Doomsday Reels: Cafe Flesh 3

Cafe Flesh 3 (2003)

The Director

Antonio Passolini

The Actors

Sunset Thomas (Sunset), Rachel Rotten (Mona), Fred J. Lincoln (Marvin Gardens), Rob Rotten (Spud), Geroge Kaplan (Dr. Jack Teasley), Anthony R. Lovett (The Brain)

The Cause

Nuclear War

The Story

"I don't know my name, that's because I'm not really alive.  So don't ask me what happened or why I can talk or how I even got here.  I have no idea.  All I know is that I have one sole purpose and that's to remember what happened and to tell others so it never happens again.  But don't expect miracles from me, after all I'm just a brain.

Here's a history lesson for ya.  At the end of the 21st century the world went to war once again, but this time it was different.  This time some wiseguy with his finger on the button thought he could get the jump on the first strike and win a nuclear war.  So he fired and they fired back and everyone else let things go too, just in case.  Boom boom, out wen the lights.  The only winners in that kind of war are the ones who die quickly and the survivors end up being the real losers.  For a hundred years the world was covered by a doomsday shroud of toxic gas that blocked out the sun and turned everything on Earth in one giant graveyard.

Nuclear war is nasty but nuclear winter is even worse, and when it was over just about everyone on Earth, 99.9%, were rendered incapable of having sex without becoming violently, mortally ill.  These were the sex negatives, or neggies for short.  And the lucky few who could still hump, they were the pozzies, sex positives and by law they were required to perform bizarre sexual acts for the twisted pleasure of the neggies, who could only watch and yearn." -opening monologue, The Brain.

The Rundown

Cafe Flesh 3 was a milestone for this column.  For the first time ever I was tempted to just not review a movie.  Now, of course, I'm not beholden to do anything but my own self-imposed rule has been that even rotten crap like Death Racers or Live Freaky, Die Freaky deserves as much attention from this column as something great like The Day or Miracle Mile.

But Cafe Flesh 3 is baaaaaaad, like embarrassingly bad to the point where I had a moment of clarity where I realized I'm writing a review of a porno movie and wondered what the fuck I'm even doing with my life.  And I remind you that Cafe Flesh 2 was pretty awful but Cafe Flesh 3, even by the standards of porn, is terrible.

So the story, which takes up a whopping ten minutes of this movie's two hour runtime, is that Cafe Flesh, now a television show in the post-apocalyptic future runs into a snag when the last sex-positive woman spontaneously combusts.  Left with a need for a star, the head of the studio hires a mad-scientist to use his time machine (made out of a converted furnace, that is actually stated in the movie) to send two people back in time to kidnap porn actress Sunset Thomas and bring her to the future to save Cafe Flesh.

The rest is just disconnected bizarro sex scenes and long-winded narration by a brain in a jar.  The same brain in a jar from the previous film, I think it's just stock footage taken from that one.  The original movie managed to sell its premise in two title cards and a couple expository lines but the brain waxes poetic constantly.

The sex scenes are so disconnected from the movie that I think the studio just scooped up a bunch of stuff they'd already shot and had the director (Anthony R. Lovett using the name Antonio Passolini, same as on the previous film) work up a vague framework to tie them together.  If not for the narration by the brain you couldn't tell what's even happening because the story is incredibly short and skips around a lot.

But what the hell do I know, this is a porno, people don't watch it for the story, right?  But if that's the case then why was so much work put into even having a story?  Why, again, did Anthony R. Lovett feel the need to make this a Cafe Flesh movie when Cafe Flesh is, artistically speaking, the polar opposite of this movie.

And if the entire point is the sex scenes then are they really worth it?  Far be it for me to speak for people who bought porn DVDs in 2003 but the sex scenes have all the quality and grace of your average late-night movie channel soft-core movies just without the simulated sex.  And the scenarios are whackadoo so I would think that would kind of take someone off guard as well.  I don't know how well this movie sold and I don't really care but I doubt it took the porn-watching world by storm.

Cafe Flesh 3 is unwatchable, don't bother with it.

The Shill

Cafe Flesh 3 is not available on Amazon but it can be found relatively easy through various websites that sell this kind of movie on DVD.  However, due to the questionable legitimacy and security of those sites I will not link to them here, seek it out on your own.

Next Time on Doomsday Reels

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