Movie Details
| Title: | The Frightened Woman | |
| Director: | Piero Schivazappa | |
| Year: | 1969 | |
| Genre: | Sexploitation | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 06.13.07 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 06.13.07 | Weird Wednesday | OK, let me tell you how much I liked this movie. I got home at like 3:30 dead tired from a long day doing physically exerting things, toot tired to even write these notes, but before collapsing into bed I had to look to see if a copy of this was available because I couldn't imagine never being able to see this movie again. (side note: not only did I find a very decent widescreen copy of the movie but I also found the excellent soundtrack which I'm listening to now! yay for me) So... where do I start. This is the kind of movie that overloads you with amazingly bizarre moments to the point where a guy can walk into a warehouse with a gigantic sculpture of the bottom half of a woman laying on her back with legs spread, walk into its vulvic doorway, have that doorway close with teeth-like sliding doors, and come out a skeleton and YOU DON'T THINK THAT'S ODD. The feverishly fantasy-minded sets and tone of the movie builds with such consistent intensity that you are overcome, overtaken, and overloaded with imagery. A man lectures his secretary on the dangers of sterilisation, saying "it is essential that the fertility of the man should reain absolutely intact." This man has a series of paintings of blown up slides of "various types of bacteria and protazoa" hanging as art in his euro-cool living room. "Bubolic plage, leprosy, typhus, cholera, carbuncles, tetanus, diptheria, rabies." He drugs his secretary's J&B and installs her into his S&M playground and subjects her to a good 45 minutes of B&D fantasy fulfillment complete with outfits, harnesses, weird-ass rubber doll versions of himself, and empty pools for him to hose her off in only broken by one hypnotically tantalising scene of her dancing to the awesome euro-pop soundtrack while wearing an outfit made of gauze. When she attempts suicide by pills, the tables turn and he confesses his non-murderous nature. The last half hour or so is spent watching him run around with her like a puppy dog until she makes him confront his vaguely-motivated hatred of women (something about seeing scorpions get it on. after the female scorpion devoured her mate, he picked up a rock and "pounded that treacherous female to a pulp," convinced that was how all women made love) by offering herself to him in a (filled up) pool, where he faces off with her in grand Speghetti Western fashion and has a heart attack or something and dies, thus becoming the latest in her faux-suicidal rampage to strike back at misogynists everywhere. It all doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially when you actually try to think about it, but my is it a bizarre cinematic journey to watch. This guy has soooo many things that I want. The block of stone with attached headcuff, the boatcar that takes him to the ancient dwarf-infested castle slash cafe restaraunt with suit-of-armor doormen, the ridiculously large piece of bread slathered with butter and marmalade, the twin showers and stand-up air-dryers in his bathroom... hell, his whole house. I just want it. I want it ore than the balloon room from Girl From Starship Venus. I want it more than the hidden torture chamber from Marta. I daresay I even want it more than the rotating corkscrew bed with entertainment center tower in the middle from Diabolik. Well, ok, I think I still want that bed more (especially if Eva's in it), but it's definitely close. The fetishistic lengths that the various sexual domination scenes play would probably be borderline tedious were it not for the creativity of each scenario and the ludricrous babble that the man sputters while exploring his kink. I LOVED his speech about sperm collecting and how rabbits have already learned to reproduce without males and how pretty soon women will be able to pick their sperm out, have it cultivated in some exterior machine, and pick it up when it's ripe. I really wanted to hear more of the Sexual Aberrations and the Stars tape that he leaves playing and see what it has to say about Leos. His scientific description of the physiological effects of fear really creeps me out. This movie is just unbelievable. Crazy, kinky, strange and erotic. A Weird Wednesday highlight that leaves me saying to myself "I must have faith in my virility." |
