Teenage Seductress

i have a thing for seventies and eighties b movies, and i have a thing for sandra currie. so i can't be rational about this film. i was debating whether i should give it an eight (my baseline for a "good" movie) or go as high as a nine. so i decided not to submit a numerical rating at all. rating films on a numerical basis is as stupid as scoring women on a one to ten scale. (as far as i am concerned, sandra is an infinity.) sure, the cinematography and art direction are "subpar" when compared with what can be found in a major studio film from the same period. they might even be said to be lacking when compared with the tech credits of the average seventies INDIE film. but i found the cinematography and art direction to be delightfully cheesy........ "teenage seductress" has a story that keeps your attention. (it maintained my interest, at any rate.) and it has sandra. so if you are into seventies exploitation flix and sandra currie, i would definitely recommend this film to you.

This crummie little story is of a daughter's attempted revenge over the father who abandoned her. The plot line is not original- but then perhaps it seemed more so in 1971. The execution is woeful.

Frankly, it is just dire. Do not be fooled by the sensational title or indeed the DVD packaging. This effort by Chris Warfield suffers from a weak plot line, zero characterisation from Sondra Currie and (on the version I have seen) a very poor digital transfer- indeed just one above bootleg.

It is certainly not a piece of seventies softcore (if that is what you think the title suggests), and I would rate it "PG" and not "18". I'd use the DVD as a drinks coaster instead ....

Teenage Seductress (1975)

*** (out of 4)

Terry (Sondra Currie) is a young woman who grew up without a father. Her father left when she was two and throughout growing up she had to hear from her mother about how evil he was. Now as a young woman, Terry decides to track her dad down as he's famous author Preston King (Chris Warfield). The plan is for her to seduce him and then tell him who she is.

TEENAGE SEDUCTRESS is obviously a film that could have only been made in the 70's and while the subject matter is sort of taboo the film actually handles it in a mature way. The title, plot and poster might have you thinking that this is going to be a dirty and fun exploitation movie but it's actually more of a family drama with a young woman dealing with some very deep issues.

The film has a lot of good things going for it including the lead performance of Currie. The actress was certainly perfect for the part as she looks beautiful and she also gets across a much darker side, which is perfect for the character. There were a lot of moments where the character was struggling with what was going on and I thought the actress nailed all of them. I also thought Warfield was good in his role and the two of them had a nice chemistry that worked considering the story.

There's some nudity and some sex but none of it is done in an exploitive manor. Instead, the film really does take its time to tell its story, let the characters grow and I think this certainly helps the film in the end. I won't ruin how the film ends but it's a nice ending that works well and seems to have been influenced by a certain Jack Nicholson film.

I agree with the other reviewer that as any kind of exploitation movie this is a complete failure. The beautiful Sondra Currie (older sister to Cherie and Marie Currie of the 70's girl group "The Runaways") does have a nice long nude shower scene, but even this is intercut with a strange flashback from her character's childhood (that's just what viewers who are trying to get turned on want to see!) and a couple bizarre shots of the drain and the shower head, which seems to be a distracting and irrelevant homage to Hitchcock, all finally culminating in a bizarro shot where her mother's face appears to her in the shower head! This sequence where they manage to hamhandedly squander the considerable entertainment value of Currie's boobs is unfortunately pretty typical of the rest of the movie. About halfway through I started making up my own movie about a sexy grown daughter (Currie)who comes to a small New Mexico town seeking out the father who abandoned her as a child. When she finds him, she sexually seduces and then proceeds to completely destroy his life, revealing to him only at the end that she is actually his daughter. Now THAT would have made a great 70's exploitation flick!

Unfortunately, THIS movie goes off on several rather boring tangents where after meeting her father, the girl gets involved with a local Mexican art dealer and uses him in a plot to get revenge on her father and his girlfriend, a local librarian. This actual movie unfortunately just isn't very good. On the plus side, this was produced by the great 70's character actor George "Buck" Flowers and he appears in a small role as a clerk. And did I mention that Sondra Currie gets naked?