The Beautiful, the Bloody, and the Bare

The world of the "Adults Only" subgenre is a curious place to go exploring. In the pre-hardcore days this was the hottest game in town and offered frontal nudity and sometimes simulated sex and for a short time was considered pretty racy stuff. Seeing these movies today you have to wonder what some of the fuss was about. This movie from Sande Johnson begins promisingly enough with the opening credits scrawled in red ink on walls as our protagonist passes by. It seems our anti-hero is a photographer who has rejected commercialism for arts sake. While in Italy he shot scenes of a bizarre religious group who practised self mutilation and that, we later learn, has affected his very impressionable mind.

Before we get to that, though, there is much ado about photographing topless and nude models (billed in the credits as "New York's most beautiful models" and I could hardly argue with that). I'm sure this was what the people who bought tickets back in 1962 really paid to see but I spent a lot of time waiting for the plot to get going. In a movie that runs only 62 minutes it takes 45 of those minutes before anything happens. When we finally learn our hero freaks out and goes into a murderous rage at the sight of red lipstick or nail polish it is too late for it to be believable. Why? Because the colour red has already figured prominently in the plot. Painted walls, backgrounds, furnishings, etc and our shutterbug madman has not reacted to any of it. When he finally goes mad at the sight of a model in Central Park putting on lipstick it is a little too hard for us to be convinced.

On the plus side, the realistic photography and real New York locations are a nice slice of a bygone era. I'll bet all of those Greenwich Village and Bowery addresses are either long gone or converted to high priced condos by now.

A totally ridiculous nudie cutie from the early days of the LBJ administration, this film would have been a justifiable view when its rival for prurience was the gingham dresses of the ladies of "Petticoat Junction." Such were the times that a film like this, consisting basically of women just standing there and letting their boobs hang out, found an eager audience.

The plot and structure of the film, such as they are, have been explained well by the other comments added by various users, and little more needs to be said about it.

It has a view moments of kitsch appeal, mostly in the footage of long-gone Manhattan, but if you are older than fifteen this film is a complete bore.

My friends and I ran out last Halloween evening to buy a few scary DVDs to watch later, amongst them this dud. For the life of me, I can't understand why we kept watching this. Since there was literally nothing happening the majority of the time, it proved difficult to even make fun of it. Plus, the session musicians that recorded the "jazz" soundtrack must've been bored to tears. "Hey guys, can you vamp for an hour?" Just what a musician wants to hear.

There were a few unintentionally funny moments, however. Once in a while, we got a closeup of the photographer pretending to lose his mind when he saw red. Compared to the rest of the film, shots like that were downright hilarious.

The previous reviewer was correct in that this movie had its time, but that time is long past.