Exploitation Film of the Month

"I'd climb aboard a porcupine if it struck my fancy."

 A new month has finally arrived and James and I wasted no time in heading down to our favourite video store and purchasing this month's flick, Score. There were a lot of choices but this film just couldn't be ignored and with a recommendation from Cinema Sewer (a filthy, independently produced movie magazine written and illustrated by one of the guys at the video store), we knew it would be worth checking out!

Radley Metzger directs 1972's Score (was released in the US in 1974) based off a 1971 off-Broadway play of the same title, written by Jerry Douglas (who also wrote for the film). This piece of "high class erotica" is just one of many directed by Radley Metzger, having directed over 20 of these films between 1961 and 1984. After checking this film out (and seeing a couple of previews on the DVD extras) I definitely want to check out some more of his work.


Score tells the story of a swinging married couple, Elvira (Claire Wilbur who reprises her role from the Broadway production) and Jack (Gerald Grant) who have a sexual appetite for men, couples, telephone repairmen- you name it! Elvira, somewhat bored with their usual hookups, and looking for a bit of a challenge, decides to seduce an innocent younger couple, Betsey (Lynn Lowry of The Crazies, I Drink Your Blood) and Eddie (Calvin Culver gay XXX icon) and make a bet out of it. You see, they have this little game where they find a couple (or individual) that catches their fancy and one of them is challenged to seduce them within a 6-month time limit. It's sort of unclear about what happens when they lose but that isn't really the point.

Elvira is quite the sex pot. She goes out in a trench coat, wearing nothing under it, and parades around the house in a sheer house coat. You can tell that Claire Wilbur knows this character inside and out and everything about her exudes confidence and sexuality. She starts off "operation music box", as the humorously innocent sounding narrator puts it, seducing a telephone repairmen(Carl Parker who has only 4 acting credits, two of which being Radley Metzger films) in front of Betsey while Jack is at work. Poor, naive Betsey is a little shocked by this, thanks to her Catholic upbringing, and tries to feign sickness when her and Eddie are expected to be over for dinner that night.

After she shows up, wearing white lace practically up to her eyeballs, Jack and Elvira start their conquest. They begin by getting the couple to relax with a bit of pot (from their pepper grinder!) and innocent little Betsey, who's never done any drugs, keeps asking "am I stoned yet?". After a bit of "Chopsticks" on the piano from the ladies, and inhibitions lowered, a costume trunk is brought out. Jack reveals how he wishes he had been a sailor, goading Betsey into revealing that she wishes she had been a model and Eddie a cowboy. The two men don possibly the most homoerotic outfits you could pick, Betsey a very minimal black lace number and Elvira comes out in a rather revealing nun outfit, emitting the response of "Jesus Christ" from Betsey.

It's certainly on now as the clock ticks closer and closer to midnight and if they're going to score, they're going to have to do it soon!This leads to splitting up the couples, Elvira with Betsey and Jack with Eddie, and after some heart to hearts (Betsey confesses her marriage issues and suspicions of Eddie's sexuality) and some poppers, it doesn't take long for both of them to score!



It's a simple story with humorous and campy dialogue delivered in the best way that it can be by it's actors, despite being a little stiff at times. It's a bit talky but the pacing is very quick and smooth. Each of them seemed to have a strong sense of who their characters were and played them convincingly. And let's face it, it's a movie about sex and having fun so we're not expecting top notch acting and dialogue here. We also see a subtle degradation of religious views into sexual exploration which leads to the glorious and freeing transformation of Betsey.

The erotic aspects of the film are noticeably uneven. The sex scenes between the two women are never more than a softcore skin flick and camera tricks playing off the mirrors to make it look like the women are touching more than they are. I discovered that this was due to hostility between the two actresses off screen, apparently because of Lynn Lowry making more money. This unfortunately ruins their chemistry and makes their scenes together look a bit silly. The scenes with guys however, are very explicit and quite raw. Little is left to the imagination as we see the men engaging in actual felatio, sitting on the edge between soft and hardcore (no worries, there's no penetration or ejaculation). I think Metzger's exploration in homosexuality and not holding back is commendable and genuinely erotic.

All of this is of course aided by the bright colours and fun camerawork. It's all very tastefully shot and paired with a mixed and amusing soundtrack ranging from strange flute to the somewhat horrible but catchy uncredited song "Where is the Girl" the reoccurs throughout the film and switches to "Where is the Boy" at the end. There are also plenty of gorgeous shots of the village of Bakar, Croatia where the movie was filmed, or as they liked to call it "Leisure City".

Score is a great mix of sex and comedy and has such a delightfully cheery ending. Everything about it is just so upbeat, fun and sexy! Though it may not be for everyone, it is the perfect example of "high class eroticism" and is undeniably enjoyable to watch (It's just too bad the carefree notions of the film didn't foster more safe sex all around as both Grant and Culver died of complications related to HIV/AIDS). I think we made a good pick for this month!

I Spit on Your Remake. All over it.

I can't wait to tear into this one. 

The other night we sat down to watch the remake of the 1978 I Spit on Your Grave. When I first heard that they were remaking this film, besides thinking it was totally unnecessary to remake it, I figured Hollywood would find some way to fuck it up and completely miss the mark. And guess what, they sure did. They did everything that they could do to try to top the original film- releasing it uncut right away to try to achieve some shock value and focusing way too much on creating Jigsaw worthy, intricate kills that are purely there for the gross-out factor that the Saw generation of kids has come to expect. A waste of time if you ask me.

