Tony Marsiglia, who also uses the surname Kane on clapper-board in PHOENIX, is an enigmatic video/filmmaker. I've seen his entire output of seven features and can't decide if he's merely a soft-core porn artiste cranking out lesbian footage, or interested in making an artistic statement as in PHOENIX and SUZY HEARTLESS, which bookend his career.
The commentary track on the DVD emphasizes Tony's legit theater background, so perhaps that is his proper métier.
This shot-in-a-week 35mm debut feature film PHOENIX is something of a mess. Are we to take this assemblage of gimmicky shock effects, mix of deadpan, low-affect performances with theatrical overacting, and the same pretentious approach offered up a decade later in SUZY, seriously? Or is it all tongue-in-cheek?
Aisha Prigann is the leading lady, who Tony literally fell in love with (and out again when she switched allegiance to his love/hate alter ego cinematographer), but her performance is stilted. She isn't the raging Helen-of-Troy-level beauty Tony makes her out to be, and the film literally sinks with her non-acting.
Parallel stories have her pacting (at film's start) with sis Sasha DeMarino to never part, but death intervenes; while story #2 concerns morgue attendant Mark Shultz (coming closest to a sustained performance here) and his creepy antics with a little fetish doll, phallic in shape but inspiring him to more conventional, hetero masturbation. One shock effect scene, after his garish parents coddle him with idiotically satirical life in a crib upbringing, has blind date Morgana Sofia Rasch/Rae baring her ample breasts, but she's greeted with the fetish in Mark's underpants where his cock should be.
In the big breasts department I was most impressed with the humongous knockers revealed by bit player Hope White, in a full-frontal-nudity scene wherein our heroine is faced with three choices in life, in a strange ritual. The actress is identified as Hope Morell in an interview with Aisha, but clearly her true identity is a mystery. What isn't a mystery is that Marsiglia/Kane likes to use breasty nudes in his films as "art", though we genre fans know it is sexploitation at its finest. .
Another shock scene is pretty much bungled, as Aisha starts dribbling, suddenly gushes what presumably simulates a Golden Shower onto the fetish idol between her legs and gives birth to some full-size adult head, presumably Mark's. This garish scene is strictly shock value.
The two stories come together when Mark meets Aisha, and the reincarnation or ghost or image of the dead sister Sasha replaces his fetish idol. Centerpiece scene is a flashback, well- played by Susan Hinshaw and Kevin Waldron as the sisters' mom & step-dad, in which Marsiglia delves into his incest theme forcefully. Had the rest of the film been as theatrically potent as this single vignette, he might have had something.
