Based on Nabokov's famous story "A Nursery Tale," In 1920s Weimar Germany, a female incarnation of Satan gives a villa of thirteen women enchanted in love to geeky Erwin Danmer--and it's all fun and games till the jealousies and murders begin.

SYNOPSIS:

In 1920s Germany, Erwin Danmer is a garden variety failed pervert who enjoys frottage and drinking away his rent—until he runs into a female incarnation of Satan named Frau Monde who offers him a harem and a wealthy villa if he picks an odd number of women by midnight the next day. He picks twelve and almost loses them till he finds his thirteenth in a drunk bum in the bushes outside.

When the devil tells him they are all princesses whom he must kiss to awaken, his adventures with terror begin since Erwin soon discovers all thirteen have past memories with him he never experienced. He first wakes young prostitute Maura Lytle, 14, just before Isa Klein, 20s, a flapper with commitment issues. When young Maura tries to seduce him, he awakens Olga, the bum from the bushes, to act as Maura's governess but all three terrify him.

Further complicating his new digs, soon Vlad, Maura’s former pimp, comes calling to extort Erwin for money until Frau Monde comes and saves the day with a gun. Then, the flapper Isa tries to kill herself to avoid being in love with mousy Erwin, but fails, so since he wants a simpler girl who wants him more, Erwin then awakens Liesl, the rich artist girl who lives next door, who thinks the villa is a painter’s academy.

When Maura and Olga, set up a human croquet course on the lawn during a cocaine and booze binge, and Liesl’s father comes over to inspect the painter’s academy, Olga’s croquet ball cracks one of the four feminist suffragette cyclists in the head, which causes Liesl’s father to insist Erwin wake all the women at once.

Erwin does but rapidly decides his survival lies in pretending amnesia with all, causing a competition to arise between the girls about who can seduce the man they love with no memory, so Erwin finally enjoys all the sexual excesses he always wanted for a Berlin moment--when all goes a little too swimmingly until Maura takes Erwin’s car to kill her former pimp, Liesl is run down and electocuted by a train, and a rowboat trip to the center of the villa lake causes two of the cyclists to drown. In the pall of these dark times, two more girls leave, Gretchen and Lusche--and Merry, the girl with croquet ball injury, is murdered in bed.

One by one, the girls turn against each other as Isa, Maura, Kara, and Kemia accuse Rose, the house cook, of trying to poison them and Erwin must find a way to quell the growing body count as he falls more and more in love with Isa, who opens to him gradually but is continuously pestered by the ominous presence of Frau Monde—until Erwin realizes too late that Frau Monde has engineered every death and debacle--leaving only briefly before she triumphantly returns to take Isa’s body as her next incarnation—making him first a man married to the devil and then her slave.

But every devil’s deal for pleasure has its price. Souls are cheap but time is expensive. Didn’t he know?

Arguably, one could say yes. But welcome to his world of hellish love and inconceivable sacrifice. The water is warm as Hades on a holiday. Jump in.