“Night Trips” Reprises Dark Odyssey Into Director’s Ageless Soul

Normally we'd tease you with an intro here, but not this time. You're going to have to just go on blind faith that what you are about to receive is something truly extraordinary.

That wasn't so hard now, was it? We apologize for the suspense—we just wanted to set the mood for your own deviant sexual adventure, just the way the director would want it. In order to do that, though, we'll have to take you all the way back to the beginning, to what seems like a bajillion years ago: a time when a CBS art director named Paul dreamed of a life away from the cold bustle of New York City, a life filled with beautiful, young, sexually uninhibited models all clamoring to be his willing erotic subjects in his balmy Venice Beach condo.

Fade to black and insert a title card that reads "Andrew Blake" right about here.

Since then, the erotic artist has built an empire that defies imagination, driven by a single minded vision to create gorgeous erotica on his own terms. We once told him that his movies were less pornography and more like something that should be played out of a movie projector onto the back wall of a cocaine party circa 1982. He told us he was relieved that someone finally got him.

More accurately his work builds on itself, working its way gently underneath the viewer's skin, and building towards a sexual epiphany as inescapable and surreal as a fever dream—and just as fleeting, too. In a world of extreme close ups and shocking immediacy, Blake's languid approach is an acquired taste—one well worth acquiring.

It's been 20 some odd years since the first "Night Trips" was released, and now Blake has reprised his own masterpiece with sultry sex goddesses Paola Rey and Charlotte Stokely, calling the sequel "A Dark Odyssey." Blake opts out to eschew dialogue, allowing the pictures to tell the story and saving a ton of money on writers. The decision works well for this movie, but we'd like to discourage other autuers from attempting it for obviously self-interested reasons.

Unlike most of his previous work, which is heavily sapphic, "Night Trips Redux" is lousy with boy-girl couplings to good, if somewhat seedy, effect. It is still, however, shot on Super 16mm film, a medium to which Blake remains completely committed. Glamorizing a junky chic that belies his subjects insatiable need to be sexually degraded, "Night Trips" is in fact much more of a mirror into the director's ageless soul, underscoring his own personal history of sexual frustration with these unstable yet beautiful dolls with a reflexively postmodern paean to his own genius.

"Night Trips: A Dark Odyssey" is available now from Studio A Entertainment.

· Andrew Blake (andrewblake.com)