Any Body... Any Way

When their car is deliberately drained of gas by ex-mortician Dr.Bradley Ann Henderson and her semi-lesbian friend Terry Wilson seek help in Bradley's isolated house where he lives with his creepy sister Myla and a servant Freddy.Dr.Bradley captures both girls for sex as he wants to find 'perfect love mate'.His ghastly memorial exhibition room with naked women looks truly memorable.Very likable exploitation movie directed by Charles Romine and shot in upstate New York.There is plenty of delicious sleaze and mannequin-like naked ladies are lovely.The film is quite atmospheric too!6 cat-fights out of 10.The climax slightly reminded me "Maniac" with Joe Spinell.

This creepy yet unintentionally hillarious film is one of my favorite b-movies. I mean you have got it all in this film-cheesy music, cheesy clothing, and the bad guy's hair alone is worth seeing this film. The plot goes something like this. A couple of college gals are partying, one of them almost gets raped, but is saved by the ubiquitous bad guy with the hair, Dr. Bradley. He invites them back to his house, where he lives with his warped sis and their necrophiliac handyman. The girls are then introduced to Bradley's demented world. Don't worry, it's not very scary or suspenseful, but definitely a campy film worth watching when you have some time to kill!

This film is long overdue for rediscovery! Apparently titled ANYBODY ANYWAY until Harry Novak got his hands on it, by any name it smells as sweet. The barn sequence at the beginning with its twenty minutes of grade "A" film library/go-go music (some of it recognizable from H.G.Lewis movies) is worth the price of admission alone. This is one politically incorrect film. From the adenoidal Mr. Bradley and his "love experiments" to the jaw-dropping "happy" ending, trash fans can not go wrong with this one. The tone is perfect--not too self-parodic, but definitely impossible to take seriously as it catalogs the various clichés of male fantasies that invariably appear in softcore films.

As one can derive the plot from the many previously posted messages here, I'll not address it in this post. Perhaps it's a girl/girl thing, or maybe I've just watched too many Harry Novak "classics," but I have to say that I found Joyce Danners to be the 'erotic anchor'of this film. I chose to watch this flick on the strength of her presence in the trailer. This red-headed vixen steals the movie with her measured speech and the deft way she somehow manages to blink under those hefty-looking false eyelashes. She's my hero-again, probably just a girl/girl thing. Though the rape scene and the character's subsequent reaction to being violated make this movie irritating at times, you gotta' love the fact that the lesbian character (joyce danner) 'takes care of her own business' after her advance are spurned. Danners could definitely benefit from the enhancement surgeries of today. Still, she's got a definite sex appeal, if you go for that sort.

Pretty work colleagues Ann and Terry (Eve Reeves and Joyce Danner) attend a wild party at an isolated barn where Ann is almost raped -- saved in the nick of time by voyeur Dr. Bradley (Daniel Garth), who hits Ann's attacker with a pitch fork handle. When the girls decide to leave the party, they discover that their car has no gas, so they walk to a nearby house to ask if they can use the owner's phone.

The girls are surprised to find that the house belongs to Dr. Bradley and his sister Ida (Irene Lawrence), but are disappointed to hear that the Bradleys' phone is out of order and that their car is being serviced. The Bradley's invite Ann and Terry to stay for the night, but the girls become worried when they discover that the windows to their room are barred and that their door has been locked from the outside. It turns out that Ann and Terry are just the latest in a long line of female 'guests' at the house, all of whom became unwilling participants in Dr. Bradley's sexual experiments.

If The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had been made a decade earlier, then the girls in Behind Locked Doors might have been more wary about knocking on the door of a remote house in the country while looking for help. Speaking of Tobe Hooper's '74 classic, there's a chase scene in Behind Locked Doors that gave me serious Texas Chain Saw vibes, while the ending, in which Dr. Bradley's 'human mannequins' come to life for revenge, reminded me of another horror classic... William Lustig's excellent Maniac (1980). I wonder if either Hooper or Lustig were influenced by this film.

Of course, Behind Locked Doors isn't in the same league as either The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Maniac: it's cheap, sleazy trash that suffers from clumsy direction, bad acting and terrible pacing (the first 15 to 20 minutes primarily consists of crap go-go dancing to bad music). Director Charles Romine seems more intent on catering to the dirty raincoat brigade than in delivering tension and scares, missing no opportunity for his female stars to get naked, even having lesbian Terry masturbate under the covers while sharing a bed with Ann.

4.5/10 for the sleaze, rounded down to 4 for the bit where Dr. Bradley covers his body with baby oil -- horrifying!