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A detective (Panos Thanassoulis) is assigned to a case involving the murder of a woman named Laura. During his investigation, he finds out that the woman was not dead at all. The dead body that had been found in her apartment was actually someone else. Once the detective tracks her down, he falls in love with Laura, who eventually leaves him for someone else and disappears. The heartbroken detective lets his life spiral out of control as he becomes obsessed with Laura and the process of finding her. He is fired from his job, succumbs to alcoholism and is pretty close to losing his sanity when he is finally able to retrace Laura's steps to the location of her last possible employment. This location is at the doorstep of a remote villa that happens to be inhabited by a deranged mother (Michele Valley) and daughter (Meredyth Herold).
This incestuous duo are a sociopathic, murderous pair who like to engage in perverted sex acts with their victims, as well as with each other, before killing them. Once the detective, now named by the pair as Singapore Sling, is in their lair he is subsequently imprisoned and subjected to a myriad of depraved sex acts and torture. One of the torture techniques involves the daughter dressing and acting like his long, lost Laura to try and trick the detective into falling in love with her. As the film progresses, the viewer sees the dynamic change in the house as jealousy enters the picture and the daughter starts believing her own illusion.
Singapore Sling is a hard film to classify. Shot beautifully in black and white, it can be placed in the same category as Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, but with Nikos Nikolaidis direction and Aris Stavrou's cinematography, Singapore Sling can also be classified as a film noir hybrid. Almost every shot, not matter what is in it, is beautiful. The set pieces and costumes are creative and music and sounds throughout the film pulls you in. Having all of the attributes of exploitation, horror, and film-noir, Singapore Sling is a film tough to label. So much so, it is almost safe to say it has created its own genre; a psycho-sexual hybrid of Lynch's Eraserhead, Pier Paolo Pasolini's The 120 Days of Sodom and Preminger's 1944 detective classic, Laura (coincidence?).
One of the rare techniques employed in Singapore Sling is the daughter and mother quite frequently breaking the 4th wall barrier and speaking directly to the audience. These exchanges may seem a bit gimmicky at first, but truly add to the film in a positive way. These scenes, as well as every other scene these two women are in, add more to the strangeness, the surealness of Singapore Sling and help show Valley's and Herold's possibly expert, or possibly inept, acting abilities. These women seem amateurish and contrived one second, and completely convincing the next as two bona-fide crazy women. With the daughter's involuntary twitches while speaking and mannerisms that allude to the reality that she may be constantly hearing voices, to the more controlled mother whose spontaneous orgasms and act of speaking both English and French in the same sentence (sometimes repeating a phrase both ways), these two women do a great job of making you watch in an almost rubber-necking fashion.
Singapore Sling may not be a film some viewers will be able to watch as they may not be able to stomach the activities the mother and daughter participate in. One of the pairs favorite pastimes, aside from killing their servants, is re-enacting the murders. Since the victims are usually subjected to sexual torture, these re-enactments detail what happened to past victims with either the mother or daughter taking on the role of a dead victim. These includes such memorable scenes as the daughter taking on the role of a victim and being forced to fellate a strap-on dildo worn by her mother before the mother rapes her with it. Or watching a woman give a man shock treatments so that her mother can ride on top of him, using his convulsing body like a human vibrator until she pisses in his face during her climax. These scenes are atrocious, but filmed in such a way that they never quite hit the level of to-sickening-to-watch. This is simply because of the way the material is handled; the way it is filmed.
Label this as exploitation, as it succeeds more there than Nikolaidis' original goal of creating a black comedy, but it is probably the most sexy looking exploitation film to date.
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