New Wave Hookers 2-4 (1991-1995)

Terms like “trailblazer” and “pioneer” tend be awarded rather liberally but in the case of director Gregory Dark, they're more than earned. With a body of work consisting of adult films, softcore erotic thrillers, a horror film starring a WWE superstar and music videos for acts ranging from the Melvins to Brittney Spears, Dark's career trajectory has been as idiosyncratic as anyone in the entertainment industry could hope to have. While directing the adult industry centered documentary Fallen Angels (1985), Dark became convinced that he could make a better adult film than any of the people he was interviewing, so he did. Much like Stephen “Rinse Dream” Sayadian had done a few years prior with Nightdreams (1981) and Cafe Flesh (1982), Dark's films changed the perception of how adult films looked and sounded with colorful, surreal visuals and scenarios and contemporary soundtracks. Dark made history from the very beginning with Let Me Tell Ya 'bout White Chicks (1984), one of the very first interracial sex films, but it was New Wave Hookers (1985) where Dark really changed the game. Easily transcending the Tracy Lords controversy that surrounded it, the film is widely considered one of the best films of its kind, though it wasn't until 1991 did Dark returned to his most famous title and two more sequels under Dark's direction would follow with Dark's avant-garde tendencies becoming more pronounced with each sequel.

Taking the idea of using new wave music to program women to become prostitutes from the first film to even stranger places, New Wave Hookers 2 follows “L” (Rip Hymen, a frequent non-sex actor in Dark's hardcore features), a cult deprogrammer who's just apprehended Kimberly (Madison), a prostitute involved with the “Cult of Willie”, run by its namesake (Jack Baker), a pimp who keeps his girls under control by playing hypnosis-inducing music before sending them out to turn tricks. Throughout his interrogation of Kimberly, L learns how the Cult of Willie operates, though is in for a major shock upon discovering Willie is at the mercy of a bigger, much more dangerous operation.

While the general New Wave Hookers premise of using music to hypnotize women into prostitution is outlandish in itself, Dark ups the bizarre ante considerably with New Wave Hookers 2. The idea of the music technique being appropriated by a pimp, a typically hilariously on-point Jack Baker, who holds sermons for his girls reading from “the good book”, Pimp by Iceberg Slim, makes for an already berserk scenario, Dark outdoes himself with a twist involving a cabal of women from the lost city of Atlantis hellbent on world domination. A standout film in a year ripe with unusual adult fare like Sayadian's Nightdreams sequels, PartyDoll a Go-Go! as well as John Leslie's Curse of the Catwoman and Laying the Ghost, New Wave Hookers 2 is a film Dark himself has claimed as a favorite of his own adult works. Still shooting on film, New Wave Hookers 2 is one of Dark's most colorful, with the visuals matching the story in the lunacy department, with Dark's sex scenes consisting of men in Phantom of the Opera-esque masks on leashes and human lamps, eroticism seeming like an afterthought. Dark also opens the film the same as the first, with a montage of the films female talent set to the Plugz “Electrify Me”, the theme of the series. Along with Madison, the top-shelf ensemble includes the likes of Savanna and Patrica Kennedy as well as Peter North, Randy Spears and Randy West, giving the film some casting ties with the aforementioned Sayadian and Leslie features.

Only slightly less outlandish but still outrageous is the narrative Dark concocted for New Wave Hookers 3 (1993). The film opens with John Baxter (Jon Dough), addressing the audience via video from Heaven where despite being dead, he's happy as a successful pimp and proceeds to tell the story of how he got where he is. In desperate need of money, John proposes to his beautiful wife Tiffany (Crystal Wilder) that she begin selling herself to bring in extra funds. In need of business advice, John turns to Sol (Rocco Siffredi), a shifty lawyer who informs John of a “deep house”, a brothel where women are programmed to have sex for money with the aid of musical earpiece. Tiffany is coaxed into going and John's plan works, though he begins to regret it once Tiffany starts charging him for sex and Helen (Tiffany Million), the head mistress of the deep house, affectionately known as “Boss Mama”, grows more and more fond of Tiffany due to her resemblance to a past lover and hatches a sinister plan to keep Tiffany all to herself.

With a nearly two hour run time, New Wave Hookers 3 is certainly the most involving film of the series script wise, with Dark somehow managing to work in a fairly damn endearing story of marriage into yet another spin on the central New Wave Hookers ingredient. Being a Dark film, of course the film was incendiary by design and it's not as if he gives anyone in the film a truly happy ending in the classic sense of the term, but there is something about the Baxter's that has a certain sweetness to it and Dark's warped sense of humor is ever present. The film is also notable in that it was one of three Dark hardcore features made during the same year that Dark also directed four exceptional softcore erotic thrillers, and while Dark himself deliberately tried to keep the two separated, with New Wave Hookers 3 there does seem to be a bit of overlap with Dark's Secret Games films with the central theme being prostitution, and the fourth wall breaking video playback was a crucial element in Secret Games 2: The Escort. Visually though, New Wave Hookers 3 is unquestionably a hardcore Gregory Dark film. The Phantom of the Opera masks return, Dark spruces up a sex scene with a bed with an imposing chain link headboard and the films most memorable image, as so wonderfully uttered by Wilder in the film, a “gaggle of quacking duckmen”, one of the most brilliantly deranged instances of Dark utilizing animal masks.

The most abstract and surreal entry in the series and one of Dark's strangest as a whole which is quite a feat, New Wave Hookers 4 (1995) is as different from the previous films as possible. While the opening credits is in a similar style to the previous three films, gone is “Electrify Me”. Also gone is the hypnotic music device, or any attempt at telling a straightforward story. If New Wave Hookers 4 is “about” anything, the sexual scenarios seem to all be from the imagination/hallucinations of an institutionalized midget named “Half-Pint” talking to himself in a mirror, opining on the nature of women, sex and prostitution. The inmates appear to be running the asylum as the doctor observing Half-Pint (Jon Dough) fancies himself a frog, ribbiting in-between his observations. Dark does ultimately bookend the film the way it began, but at the time New Wave Hookers 4 was Dark at his most unhinged and provoking. Dark had never catered to the trappings of conventional adult films but New Wave Hookers 4 was a different type of film even for Dark and would be a sign of things to come when Dark would go even more free-form. Deliriously seguing from one scene to the next, arousal seems to be the furthest thing from Dark's mind, with Dark dressing his male performers up as clowns, dogs, puts bird cages on their heads and in the films most infamous scene, two performers in seal costumes beg for fish on a set of ice blocks.

Following New Wave Hookers 4, several other sequels followed, though Dark had no involvement in any of them. There was even a reboot of sorts with Neu Wave Hookers (2006). New Wave Hookers 4 was also one of the last films Dark made for VCA, who had produced and distributed the series as well as Dark's other hardcore films with Walter Gernert, a co-owner at VCA, being “Walter Dark”, the second half of the infamous Dark Brothers. After leaving VCA, Dark formed his own production company, Dark Works, and secured distribution though Evil Angel, his subsequent adult work following the template set by New Wave Hookers 4, becoming more abstract, confrontational and uncomfortable, pushing the sex as well as the slick, music video style editing into even more challenging territories. Speaking to Hustler's Erotic Video guide and quoted in Psychotonric Video magazine in 1997, Dark philosophized a bit on New Wave Hookers series saying “One of the key ideas running through the New Wave Hookers series is the transference of power, inverting the normal situation and turning the male into the sex object.” While the first New Wave Hookers will perhaps always be the film Dark is most well known for, the second, third and forth films are classics in their own right, each showcasing the talents of one of the most original and innovative artists to ever work in the adult medium.