I’d never heard of “The Black Room” until I saw it on a list of Amazon recommendations. I figured, “Why the hell not?” and gave it a try.
The film starts with an attractive couple having sex. They get killed, then the scene switches to another attractive couple having sex. I thought, “OK, it’s gonna be one of those films.“
And in fact, “The Black Room” is all about the topic of sex, though it applies more intellectual force than you might initially presume.
We have a married couple whose relationship has lost its erotic charge, largely because they have annoying kids. The husband has taken to having affairs with women he just seems to pick up on street corners. To engage in these affairs, he rents a strange room in a house owned by a brother and sister pair. (This setup might remind viewers of the film “Burnt Offerings.”) The room, poorly lit with candles, looks like the setting for occult sacrifices.
Things get interesting when the wife realizes what her husband is doing, and takes to using the room for her own infidelity.
It’s the strange nature of the brother and sister couple that gives this film its menace. Rest assured that plenty of blood is spilled.
Linnea Quigley, perhaps most famous as the character Trash from “Return of the Living Dead,“ has a small role. Christopher McDonald, one of those faces you’ve seen in 1 million films, has what is presumably an early part for him.
The film does a decent job of mining the philosophical territory that came with the pre-AIDS, early 1980s sexual revolution. It’s almost a feminist film in that it bemoans the limited sexual roles available to women (basically whore or sexless prude). Not that men, the film seems to argue, have it much better. They can either be cads or tormented voyeurs.
There’s an interesting twist at the end that implies some kind of supernatural forces at work.
The budget is pretty low (ALL the blood looks like Kool-Aid), and the pacing drags at times.
