By their very nature, horror films usually have some sexual undercurrent to them--Dracula dominating young women, Dr. Frankenstein building the "perfect male," etc.  But that's usually all it is--an undercurrent.  But here's a horror film that took that undercurrent and made it a topside wave that, in effect, carried the rest of the plot with it.  It's a flick in which  true horror is the twisting of sexual desires and the devastating loneliness of sexual perversity, a kinky little epic that makes fetishes frightening and hang-ups horrifying... a bit of very combustible celluloid that could fairly be described as...

By HANK REARDON

Some films, you just have to wonder how they ever got made.

Private Parts, a 1972 study of sexual pathology and homicide in a rundown apartment hotel, is so seriously twisted that it made this reviewer quite uneasy. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer hated Private Parts and unloaded it on the grindhouse circuit with little publicity. Some newspapers refused to print the title in ads for the film, often changing it to read Private Arts or Private Party. In some markets, it was retitled Blood Relations.

Despite its still shocking scenes, Private Parts has received very little attention from horror film buffs over the years. No one’s gone to bat for Private Parts (although I recall that Time Magazine gave it a rave review in 1972). Yet Private Parts makes no top 10 lists of great horror films.

Perhaps that’s because of a sharp social commentary edge that blunts the horror. A wickedly funny chiller, Private Parts is a DVD cult sensation waiting to happen. A director's feature film debut doesn’t come much stranger than Paul Bartel’s demented tale about the deviant denizens of a sleazy hotel. Dripping with sexual depravity, morbid voyeurism and a general tone of anti-social malevolence, this often-disturbing black comedy takes perverse pleasure in wallowing in kinky sex, fetishism, transvestitism and murder.

Private Parts harkens back to such excursions into insanity as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (about a sexually repressed photographer who takes close-up shots of models as he murders them) and also paves the way for the strange cinema of directors David Lynch and Gus Van Sant, whose films are populated by sex-obsessed oddballs of every description.

Even with such a focus on abnormal sexuality, Private Parts is creepy enough to qualify as a horror flick. It renders homage to Psycho, Repulsion, and Rosemary’s Baby and has the look and feel of Curtis Harrington's films of that era. The film also pays an offhand tribute to Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), but I can’t tell you how without revealing a key plot point.

Private Parts begins with some heavily stylized opening credits conveying a sense of weird menace. Hugo Friedhofer’s powerful theme music recalls the lurid scores of forties film noir dramas.

The film’s protagonist is Cheryl Stratton (Ayn Ruymen), a 14-year-old voyeur. (The pretty actress was actually a youngish 24 when she made the film!) Cheryl is kicked out of her apartment after she’s caught spying on her roommate Judy’s lovemaking. Cheryl winds up at the King Edward Hotel, a downtown mausoleum managed by her Aunt Martha (Lucille Benson), an old and prudish woman who claims that The King Eddie is "one of the last respectable hotels in the city," even though its rooms are filled with perverts aplenty.

Aunt Martha is a rather sinister presence herself, kindly yet with a disquieting, judgmental stare that hints at something evil going on beneath that calm surface. In a nice touch, we find out that she gets her jollies attending the funerals of complete strangers.

The lodgers are an odd assortment indeed: a shy photographer with an inflatable doll (John Ventantonio); a homosexual reverend (Laurie Main) with a leather fetish, a huge collection of gay porn and a phallic shrine featuring a life-sized statue of Christ in motorcycle chains; a lewd and senile old crone; and an alcoholic in perpetual oblivion. Murders are being furtively committed in the sagging old apartment building, and too-trusting Cheryl may be the next victim. No one seems to know what happened to the model Alice, the previous occupant of Cheryl’s room.

Jeff (Stanley Livingston), a store clerk nebbish, takes a shine to Cheryl, but she is drawn to George, the handsome, mysterious and aloof photographer with the Afro who lusts for her, but is afraid to make a move. Unbeknownst to Cheryl, George sleeps with a water-inflated doll and even injects his own blood into it in a weird ritual of pretend sexual intercourse--after attaching a photo of Cheryl to the doll's face. You can’t say you weren’t warned, though. One of the film’s taglines in its limited ad campaign was: “Cheryl is a lovely girl...but to George, she's a living doll.”

