The Deadly Females

Donovan Winter, low budget film maker but very good film maker! Actors that are not big names but who are very good, like Tracy Reed, who worked with Stanley Kubrick in "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb", which is also the main actress. The others, Bernard Holley, Scott Fredericks, Heather Chasen, Brian Jackson, Roy Purcell, Jean Harrington, Olivia Munday, Jean Rimmer, Raymond Young, are all very good in their roles. An unexpected good movie!

Britain 1975, with the news headlines dominated by violence including mass murders by the Provisional IRA and brutal bank robberies, but also by the struggle for women's equality, the subject of a major piece of legislation that year. Donovan Winter put the two together in this ironical story of an all-female murder-to-order squad. Headed by suburban mother Joan (Tracy Reed) who agrees terms with her clients over coffee and biscuits in an up-market venue, the victim, usually a partner who has become unbearable, will be taken out with the utmost efficiency, the surroundings always left spotless into the bargain. The film was criticized for being too long and slow, but I don't mind that if on board with the subject. Taking one example, the long conversation with the fussy housewife adds to the impact when she suddenly - and literally - gets the chop. The cynical flavour is summed up by neglected wife Heather Chasen reading Live and Let Die while awaiting the call that will confirm her despised husband has been terminated. The victims range from the slightly dislikeable to the downright repellent, with the middle-aged men looking seedy, though that might just be a reflection of the haircuts of the time. There's no faulting Winter's casting including a young Rula Lenska as a mysterious character turning up in the early stages and at the end. Tracy Reed, one of those actors who never quite got the breaks, is excellent, and would surely have made an ideal Avenger in the Honor Blackman mould.

In this film, the titular Deadly Females like to have tea, chat, stand and sit. Oh yes, they also kill people in some of the the most unspectacularly boring scenes I've ever witnessed. Just stultifyingly bad cinema.

I really dislike those kinds of reviews on IMDb that sort of yell at me in all capital letters "never [to] see this movie!!!" or some such, because often these reviewers are straight-up morons who don't really know what they're talking about--but I've never been more tempted to join the capital-letter yellers in my life.

'The Deadly Females' (1976) is another fabulously frisson-worthy, dazzlingly deviant, roughly hewn gem from sensational UK smut impresario Donovan Winter! These surreptitiously sinister sinner slayers are scintillatingly trained to pleasure their ecstatic victims...to death!!! No malignly mesmerized male is safe from corpse-making clutches of 'The Deadly Females' as with just one tantalizingly terminal terror-touch from these dextrously duplicitous death-darlings, and you will 'come' to the most terrible mischief! 'These amicable assassins give good dead!' - 'Once these glamorously grisly gals get you between their crosshairs they will rub you out before you can shoot your load!' While 'The Deadly Females is undeniably absurd, these lurid larks are huge fun, and Donovan's grubby little film is burnished with a surprisingly gifted cast, including dreamy-delicious redhead death-dealer Rula Lenska!