My Xmas Xploitation Triple-Feature
I was fortunate
enough to have received three older exploitation films via the post
this week – lucky, because not only were these three separate
packages from thee separate Amazon.ca sellers not even supposed to
have arrived until the new year, but also lucky as it was three days
'til Christmas and the two post offices near my apartment are packed
to the tits with Christmas packages and boxes. It's not an overly fun
time at the post office this time of the year, the skeleton staffs
are overworked and stressed out and trying to cope with the influx of
mailed presents and packages as best they can; at times it looks like
they're trying to bail out a sinking ship with a tea spoon. But they
always end up managing. This year, I don't have much to manage over
the holidays, Xmas 2015 is shaping up to be a relatively low-stress
holiday; which provides a fantastic framework for catching up on some
old cult oddities that I have been missing out on for years. Two of
the releases I purchased had been released on DVD by Severin Films
and Synapse Films (respectively) nearly a decade ago – give or take
a couple of years – one of them appeared to be already out of
print: Gwendoline (aka The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of
Yik-Yak) starring Whitesnake's
80s video vixen Tawny Kitaen, and Exposed, starring
Christina “They Call Her One-Eye” Lindberg. The last of the three
films, while having had a couple of DVD releases already, was at
least a very recent Blu-ray release from Scream Factory: Women's
Prison Massacre, starring Lauar
Gemsar as Emanuelle, in one of the notoriously violent Emanuelle
entries from Italy. Women's Prison Massacre is
the last in a trilogy of Emanuelle/Women-In-Prison films that were
shot back-to-back my Bruno Mattei in the early eighties, the
collection of these three films is somewhat confusing as both their
productions and releases – and content – overlapped heavily,
coupled with the rotating title changes depending on what and when
and where each International distributor was doing with and handling
each of the films. Even after their respective DVD releases in the
early 2000s, I had to double- and triple-check the specs, credits,
and descriptions of each film on the internet to finally get straight
that the other Mattei/Gemsar Women In Prison collaborations were not
in fact the same film re-titled by different distributors. Of the
three, I'd up to this point only seen Violence in a Women's
Prison, which had been released
by Shriek Show on DVD over a decade ago. I did not, at the time,
think that film was very great. Watching the new Blu-ray of Women's
Prison Massacre, I found that to
be the far superior film of the pair, it's a nearly arthouse take on
the Women-In-Prison sexploitation model, stretched to new heights by
the brazen homages to Assault on Precinct 13 and
The Deer Hunter, which keeps
things moving at a far more exciting pace that the film has any right
to. Additionally, while I nearly always love the exotic Laura Gemsar
in or out of her string on Emanuelle roles, in Women's
Prison Massacre she really turns
in a solid and confidently impressive performance. Mattei and Gemsar
really outdid themselves on this one, and as far as exploitation
flicks go in general, this is one of the best and particularly bloody
for a WIP flick, and has even managed to spark in me a genuine
interest in revisiting Mattei's previous works in the Women-In-Prison
and Nunsploitation sub-genres.
I
followed this film up with Just Jaeckin's Gwendoline,
which is the “director's cut”
version of the longer-titled Perils of Gwendoline in the
Land of Yik-Yak, and I was duly
stunned into a surprised, smiling silence to see that the director of
the original Emmanuelle film
(from 1974) had taken his erotica tendencies into a whole new realm
of tongue-in-cheek comedy, complete with amazing sets, locations, and
lush, sexualized costuming – some of this film actually reminded me
of Mad Max Fury Road, at
times mixed with Big Trouble in Little China. With
this film, Jaeckin took sexploitation smart-women-in-peril filmmaking
in the Philippines (a Roger Corman staple) to a whole new level of
sexy, funny, charming, and sophisticated camp. As much as it pains me
to say this, I actually preferred Gwendoline (based
on the fetish/bondage comic book “The Adventures of Sweet
Gwendoline”) over the sexy camp classic Barbarella.
It's surprisingly hard to picture the sweet, charming, young Tawney
Kitaen here in the lead role of the innocent and sexually curious
Gwendoline in 1984 as the assertively sexy vixen of Whitesnake's
videos only a few years later into the late-eighties.
The last of this impromptu Xmas sexploitation trilogy was Exposed,
aka Diary of a Rape, starring Christina Lindberg and which
preceded Thriller: A Cruel Picture / They Call Her One-Eye by
two years in 1971 but which for newer audiences such as myself
follows our introduction to the beautiful sexploitation
Swedish actress Lindberg. Exposed actually re-works extremely
well as an unintended follow-up to Thriller, in that film we
see Lindberg getting to kick some ass in what is one of the most
poetic revenge stories I've ever seen – Exposed works like a
sort of antithesis to Thriller, where Lindberg's character
experiences quite a different, subtler form of sexual manipulation
and blackmail, and then spends the actual plot of the film both
trying to escape her situation and simultaneously overtly asking for
help with her situation – but asking her current jealous and
thick-headed boyfriend proves to be only a brick wall for her. In
Thriller, as Lindberg goes on her rampage of revenge, we're
with her all the way. In Exposed, she creates a character that
we completely sympathize and empathize with, and again, we're with
her all the way. In both films she is completely engaging, and part
of this is undoubtedly due to her nonthreatening beauty and
sexuality. She is attractive, but the scenes she is disrobed in are
not in the film to entice, but to illustrate, with Lindberg in firm
control of her character, the manipulation that has made her a victim
of slimy opportunists. And the film shows us, in a way: is not her
thick-headed boyfriend being an opportunist as well? He uses the fact
that she had been a sexual victim against her, and almost as a
reason not to help her. In both Exposed and Thriller:
A Cruel Picture Lindberg's empathetic characters are then
basically left to fend for themselves, which is both sad and
empowering at the same time. And speaking more of it as an overall
film (or film experience), Exposed is also beautiful in its
photography and its editing (once again sharing an aesthetic with
Thriller).
Overall, this Xmas Xploitation Triple-Feature was far more than I
could've asked for; beyond expectation (or Xpectation?) because going
into this, I had no expectation. What I did have was a pile of
DVDs shipped by Amazon sellers and delivered by Canada Post in time
to relax and spend some leisure time with before we get into the
thick of the Xmas holidays. Merry Christmas, everyone!
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