D'Amato's last decade and a half's work as a maker of hardcore sex films is usually seen as an uninteresting, if extensive, footnote to his work. However, Midnight Obsession shows that there is still an interesting mind at work, even if the film-making is hampered somewhat by the duller demands of the genre.
Midnight Obsession is a porno spin on the Billy Hayes/Midnight Express story, with a young American woman caught at Istanbul customs with a dildo-full of cocaine inside her anus; she is quickly bunged into a Turkish prison where she finds herself at the mercy of fellow prisoners (male and female), wardens and a shadowy official whose obsession with seeing her naked got her searched in the first place. All of this is rather more reminiscent of another Brad David vehicle, Querelle, as our heroine like Genet's sailor allows both the representatives of authority and the outlaws to enact their sexual fantasies on her, sex which she mostly disavows when she isn't doing it but seems to enjoy well enough when she is.
Like Genet, D'Amato is suggesting here that sex is the obsession which really motivates the deeds of authority and the crimes of the outlaw, that the impetus of power and criminality is sexually based. The heroine smuggles her drugs (in one of her sexual orifices) when she is dropped by the hunky reporter who she is romping with in the first scene – suggesting that opiates are a way of dealing with it when sex fails. As mentioned above, the official who spots our heroine at the airport asks for her to be searched purely for prurient reasons, and he is delighted when the drugs are found and he can see that she is imprisoned to become slave to his sexual whims. The female head warder is obsessed with the official, and so punishes the girl as much as she can in order to express her sexual jealousy. Even the female US diplomat Smith is sidetracked from helping the protagonist by a couple of hunks, who she'd rather spend time having sex with than pursuing her official duties. Keeping to this theme, the most daring shot of the film swings from an exterior establishing shot of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque to the interior of the cell in which our heroine is being put through power's sexual paces – power emphasises itself through architecture and through the sexual subjugation of bodies – a subjugation which is never less than half-willing.
Unfortunately, such shots are rare in a film which is concerned throughout to show the usual meat and money shots and have its actors perform sex is positions which are unnatural, purely to allow the greater access of the camera and therefore the viewer's eye. The acting is pretty rudimentary (not helped by a dub on the US version in which the heroine sounds like Margaret Dumont) but the John Waters quality of the performers helps add to the point that reality is a crudely performed sex show. The prison itself is grey and dreary in appearance, reminiscent of those concentration camps in mid-1970s Nazisploitation romps but also hearkening back further to the interior of the interrogation room in Rosselini's neo-realist masterpiece Rome Open City.
Midnight Obsession is a porno spin on the Billy Hayes/Midnight Express story, with a young American woman caught at Istanbul customs with a dildo-full of cocaine inside her anus; she is quickly bunged into a Turkish prison where she finds herself at the mercy of fellow prisoners (male and female), wardens and a shadowy official whose obsession with seeing her naked got her searched in the first place. All of this is rather more reminiscent of another Brad David vehicle, Querelle, as our heroine like Genet's sailor allows both the representatives of authority and the outlaws to enact their sexual fantasies on her, sex which she mostly disavows when she isn't doing it but seems to enjoy well enough when she is.
Like Genet, D'Amato is suggesting here that sex is the obsession which really motivates the deeds of authority and the crimes of the outlaw, that the impetus of power and criminality is sexually based. The heroine smuggles her drugs (in one of her sexual orifices) when she is dropped by the hunky reporter who she is romping with in the first scene – suggesting that opiates are a way of dealing with it when sex fails. As mentioned above, the official who spots our heroine at the airport asks for her to be searched purely for prurient reasons, and he is delighted when the drugs are found and he can see that she is imprisoned to become slave to his sexual whims. The female head warder is obsessed with the official, and so punishes the girl as much as she can in order to express her sexual jealousy. Even the female US diplomat Smith is sidetracked from helping the protagonist by a couple of hunks, who she'd rather spend time having sex with than pursuing her official duties. Keeping to this theme, the most daring shot of the film swings from an exterior establishing shot of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque to the interior of the cell in which our heroine is being put through power's sexual paces – power emphasises itself through architecture and through the sexual subjugation of bodies – a subjugation which is never less than half-willing.
Unfortunately, such shots are rare in a film which is concerned throughout to show the usual meat and money shots and have its actors perform sex is positions which are unnatural, purely to allow the greater access of the camera and therefore the viewer's eye. The acting is pretty rudimentary (not helped by a dub on the US version in which the heroine sounds like Margaret Dumont) but the John Waters quality of the performers helps add to the point that reality is a crudely performed sex show. The prison itself is grey and dreary in appearance, reminiscent of those concentration camps in mid-1970s Nazisploitation romps but also hearkening back further to the interior of the interrogation room in Rosselini's neo-realist masterpiece Rome Open City.