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| Images Courtesy of MGM |
Teen runaway Cheryl Stratton (Ayn Ruymen) walks in on her aggressive
roommate Judy (Ann Gibbs) having sex with her boyfriend Mike (Len Travis) only
to be blasted into moving out by the enraged Judy but not before shacking up at
the downtown LA King Edward Hotel managed by her Aunt Martha (Lucille Benson) whom
she has never met. Rather than return to
Ohio to her parents’ home, she accepts an offer from Martha to live with her
for free provided she doesn’t wander about the hotel grounds at night. The hotel’s guests are a gaggle of strange
and eccentric characters with their own perverse sexual leanings including but
not limited Reverend Moon (Laurie Main) who dresses as a priest one minute
before casually changing into heavy leather S&M gear the next. There’s a photographer named George (John
Ventantonio) with an inflatable sex doll on his bed and sooner or later a
masked assailant starts picking people off one by one.
Ahead of its day and perhaps too much for people in that
era, Paul Bartel’s feature film directorial debut is a stylishly and
satirically impish tongue-in-cheek thriller unafraid to get kinky or naughty
when it doesn’t veer in and out of hilarity or horror. Treading grounds similar to Hitchcock’s Psycho
with the idea of Stylishly lensed by The Fugitive director Andrew
Davis and a startling orchestral soundtrack by legendary An Affair to
Remember composer Hugo Friedhofer in his final score, Private Parts is
a sneaky, sometimes sexy psychological horror film with more than a few twists
and turns up its tricky sleeves. The ensemble
cast including future Jaws actress Ayn Ruymen in her screen debut as the
plucky unassuming heroine, Duel character actress Lucille Benson as the
mercurial Aunt Martha and particularly John Ventantonio as the sexually twisted
photographer round out this kooky cast of characters in a world both threateningly
dark yet deliciously funny.
After poor tests screenings and the studio being rebuked
over choosing the title Private Parts over its working title Blood
Relations, MGM dumped the film under its subsidiary label Premier Productions
alongside two other horror films before being shelved. Despite the initially hostile reception and
unsuccessful efforts by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures to buy the film back
from MGM as it fit more closely into the Corman exploitation-comedy niche, it
marked the emergence of a distinctive new actor-director talent that would only
blossom into greatness over time and subsequent projects.
Not long after unsurprisingly, Bartel joined
forces with Roger Corman when he went on to make Death Race 2000 three
years later. While Eating Raoul is
considered by many to be Bartel’s masterpiece, Private Parts is on its
terms truly an interesting dose of kink-infused horror-comedy with more than a
few memorable vistas that do manage to creep under the skin. Not everyone will take to the awkward offbeat subversive tone of this thing but there’s no question something like this would invariably
pave the way for David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
--Andrew Kotwicki
