Climax

Amidst the plot less sex films and pointless one-day wonders there lurk some real movies from the early days of hardcore. Director Jack Genero actually put some thought and effort into this oddball but successful revenge drama.

If Dino De Laurentiis had gone porno, he might have concocted something like CLIMAX aka KITTY'S PLEASURE PALACE. Catchy alternate title is a stretch, as what we have is a leading lady named Kate, who is devoted to her pet kitty cat but is definitely not running a brothel.

Instead she has an armed fortress of a mansion, manned by mean looking women toting machine guns, her headquarters for revenge against male perverts (are there any other kind?).

Prologue shows her and the pussycat hiding in a closet while her friend Rose is raped by two drunken Nazi soldiers "somewhere in France" in January 1945. A G.I. conveniently barges in and guns everybody down. This key plot point was bungled by Genero and his co-scriptwriters -the fact that G.I. Joe killed Rose indiscriminately in this scene is completely overlooked by Kate at the climax of the film, a crucial point which renders the storyline nonsensical.

But this is porn after all, and the fun is watching the women get back at the men. Unlike the softcore style ILSA movies, women mistreating women is not a theme here.

Episodic structure, for a series of sex scenes, has Kate's girls luring men on, servicing them sexually, and then murdering them. Chief accomplice is Maria Arnold (credited as "Marie Arlo"), wonderfully playing a hit woman the same year she starred as a super-duper hitlady in COZY COOL.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

Silliest segment has our ladies going after necrophiliac Norman, out of stir and now working as undertaker (natch) at a funeral home. They bait him with a lovely "corpse" who comes to life for a threesome (doesn't make much sense since he's dealing with live femmes here). When Daphne tries to kill Norman with an axe (?!), she accidentally kills the other girl instead. This ridiculous sequence drags the film down quite a bit.

Another highlight is the surprise appearance of Susan Westcott (I'm adding her to the credits, as she was hidden behind the pseudonym "Susan Shaw"), as Erica. She disguises herself as a nun (quite a shock for fans of her DIARY OF A NYMPH movie) and is about to kill Col. Downs (apres-sex) by covering him with cement inside a coffin (a novel mix & match form of homicide) when Kate intervenes.

Turns out the good colonel is G.I. Joe from the prologue, who Kate is thankful to for saving her life back in France. Yes, his shooting the German rapists saved her, but what about his gunning down indiscriminately without even an "oops" expressed her BFF Rose in the same scene? Not to worry, Kate puts on a sexy nightgown and beds down with the Colonel, after he's washed off all that cement. Happy ending has her giving up her quest for revenge.

All things considered, it adds up to quality porn.