Tuesday, February 20, 2018

12: The Abductors (1972, Don Schain)



Owned release: The 2003 DVD put out by Monterey Video as included in the 2004 box set with the other two films in the Ginger series.

Acquired: June 13th, 2012 from Amazon - same order as Strip Strip Hooray, oddly enough.

Seen before?: Nope.

Seems appropriate that a film about a female detective whose main asset is her easy sexuality should turn into an object lesson on the perils of going too fast. Don Schain's The Abductors followed hot on the heels of his Ginger, the 1971 film that introduced Cheri Caffaro's sultry and savage superdick. Turned around quick enough that it also bears a 1971 copyright date, the chief problem with The Abductors is that the speed of production didn't leave any room for innovation - at every point, the reigning ethos seems like, "What if we just made Ginger again?" The biggest difference between the two, best as I can tell, is that this film drops the uncomfortable racism that's the most eyebrow-raising aspect of Ginger and replaces it with a second helping of uncomfortable sexual violence. Erasing ethnic slurs and doubling-down on rape - that's progress in these parts, I guess.

While I'd like to stop there and move on to the next film - this film, for all its discomfort, is intensely boring in the way that only a determined Xerox of a previous success can be - I suppose I should at least try and muck around with the sexual politics on display here. Ginger is strong and confident in her sexuality and takes pride in her desires - the opening scene sees her and her boss at the detective agency bantering, with Ginger making knowing cracks about her long history, e.g. "I'm lying flat on my stomach for a change," whereas the cheerleaders who are kidnapped at the film's outset are explicitly marked as virginal and thus easy marks for predatory males. So far, so standard. But the introduction of another detective, a younger woman who is also sexually confident and a judo champion to boot, complicate things a bit. Carter, the younger woman, is being used as bait to draw out the abductors, yet once her cover is blown, her strength fails her; while it briefly looks like she's going to use her judo expertise to fight her way out, that gets stymied pretty fast and earns her nothing more than some punches in the stomach and some rough tit-squeezing (there's a lot of rough tit-squeezing in this). Ginger, meanwhile, is also ensnared within the trap of the abductors, but she wiles her way out by seducing a gullible guard. It's not enough to be strong in the world of the Ginger films - to get the upper hand, you have to be able to weaponize your sexuality.

With that in mind, the surfeit of rape makes structural sense (though it doesn't make it any less gross) - in this universe, seemingly all depicted sex is also an act of violence. When one of the lead abductors attempts to break down an unwilling abductee by forcing his fingers into her vagina, that's an act of violence; when Ginger gets information out of a guy by handcuffing him to a tree, threatening him with a knife and fondling his junk, that's an act of violence; when the brainwashed cheerleaders cheerfully go to bed with the rich industrialists who've purchased them, that's an act of violence. Even the one seemingly innocent scene of mutual sexual enjoyment, in which Ginger and an Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer-looking advertising executive (with whom she's been flirting in order to set into motion her scheme to infiltrate the abductors) make love on a white shag carpet, turns out to be an act of violence - the advertising man was of course secretly a part of the abduction ring the whole time. And there's no counterbalance scene that's simply Ginger getting some as she professes a love for - the closest she gets to that is her friendly back-and-forth with her boss. Sex is power and power is sex, and never shall the twain be separated. Between the rape, the handcuffing, the sex-slave-creating brainwashing, the multiple scenes where Ginger starts to jerk a dude off only to chuckle and blue-ball him by walking offscreen, the cheerleader with the whip and the general skeeviness (where Ginger appeared to have been filmed in a series of hotel rooms, this appears to have been filmed in a series of basements), I feel like I know maybe a bit too much about Schain and Caffaro's sex life.

No comments:

Post a Comment