingo Motel in Santa Monica, DESIRE AND HELL AT SUNSET MOTEL is a long-winded, stage-bound travesty with a belabored hipness so smug and depleting that the film becomes an exposition of sham and stupidity. Chester DeSoto (Whip Hubley) checks into the Sunset Motel in 1950s Anaheim for a sales meeting of the Tiny Plastic Toy Company. Accompanying him is his sultry sexpot wife, Bridey (Sherilyn Fenn), a woman whose desires run the gamut from an obsession for seeing Disneyland to taking midnight swims in the motel swimming pool wearing alluring black negligees. Soon after signing the register, Bridey is making advances on loitering Lothario Auggie March (David Johansen), who also happens to be blackmailing Chester for past Communist associations. Chester is busily engaged in hiring a sleazy psychotic beatnik appropriately named Deadpan Winchester (David Hewlett) to get the goods on his wife. Amongst all the sordid maneuverings, the pompous and effete motel manager (Paul Bartel) is fussily spying through his shuttered office window at this jumbled collection of screwballs. The narrative line collapses in torpid and ramshackled scenes involving amnesia, hoola-hoops and murder. Ultimately, Deadpan is arrested by the cops for having killed blackmailer Auggie, and the DeSotos, joyous at having manipulated Deadpan into eliminating their blackmailer, fall into bed together as Bridey breathlessly intones, "Take me to Disneyland." At one point well into the jumble of DESIRE AND HELL AT SUNSET MOTEL, a supporting character, musing to himself, states with grim finality "There's a lot less to this than meets the eye" and there is a no truer line of dialogue spoken in the film. First time writer-director Alan Castle strives for a jokey, stylistically dense parody of 1950s potboilers, but fails completely. Castle, with clunky direction and a badly paced over-the-top screenplay containing dialogue dipped in a curious amalgam of Somerset Maugham and James Elroy ("They say radioactive things have a half life as they decay. I think I'm radioactive"), is seemingly unable to muster enough energy or inspiration to take advantage of Jamie Thompson's impressively evocative cinematography. The film is further stunted by the flat line readings of the actors, who appear to be playing out an extended form of a particularly bad Second City TV sketch, the parodic elements further blunted by a self-conscious post-modernist smirk. Sherilyn Fenn (TV's "Twin Peaks," RUBY) lends a sultry presence to the proceedings, but her acting ability teeters wildly from parody to self-parody. David Hewlett joins her in performing in a thoroughly psychotic manner, while Whip Hubley in contrast is completely bland and forgettable. Paul Bartel, David Johansen and Kenneth Tobay all lend their moral support to the project but are all cast adrift and abandoned in the uncharted waters of a production without a rudder. (Sexual situations.)