Daughters of Discipline

A nugget of an interesting idea begins DAUGHTERS OF DISCIPLINE, but uncredited auteur (and hidden by a mask in his "acting" role too) Shaun Costello fumbles the opportunity to craft a thriller, delivering the usual fetish garbage instead.

I live near the Meatpacking District where real-life activities similar to the S&M porn depicted here once occurred on a nightly basis at The Vault, Hellfire Club, etc., now merely home to trendy restaurants where tourists congregate when visiting The Highline.

Costello posits a variation on Hellfire Club in the form of a death cult, which heroine C.J. Laing joined on the insistence of her heinously overbearing (and chauvinistic) boyfriend Bob. He's played by an untalented but suitably scuzzy "pretty boy" actor who has a lengthy mainstream career after starting out in gutter-level porn like this.

I thought of RLS and "Treasure Island" because the film opens with Costello's version of The Black Spot: Laing, alone among perhaps 8 members of the cult, receives a letter under her door bearing a skull & crossbones note, indicating she is up for presumably fatal electrocution fun & games at the cult's meeting that night.

Laing recalls in flashback how Bob coerced her into joining, and after a pointless bit of masturbation, we see how trapped she is under Bob's thumb. Him cajoling her in the cornball porn-speak way of manipulation is harder to watch than the explicit and faked torture footage to come.

Meant to shock rather than arouse, this nonsense does have the typical Shaun tongue-in-cheek elements, notably the femme members of the cult, including the inevitable but always worthwhile Sharon Mitchell, dressed in short nighties during the orgiastic climactic scene. Costello uses his favorite low angle (shooting from beneath) camera to record Laing forced to sit in a makeshift electric chair on a penetrating electrified dildo, and get tortured with the usual nipple clamps. At least in the print used by Alpha Blue Archives, the DVD has no ending so we don't see whether Laing is killed or not.

A good version of this material could have brought in a Satanic cult element, always intrinsically interesting whether it be porn or horror, or at least made the "who's chosen to die?" element suspenseful. Costello is content with ambiguity and generally not resolving even the simplest of details - all he cares about is a gimmick to use as springboard for "Adult" content.

Premise that she really craves pain and humiliation is introduced and apparently internalized by many viewers, extending this somehow to the actress herself and not just the role. I led a sheltered life (relatively speaking) in the '70s and only saw Laing in more positive roles for Roberta Findlay and others, and never attached the masochist reputation to her -so watching DISCIPLINE I sympathized and felt she was put-upon, not just a case of (in porn-speak) "you know you love it!".

This type of fetish junk has come a long way since Costello's efforts, and now some of the video features, particularly those of Ernest Greene and his wife Nina Hartley, are extremely sophisticated, employing professional masters or mistresses of the rope and other bondage artists to craft something approaching art (at least for those who enjoy this genre). It is more than nostalgia but rather another example of current values-inversion that so many young fans are attracted to the beyond-primitive style of ancient roughies like this one.

This relatively straight-faced roughie stands as one of Shaun Costello's more disturbing works, surpassed only perhaps by his notorious DOMINATRIX WITHOUT MERCY made that same year with a slightly more substantial budget. Lack of funds must surely be considered the primary reason why this otherwise seriously sick puppy never quite gets under one's skin.

Pity poor Ellie (C.J. Laing) who, in her quest for sexual satisfaction through extreme humiliation, has fallen in with a death cult determined to take their actions to a logical conclusion by sacrificing one of their own. This sacrificial lamb will receive a note depicting a skull and crossbones. None too surprisingly, Ellie turns out to be the chosen one. Hit by this distressing news, she reminisces about her initiation into the cult at the hands of its perpetually hooded leader (Costello, the voice and physique being a dead giveaway by now) and her seemingly heavily medicated boyfriend Bob, who sports a '70s soccer star's ill-advised mullet and looks like a young David Morris but is actually Pepe Valentine (billed as "Michael King"), the boy next door from INSIDE JENNIFER WELLES, where he performed a threesome with the star and Peter Andrews. This sequence once again showcases Costello's keen eye for composition with its nearly abstract view of the four intermingling bodies shot from below. Another aspect of the scene should convince most viewers by now that Costello was at the very least bi-curious when his character requests and receives an open-mouthed kiss from the other girl (not C.J., so I'm going to assume she's the mysterious "Brenda Filbrick") in the scene after Bob has popped a non-faked load in same mouth, semen merrily dribbling down their chins ! With Ellie pleading in vain with Bob to let her hide out at a friend's house, all is prepared for the big event. Unfortunately, the shocking sight of the homemade electric chair that has been set up for Ellie's demise is severely diminished by Costello explaining the procedure in a tone better suited to a car polish infomercial. Fitted onto a wired dildo and hooked up with starter cable nipple clamps, the poor girl is forced to witness the other cult members (with an incredibly youthful Sharon Mitchell dragged in at the eleventh hour) engage in a mini orgy before the switch is flipped and the frame freezes.

Threadbare even by Costello's standards, this film lacks the kind of strong central performance provided by Marlene Willoughby in BETRAYED TEENS or Roger Caine in the Dan McCord vehicles, giving a much-needed impression of gravitas to basically nonsensical material. C.J. Laing cements her reputation as the ultimate '70s sleaze cinema submissive (try saying that three times in a row) but necessarily makes for a very passive heroine. While her powers of endurance may be impressive (relax, the severe beating she receives is clearly faked with clever editing and red food dye on the cat o'nine), her whining acceptance of her sorry plight while she could so easily have fled make her character almost impossible to sympathize with.