Daughters of Lesbos (1968)


Daughters of Lesbos (1968) 

The film revolves around the meeting of the titular club, whose members loathe men and consider the female of the species to be superior beings. It is also hinted that the meeting's purpose involves discipline of some kind, but this only comes into play at the very end. Instead, a series of vignettes illustrate key moments in the girls' past lives -- a drug-induced date rape (by a male, of course); the summer camp "initiation" of an erstwhile onanist; another initiation, this time of a hippie hitchhiker by a more aggressive dyke; and another serial masturbator who daydreams of a previous bathtub liaison, attracting the attention of a (male) voyeur.

All this is filmed without direct sound; instead a sometimes-purring, sometimes-scolding female narrator very effectively describes and comments on the action in passionate prose. A frantic free-form jazz combo intensifies the action. The girls are generally good-looking, and the soft, shadowy photography highlights their tender flesh to advantage. The sex scenes (with full-frontal nudity) are (as usual) quite repetitive, but placing them in the context of these stories gives them a boost.

The clincher comes in the very last sequence, when the girls take vengeance on an offender. The Penthouse-forum style melodrama suddenly and completely unexpectedly veers into "roughie" territory, and the consequences will leave the viewer stunned. (IMDB goblinhairedguy)











 Jackie Richards (Noel)

Sue Akers










Capone (1975)


Capone (1975)

The story of the rise and fall of the infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone and the control he exhibited over the city during the prohibition years. Unusually, briefly covering the years after Capone was imprisoned. (IMDB) Not much for historical accuracy.
























Asylum (1972)


Asylum (1972) 

4 short story adaptations of Robert Bloch stories. I will look at them in order they appear...

"Frozen Fear": short story of a man who attempts to cut himself off from a loveless marriage in order to take up with his mistress by a rather inventive means of murder only some things don't seem to want to stay dead. Short, but effective and creepy with a terrific ending even if we are required to suspend disbelief quite a bit in a few scenes.

"The Weird Tailor": a tailor desperate for money agrees to, at the request of an unusual elderly customer (played by Peter Cushing), to make a special suit out of a very strange type of fabric. Only when he delivers it, he discovers the elderly customer actually has no money to pay and even more shocking is the true purpose of this bizarre suit. This is the best of these tales. However, to be honest, I much prefer the adaptation from the "Thriller" series.

"Lucy Comes To Stay": a tale of psychosis as Lucy (Charlotte Rampling) returns home from the mental hospital, presumed cured, only it seems the naughty girlfriend who landed Lucy in trouble to begin has started to visit her in secret as well. Actually this is not at all bad, it just runs a little too long for my liking. Still there's some quality about Charlotte Rampling I find irresistible.

"Mannikens of Horror": the framing story for the others in the series as a new doctor visits a mental hospital and discovers that the Doctor who called him there is now a patient in the ward. He's told he can have the job if he can identify which patient upstairs is that Doctor. Finally he comes to believe the individual is a strange fellow who makes small lifelike figures, into which he plans to place his conscience and use as his means of escape. A number of startling twists here, fine stars like Patrick Magee and Herbert Lom, make this both entirely unpredictable and honestly quite good. (IMDB Space_Mafune) V&D