Welcome to HOLLYWEIRD, a recurring column digging into the forgotten, weird, overlooked, and failed experiments from Hollywood’s first 100 years!

Directed and Written by Alien Castle
Starring Sherilyn Fenn, Whip Hubley and David Hewlett
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 95 minutes

by Billy Russell, Staff Writer 

The saddest thing about Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel is how little information there is about this movie out there.  Usually, you can pull up a trivia page on IMDB or take a look at the production history on Wikipedia, but nothing like that exists here.  Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel really is a forgotten movie–not many people talk about it, and I only ever stumbled upon it by blind luck, and I’m glad that I did.

Released in 1991, one year after Twin Peaks aired on TV, Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel definitely feels inspired by the Lynchian weirdness of Twin Peaks but it’s not a thematic, soulless rip-off.  It feels like the idea of the movie existed long before Twin Peaks, it’s just that the show’s success allowed for smaller studios to take a chance on bizarre, dreamy neo-noirs that they ordinarily wouldn’t have before.  I’m sure it didn’t hurt to have Sherilyn Fenn in the film to attract a built-in audience either.

Birdey and Chester (played by Sherilyn Fenn and Whip Hubley, respectively) are new to town, Anaheim, 1955, as Disneyland has just opened to the public.  They settle into one of those weird motels that only exist in the movies, that are populated with intriguing eccentrics, including a mandatory cameo from Paul Bartel as the property manager.  The movie is shot and staged like a classic noir that would be set in LA, but this is one county over, so the characters look a little more used up.  The Orange County of Desire and Hell looks like it’s been through some stuff, like an LA-set noir chewed them up and spit them out here in Anaheim and they’re just trying to survive.

Chester is a toy salesman on business and Birdey wants to use the trip as an opportunity to see Disneyland.  Neo or not, this is classic noir, and the two hate each other.  One–or maybe both of them–want to see the other one dead.  There is a murder (or maybe not), lapses in memory, gaslighting, drugs, afffairs, a psychotic beatnik hitman played by David Hewlett of Stargate Atalntis fame and more red herrings than you can count.

All of this is set in the shadow of nuclear proliferation.  With all the cigarette smoke wafting through the air and all the talk of Disneyland opening just miles away, there’s the constant threat of nuclear annihilation looming over our characters’ heads.

Birdey awakens one day, days into the future, with no memory of what happened during those missing days, to find that Chester has been murdered.  But things aren’t that simple.  The plot pulls the rug out from under us enough times that we know that part of the fun is never, ever knowing what’s quite real and what’s not.

Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel isn’t perfect, but damn if it isn’t intriguing.  I think the most surprising thing is its PG-13 rating from the MPAA.  Usually, these types of movies are swimming in sleaze, and if you’re going to have one watered down like this, it’s to get more butts in more seats during a theatrical release.  I tried doing some research on this movie, and as far as I can tell, it never saw a theatrical release.  I think it was direct-to-video, so the PG-13 rating is, if anything, to be a bit more faithful to a 1950s film that would have to hint at things like sex and nudity and some of the harsher violence.  But, then, you wouldn’t have the femme fatale shrieking “PENIS ANUS!” at her husband in a 1950s noir, so what do I know?

I saw this movie the way God intended: On tape, procured from a VHS swap I was at years ago.  I traded tapes with a gentleman who was very interested in a tape I had and he gave me a whole stack of tapes for it, and Desire and Hell was amongst the titles of that stack.  I remember he asked me, “You like Sherilyn Fenn?”  I said of course.  He tapped the cover of Desire and Hell and said, “You’re gonna wanna see this one, then.”

It took me about five years, but I finally did watch it.  It was on a screener tape, made for video rental chains to determine how many copies to order.  It begins with a trailer for the movie and the cost per tape, which has the very specific price of $89.98 USD.  Kids, if you didn’t know this, there were affordable tapes to own for something like $25 if it was extremely popular, like Batman or Jurassic Park, but if it was something like this, like Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel, it was gonna cost like $100 to own, which is why video stores were gonna charge you late fees if you didn’t bring it back on time.  This weird-ass movie cost a bundle, they were gonna try their damndest to make a profit off of it.  

Movies like Desire and Hell are an intriguing snapshot into a specific time and place in filmmaking.  It’s interesting to see the forgotten relics that were made in the wake of something much more popular, like Twin Peaks, which itself was already pretty weird.  It’s very, very strange, but it feels sincere in its weirdness.  It’s not a meticulously manufactured product.  Obviously, the point of the movie is to have this surreal timeline in this nightmarish place, but at the end, when you think back on it, it really does feel like a fever dream.