Café Flesh 4K UHD Review

Mondo Macabro

Blu-ray Release: January 27, 2025 (LE 4K/BD); July 8, 2025 (SE Blu-ray); November 11, 2025 (SE 4K UHD)

Video: 1.85:1 & 1.33:1/2160p/Color

Audio: English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono

Subtitles: English SDH

Run Time: 75:38

Director:  Stephen Sayadian

Note: I was sent the standard edition 4K UHD version of Café Flesh, so I’m slightly updating this Blu-ray review to include a little information about the 4K improvements over the 1080p disc.

The time: five years after a nuclear apocalypse. The survivors: post-nuke thrill-freaks looking for a kick. Able to exist, to sense, to feel everything, excepting pleasure. In a world destroyed, survivors break down to those who can and those who can’t. 99% are “Sex Negatives,” call them “erotic casualties.” They want to make love, but the mere touch of another person makes them violently ill. The rest, the lucky one percent, are “Sex Positives,” those whose libidos escaped unscathed. After the Nuclear Kiss, the Positives remain to love, to perform, and the others can only watch – can only come to the Café Flesh. (From Mondo Macbro’s official synopsis)

Stephen Sayadian began his career as a satirical illustrator for Mad Magazine and National Lampoon, eventually graduating to creative director at Larry Flynt Publications in the mid-’70s, where he worked on ad campaigns for Hustler Magazine. Later, he moved with Flynt to LA, where he designed poster art for movies, including John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) and Escape from New York (1981), and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), discovered the area’s punk rock culture, and started bringing his specific graphic ideas to his own movies. He teamed-up with Hustler writer Jerry Stahl and photographer Francis Delia for two pornographic features, Night Dreams (1981), which Delia directed, and Café Flesh (1982), which he directed with uncredited assistance from Mark S. Esposito. 

Café Flesh, the more well-known of the two pictures, is a thinly-veiled politically allegory made up of obscene and avant-garde performance tableaus, hardcore sex acts, and, best/worst of all, it’s dripping with cynicism. It is a whirlwind of transgression and innate contradictions that blurs the line between genuine artistic achievement and frivolous trash for trash’s sake. The best comparison is early MTV, but with a deadpan, Dadaist slant and a lot more blow-jobs. Like its predecessor and Sayadian & Stahl’s third, non-pornographic feature, Dr. Caligari (1989), Café Flesh’s appeal is too niche to tie to any specific genre or audience. Its affected, hardboiled beatnik dialogue, stagy style, and ironic sense of humor are too weird for typical porn fans, while its graphic sex and acidic tone make it an uncomfortable viewing for arthouse crowd (a less porny cut was eventually made), leaving only the ever-so-loyal midnight movie crowd to pick up the pieces.

It’s far from the first or only porn satire or art film, but Café Flesh does occupy a spot on the incredibly small pantheon of post-apocalyptic sex satires, alongside Donald G. Jackson & R.J. Kizer’s Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988), L.Q. Jones’ A Boy and His Dog (1975), Juliusz Machulski’s Sexmission (Polish: Seksmisja, 1984), and at least one other hardcore movie, Gerard Damiano’s The Satisfiers of Alpha Blue (arguably not a comedy, 1981), not to mention the impossible to track STV/ST-pay-per-view/STS porno pipeline (here’s a list I found using a Google search, in case you’re curious). There were two official sequels in 1997 and 2007, both written & directed by Anthony R. Lovett without participation from Sayadian, Delia, or co-writer Stahl.

Video

Café Flesh premiered on North American home video via VCA Pictures’ VHS and was released on Laserdisc by Image Entertainment in 1990. VCA then reissued the film on DVD in 1999 (from screencaps, it appears to be VHS quality). Mondo Macabro debuted Café Flesh on a limited edition 4K UHD/Blu-ray combo pack in January of 2025, followed by a single-disc, 1080p Blu-ray version in July, and, now, a standard edition version of their 4K original negative restoration (made with input from Sayandian and the UCLA Film & Television Archive). 

The 4K remaster was culled from several sources, but is, to my eye, pretty consistent in terms of clarity and color timing. The only notable inconsistencies are occasionally blurred wide-angle shots, which are probably inherent lens effect artifacts. Producer/cinematographer F.X. Pope’s photography is built around the stage performance and black box aesthetic, and features harsh shadows and highlights. The deep pooling blacks and blown-out highlights are all part of the design, though I wonder if the balance might have changed with an extra HDR/DV boost. Ultimately, while HDR/DV passes are always nice, I’m not sure it would make much of a difference for this particular remaster.

The costumes and set pieces are awash with pastels and neons, but the high contrast, coupled with a cool, blueish overlay, keep colors from bursting off the screen, like one might expect from a saturated film of the MTV era. Again, I was initially disappointed by the lack of HDR/DV, but I’m not sure what it would add to such a blue muted look. The 2160p edges are hard and crisp without halo problems, film grain is present and consistent, but not noisy (if I’m really nitpicking, the edges of the frame are a bit buzzy with lightened grain effects), and textures are rich, despite the coarse lighting.

Just like the Blu-ray I previously reviewed, Café Flesh is presented with two aspect ratio options – the original 1.33:1 and a 16x9 friendly 1.85:1. I opted to watch the complete film in 1.33:1 and the 1080p caps on this page match, but I also checked out the 1.85:1 transfer to verify that it is essentially a zoomed version of the same remaster. Whichever version you pick, the image quality is impressive.

Audio

Café Flesh is presented in its original mono and uncompressed 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio. The film is sort of a series of music videos, so Michell Froom’s soundtrack takes precedence during the tableaus/sex scenes. The dialogue-heavy in-between sequences are clean and natural, while the effects and ‘performance’ during said tableaus have a slightly artificial ADR quality (White Zombie fans: keep an ear open for the orgasm sounds sampled into “More Human Than Human”). Froom was a composer and keyboard player, but his biggest contributions to pop culture were album production. He produced albums for Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, Crowded House, Los Lobos, Pearl Jam, Bonnie Raitt, and several others. His Café Flesh soundtrack was later released as an album entitled “Key of Cool.”

Extras

• Commentary with Stephen Sayadian – The director discusses his career, Café Flesh as an “anti-erotic film,” other concepts and themes, the careers of the cast & crew, edits made for the arthouse release, making visual tributes to his favorite films, click-track songs used during production, and the logistics of shooting pornography.

• Interview with Stephen Sayadian (57:47, HD) – This is a more focused and concise discussion with the writer/director, who covers a lot of the same ground as he does on the commentary and takes a deeper look back at his total career.

• Interview with Jerry Stahl (15:22, HD) – The co-writer talks about his career, admiring Sayadian’s work, their collaboration, and the freedom afforded by a movie like Café Flesh.

• Interview with Stoya (9:39, HD) – The semi-retired pornographic and non-pornographic actress/writer/director looks back on her introduction to Café Flesh, its meaning, and how it helped change/inform her perspective on adult filmmaking and sexworkers.

• Interview with Jacob Smith (17:49, HD) – The co-founder of Master of Arts in Sound Arts and Industries, writer of Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media (University of California Press, 2008), and professor at Northwestern University recalls the difficult process of getting ahold of Sayadian for an interview and explores the use of sound design and music in Night Dreams and Café Flesh. 

• On-set footage taken from a news clip (3:08, SD)

• Theatrical trailer 

The images on this page are taken from the BDs and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.