There is a profound sense of sadness that surrounds director Juliet Bashore KAMIKAZE HEARTS. I think for those who know the ins and outs, the film is a collection of many factors. From shambolic drug drenched lead, who zings on the screen. To the dampened life of many of those who sadly are no more. Which is explored in a reflective and warm nature by a commentary from the director and the central ‘actor’ Sharon Mitchell. The two seem intent on not shaming or blaming but reframing the events that surround this films creation and making. Actors play porn crews, producers and the like. The now reformed Mitchell is still magnetic, less her destructive drug habit. The quasi-documentary plunge into the 1980s porn industry, never relents and exposes the seedy and the comradship in equal, unpleasent ways. 

Sharon Mitchell was then a porn actor, with a taste for higher art. She starred not only in San Francisco fare but also in main stream fare, including Oscar winner THE DEER HUNTER in a small role. Here we follow her as she works on a porn version of Bizets CARMEN. That is a doomed love affair that seeped into the failed aspects of toxic love. Here we have a compatible situation. The filming is a disruptive series of events, where sex and misogyny, drug abuse and exploitation seep from the walls. To complicate matter,  Mitchell partner Tigr are caught in a toxic romance. Their sexual desires are enveloping one but leaving the other to conquer and claim. This records San Francisco’s X-rated underground and an intense, searing love story. One that is at turns passionate and other poisonous.

Presented in a new 2K restoration from the original 16mm A/B camera negatives, it retains it grit but with a sense of the redemptive power of that as a record of events. Kino Lorber and the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, deserve praise for effecting one but also capturing the other. You can also see the way a film makers mind and dare I say Gaze, works in the short extract from Crash (the working template for this film.) A valueable extra for film making and film meditating. There is much to focus on here, as the BFI have done a great job in making a tough sell, well, sellable but the commentary is a masterly piece of discussion that avoids being to historical point – counter point and instead vims and wizz with those on the coalface talking openly about themselves and their movie. This publication is a very small fish, in a massive pond, with massive sharks swimming around but if they dont say it, I will. THIS IS OUTSTANDING….

• Restored in 2K from the original camera negative by Kino Lorber and the UCLA Film & Television Archive
• Audio commentary by director Juliet Bashore, actors Sharon Mitchell, Jon Martin and Howie Gordon, and performance artist Shelly Mars
• Crash (excerpt, 13 mins)): in 1990 Juliet Bashore workshopped a ‘fictional’ version of Kamikaze Hearts through the American Film Institute. This sketch is one of the outcomes from the AFI project
• Interviews (2022, 173 mins): a selection of newly recorded interviews totalling almost three hours with Juliet Bashore, Sharon Mitchell , Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, Susie Bright, Howie Gordon, Jon Martin
• Vintage trailer
• 2022 trailer
• English subtitles for the Deaf and partial hearing (feature only)
• **FIRST PRESSING ONLY** Illustrated booklet featuring new writing by artist, curator and co-founder of Club des Femmes Sarah Wood and a 1990 interview with Juliet Bashore