Water Power

The 70's were the times in which porn was very mean and ugly.Lots of so-called XXX roughies was made during those glorious years of cinematic filth.Among them was infamous "Waterpower" by Shaun Costello.Jamie Gillis plays here a notorious rapist called the Enema Bandit.He viciously rapes his female victims and before the rape he gives them an enema.The cops are trying desperately to catch him..."Waterpower" is certainly a shocking and dirty stuff,but the acting is pretty good and the cinematography is great.The film is filled with gritty atmosphere of urban decay.The scenes of sexual violence are hard to stomach and the misogyny is rampant through its projection time.Jamie Gillis is frighteningly realistic as the Enema Bandit.A must-see for fans of bizarre hybrids of porn and horror.8 out of 10.

This is one of so-called "roughies", nasty hardcore exploitation cinema. Good example of that kind of cinema is surely the other picture from Gerard Damiano: "Forced Entry". "Waterpower" is quite similar - it's filthy, with lots of XXX scenes included, but they're here trying to say: "we were shoot on purpose". Don't be naive, it's only another fetishistic piece of trash. But it's also quite entertaining. The plot is very simple: there's a man with some serious psychic problems. After a visit in a bordello, where he sees the man doing an enema to a girl, he finds he's new great fascination. He starts to be a "moral voice" of the big city, he traces young women and rapes them. After all he's doing an enema to them to - as he says - purify them. Well..., I didn't find it nice watching water mixed with feces coming out of those girls, but I must admit that this is really original idea. See for yourself if I think that you have to, but remember that you were warned.

All the way through watching "Water Power" I couldn't stop chuckling because Jack Nicholson's legendary Joker quote from "Batman" was stuck in my head. "This town needs an enema!" That must have been exactly what the protagonist was repeating in his head the entire time as well. Gerard Damiano, the same legendary guy who brought us "Deep Throat" presents this vile and hugely perverted "Water Power". At least, that's what the cover proudly exclaims, but apparently this was just a shameless publicity stunt and the actual guy in the director's seat was Shaun Costello. Now that is a much more logical and acceptable link with this film. "Deep Throat" was a porno movie, but a comical and light-headed one, whereas "Water Power" deals with unpleasant topics like rape, torture and perverted fetishes. Since Shaun Costello previously directed the notorious "Forced Entry" – revolving on a Vietnam veteran on a rape and murdering rampage – it's much more credible to see his name linked to "Water Power". Either way, this is a remarkable piece of ultra-smutty 70's porno exploitation. It's a unique and fascinating effort to behold, but for all the wrong reasons as you're are basically watching a story about a misogynist freak raping women and sticking tubes of water in their behinds and actually getting away with it, too! "Water Power" introduces a thirty-something and very bored guy named Burt. His apartment is decorated with pornographic pictures and he peeps at his sexy stewardess neighbor through a telescope, but other than that he's a random and completely normal male individual. After a visit to a luxurious sex club, however, Burt discovers his true calling in life: enemas! He goes on a purifying crusade through the rancid streets of New York, beginning with his neighbor but quickly taking on every random woman he assumes to be a dirty whore. He picks them up or even perpetrates into their houses, rapes them and then finally thrusts tubes into their anuses and turns on the tab! The police desperately searches for the so-called "enema bandit" but can't find him, even though he doesn't make too much efforts covering up his crimes. That's probably because the duo of inspectors is too busy investigating each other's genitals. Supposedly based on a true story, "Water Power" is a rather disturbing film. The setting, decayed and sleaze-infested New York streets, is obviously copied from "Taxi Driver" and Jamie Gillis probably even owes his casting to his sinister and menacing appearance. Most unsettling, of course, is the actual act of performing forced enemas. They look very realistic and even more painful (I hope the actresses were paid accordingly!) and honestly not something you do to get sexual kicks. Anyways, in case you are looking for the extreme type of adult movie with a plot – yes, they do exist – and character development, "Water Power" would make an excellent choice.

Three intervening decades have done nothing whatsoever to blunt the impact of this notorious roughie, ripped from then current headlines about one Michael Kenyon alias the Illinois Enema Bandit who raped and forcefully, er, cleansed at least two dozen women between 1965 and 1975. Charged with assault and battery, he served a mere six years behind bars, only to be paroled in 1981 after which he wisely faded into well-deserved obscurity. While a TV movie of the week (starring Cameron Mitchell perhaps, think TOOLBOX MURDERS) might've been a tantalizing proposition, the counterculture seemed a more likely candidate to process this peculiar court case. It served as inspiration for Frank Zappa's song "The Legend of the Illinois Enema Bandit" and, for better or worse, this interesting but still extremely hard to take adult film long attributed to Gerard Damiano of DEEP THROAT and DEVIL IN MISS JONES fame. Though his name has always been prominently displayed in both credits and all publicity material, Damiano has repeatedly gone on record claiming he was supposed to do it, but didn't. Most sources henceforth agree that it was our old friend Shaun Costello at the helm, a theory supported by the familiar soundtrack choices (Bernard Herrmann's VERTIGO soundtrack has once again been extensively plundered to set the mood) as well as the director's brief appearance as an extra in a police station sequence. If indeed so, this truly stands as his most disturbing effort since 1972's FORCED ENTRY and it's a far better produced work to boot.

