Misty Mundae:  An Appreciation

by Fuggy

Misty Mundae

Oh Misty Mundae. Chantal has arrived on the Softcore Reviews doorstep for review, and it's made us, well, Misty-eyed (quite literally) and reflective.  Here we are with your very last release for Seduction Cinema.  The last one ever.  It seems like only yesterday that you were a young girl in a neat bob haircut, with a ludicrous sunburst tattoo on your shoulder; your doe eyes widened with innocent incomprehension as you were variously murdered, strangled, stabbed, shot, bitten and eviscerated, usually by your boyfriend.

For me it really was yesterday, because I was just scanning Vampire Strangler for review on this site.  Having one of her earliest videos arrive at nearly the same time as her last has made me think about the amazing run of Seduction Cinema from 1998 to 2004 and the development of Misty Mundae, aka Erin Brown, into one of the biggest softcore stars we've ever seen.

Chantal is a pivotal movie in many ways, and it's also an unusual DVD release in that the folks at Seduction have actually managed to get Misty to sit down with the director Tony Marsiglia to contribute commentary for it.  It's brutally honest, and equal parts funny and very sad.  It's also the closest thing we'll probably get to a career-summing interview.  She no longer considers herself in any way, shape or form to be a softcore star any more, so it's highly unlikely that she'll ever submit to an interview for Softcore Reviews.  So this is as close as we'll get.  (However, if she's reading this, she's welcome to prove me wrong!)

"I don't think of myself as an erotic film star, or a softcore porn star or anything like that," says Misty in the commentary for Chantal.  "It was a role I was handed, and I just kind of went for it."  Her career started with very humble beginnings.  Before she was Seduction Cinema's leading actress, she was the property of Factory 2000, or more precisely, she was William Hellfire's girlfriend.  Factory 2000 was an underground collective from New Jersey featuring filmmakers Hellfire and Johnny Crash, and their friends and girlfriends, such as Misty and Chelsea Mundae, Lilly Tiger, and Zoë Moonshine.  Their offerings ranged from strangulation fetish videos (I Was a Teenage Strangler), to grindhouse gore (Kinky Cannibals), to pretend snuff (Snuff Perversions) to the inexplicable (Duck!  The Columbine High Massacre).

Misty gets busy in Spider-Babe

Their output, and the assets of their leading ladies, caught the eye of fellow New Jersey auteur Michael Raso, who snapped them all up for what later became the Seduction Cinema juggernaut.  What followed was a seamless morph through a number of different aspects of erotic cinema.  The kind folks at Seduction have kept us up-to-date with their output by sending us review copies, and as fans we've purchased many of their titles over the years, so we've secretly been documenting this entire era of softcore.

There were so many films, in such a short time, that it's hard to keep track of what happened when.  At first the Seduction output resembled the Factory 2000 releases, and the movies were still being directed by William Hellfire.  Bikini Girls on Dinosaur Planet, for instance, can best be described as a bunch of topless cave-girls walking around in a mud pit.  "Some of the sex here is like watching lesbian paint dry," I churlishly wrote in my review.

Somewhere along the line, they got into the business of making film parodies as well.  The Erotic Witch Project became a DVD hit and spawned two immediate sequels.  "When it comes to mainstream film parody," wrote the head honcho at this site, "Seduction Cinema knows how to isolate and identify the crucial element that is missing from most Hollywood big screen productions:  namely, lots and lots of lesbian sex."  Amen to that.  Then came Gladiator Eroticus, which featured Misty in the crucial role of the Roman soldier Clitoris in what our resident reviewer described as "clam-slamming action."  If that doesn't get him quoted on the back of a DVD box, I don't know what will.

There were numerous movies that explored drug addiction, such as Roxanna, and Lustful Addiction.  Misty got to direct a few movies herself, such as Voodoun Blues, a full length exploration of a student film she had put together a few years before.  The budgets got bigger, and the movies kept on coming.

Where's Misty? The girls cavort in Lord of the G-Strings.

