Cremaster 5

The five in-progress avant-garde Cremaster films have been made out of sequence for a Guggenheim Museum showing of all five in the year 2000; Cremaster 5 is actually the third to be filmed (released in 1998 when number two and number three had not yet been made). In number five, the Queen of Chains (Ursula Andress, with the singing voice of Adrienne Csengery), wearing a glass dumbbell on her head, moves into the restored Budapest Opera House where she sings passionately of her lost love (writer-director Matthew Barney), later seen as a half-man/half-fish surrounded by pink mermaids. Her aria is in Hungarian, minus subtitles. The 51-minute musical fantasy, with a vid-to-film transfer, was made on a $200,000 budget. Also of note: The title refers to the set of minor muscles in the male anatomy that raise and lower the testes, in order to accomodate for temperature.