Owned release: The 2006 DVD put out by Something Weird & Image Entertainment. This is the second of three featured films on the disc, sandwiched in between One Shocking Moment and Maidens of Fetish Street.
Acquired: July 1st, 2017 from Amazon.
Seen before?: No.
Yup, that's this site's first NSFW image. Showed up a bit quicker than I expected, I'll be honest.
This, though, is also a remarkable indication of the film to come - it can't even get through the opening credits without pushing out some naked flesh. Literally the first image in the film is that of an FFM threesome, and an unceasing parade of sexual imagery continues under the whole of the opening credits. All are images that will reappear later in the film - the image above, for instance, is extracted from the film's second segment, regarding a housewife who is compelled towards extramarital affairs - but sans context it still serves as a statement of purpose: You came for some sex, you're gonna get some fuckin' sex, mister.
This being 1969, the mainstream breakthrough of hardcore porn is just around the corner, and The Abnormal Female plays like a film with a foot in both camps - the single-mindedness of a hardcore film joined to the cynical, judgmental morality endemic to a lot of sexploitation of this era (though, to be fair, that attitude was hardly limited to the grindhouse circuit). Mostly, this feels intensely frustrated at not having been made and released three years later, and that anger comes out in the treatment of the women in the film. It's framed as a series of case histories by a psychologist who specializes in this sort of thing, and as the title implies, it's very concerned with a "right" way to be a female in opposition to all we see here. These profiles concern, in order, a sadist, a serial adulteress, a nymphomaniac, a married couple of swingers and a lesbian; as their sordid histories are being depicted, the narrator in the guise of the psychologist breaks down their neuroses with no small amount of tongue-clucking. This is especially strong in the second segment, wherein the adulteress's outside activities are explicitly contrasted with her married sex life - the latter is "decent" (read: dull), the sort of thing where the husband likes to do it in one way and that's all that's being brought to the party, while the former is taboo enough that the woman demands to be demeaned by her lovers in the filthiest terms imaginable.
Yet, sex needs filth, right? Because of that, there's another part of me that wonders if this is a bit of a jape, an ironic laugh up the sleeve at the notion of sexual mores by aspiring pornographers. I sense a bit of hand-tipping at times: in the ludicrous outsized origins and appetites of the nymphomaniac, who spied on her parents both in the act and during solo work, the latter of which led to her own taste for self-pleasure, and once had fifteen guys in one afternoon and by the way, she's also fifteen years old; in the sadist finding a way to torture her slave with citrus fruit; in the married couple being horny enough to fuck every day and eventually get into threesomes but still wholesome enough to call it "intercourse." The Abnormal Female is the kind of grungy black-and-white chunk of sleaze that tut-tuts about the sleaze while making sure to slather it on you in great greasy dollops, and part of the amusement is the friction between word and deed, between the ostensible morality being espoused and the actual one being depicted. Are the filmmakers looking down their nose or thumbing it? Do the quotes on the title card belong around the whole thing or just the second word?
The bigger question, though, is: Does that really matter? Because, if I am to judge every film by its intent, then I must loop back to the beginning of the review and get back to the main intent of this film. Which is fuckin'. Lots of fuckin'. And, in that regard... this is actually pretty enjoyable. It's fairly well-shot for a film of this era, with lots of rich shadowy blacks adding just the right dose of moody grime to the copious rumpy-pumpy, and director George Rodgers has enough skin in the game (excuse the pun) to suss out the occasional startling composition, e.g. the low-angle closeup on Vicky the sadist as she whips her slave, turning her growling visage into a mass of flying hair and swirling leather. The women are more attractive than average, with the actress playing Janet the young married being legitimately supercute, and the guys are... well, the guys are mustachioed skeeves, mostly, but Vicky's slave and Janet's husband Fred aren't so bad, and two non-skeevy guys in a film of this type and time is two more than most. It has its problems - alarmingly, nobody in this movie seems to have ever kissed another human being before, and they stop just short of straight-up licking each other's mouths - but as far as this ignominious genre goes, I've seen a lot worse. The sex is decent, the women are decent, and it's not weighed down with extraneous nonsense. It does its thing in an hour's time and gets the hell out. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.
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