| Product: |
Bizarre (DVD) |
| Date: |
17.11.06 (411 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: It's a weird horror/porn hybrid narrated by a mummy
Disadvantages: It's a weird horror/porn hybrid narrated by a mummy
(Film only review – the only DVD release I’m aware of is American.)
As the lights started to go out on the British film industry in the 1970s, one of the few genres still capable of making money was the sex film. By sex film, I don’t mean the likes of Deep Throat or other hardcore movies from America or Scandinavia. British censorship would never have allowed it. Instead we saw a whole spate of sex comedies, which used Carry On style innuendo, while at the same time rendering it rather pointless as audiences actually got to *see* the ladies’ front bottoms instead of just having Sid James make smutty allusions to them. A strange and totally unnecessary hybrid of explicit nudity and sniggering, seaside-postcard-style humour was born, and while a very few (the Confessions films, for instance) are just about watchable, most are not (try to sit through The Amorous Milkman if you don’t believe me).
But there were a few stranger entries into the British 70s silly porn cycle, and few are stranger than this little number, known as Bizarre in America, and The Secrets of Sex in the UK. It’s also gone under the title Erotic Tales From The Mummy’s Tomb, which might give you some idea of where it’s coming from. So to speak.
The director, Antony Balch, was a cinema distributor who loved exploitation films, especially old horror movies. During his time he made unwatchable, experimental films with William Burroughs and distributed old weirdo classics like Freaks and Haxan (he was responsible for the version of Haxan with the Burroughs commentary). He reached his apogee with his second film as director, the fabulous Horror Hospital, one of the funnest Brit horror films of the 70s. But in 1970 he brought us this weird little film; it made quite a lot of money, apparently.
It’s an anthology of shortish vignettes designed to illustrate the continuing war between the sexes, which has apparently been going on for centuries (oddly, the sexes have continued to willingly breed with one another all that time, but let’s indulge the film, eh?) It’s narrated by a rather shabby looking Egyptian mummy who introduces each segment with some cryptic utterances about the eternal struggle between man and woman. The stories themselves, of which there are six, all have twist endings which range from the vaguely sensible to the utterly barking. Some have kind of a horror vibe (a bondage photoshoot gone horribly wrong; a freakish birth; a woman who keeps the souls of her lovers trapped in plants). Some are more normal (a sexy lady burglar breaks into a man’s house; a saucy spy spoof with a punchline taken from a Monty Python sketch). And there’s that old chestnut: a man who has some kind of fetish involving lizards and his attempts to find a prostitute to play along.
But the plots don’t give even a taste of just how peculiar this film is. What to make of the sequence where the mummy endlessly recites the lines ‘Imagine you were making love to this girl. Imagine you were making love to this boy’, accompanied by shots of pretty looking men and women, but which goes on for *ages*? Or the weird silent movie pastiche in the middle? Or the fact that one sex scene constantly cuts to shots of aeroplanes coming in to land? It’s all weirdly reminiscent of underground cinema in terms of pacing and even imagery. A scene where topless women are pelted with rotten fruit while men with guns advance on them, all in slow motion, is just not the kind of thing you tend to get in mainstream films.
I’m not really suggesting that Bizarre is any good. It’s well shot, makes good use of colour, and the soundtrack is a nice blend of classical and lounge, but that’s not enough. It’s weirdly arty (lots of slow motion and slightly daft editing), but that kind of artistry isn’t what a film like this should be striving for. It’s the kind of film we all dream of making when we’re about 16 (old enough to be pretentious, young enough not to realise how absurd our pretentions are, and hormonally fired-up so that we basically just want to fill the screen with naked chicks). But I have a huge soft spot for it. Maybe it’s the shots of those Victorian dinosaur statues in Crystal Palace; maybe it’s the incongruity of the mummy scenes; maybe it’s just that I still enjoy watching naked women cavort on screen. More likely it’s all three.
The acting is rubbish throughout. The only cast member I’d heard of was Valentine Dyall, an old British radio star, who has a great voice (imagine Vincent Price, but deeper and more English). He’s the voice of the mummy. Everyone else is woeful. There’s a lot of full-frontal nudity, both male and female, and obviously a fair few sex scenes (only one of which, oddly, is actually all that explicit, and even that is nowhere near hard core porn. This is a pretty tame film really, and while I wouldn’t necessarily want to watch it with the Queen, I’d have no qualms about watching it with, say, Princess Anne). There’s a predictable element of pseudo-lesbian fumbling, and also, surprisingly, a tiny bit of gay male groping. Obviously people who find films like this objectionable should stay away.
This really is an oddity. It isn’t good, it’s a bit too slow-paced to be funny, intentionally or otherwise, and it isn’t even remotely erotic. But if you like weird old films, old skool Brit porn, or just the site of naked 70s models falling over in slow motion, then this might just be the film you’ve been looking for. It certainly deserves a cult following, and I can’t do that by myself.
Summary: Probably the strangest British sex comedy ever made
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