Fiume and Juliam McKinnon | La vedova nera (The Black Widow) / 2023

an italian cyclist ends up in french porno hell

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fiume and Juliam McKinnon (screenwriters and directors) La vedova nera (The Black Widow) / 2023 [20 minutes]

 

A nasty little French film in which a sweet Italian bicyclist (Siro Pedrozzi) speeds presumably back to his home, only to fall into a seeming concussion in the trip, and who is then compelled by an apparently nice gatekeeper to enter an S&M porn theater, where a number of sexual beings hang out in the corners of the theater and the aisles, although the most dominant figure sits down next to the boy in an attempt to seduce him.

      The movie seems to be about a young handsome gay boy seduced by a woman who wears a ring of amber in which is embedded the “black widow spider” of the movie’s title, but the boy is finally tempted by his seducer’s retreat into the bathroom, he eventually following only the discover a man has brutally killed another sexual partner with blood oozing from his body, matching the film’s quite evocative red décor. He rushes from the room seeking an escape out of the theater, but finds all doors locked.

      Upstairs he attempts to get into the room where the film is being aired, only to discover that the film itself has become a kind of monster which attacks him. Meanwhile, the terrifying stalker tracks him down, as he again attempts to find an exit in which all door seem to be locked.

     Another of the theater’s gay visitors is discovered to also be a corpse, and our young Italian youth desperately clings the last exit as the monstrous slayer comes closer.

     He escapes into the gentle arms of what I have described as “the gatekeeper,” but we quickly recognize, given that our young hero is now wrapped up in a sling, naked and probably dead, which quickly becomes a crystalized corpse ready for the spider’s palette, that our gatekeeper is also one of the bloody sodomists who destroy all those who enter the hell they have created.    

     What this little horror film is trying to tell us I have no clue. Perhaps it’s warning us of youthful digressions, about the effect of on-line porno. That might be far too easy of an answer to the horror of this story resulting from a simple bicycle spill. If the images are memorable, the plot is clearly queer terror without any possible resolution. And I can’t suggest anyone take the little torturous trek down the aisles of the porno theater, whether in a concussion or a living desire to experience the delicious tortures of messy sex. Don’t go here, I advise, knowing, of course, that many will track down this film simply because of my disdain.

 

Los Angeles, December 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024)