Untamed Cowgirls of the Wild West Part 2: Jammy Glands from the Rio Grande

Following on the heels of one of Rinse Dream's stronger pieces of video work, UNTAMED COWGIRLS OF THE WILD WEST 2 unfortunately doesn't quite live up to its predecessor. It's still mandatory viewing for Dream fans (if they can find it!), but unfortunately finishes out his filmography on a bit of a sleepy note.

Dream's post-CALIGARI video work is an interesting body to explore on its own terms, largely eschewing almost any sense of narrative for a more formalist exploration / deconstruction of what makes modern porn tick. Nevertheless, a bit like a magic eye painting or a Rorschach test, if you squint just right, the vague outlines of a plot do become apparent. NIGHTDREAMS 2 & 3 (Dream's video work is solely comprised of diptychs constituting one long-form feature) is the closest to a traditional narrative, though still highly impressionistic, while PARTY DOLL A GO-GO 1 & 2 prove the least. COWGIRLS falls somewhere in between, with a vague wisp of story apparent in the first part, but, as far as I could tell, all but completely abandoned in the second. Future viewings may prove there's more here, but, for now, it feels pretty empty.

Like all of Dream's video work, UC2 largely consists of retro-pop dialogue repeated robotically by its cast, then whipsawed back and forth in the editing room to create a weird kind of formalist abstraction. After a superb opening recap of the first installment that reduces the entire film to a blinking barrage of non-sequitur gibberish, the film settles into fairly routine F&S, albeit with some nice crane-based camera-work. Unfortunately, this is the most dialogue-free of Dream's latter-day productions, with the zany writing kept to a minimum and most of the formal experimentation coming from video-generated title cards interrupting the action. While I admit to getting a few chuckles out of these, nothing quite reaches the Olympian heights of "slut slaw," the brilliant neologism for the female anatomy coined in the first part.

Instead, Dream here seems largely to be on autopilot, cranking out five acceptable sex scenes, chopping them up just enough with video titles so that they become impossible to jerk off to (the director's general porn M.O.), and then calling it a day. While his prior video productions are all brilliant deconstructions of the video-shot porn era, it seems by UNTAMED 2 even Rinse Dream was running out of ways to subvert the system. In the end, it's probably best that he quit here, while he was still at least somewhat ahead.

To set the record straight, reading the prior (and only) IMDb review one would think that Rinse Dream's porn video is a subject for a college course on Semiotics. No, it's not philosophical nor is it cutting edge post-modern filmmaking. It's pretentious gonzo porn made before the Gonzo revolution (following Gresham's Law) drove serious Adult Entertainment out of the marketplace.

This is not Brecht distanciation, it is merely delivery of XXX sex content with the insulting format of non-stop audience put-downs. The weird editing, use of intertitles to interrupt the visuals and general fake-artsiness make it unwatchable, literally. On Disney+ there is a warning about "flashing lights" appended to every movie (it seems), and this video certainly deserves a similar disclaimer.

When I was in college in the '60s I found much of Godard's work similarly unwatchable - I recall the first movie I ever walked out of in my life was in fact one of his better ones: A Married Woman; I later got onto his wavelenght and by the 1980s became a fan.

But Jeanna Fine and Tami Monroe, for example, have made many fine Adult features, just not as fake-hip as this crappy one. Rinse Dream has worked on mainstream projects, and was taken seriously for the avant-garde effects of Cafe Flesh, but I would classify his fans as true masochists, analogous to those lost souls who dig and pay to see Cuck movies.