Dildo Heaven (2002) (Fantastic Fest 2025)

You’d think you would know what kind of film you’re in for when you decided to sit down and watch a movie called Dildo Heaven (2002), but no matter what your expectations might be, you’d only be half right.

It’s a hell of a title, to say the least. For Doris Wishman, the then 89-year-old director of Dildo Heaven, a film’s title was the seed from which the rest of its production would sprout and flower – something which was already well-known by the time she was interviewed (in a hilarious and slightly chaotic segment) by Conan O’Brien on Late Night in 2002, as part of this film’s promotional campaign. In fact, I’d highly doubt if there’s any filmmaker, alive or dead, who had as much of a knack for crafting captivating movie titles as Wishman did; with a decades-spanning film career that included such highlights as Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), Let Me Die a Woman (1972), and the Chesty Morgan-starring Deadly Weapons (1974 – no prizes as to guessing what said weapons are), Doris Wishman was a remarkable woman who rightfully earned her place in cult film fans’ hearts as the “Queen of Sexploitation”.

While genre film aficionados will likely recognise some of Wishman’s earlier work, Dildo Heaven has – until now – remained in almost complete obscurity. Wishman sadly passed away shortly after the film’s premiere, which is likely the reason why it never received wider distribution… until now! Rescued and digitally restored by Muscle Distribution (recently founded by queer film historian Elizabeth Purchell), Dildo Heaven has returned from the great beyond (a second coming, if you will) for the viewing pleasure of us mere mortals, as part of the 2025 edition of Fantastic Fest. If bad girls go to hell, then let’s see what they’re missing out on.

Dildo Heaven follows three housemates – Lisa, Beth and Tess – throughout their day-to-day lives as they go to work, watch television, and attempt to seduce their bosses; will they be successful in their search for love with the respective men of their dreams, or will they end up finding that a silicone phallus makes for a better lover? Meanwhile, their nosey neighbour Billy – who seems to have taken the title of Wishman’s prior film Keyholes Are for Peeping (1972) as not only a statement of fact but also an instruction – goes on a voyeuristic escapade that warps space and time via the use of stock footage from classic Wishman productions.

If you haven’t gathered already, Dildo Heaven isn’t a particularly plot-heavy film, even by sexploitation movie standards, to the point that it borders on avant-garde. Dildo Heaven is essentially Wishman’s answer to Sex and the City (1998-2004), a free-form expression of female sexuality that lies somewhere between the realms of soap opera, softcore sex comedy, and psychotronic oddity. For a movie with the word “dildo” in its title, it’s fairly innocent – albeit by no means naive – in its presentation, yet the vibe of Dildo Heaven is as close as you’ll get to recreating the atmosphere of the inside of an adult novelty store on screen; this shouldn’t be too surprising, as Wishman was working at a sex shop named the Pink Pussy Cat at the time, and at least one sequence of the film takes place at said store. In a lot of ways, Wishman’s film feels like an extended commercial (or even infomercial) advertising the benefits of the dildo, and yet the titular sex toy only features briefly in the film’s short 79-minute runtime.

Beyond all of these aforementioned aspects, Dildo Heaven is still a deeply strange film full of plenty of memorably odd moments. At least two of the film’s sex scenes are interrupted by numerous close-up shots of a hilariously awkward-looking stuffed toy monkey, one of the lead girls is haunted by a nightmare in which her bed is surrounded by flying phalluses, and the aforementioned peeping tom Billy won’t stop accidentally breaking the laws of time and space by spying on clips of bikini-clad bombshells from Wishman’s ‘70s ouvre (a good deal of which are, delightfully, filmed directly off of the TV screen). Whilst I can’t say Dildo Heaven was entirely for me – it’s a very slow and uneven film for what it is, in spite of its novelty factor and digital-video charms, and far too little of the film is focused on its leading ladies, their personalities, and their dynamic with one another, let alone the sub-plot actually involving one of them buying a dildo – it’s a certainly an intriguingly singular oddity from the late career of one of coolest and most iconic women in the history of cult cinema.

Muscle Distribution’s restoration of Dildo Heaven is admirable, not only because of how high quality it is, but also because it’s an all-too-rare instance of an effort being made to restore and preserve a work of cinema from the early digital era; a large amount of independent digital cinema from the late ‘90s and early noughts is at severe risk of becoming lost media due to ageing hard drives and lack of physical prints, so a restoration project like the one that has been done for Dildo Heaven is always one worthy of celebration. The decision to restore the archival clips from Wishman’s previous films from the recorded-off-the-TV versions created for Dildo Heaven rather than simply replacing them with the higher quality restored versions featured on AGFA’s Doris Wishman box sets (which Muscle Distribution founder Purchell also worked on) is a creative choice which I think is worthy of praise in itself.

You’ll never see another movie quite like Dildo Heaven. You’ll certainly never see another movie directed by an 89-year-old sexploitation legend that opens with a rap theme song. It’s unclassifiable, even by Fantastic Fest standards – and that might just make it unmissable.

Robyn’s Archive – Dildo Heaven