Sex Farm

FRUSTRATED WIVES is an entirely cheap little British sex/exploitation movie directed by Arnold Miller, who had previously shot such notorious documentaries in the 1960s as London IN THE RAW and PRIMITIVE London. It looks like he had a few quid spare change in his pocket one day so he used it to finance this dreadful little film which is almost entirely without merit.

The original title was SEX FARM, which has entirely different connotations as a movie, so it's no surprise that the title was changed for the release I saw. The story features a couple of bored housewives who are abused and neglected by their sexist husbands so decide to go to a special 'sex clinic' in the country for enlightenment. While there they encounter all manner of odd stuff from pervy gym instructors to nerdy teacher types and more.

It's all relatively plot less and simply an excuse for a series of mildly explicit sex scenes. The main two actresses are required to do very little apart from look good naked, which, as they are both very voluptuous, comes easy to them. Rather amusingly, one of the actresses, the Canadian Hilary Farr, is now a mainstream TV presence and made this film under a pseudonym. She must never have envisaged the days of the Internet and the IMDb and how her starring role in this would come back to haunt her. FRUSTRATED WIVES is a fairly grubby and uninteresting film, not to mention boring, and one scene of a young guy getting to grips with an old granny is undoubtedly the worst thing in it.

After years of searching I finally got to see this title! (Ask me how.) And since there are no reviews of it up here, well, I just HAD to write one.

It's not a good film. Of course. It's similar to 1972's Clinic Xclusive (aka Sex Clinic) and has much in common with other British sex comedies of the period. Two frustrated wives (which was used as an alternate title, possibly to persuade people that this wasn't a notorious film involving farmyard animals) head off to a health farm to get away from their dreadful husbands. Neither of them are especially pretty but their bods make up for it - one suspects they were cast for their chests.

The film was for a while refused a certificate by the BBFC (outside London) for excessive sexual content, but it doesn't seem excessive nowadays (although I should add that the copy I watched had two or three obvious cuts - I suspect a couple of minutes of sexy time was edited out, annoyingly). What will instead stagger any millennials/snowflake generation types watching now (unlikely, I know) is the sexual politics. Their jaws will hit the floor as they see molesting and sexual harassment treated like a joke. Tut tut, they will say, it's no wonder the likes of Jimmy Savile got away with what he did when the cultural climate was like this (the issue is vastly more complex than this but I'm not going into that now). Some women are not treated well in this film.

What also takes the breath away is some OAP sex - some lady, who must be nearly 70, has a topless snog with a guy probably in his 40s. It's not that nice to watch. There's also some inter-racial lesbian fun, which may have raised eyebrows at the time.

The most titillating sequence is one near the end where a husband's bit on the side gets fully naked. The camera homes in on her naked crotch as she goes to put her knickers on. It's a rare bit of pubic hair in the flick.

But Sex Farm isn't a good movie, it's pretty dull and vacant with little in the way of wit or incident. It's easy to see why it resides in obscurity (and that title probably didn't help). Seek it out if you must but don't expect much.