Reflections

Something Weird Video makes no bones about its 40-plus-years after release of the unreleasable vanity film REFLECTIONS - it's weird enough to qualify. Unfortunately, this junker resembles many an untalented filmmaker's pretentious attempts at navel-gazing.

Culprit is one John Mavros, a neophyte who hired Martin Scorsese as co-editor here, and was rewarded a decade later with assistant editor gig on RAGING BULL. The rest of his career "is silence".

Take your pick of irritating affectations -many of them are present here. Notable (and most nauseating for me) is constant use of the New Wave gimmick of substituting panning shots across the room for reverse shots - a feeble technique Mavros uses dozens of times to ill (or null) effect. When in doubt he presents S.O.L.I. romping in the surf beach footage, another dated '60s mannerism.

Non-story concerns the love life of heroine Susan Wallack, whose very large, natural (even a tad pendulous) breasts qualify her for softcore porn, presumably this film's intended destination. It plays far worse than most softcore epics, mainly shot MOS, as we watch Wallack make out with a succession of four guys, in pointless filler fashion. One rapes her, perhaps the only exploitable segment (for a trailer?) of this non-film.

I used to see many unreleased (and unreleasable) movies late night at weekly private screenings in the '80s at the Thalia run by the late Richard Schwarz, and that's what this refugee-from-landfill effort reminded me of. So unless you have dangerous completist tendencies like me, watch out.