"Sex is of no use to me, I assure you."
"But orgasms are yang!"
It probably comes as no surprise that this is one of my favorite films, given that a still from it has been my pfp since the day I ed Letterboxd. Though the image and the scene it comes from have been widely circulated on social media in the last few years, few have seen the film itself and hopefully Severin's House of Psychotic Women collection, an…
"Maybe I'll recognize her if I see her face."
"She doesn't have one."
I knew I was in for a rough time with this made-for-TV echo of Jaws set at a ski resort, but persevered for the sake of Sylvia Sidney, and for Joseph Stefano, author of Hitchcock's Psycho screenplay, many Outer Limits episodes, and The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre. Sadly, this screenplay is as phoned-in as it gets, and made even worse by Herb Wallerstein's abysmal direction.
Wallerstein…
James Landis (The Sadist) wrote and directed a spare, thoughtfully composed two-hour Baby-Dollish drama called Tender Grass, with a young Vilmos Zsigmond behind the camera. It looked great but wouldn't sell. So Mondo Hollywood director Robert Carl Cohen was brought in to sex up the film and make it drive-in ready. Some of his additions, like vivacious town floozy Virgina Wood, made the film sing. Others, like the corny and utterly pointless intertitles, drag it down. The resulting artifact is…
Exceedingly gentle and bovine, given the subject matter. Theroux as a bland, clueless non-entity works well as a mechanism to give people miles of rope to hang themselves with their own words. But without more context it feels insufficient to the moment. It will outrage many anyway, so why not go for it and provide fuller information about the military killings and mob conflicts in the West Bank?
And yet, when you take into that this is a BBC…
On the surface, a rather gross collection of stolen shots showing two aggressive young men prowling for sex on the beaches of Cannes; the superimposition of a pinball game expresses their eagerness to 'score' with no regard for women as human beings.
It's easy to read this Rozier short as misogynistic nostalgia for misspent summers. But the camera is almost completely unconcerned with the women in the film and gradually one wonders if it is not the the guys who are being objectified; prized for their idle youth and their hunger as they strut endlessly down the boardwalk.
