Director/Screenplay – Scooter McCrae, Producers – Aimee Kuge, Justin Martell & Mareen McCrae, Photography – Anton Zinn, Music – Fabio Frizzi, Visual Effects – Trey Lindsay, Makeup & Special Effects Designer – Ashley Thomas, Production Design – Dan Ouellette. Production Company – Not the Funeral Home/Moose + Squirrel.
Damian Maffei (Derek), Yvonne Emile Thälker (Susan), Marc Romeo (Gilbert), Scott Fowler (Alan Kaplan), Kate Kiddo (Amanda), Fedor Kuroedov (Bobby/Billy)
Alan is hired by his friend Gilbert to test out Susan, a lifelike sex doll that Gilbert’s company has created. Susan has been designed to realistically bruise and bleed for men who like to be rough and beat and abuse women. Gilbert offers Alan the use of his residence in upstate New York to take Susan for testing. Seven months later, Derek, a mutual friend of Alan and Gilbert, learns that Alan has committed suicide. After finding that Derek has fallen on hard times and is living in his car, Gilbert offers him the same job that Alan had of testing out the Susan doll. As Derek moves into the residence and experiments with Susan, he begins to find her artificial intelligence uncanny.
I first encountered director/writer Scooter McCrae with the extraordinary Shatter Dead (1994), perhaps the most unique treatment of the zombie film to come out since George Romero’s original trilogy. Subsequently, McCrae directed only two other horror films with Sixteen Tongues (1999) and Betamax (2015). Black Eyed Susan was his fourth feature film as director.
There has been a major upsurge of films about Androids and Artificial Intelligence since the early 2010s. These include efforts such as Her (2013), The Machine (2013), Automata (2014), Chappie (2015), Ex Machina (2015), Morgan (2016), tv’s Westworld (2016-22), Tau (2018), Zoe (2018), Archive (2020), After Yang (2021), Finch (2021), M3gan (2022), The Creator (2023) and The Electric State (2025), among others.
Most of these A.I. films have been fairly innocuous and unadventurous treatments. There was one previous film about sex robots with the unfunny comedy Hot Bot (2016) and it is there by implication in films like The Stepford Wives (1975) and Wifelike (2022). There have been several works about machines that develop lustful/romantic intents with Demon Seed (1977), Saturn 3 (1980), The Companion (1994) and T.I.M. (2023), none of which offer any adventurous take on the usual. There have been a couple outside of that with A.I. Rising (2018) about the frequently sexual relationship between an astronaut and android companion on a space journey, android sex in Subservience (2024), as well as The Artifice Girl (2022) about an A.I. program created to catch underage sexual predators. Not long after watching Black Eyed Susan, there was also the highly entertaining Companion (2025) also on the theme of the sex robot, although one where the treatment was at almost opposite remove to this.
Scooter McCrae takes the theme of android companions in banal films like M3gan (2022) or Subservience and logically extends it, pushing it into some highly uncomfortable places. McCrae also gets fairly explicit. There are no sex scenes as such, but Yvonne Emile Thälker is fully nude for most of the film and McCrae does not shy away from showing us pussy and full labial shots. Damian Maffei also takes his clothes off, although only in one scene. You are quite taken aback by the opening scene that shows Scott Fowler punching and slapping Yvonne, before the abrupt pullback as Marc Romeo enters the room and explains that she is a sex robot created for people to abuse and then starts enthusiastically talking about how they have developed skin that realistically bruises and even bleeds.
Black Eyed Susan is a film that delves into a lot of areas that most other films shy away from – the dark side of what somebody would want to use a sex android for, the reasons why people desire to hurt others either for pleasure or abuse – and is perfectly willing to look on as such things are depicted. There is really something quite uncomfortable to scenes watching Yvonne Emile Thälker say she enjoys being hurt and urging Damian Maffei to beat and punch her. Or a particularly nasty scene where Yvonne is curious about Damian shaving, takes the razor blade and places it in her mouth and then talks about trust as she proceeds to give him a blowjob. Although the most uncomfortable scenes get to be near the end where Damian Maffei uncovers the next evolution of the sex android that Marc Romeo is planning.
Trailer here