The ostensible (professed) theme of FADE TO RED (aka DEVIATES IN LOVE) is secret desires, though the thing most repressed by the film is narrative coherence. Cobbled together out of a bunch of stock footage and credited to one "Max Miller" (at least in the version I saw), it bears all the hallmarks a Ray Dennis Steckler atrocity.



The film starts out strong with footage of a sexual torture session that the narration ascribes to the Inquisition. The Inquisition, the voice intones, was largely attributable to an overly repressive church seeking outlet for its repressed desires via alternate, sadistic means. The images onscreen depict women bound to tables being whipped and forcibly penetrated, with a surfeit of ejaculations suggesting the footage was culled from a different source, probably a racy European loop.