The follow up to his midnight-movie smash hit Café Flesh, writer/director Stephen Sayadian reimagines the story of the classic German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) for the post-New Wave avant-garde scene. When making Café Flesh, Sayadian’s financiers required him to include hardcore sex in order to ensure they could make money on the porn circuit, even though he didn’t think it was necessary. With Dr. Caligari, Sayadian was finally able to make a sexually charged, avant-garde film without all the trappings of pornography.

Having spent years in between the films working in the theater, as well as a production assistant on music videos, Sayadian’s Dr. Caligari takes more from the impressionist visuals of the original than the story itself. Here we have a dominatrix type Dr. Caligari – the granddaughter of the original doctor – who is conducting illegal experiments on the patients in her insane asylum. This simplistic story basically serves a hook to hang some of the wildest images ever put on film. The film takes the surrealism of Bunuel and Dali and mixes it with a melange of pre-WWII German cabaret and post-WWII America – it’s soaked in kitsch, pop-art, advertising/commercial design, and a healthy dose of post-Zappa/post-punk irreverence and social commentary. This film draws from the same well as Sayadian’s contemporary Tim Burton, but with fantastical visuals that Burton would never dare to attempt. Featuring cannibals, serial killers, frigid housewives, and a dominatrix doctor, Dr. Caligari creates a sexy, silly, depraved, outlandish, and completely other worldly universe that