Hell or Las Vegas: Perdita Durango - 35MM

It’s only natural that “Hell or Las Vegas” concludes with the most Hell-facing title in the series, Álex de la Iglesia’s psychotic adaptation of Barry Gifford’s novel 59° and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango – written in the aftermath of David Lynch’s more famous take on Gifford’s Wild at Heart. But while Lynch’s film depicted a pair of well-meaning young lovers on the run, Perdita Durango revels in depravity and evil, set in a sun-scorched southwest where “the only two real pleasures left on earth are fucking and killing”. Rosie Perez stars as the eponymous sex worker Perdita, alongside Javier Bardem as her Santeria-practising drug dealer boyfriend “Romeo Dolorosa”. In this accursed road movie, Perdita and Romeo commit all variety of sins – murder, kidnapping, rape, cannibalism – en route from Mexico to Vegas, where Romeo is contracted to deliver a truckload of fetuses to a cosmetics company at the behest of a mob boss. Costarring James Gandolfini as the dogged FBI agent on their tail and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins as Romeo’s assistant in ritual sacrifice, de la Iglesia’s English-language debut feels like a Hollywood film beamed in from another planet (in actuality, a lavish Mexican-Spanish coproduction.) Butchered by U.S. distributors and released as Dance with the Devil, Perdita Durango remains as transgressive as it is misunderstood: a neo-exploitation film par excellence whose antic sadism is less indebted to Lynch or Tarantino than the spirits of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Russ Meyer.

Introduced by Steve Macfarlane 8/25!