Steven R. Monroe directs the 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave and it's not surprising to find that he's most known for camera operation and has mostly just directed TV movies (what you might call, a director for hire). This remake follows the same basic plot as the original- Jennifer (Sarah Butler) is a writer who comes to a remote cabin, deep in the southern backwoods, to get away from the city life and write her next novel. Unfortunately for her, she catches the eye of a nasty group of male locals who pursue her and proceed to rape and beat her in an extremely gratuitous fashion. She escapes and gets her revenge.

I'm really not even sure where to start with this one. First of all, I didn't get anything out of Sarah Butler's portrayal of Jennifer. She was a weak character, one that they overplayed as flaky and somewhat mindless. The supposed character development that much of the first part of the film  focuses on really showed us nothing more than some typical city girl that's clumsy, naive and probably only capable of writing Confessions of a Shopaholic during her writing retreat. I don't feel anything for her which immediately makes the film feel pointless. There's nothing interesting or at all special about her or her mediocre performance. This made all the rape scenes just feel like the most base kind of exploitation, rape for the sake of entertainment, and to set up for some overly explicit kill scenes. That was what made this film feel so wrong and off base with the original. It misses the point of exploitation films of 70s and takes it a step too far and in the wrong direction.

We are then somehow lead to believe that this girl, after being quite abusively raped, was able to jump into freezing cold water, fully nude, and hold her breath long enough to swim completely out of sight of her captors. It would be pretty impressive for anyone to do that in peak physical form but after the exhaustion of what had just happened to her, just minutes before, that's pretty goddamn amazing. This is where all the terrible plot holes start coming in to play. In the original, they leave her to go back to her cabin in her beaten down and degraded state and make no mention of killing her because it isn't really necessary. They show her going back and cleaning herself up, dealing with what just happened to her and becoming stronger so that she can get her revenge. This takes about a day and is pretty effective in my opinion. Now in this remake, we don't see what happens to her for a while. A whole month in fact. Uh, right. Instead we get an overly drawn out look at the lives of these detestable men in what I guess is an attempt to make us loathe them even more which, trust me, was pretty easy when we saw them raping her. So basically, this girl, who can't even hold her phone without dropping it in the toilet, was able to somehow survive in the woods for an entire month, living off what they briefly allude to as rats that she caught herself (oh yeah and apparently she can catch fish with her bare hands...), and somehow procuring some clean new clothes. Hell, she could have walked all the way home in that time! All of this defies all possibility of belief and reality. I don't see how we are expected to believe that this girl is capable of any of this when we're given such a poor definition of her character in the beginning. That destroys the effect of the film and is what makes it feel so gratuitous and unredeeming.

The original film is all about drawing everything out, every shot and every scene, making it feel realistically voyeuristic and making you really feel everything- her torture, her rape and her revenge. This remake is drawn out in all the wrong places. Way too much time is spent focusing on the men in the movie and their sorry attempts at portraying believable country boys. Our lead asshole looked like something out of a jeans ad, you know, a really forced attempt at styling a city boy to make him look country. I also couldn't get past that chubby guy who played the gay guy Damien in Mean Girls and his crappy attempt at a southern accent. They also decided to throw in a new character, the town Sheriff, who gets in on some of the rape action. They spend A LOT of time drawing out his story, showing his family life with his daughter, all to give our main character some weak leverage to get to him. Yeah we get it, it's supposed to be uncomfortable to watch him behaving normally at home with his wife and daughter when he enjoys going out and raping women, and she uses his daughter to get to him. But then we don't ever find out what she actually did with his daughter and she doesn't even use her in some way in front of him which I think, would have been more effective. Instead, she had to do something overly elaborate, which brings me to the revenge kills.

What was so great about the original was the smart and effective ways that she went about killing the men and how much you could feel her pain from what they caused her. Not only that, they were simple. In this remake however, they've fallen into Saw/Hostel territory. Though yes, they are some pretty exceptionally gross and cruel kills, I give them that, but I just couldn't get over the improbability of them all. It also didn't help that they kept throwing cheesy one-liners for her to say that pushed this film further and further into cheesy, torture porn caliber film making. And even though they were trying so hard to think of the outlandishly clever and ironic kill schemes, I was bored watching them and waiting for her to carry each one of them out in her petty, unsatisfying way. They spent too much time trying to make her scary looking, using typical, used-up imagery like long dark hair hanging in front of her face and making her look dirty and menacing. She's not supposed to be Samara from The Ring, she's supposed to be a broken down woman who's angry, not demonic. It completely cheapened any humanity and pain that Jessica had to begin with, therefore canceling out any attempt this film ever made at female empowerment or really any point at all.

I went into watching this film very openly and I really tried to give it a chance but it just didn't deliver. I think that when you're remaking a movie, solely for the purpose of trying to make more brutal rape and torture scenes, something has been lost and doesn't feel right. Some of my favourite modern horror films are some of the most disturbing (Martyrs, A Serbian Film) but they have a point, an underlying message in them that makes the violence justifiable and significant. This film just gives audiences an excuse to indulge in some guilt-free sadism that no matter how hard they tried, really isn't justifiable.