THE REVEREND’S REVIEW
FT’s resident man of the cloth REVEREND PETER LAWS dons his dog collar and faces the flicks that Church forgot!
In 2017, The University of California studied 100 of the most successful movies from the previous three years. Their gender analysis revealed that women had only 36% of screen time, dropping to a mere 32% for Oscar-winning films. If you only counted speaking parts, it was a paltry 27%. One genre bucked the trend, however, with female characters speaking and driving the plot for 53% of the running time. Yes, horror movies are often dismissed as misogynistic, yet ironically they’re the most consistent at showcasing female characters – often strong ones.
We have two of them this month, starting with an erotic shocker called The Frightened Woman (1969, Shameless Films). It’s a fabulously twisted two-hander featuring a handsome company director who traps Maria in his luxury villa. He spends the first hour berating and degrading the talented journalist simply for being a woman. She is drugged, tied up and humiliated. At one point, he even forces her to have sex with a life-size mannequin… of himself. Yes, you need to brace for some unhinged sado-erotica here.Yet it’s as intelligent as it is depraved, and often gorgeous in style and imagery. You’ll quickly understand why Dagmar Lassander (Maria) calls this her finest role.
We meet another powerful woman in Mausoleum (1983). Bobbie Bresee had been a busy guest star on shows like The Love Boat, Charlie’s Angels and The Fall Guy, but here she’s the star, playing Susan Nemod (read that surname backwards), a happily married 30-year-old… until an ancestral spirit sends her full-tilt bonkers. Suddenly, she’s burning folks alive in exploding cars, then shagging the gardener and stabbing him with a hand rake. It’s a hoot, especially when Susan levitates the worst actor on Earth over a shopping mall balcony, then rams him three floors onto a spike. Bresee is solid in a role that is both ridiculous and demanding. Marjoe Gortner plays her husband. This cult character actor started life as an evangelical child preacher. He made $3 million on the tent revival circuit, but his dad ran off with the money, so Marjoe pivoted into movies. In
Mausoleum, he’s thrilled when his wife develops an insatiable love of sex… but not so much when she squeezes him a little too hard in the bath. It’s a sumptuous Blu-Ray with great extras and a lovely transfer. Tip: if you buy this directly from Treasured Films, they’ll even throw in a ‘Bitey Boob Demon’ magnet since there’s a scene where Susan’s possessed breasts develop drooling fangs.
If people saw still images from these two films, they’d think horror treats women as objects. A Mausoleum poster features a sixth-form level drawing of a demon with pendulous breasts drooping over a tomb. The Frightened Woman has a female with tape across her mouth, or face down like a hunted bear, with a man standing on her back. Yet, if anybody takes the time to watch either, they’ll find that even as far back as 1969, ‘trash’ films like these were some of the most ardent cheerleaders for female empowerment.
You need to brace for some unhinged sado-erotica here