Singapore Sling (1990 film)

Two mentally ill women who are clearly suffering from not otherwise specified delusional disorders, a mother and a (grown) daughter, live together in a secluded mansion. They are in a relationship and both are recognised for their beauty. They spend their days playing perverse BDSM-related incestuous games in memory of their sadistic patriarch who, when he was still alive, raped his daughter when she was eleven, murdered several servants, and is now a mummified corpse with which the daughter is shown having sex. They occasionally kill their servants and bury their bodies in the garden.

When first glimpsed the psychotic mother-daughter protagonists, half-dressed, are burying their disemboweled chauffeur into a pit, they have just finished to dig in their backyard on a dark and stormy night with thunder and heavy rain. They lay down their shovels and drag out of the bushes, his fresh corpse. He was killed in one of their usual games combining incestuous sex with murder. Shortly after this and at first unnoticed by the two women, a lovesick detective pulls his car up to the residence. He is suffering from a painful bullet wound and an equally painful yearning to track down Laura, his long-missing beloved for whom he has been searching for three years and about whom it is known that she has visited the area. What he does not yet know is that he has stumbled onto the lair of two profoundly insane women who have already lured Laura into their home and brutally killed her (in the process decorating their kitchen with her viscera, as a flashback helpfully shows). It is also revealed that the daughter is physically very similar to Laura and is desperately looking for a man's companionship.

The duo then easily take the seriously wounded and bleeding detective, having already figured them out to be responsible for Laura's kidnapping, into their home, essentially kidnapping him. As the exhausted detective was silent and apparently refuses to speak, even in order to state his own name, the two women christen him 'Singapore Sling', after they discover a recipe in his pocket notebook for that type of cocktail. They use him as a pawn in their sexually tinged role-playing games and as a party to their distorted and perverse form of entertainment, during which Singapore Sling, now a prisoner, is tied up, chained to a bed, vomited on, electrocuted, used as a sex slave, and subjected to various other forms of torture and atrocities in which he is forced to participate. However, as Singapore Sling's confinement wears on he regains his strength and takes a more active role in the games. His deranged captors become concerned and alarmed when a sharp kitchen knife, belonging to the late father, goes missing and they discover Singapore Sling digging a deep hole in their backyard. As psychotic as these two are, they are still lucid enough to recognize that a killing is imminent, if not two or even three. In an atmosphere of decadence and dark madness, the characters gradually sink into the depths of their subconscious mind.

A few days later, the daughter decides that she is fed up with having to suffer under the yoke of maternal authority, and, together with Singapore Sling, murders her mother. Singapore Sling then takes what up until now used to be the mother's role in the sexual games. However, during one of these games, a reenactment of Laura's murder, he stabs the daughter, playing Laura, with the aforementioned missing kitchen knife now attached to his penis. The daughter, while bleeding to death, shoots Singapore Sling and then he goes out to the garden and falls into the pit which he himself had recently dug. The film hence ends, in short, with all three characters dead.

• Meredyth Herold as Daughter
• Panos Thanassoulis as Detective Singapore Sling
• Michele Valley as Mother

Director Nikos Nikolaidis said the following about this film's reception during an interview: "When I was shooting Singapore Sling, I was under the impression that I was making a comedy with elements taken from Ancient Greek Tragedy... Later, when some European and American critics characterized it as 'one of the most disturbing films of all times,' I started to feel that something was wrong with me. Then, when British censors banned its release in England, I finally realized that something is wrong with all of us."[4]

The Icelandic neo-psychedelia band Singapore Sling is named after the film. As the band's frontman Henrik Björnsson explained in a June 2003 interview with Belgium's VRT Radio 1: "We had a first gig. It was booked and we didn't have a name and I had been looking for a film called Singapore Sling for a long time. I couldn't find it anywhere. It sounded cool, so that became the name of the band. It's some kind of dark, perverse Greek film from 1990. I haven't found it yet, so if you know someone who has it, please let me know. I hope it's good. A dark perverse noir film and a guy who has sex with a corpse. And he's called Singapore Sling."[6] In November 2005, after the completion of his last film The Zero Years, a tale of perversion and sexual dominance which failed to replicate the earlier success of Singapore Sling, Nikolaidis declared his intention to stop making movies in order to deal with music.[7]

• Mikela Fotiou, "Monstrous Women and the Subversion of Patriarchy in Nikos Nikolaidis’s Films Singapore Sling and See You in Hell, My Darling," Sixth Global Conference, 2014, "Evil, Women and the Feminine," Friday, 2 May 2014 – Sunday, 4 May 2014, Lisbon, Portugal, Sunday, 4 May 2014, 14:00, Ninth Session: "It’s Show Time!" Chair: Roger Davis.

• Singapore Sling at Nikos Nikolaidis (Film Director/Writer/Producer)
• Singapore Sling at IMDb
• Singapore Sling at the Greek Film Archive Film Museum: Home Page, Digital Archives, Filmography
• Singapore Sling at 5 Books, 6 Films, and... Nikos Nikolaidis: Films
• Singapore Sling at Rotten Tomatoes
• Singapore Sling at AllMovie
• Singapore Sling at The New York Times Movies
• Singapore Sling at the TCM Movie Database