(Originally reviewed September 13th, 2019)
Sammy (Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla) Petrillo gets his marriage counselor diploma in the mail and sets off to make a name for himself in the profession. Meanwhile, his own personal life is a wreck. His girlfriend (Kristen Steen) won’t marry him because he always has to care for his dominating mother (also Petrillo, with his voice dubbed by the director, Doris Wishman). As Petrillo meets with his patients, the superintendent (Phillip Stahl) in his apartment building spies on various tenants by looking through their keyholes.
The naughty footage looks like it might’ve been taken from outer sources, perhaps old stag reels or even from Wishman’s other films for all I know. Many of the sex scenes are tinted yellow for some damned reason. Others are filmed through a negative filter which makes it impossible to tell what the hell is going on. None of them are remotely sexy.
Most Wishman movies are unintentionally hilarious. If you’ve ever seen Let Me Die a Woman or Deadly Weapons you know what I’m talking about. With this one she tries to be funny on purpose and the results are disastrous.
Petrillo made his living imitating Jerry Lewis. He unwisely dropped the act for this movie. Sporting long hippie hair and doing random impressions (everyone from The Invisible Man to Porky Pig), and telling unfunny jokes, he never once elicits a single laugh from the audience. You know they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel when he shows up in drag. The results are pretty dire, even for Wishman’s standards.
The film falls into a predictable pattern early on. It goes back and forth from the unfunny scenes of Petrillo (who also may be familiar to you from his bit part in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) interviewing women to the voyeur peeping on lovemaking couples. Neither plotline hits its intended marks, making Keyholes are For Peeping or is There Life After Marriage? a frustrating experience to say to least.
Wishman’s made some bad movies in her time, but this one just might take the proverbial cake.
AKA: Keyholes are for Peeping.
DORIS DECEMBER NOTES:
1) When Doris Wishman added newly shot sex scenes to older movies in the past, the results were wildly uneven. Here, she tosses in a bunch of old sex scenes (I spotted bits from The Hot Month of August and Passion Fever, but I’m sure there were others) with newly shot footage. She doesn’t even attempt to make them match. When the building’s super peeps through keyholes, he’s in color and the people fucking in the room are in black and white. (I’ve seen lots of movies where it turns from night to day within the same scene, but very few that go from color to black and white and back.) Sometimes they’re solarized so you can’t make heads or tails of it. (Let Me Die a Woman also contained a random solarized sex scene.)
2) I liked Sammy Petrillo in Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, but BOY, is he bad here.
3) Director Trademarks: Random dance scene, shower scene (this time the score isn’t overly bombastic, just overly annoying), off-kilter narration, poor dubbing (when Petrillo is in drag), whiplash editing (the Hawaiian sequence is a fever dream of incompetence), shots of undergarments hitting the floor, and (what else?) feet.
4) Sigh.
5) You know that overused joke I make about Martin Scorsese calling a particular moment in a Doris Wishman movie “CINEMA”? You won’t find that joke here.
6) To add insult to injury, the movie never answers the question in the title. In fact, the film ends asking the audience, “So… is there life after marriage?” You would at least think that after an hour and nine minutes of fast motion “comedy” scenes, incoherent editing, and lame “comic” sound effects, Wishman would’ve had the decency to answer that query.
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