At the same time, Misty got a bunch of new playmates to fool around with.  These included Julian Wells, Darian Caine, and A.J. Khan.  Each played off of Misty in different ways.  Darian Caine was usually the comic foil, game for anything, especially a nice lesbian romp.  A.J. Khan was the sultry ingénue whose dark skin played off of Misty's alabaster whiteness.  And Wells was the tough chick who usually tormented the younger Misty, mentally and sometimes physically.  She was also the best actress of the bunch, and between the two of them, they elevated the level of commitment to that aspect of the production process to all-new levels.  Gone was the half-assed attitude that was a hallmark of the Factory 2000 era.

You might think that the same cast over and over again would get boring, but on the contrary, familiarity bred sexiness, as I discovered in my review of Flesh for Olivia. "Wells, Khan and Mundae allow their hands and tongues to rove a bit more freely with each other," I wrote then.  "Fingers run smoothly over crotches, lips kiss at panties.  Everything is just a little bit more explicit than you expect." As Misty put it in her Chantal commentary, "We've done it enough times now.  We know the routine."

Before she knew it, this sexual heat was turning on the masses on basic cable, and she was an out-and-out Softcore Diva.  Mistymundae.com was getting more traffic than the entire Seduction Cinema website.  Seduction was almost obliged to put her in every one of its movies, even if it was just a cameo appearance.  My review of My Vampire Lover refers to her walk-on as a schoolgirl selling cookies thusly:  "Misty in a schoolgirl outfit can walk on to the set of any movie she wishes, as far as I'm concerned."

Misty shares a tender moment with Shelby Taylor in Playmate of the Apes

Misty had more than her share of rabid fans, and I counted myself among them.  My initial taste of the Mundae phenomenon was when Playmate of the Apes first appeared on Cinemax.  Her body and her acting was so different to what you usually see in your typical softcore product that it wasn't hard for her to stand out from the pack.  In amongst a throng of tanned, big-titted bleach blondes with little to no acting ability, here was a skinny brunette with no tan whatsoever and little more in the way of boobage, and she was not only bringing the steaminess to the sex scenes, she was acting rings around the others and cracking funny lines with great timing.

Within a year, Lord of the G Strings and Spiderbabe had their premieres on Cinemax as well.  It was a whirlwind, a freight train running down the tracks.  Though she had become a Softcore Diva, as she mentions in the Chantal commentary, "I never perceived myself in that light."  And it was a moment of perception that appears to have brought that out of control freight train to a skidding halt.

As she tells it, she was in Los Angeles in 2004 filming Lust for Dracula.  She was in a house, getting made up for a scene, looking down on two actresses lying in the back yard shooting an unusually explicit sex scene.  "I was looking out the window at it, and it just looked so sleazy to me," she remembers.  "It looked really dirty.  And I was like, 'my God, is that what it looks like?'  It was kind of horrifying for me, that moment of clarity."

"Whatchoo talkin' 'bout?"

I know what scene she's talking about; in my review of the movie (which is one of my favorites), I singled it out as a beautiful and "remarkably satisfying scene."  Here's a screencap.  Doesn't it look wonderfully peaceful and pleasant and erotic?  To Misty, looking down on it from above, it looked horrible and dirty.  Clearly it was time for her to take a break and clear her head.

Unfortunately, there was no chance for that, because within two days she was already shooting Chantal, with the same director and much of the same cast.  It's a harrowing movie, and must have made for a harrowing, emotionally intense shoot.  A day before the shoot was to end, and after filming an emotionally draining scene in which her character was degraded, abused, and forced to crawl along a dirty floor, crying, she had what she describes as an "emotional breakdown." 

She came to a realization.  "It was time to move on," she admitted to herself.  Erin Brown is a remarkably smart person, with a sense of personal detachment that allows her to understand what she is going through and contextualize it with remarkable insight.  "I'm glad for everything," she says in her commentary, referring to Chantal specifically, but thinking about her whole experience, "because it ended up being a transitional point in my career." 