Opening with an improvised New York street scene, stylistically likened to Martin Scorsese's MEAN STREETS by Jonathan Ross in his enjoyable if not always accurate INCREDIBLY STRANGE FILM BOOK (where he continually refers to the film as being titled THE ENEMA BANDIT and asserts that it sports no credits whatsoever while it actually has and fairly complete ones at that), the movie introduces its audience to an apparently average nameless guy played to absolute psychotic perfection by the inimitable Jamie Gillis. Surely, this part was instrumental in cementing the actor's longstanding reputation as porn's most fearsome nasty bastard and may even have hypothetically influenced the respectable likes of Harvey Keitel on Abel Ferrara's gut-wrenching BAD LIEUTENANT. A casual trip to a sleazy brothel named rather incongruously the Garden of Eden earns him a $ 10 blow job from friendly resident tart Sharon Mitchell and a lecture by madam Gloria Leonard (legendary former editor of skin magazine HIGH SOCIETY and one time chairwoman of the Adult Film Association of America) on the house specials. Her mention of high colonic captures his interest and, as luck would have it, one such session is just about to get underway with faux doctor Eric Edwards (yet again wiping the floor with his Mr. Sensitivity image) and ditto nurse Marlene Willoughby pumping a bagful of soapy water into the bowels of poor supine Pamela (Long Jean Silver from the jaw-dropping Alex deRenzy flick of the same name, though her claim to fame – one of her legs has been amputated following a car accident and she occasionally uses the stump for penetration of various partners of both sexes – is kept out of frame here). Having found his niche, Gillis sets about to ritualistically clean the "filthy whores" of Manhattan, his first victim being his across the street neighbor, a pretty stewardess he worshiped from afar until he realized she had a boyfriend (the ubiquitous chubby-cheeked David Joseph) whom she regularly performed sex acts with. The girl's eternal second stringer Clea Carson, billed as "Valerie Morgenstern", a pseudonym derived from mainstream actress Valerie Harper and her popular TV character Rhoda Morgenstern, more than a tad ironic considering this actress would go on to become a heavy hitter in the Women Against Pornography movement, sidling up to the likes of Linda Lovelace !

The nature of the crime alerts hard-bitten vice squad detective Irene Murray (an understated C.J. Laing who only seems to come to life when it's her turn to tussle with Gillis) who is forcibly teamed up with homicide cop Jack Gallagher (deftly sketched by the extremely hirsute John Buco) to crack the case. A pair of lesbian teenage sisters named Ginger and Candy (reliable supporting babe Susaye London and one shot wonder Barbara Belkin) find their fondling rudely interrupted by Gillis in the movie's most tasteless number, where it becomes painfully obvious that neither actress was given a chance to clean up before the forced irrigation action, a humiliating highlight clearly taken well beyond the ladies' comfort. Armed with the perpetrator's description and having narrowed down his territory, Irene agrees to act as decoy which very nearly leads to her being offed as the badge in her handbag inadvertently divulges her identity. The final frames show the maniac's face being lit up by the arriving cop car before he makes his way into the night.

It would be easy to ridicule WATERPOWER if it had been assembled with the slapdash, "make it up as you go along" attitude of Costello's customary "Russ Carlson" quickies of the same period. The immediately obvious fact that it doesn't pushes the film into a whole different territory however. Compellingly written and acted with utmost conviction for most part (making the rape scenes particularly queasy viewing), it has a power to disturb that very few other roughies can even begin to touch. Considerably more extreme than mainstream portraits of psychosis such as John McNaughton's admittedly excellent HENRY : PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, it once and for all dispels that old "less is more" adage by searing each grotesque violation into the mind's eye with unrelenting blowtorch intensity. Presumably impossible to love (unless maybe you're the lucky owner of a very sick mind), this is one film you will NEVER forget.

Loosely based on the exploits of The Enema Bandit, a criminal who would sexually assault his victims before forcefully administering an enema, Water Power is a hell of a sleazy film—one that makes you feel incredibly dirty for having watched it. A twisted cross between Scorsese's Taxi Driver and a grimy 70s XXX feature, it follows nut-job rapist Burt (played by porn-star Jamie Gillis) as he sets out to cleanse the filthy women of New York, via the use of high colonics.

Directed by smut-merchant Shaun Costello (but often accredited to Gerard 'Deep Throat' Damiano), this film inevitably features a fair dose of adult acts and 'other scenes of a graphic nature' (use your imagination—I'm not gonna describe it!), but it also works as a thriller (thanks largely to Gillis's convincing turn as a total crackpot), meaning that fans of extreme exploitation such as myself can offer up a fairly valid (if not completely convincing) excuse for watching this filthy, disturbing and quite nauseating fetish flick.

As far as rating this one goes, it deserves either 1 out of 10 for making me feel like a total degenerate, or 10/10 for being a one of a kind, unbelievably demented and totally disgusting 'masterpiece', so I'll average it out and give it 5.5/10 (rounded up to 6 for IMDb).