Psychedelic Sexualis

A lot of people seem to have been disappointed by this movie because they stepped in hopping to find a simple sexploitation film (I believe because it was issued by Vinegar Syndrome). In that sense, it isn't very graphic indeed. If you're in for that you'll find only a short orgy scene.

But there's much more to find here. It is more like a B-movie thriller and it's good at it. The film is more to be compared to films such as 'The Sadist' (1963), 'The Thrill Killers' (1964), even if the car and shooting scenes are concentrated in the beginning of the movie. The rest of the movie shows what led to this through flashbacks and the suspense is rather well maintained. The events of the beginning are serious and weird enough to make us want to know more and it's rather satisfactorily resolved.

It would be irrelevant to compare it to the work of a David Friedman or a Doris Wishman, though some themes aborded could be similar. The movie addresses subjects such as nymphomania, serious oedipus complex, over-possessive mother, mother-daughter rivalry, but it's not illustrated by lame makeout scenes. The movie is overall a slightly disturbing thriller, which I enjoy much more.

The actors are fairly good. Sandra Lynn manages rather well, at least she gives emotions and delivers her lines with some small talent. I liked her performance very much.

Compared to a mainstream production of the time, it isn't much of course, but compared to most 1960s sexploitations films that usually include around 15min of interesting footage and the rest being lame and uninteresting strip teases and faked intercourses, I was more than happy to watch this one, and even more to find that it was interesting all the 1h40min!

The only other film by Albert Zugsmith I've seen for now is 'Confessions Of An Opium Eater' (1962) and I enjoyed both a lot. I hope to discover more of his odd work in the furure.

Reissued in tandem by Vinegar Factory with a similar Albert Zugsmith picture "The Incredible Sex Revolution", this tedious farrago is ego-tripping, untalented cinema at its nadir. I kept wanting to yell at my small screen (fortunately I didn't suffer through this mess in its short life 50 years ago as a theatrical entry) "Put a sock in it" to auteur Albert.

Probably inspired by Orson Welles' tour-de-force (and in a way yet to be equaled) opening shot to the Zugsmith production "Touch of Evil", Big Al stages a showy opening sequence lasting about 15 minutes that is pretentious and dreadful. The film is based on a book by Dr. Krafft-Ebbing and the star of earlier "Sex Revolution" encores as a shrink named Dr. Krafft, treating lovely patient Sandra Lynn.

Opening is silent action and chasing around madly in his car by antihero Ronald Warren, a crappy performance as a psychotic jerk whose parents are to blame. Central gimmick of a mania for roses, whether truly a medical condition or not, is simply nutsy and stupid, and Zugsmith is even more stupid than his characters to expect any audience to buy into it. The whole film falls into a category of cinema that unfortunately is alive and well - the concept of making movies about subjects so arcane they have not been handled before -leading to ludicrous results.

I discovered this yet-to-be identified officially genre after watching "A Bridge Too Far" 38 years ago - all the critics agreed it was idiotic to mount a super-production (that Joseph E. Levine film was one of the costliest made in the world at that time, even more expensive than De Laurentiis' misguided "King Kong" remake). But here was a WW II story of failure that had not been told to a mass audience before -yeah, right, an audience would rather celebrate "The Longest Day" than brood over a horrendous blunder.

So getting back to Zugsmith, he dredges up perhaps the least interesting psychosis in the book -this rose mania. Who cares? The movie whips up a dramatic frenzy concerning it, and even the requisite stupid "false ending" (a la the atrocious and influential ending of "Carrie") mocks the rose nonsense. But the viewer must sit through a torturous unfolding of sick minds as embodied by poor actors, not just Warren, but overacting by Lynn, terrible papier mache acting by Barbara Hines as her supposedly sexpot mother and yet another horrible mother from Regina Gleason. The only conclusion one can draw after suffering for 101 minutes is that Zugsmith hated his own mom.

But as usual, he uses screen writing as his vehicle to demonstrate how well-read he is, how erudite he is, and above all how much meticulous research he's done. So the actors, and not just the boring shrink Lee Gladden (palmed off to us again as a real-life shrink and scholar) are wont to recite lots of useless information, boring and unbelievable. From a Vinegar Syndrome point-of-view (the distributor is dedicated to unearthing and preserving all manner of trash that can be included under the phony rubric "Sexploitation"), the chief value is a lengthy sequence that brings the film to a halt at a party with lots of actresses going topless. Fine and dandy for 1966 but I confess to not being able to get worked up in 2015 over such a display given the non- stop exposure to pornography currently abroad in our society.

And so even with this crutch included (and alternate "soft" footage with the partial nudity minimized), "Roses" fails to constitute entertainment as we know it, and as far as enlightenment goes, Albert Zugsmith is one of the last places I would go in search of that.

I'm surprised there isn't an Albert Zugsmith cult yet. The films from his "auteur" period (1958 on) are so odd and distinctive that someone needs to over-praise him and find some grand design in his body of work. Having seen many of his films over the years (including The Chinese Room and the trailer from Movie Star American Style or LSD I Hate You), I wonder why people who have seen the extant Andy Milligan films and Ray Dennis Steckler's projects haven't latched on to Zugsmith. This one is from the mid-60s, when Zugsmith no longer worked at second-string semi-majors such as Allied Artists, and was making films for the same "adults only" marketplace as Barry Mahon and David Friedman and Doris Wishman. I always find Zugsmith's sex-oriented films to be ugly--even if he has attractive looking cast members, the projects always have a dingy, sleazy feel that makes the films seem dirtier than they are. This one is oriented around voyeurism and low-rent Freudian psychology. There's even a psychologist who seems to be playing himself, and there's a disquieting incest subtext running throughout the film that will turn off most people's libido. On the good side,excellent (though diverse!) library music cued throughout the film, which makes the static visuals seem more vibrant than they are. Overall, PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS/ON HER BED OF ROSES seems to be an attempt to make a Barry Mahon style film with a twist of Joe Sarno. It's sad to think that the man who produced Orson Welles' TOUCH OF EVIL was making films like this--one step above something like Lou Campa's SOCK IT TO ME BABY--seven years later. Unless you must see all of Zugsmith's films, you'd be much better off finding some Lou Campa or Barry Mahon or Joe Sarno film you haven't seen rather than sitting through this waste of time.

With an alternate title of "Psychopathia Sexualis" as well as "Psychedelic Sexualis", you would think that the film is a sex film. And, while there is talk of sexuality and some cursing, this exploitation film is really more about getting the viewer's expectations up more than anything else. In fact, there is often no real plot and the film is made up of a lot of disparate parts that add up to nothing...especially with the grade z acting.

The film begins with some guy driving like a maniac and then shooting people with a high powered rifle. This really doesn't have a lot to do with the rest of the film. The rest is choppy and episodic and consists of a lot of nonsense--hula girls at parties (this not set in Polynesia...there's just a random hula girl!), women making passes at their therapists and little vignettes that never make much sense. In fact, the whole thing looks almost like someone's home movies strung together randomly...very randomly. Throughout all this nonsense, I never once detected anything that was interesting or worth seeing. A total bomb.