And, after a pause, she off-handedly throws off the most amazing insight of all:  "Not just any girl who's willing to get naked could have done this role."

Let's be totally honest here.  We here at Softcore Reviews are insane.  We're totally bonkers.  We're fans of a really, really weird (and sometimes dreadful) genre of movie.  We'll forgive a crappy movie's bad plot, horrible dialogue, and atrocious acting if a nice-looking pair of boobs shows up.  We'll spend 3 pages in our forum debating whether or not an actress has gone "the extra-mile" in a scene, despite the fact that the actress is a porn star and goes the extra-mile on a regular basis in her day job. 

If we take a step back, we realize the unrealistic expectations we demand of our softcore stars.  We blow smoke up their asses by talking about how great of an actress they are, how brilliant we think they are, or how much we love them, but would we say any of that if they didn't get naked for us?  I doubt it.  If you look at it from their perspective, it must be depressing to think about.

For her own sanity and for her own sense of personal worth as an actress, Misty had to stop, and become Erin Brown again.  She had to move on and do something for herself.  She talks about the expectations and demands of her fan base.  "I can't go online to fan sites to read anything about me, because half of the things up there are like… 'When is Misty going to do a hardcore film?  I want to see that girl get fucked!'  And that's upsetting to me."

Misty dares you to look away

There's another reason it had to end.  And that is...good god...how the hell did she do it in the first place?  Misty appeared in 80 full length features in about six years.  How did she keep it up?  I've been in Los Angeles for two years and have managed to only put together one short film.  In that time, Misty and crew could've knocked off a hundred of them.  I swear, sometimes I think it takes me longer to review a movie than it took them to make it.

So what has Misty been up to since?  In the Chantal commentary, she seems momentarily saddened by how things are going.  "I haven't been as busy as I'd like to be," she admits.  "I'm not making as much money these days, since I quit softcore, but I'm happier."  There have been a few low-budget movies here and there.  She's broken ties with Seduction (which makes this Chantal commentary even more of a miracle), and Hellfire, but still works with Marsiglia.  She appeared in the Showtime series Masters of Horror, which in one episode probably had a bigger budget than any full-length movie she had ever made.  "I honestly thought when I did that, it was going to be a big deal; that it was going to launch my career into high gear, and open up a lot of doors for me," she says.  "But it's been the opposite.  I've hardly done anything since."

She bleakly relates the devil's advocate advice of a friend. "You're getting less and less work, you're going to be forty years old and a washed up has-been," the friend said.  "So you have to take the initiative and go out and go on casting calls and put yourself out there and believe in yourself."  She pauses.  "I need to do that, obviously, judging by the past two years of my career."  But you know, if anyone can do it, Erin Brown can.  Maybe I'm still blowing smoke up her ass, but I'm not under the expectation that I'll get to see that ass anymore, and that's okay.

Misty is willing to stay after class for some extra "help"

Take a step back (yes, I know, that's now two steps back), and you'll see that we have an absolute treasure trove of softcore sitting right in front of us already.  Chantal may mark the end of the new product, but there's no end to the amount of back catalogue we have to savor.  Get ready for an onslaught of re-releases from Seduction, as the rich vein of work Misty and friends produced from 1998 to 2004 will be stripped bare, like...uh, well, like Misty herself in most of these movies.  The freight train is rolling out of the station once again.

So go out and buy one or all of these DVDs, crack open a nice wine, and toast William Hellfire, Tony Marsiglia, Michael Raso, Julian Wells, Darian Caine, A.J. Khan, and most of all, Misty Mundae aka Erin Brown.  While we bemoan the state of the softcore industry today, and grow wistful of the Golden Age of the 1990s, little do we credit the New Jersey School, who were having a Golden Age right under our noses just five years ago. And Misty was their golden schoolgirl.

Also be sure to check out MISTY MUNDAE'S TOP 10 FILMS

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