A door-to-door salesman comes home early one day to find his wife in bed with another man. Devastated, he runs off to New York City where he rents a seedy apartment and starts peeping on women. Wherever he goes, he sees his wife’s face in the women he ogles, which slowly sinks him into madness.
Directed by Larry (Beware the Black Widow) Crane, All Women are Bad is only an hour long, but it suffers from way too much padding. If Crane cut out the scenes of our hero getting lost in the woods, taking slow moving ferry boat rides, and wandering around Chinatown, the film would’ve been a helluva lot shorter. The unnecessary recap of events at the very end further helps to pad things out to an interminable length.
Maybe my issues with the film could’ve been overlooked had the softcore sex scenes been decent. However, Crane gives them a listless quality that is decidedly unsexy. Sometimes, Crane begins a scene with promise (like the stuff with the fortune teller or the weird undertaker), but the follow-through is weak or ends abruptly. Even the lesbian bondage scenes squander much of their potential. Crane also delivers one of the most cut-rate “trip” scenes in screen history. (It’s nothing more than a woman posing in front of a slideshow projector.) The unending stream of useless narration grates on the nerves too.
There’s an occasional bright spot to be found amid the malarkey. We get an odd scene where our main character peeps on two guys getting it on. I guess if the title of the film is All Women are Bad then that means these men are good? Either way, this bit is certainly progressive for the times. The most memorable moment though comes when our hapless hero looks down and imagines he has his wife’s breasts! Also, I can’t completely hate any movie whose title inspired a Cramps song, but that morsel of goodwill only goes but so far. For the most part, All Women are Bad just ain’t very good.
That’s future Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano as the talent agent (he was responsible for the “special effects” too).
No comments:
Post a Comment