John Waters once said that he wanted to make a film that had no sex and no violence, but was rated "X" just for its theme and ideas. Well, this movie might be as close as anyone has ever come to that--it has no on-screen violence and very little sex but it is unbelievably sleazy, managing to touch on incest, pedophilia, fetishism, frigidity, prostitution and rape all in a scant running time. It is also surprisingly serious and well-made. It's not a film I'd want to watch again any time soon, but you have to respect the fact that it was made at all.
The movie is about a young girl with a shrewish, puritanical mother and an absent, whoring father. She becomes unnaturally attached to the toys her father gives her, even taking them to bed with her as a young adult, much to the consternation of her new husband with who she proves decidedly frigid. While her husband seeks solace from other women, the heroine comes upon a unique solution to her frigidity problem--she becomes a prostitute (!) catering exclusively to a strange breed of older men who call her "baby" and insist that she call them "daddy". All of which leads to a very predictable but nevertheless touchingly tragic encounter with her actual father.
This is one of strange breed of early 70's "roughies" that were marketed as sexploitation films, but had a surprisingly downbeat view of sex. Other films like this include "And When She Was Bad", "Swinger's Massacre", and "The Toy Box" (with which this has been paired on Something Weird's latest DVD release). But while many of these other films no doubt left their male audience with mixed feelings of being turned on and wanting to castrate themselves, this film definitely evokes the latter response. I know that doesn't sound like much of a recommendation, but this a rare film that despite its far-fletched plot realistically portrays sex as a potentially destructive force for both the repressed and the promiscuous (and without any preaching or moralizing). That's in many ways preferable to the usual "adult" fairy tales where everyone has a lot of sex with multiple partners and lives happily ever after.
The movie is about a young girl with a shrewish, puritanical mother and an absent, whoring father. She becomes unnaturally attached to the toys her father gives her, even taking them to bed with her as a young adult, much to the consternation of her new husband with who she proves decidedly frigid. While her husband seeks solace from other women, the heroine comes upon a unique solution to her frigidity problem--she becomes a prostitute (!) catering exclusively to a strange breed of older men who call her "baby" and insist that she call them "daddy". All of which leads to a very predictable but nevertheless touchingly tragic encounter with her actual father.
This is one of strange breed of early 70's "roughies" that were marketed as sexploitation films, but had a surprisingly downbeat view of sex. Other films like this include "And When She Was Bad", "Swinger's Massacre", and "The Toy Box" (with which this has been paired on Something Weird's latest DVD release). But while many of these other films no doubt left their male audience with mixed feelings of being turned on and wanting to castrate themselves, this film definitely evokes the latter response. I know that doesn't sound like much of a recommendation, but this a rare film that despite its far-fletched plot realistically portrays sex as a potentially destructive force for both the repressed and the promiscuous (and without any preaching or moralizing). That's in many ways preferable to the usual "adult" fairy tales where everyone has a lot of sex with multiple partners and lives happily ever after.