It may be of no strange coincidence that director Nikos Nikolaidis’ film Euridice B.A. 2037 made its debut in 1975, the same year that the world was introduced to three other legendary cult films – The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Thundercrack and Pier Paolo Passolini’s posthumous epic Salo. Making his venture into filmmaking on the heels of these underground classics undoubtedly set the stage for Nikolaidis’ own venture, some 15 years later into the world of sado-sexual satire. The fruit of that endeavor falls onto DVD for the first time and brings with it a level of viewership commitment that is rarely existent in today’s overtly PC charged planet.

As the rain and wind howl, the camera settles on a pair of scantily clad women toiling away in a dense mass of vegetation. Battling the forces of nature the two seem resolved to complete the task at hand. Once the hole is deep enough to dispose of the corpse of their recently murdered chauffeur their work will be done. Elsewhere on the property a mysterious detective has arrived, exhausted from his travels and reeling from the unexplained bullet in his shoulder, he takes a moment to rest before continuing on to the house – following a lead – in search of his beloved Laura. When the night has parted to dawn, the detective makes his way to the home. After collapsing in the doorway, he is taken in by the wayward Mother and Daughter. Unable to speak, the pair bestows the stranger with the designation Singapore Sling, and directly begin to subject him to their depraved realm of abhorrent sexual desires.

Ostensibly a satire on, and homage to, the hard boiled pulp classics of the 1940’s, Singapore Sling succeeds on all fronts in that manner and, in essence, further creates a kind of Gothic Noir sub-genre, by focusing on the stark and beautiful art direction of the film.

Like some Machiavellian version of Otto Preminger’s classic thriller Laura, the backstory of the ill-fated charge of Singapore Sling, may or may not be dead. In fact, the ambivalence that exists in the film is so electric that, although the audience is lead to believe that the maniacal duo at the center of the plot are in fact mother and daughter, that case is arguably up for grabs by the end of the film.

Regardless of the kinship of the killers, one thing remains certain; the level of shocking sexual behavior that the pair exhibits is inarguably unsettling. Nikolaidis’ film is designed to distress you, mixing bondage and incest with every conceivable bodily fluid, all of which culminates in a Salo-esque zenith that would leave all but a few of the most jaded viewers wishing to scratch their own eyes out.

Shot in crisp black and white, the vulgarity of the images captured by cinematographer Aris Stavrou lose none of their power, and, in keeping with the central look of the film, harken to the absolute dark noirs of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s European classics, where shades of gray are as seldom seen in the film frames as they are in the characters that inhabit them. This powerful concentration of light makes Singapore Sling all the more effective in relating the bleak humanity of the cast.

Not for the weak of heart or the delicate of spirit, Nikolaidis has crafted a modern transgressive masterpiece that few would care to stomach but more importantly even fewer would have the guts to make. Even over the past several years as directors like Takashi Miike push the public’s constitutions further and further from the safety of the middle ground, the terror and power of Passolini and Nikolaidis’ visions of moral society’s unqualified decay will continue to stand as harbingers for the ills of the world.