"In a second-rate Spanish hotel with aspirations to melodramatic grandeur, a film crew sweat out their mutual fear and loathing. They are cramped and confined by decor but as restless as a prowling camera, forever being forced into abrasive contact and bitter exchanges. They are not working. There is a hiatus as hysterical and imprisoning as the atmosphere of soap opera. The hotel helplessly gives up the ghost of reality and becomes their set. Hell is making a film with other people, and Fassbinder himself appears as the most abused of all, the production manager, everyone's enemy, slave and idiot.
"But Holy Whore is also an opportunity for that high style that so often accompanied Fassbinder's sour view of people. The picture is sleazy and pessimistic, but it is also formal and elegant. As insult and humiliation mount, so its poisonous tone breaks out in cold beads of humor. We begin to see all the characters as monsters made out of their own neuroses, and the film turns into a tribute to misanthropy, self-pity and warped endurance. The group is as ill-assorted as it is inevitable--Lou Castel, Eddie Constantine, Hanna Schygulla, Marquand Bohm, Ulli Lommel, Katrin Schaake, Margarethe Von Trotta, Hannes Fuchs, Kurt Raab. Fassbinder always relished cannibal crowds, unlikely casting and embarrassing meetings, and here he scuttles around the tortured group breathing a motto into the film: 'Indulgence is its own reward.' " David Thomson