THE BIZARRE ONES (1968) **

A babe who looks zonked out on drugs hops in her car and heads to a swinger party.  Along the way, she picks up a hitchhiker who says, “I don’t have to rape my women—They come to me!”  Naturally, he insists they bone, so she ties him up using a handcuff rig in her car (who needs AAA when you have BDSM?) and blows him.  Leaving him tied up, she goes to the party where more people are tied up and used for the pleasure of others.  Things take a turn for the worse when the party moves to a nearby river where everything comes to a tragic end.  

Directed by Henri Pachard (who’d later go on to make a slew of hardcore flicks), The Bizarre Ones has a decidedly Warholesque feel to it.  And by that, I don’t mean that it’s arty.  I mean that it features crummy black and white photography and long static shots where nothing much happens.  

There is a heavy concentration on S & M, but like the title implies; some of this shit is so bizarre it’s hard to know if anyone (including the actors and/or characters) are getting anything out of it.  Consider the scene involving a clunky portable sex machine.  It takes forever for the guys to set it up (outdoors), and once they put the woman in there, it offers so little payoff, that you have to wonder if it was all worth it.  Maybe that was Pachard’s intent after all.  He wanted to show you just how involved being a bizarre one was.  He wanted the audience to know if you’re gonna take a woman out into the woods and put her into a portable sex machine, you have to deal with wrangling extension cords and laboriously setting up equipment before you even think about coaxing her into the machine.  He wanted to show us that being a bizarre one is not nearly as glamourous as we seem to think.

Other allegedly kinky goings-on:  A girl is tied up and force-fed black rope licorice.  Another is strapped to the luggage rack of a car and taken for a ride.  (So THAT’S what Samsonite feels like!)  The film also contains the first use of a hammock as bondage paraphernalia, so it has that going for it.

One plus is that it features a lot of outdoor bondage, which is something of a novelty in these pictures.  So, if that’s your thing, you might dig it. Unfortunately, the poorly dubbed dialogue is laughable, and the droning sitar-heavy soundtrack will surely have you nodding off in no time.