La masseuse perverse

Review: "Clinic Exclusive" (1971) or "Sex Clinic"

Not bad, but gosh, how boring it becomes with all those women unnecessarily baring their breasts without any apparent plot development. There's a bit of morality thrown in, which almost feels like a surprise amidst the gratuitous scenes. Interestingly, the star Georgina Ward was apparently in line to be a Labour MP, but naked stills of her from this film ended up in the newspapers-more morality than we bargained for!

As an early 1970s film, it hasn't aged particularly well, but it's watchable if you're prepared to cringe now and then. A mix of dated titillation and half-hearted storytelling. 6/10.

The poster at the top of this article is totally misleading. It gives the impression that this is a 1970s West German-style sex comedy; in fact it is a rather stern morality tale about a ruthless woman running a physiotherapy clinic, while mercilessly exploiting her customers, particularly an elderly love-starved lady who she bleeds white, taking her for every penny;eventually she gets her long overdue, well deserved comeuppance, courtesy of an even more experienced confidence trickster; anyone who watches consumer-advice tv programmes like the BBC's "Watchdog" will see the big con coming a mile off; the only surprise is the con-artist's motive. A pretty average criminal-caper B-movie.

SEX CLINIC is not a good film, but like so many other mediocre & forgotten efforts (not a single self-appointed "expert" back in Blighty has submitted an IMDb comment) it has been revived by the porn video label Salvation Films and found its way to America's guilty pleasure known as Netflix.

Like most Netflix offerings, the blurb to "shill" the movie, which appears on the little white mailer, is thoroughly misleading, pegging the film as a homosexual S&M package. Instead we have a rather grim, downbeat tale of a beautiful massage parlor lady financially & emotionally mistreating her customers. Had this been made in NYC a few years later (see: Joe Davian, Phil Prince, etc.), the S&M would have been included along with a solid dose of verbal humiliation, also lacking here.

Georgina Ward makes a pretty if tepid villainess; it is interesting that her film and TV career ended soon after this turkey -she had made solid appearances on many fine shows like "Danger Man" and "The Avengers". She preys especially on older people, bilking a geezer (who unfortunately bares his unappealing backside for the camera) out of 500 pounds early in the show, and the main plot line involves her grabbing every penny that good ole Carmen Silvera can raise, latter having a lesbian crush on Ward.

The melodramatic plot line of revenge unravels in straightforward fashion, but what I found diverting (if only ephemerally) was the glum, dour tone of the movie. This is a case where rather talented, and some famous at the time (from their TV appearances) cast members are called upon to enact sleazy roles, and not in the typically comical, who cares? mode of so many British sex comedies of the period. I had a similar reaction watching BLUE BLOOD, a vanity film from 1973, in which it is almost shocking to see Derek Jacobi in endless bed scenes with beautiful unclad actresses - a man of his talent clunking through soft porn!

End result is indicative of a culture where, for historical reasons involving funding -see Alexander Walker's essential tome "Hollywood England" to get the background picture - movies were considered junk while theatre and TV reigned supreme in Blighty at this time. So actors would appear in demeaning roles in poverty-budget films without a second thought or even damage to their careers -bouncing right back to quality work on the boards or the tube.

SEX CLINIC offers something a little different from your usual British sexploitation movie, although that doesn't make it good. In fact it tells a somewhat tight and inventive storyline about a scheming antagonist who has all of the men (and women) in her life wrapped around her little figure. Said figure is played by the attractive Georgina Ward, who runs a kind of spa/clinic where all kinds of sexual shenanigans are going on. Co-writer Hazel Adair also wrote KEEP IT UP DOWNSTAIRS but is chiefly known for writing the long-running soap CROSSROADS, and SEX CLINIC feels like nothing more than a soap with extra sex and sauce.

Much of the running time seems concerned with Ward's efforts to seduce those around her for profit, so there are a lot of softcore fumblings. Ward certainly isn't a shy actress and seems to spend half of the running time naked. The rest of the film is a bit of a mess, with familiar faces popping up but an overall vignette style to the narrative which eventually begins to drag in the second half. Bizarrely, this is a film which was directed by Don Chaffey, who once helmed the great JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS but must have fallen on hard times. Peter Halliday and Windsor Davies have small parts (fnar fnar) and there's the unforgettable and frankly unwanted chance to see Carmen Silvera, Rene's wife in 'ALLO 'ALLO, naked.

"Clinic Exclusive", also known as "With These Hands...", is an outlier among British sexploitation flicks, and I wonder if that is why I had never heard of it until today. For one thing, it's not a comedy, which almost all British sex flicks were. We're spared the cringe-inducing comedy of the "Confessions" series. It also seems to try to tell a serious story.

This is the problem, as it so often is with movies that try to be erotic. Either the sex gets in the way of the story, or the story gets in the way of the sex. There's so much nudity in the first half of the movie that I expected a light sex-farce, with an unobtrusive plot that would just provide ample opportunities for the girls in the movie to show off their ample assets. In the second half of the movie, however, the nudity and sex takes a backseat to a serious, if rather silly, story.

The protagonist is a raven-haired vixen who works at an unspecified "clinic" in which she prostitutes herself to her clients and blackmails the richer ones with the threat of revealing their licentiousness. At first we follow Julie doing what she does, allowing herself to be molested by an old man whose butt the movie regrettably shows us, and also detailing a relationship she has with an older lesbian who is apparently in love with her. Also regrettably, the movie shows the harsh-featured, middle-aged Sappho topless.

In the second half of the movie, the protagonist seems to fall in love with one of her clients, and is shown questioning her amoral behaviour. The movie turns into a lesson in morals, which I'm pretty sure nobody who saw it expected, or wanted.

The last thing that sets this movie apart from all the other British sleaze that came out in the '70s is the performance by the main actress, Georgina Ward. It's actually fairly powerful. She's ideally chosen as a cold-hearted vixen who uses her sex appeal to ensnare people. It's only in the movie's bathetic climax that I didn't believe her, repeating words and phrases rapid fire as she does, like a robot gone haywire.

It's the screenplay that lets it down. It was written by Hazel Adair, whose "Virgin Witch" is a sleaze classic. Here, though, the story undercuts it, and if they wanted to make a sexploitation flick they should have kept it as light as it is in the beginning. If they wanted to make a serious movie about morality, they should have used that approach from the beginning.