George is also a peeping Tom, lurking in the neighborhood park after sunset and snapping dirty pictures of naked couples for skin magazines; he is later seen observing Cheryl through a peephole as she bathes. Cheryl knows she is being watched, and puts on a show for George. Cheryl has moved from being a curious innocent to a tease of the first magnitude, getting off on being secretly watched in the bath or dressing like a whore to suit George's black-lingerie fantasies. She is precocious, wants to be treated like a woman, but she is getting in way too deep.

Cheryl does not realize that she is in serious danger. People are being murdered all around her: first Anne, the “model tenant” who has gone missing; then Mike, Judy’s boyfriend, who visits the premises to retrieve a stolen item and is decapitated; and then Judy herself, who drops by the King Eddie, suspecting that Mike might be shacked up with Cheryl. Judy explores the creepy basement and is stabbed to death in the photographer’s darkroom after seeing some very compromising prints. Of course, we never get a good look at the killer(s).

Private Parts captures the sinister quality of lowlife hotels in a manner that may have influenced the set design for The Day Of The Locust (1975), Barton Fink (1991), and The Fortune (1975), all dark and quirky films that unfold in a strangely exoticized Los Angeles. One or two gloomy corridor shots in Private Parts anticipate Stanley Kubrick’s scary images of the Overlook Hotel’s haunted hallways in The Shining (1980). (During pre-production, could the obsessive Kubrick have viewed every film set in a hotel and been aware of Bartel’s little horror gem?)

Private Parts’ cinematography is quite elegant for such a low-budgeter, and is the work of future film director Andrew Davis Under Siege, The Fugitive).

With the exception of Livingston and Benson (who later turned up on Tom Hanks’ Bosom Buddies sitcom), the cast consists of virtual unknowns who shortly thereafter dropped off the face of the Earth. It’s rather amazing that Livingston, of the squeaky-clean sitcom My Three Sons, agreed to appear in such a kinky film, but then again, he was considered the black sheep of the Steve Douglas family after marrying a go-go dancer. His future in films after Private Parts was spotty and not at all grand.

John Vantantonio--the actor who played the tormented photographer, George--was very good. Vantantonio made one more horror film in 1975 (the TV-movie Alien Lover) and then disappeared from the world of film, ŕ la Christopher Jones.

The genre screenwriting team of Philip Kearney and Les Rendelstein (who also co-wrote 1965’s Stay Tuned For Terror) gave up on Hollywood after Private Parts, which is their final credit.

Director Paul Bartel certainly made a few interesting and outré films in a showbiz career spanning 32 years. It's a pity he didn't specialize in straight horror, as he had a knack for it. Eating Raoul (1982) was a comedy about cannibalism, a satire with mild horror elements. With Death Race 2000 (1975), Bartel created a new genre--the apocalyptic road movie, which inspired films like Mad Max and 2019: After The Fall Of New York.

Fortunately, when his career as a director stalled, Bartel was able to morph into an excellent character actor, much in demand until his death in 2000 at age 62. In Private Parts, Bartel has a quick cameo as a wino urinating in a park. Blink and you’ll miss him. He is slim and longhaired as he crawls from the bushes, bearing no resemblance to the portly, bald, avuncular and invariably bow-tied figure he would later become.

Bartel appeared as an actor in several horror flicks: Piranha (1978), Trick Or Treats (1982), Chopping Mall (1986), Killer Party (1986), Munchies (1987), Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), Soulmates (1992), Bucket Of Blood (1995), Not Like Us (1995), The Devil’s Child (1997) and Evil Lives (2000).

In 1985, Bartel guest starred on the revived Alfred Hitchcock Presents series, in an episode titled "The Jar," based on a chilling tale by Ray Bradbury. Bartel directed two of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories-- Secret Cinema in 1986 and Gershwin’s Trunk in 1987. Bartel also produced Out Of The Dark, a 1989 grade-B slasher film about a clown-masked killer who goes after telephone sex-line workers.

Bad box office increasingly marginalized him as a filmmaker. Bartel’s last credit as a film director was Shelf Life (1993), a “bomb shelter comedy” that was as misunderstood in its day as Private Parts was 21 years earlier.

Thanks, Hank.  It's true, Private Parts is a cult film bonanza just waiting to be mined by a film critic (a genuine cult film that hasn't already been flogged to death, just imagine!) and definitely should already be out on DVD--after all, it's an MGM film, and MGM has not been shy at all in bringing out out all kinds of genre films on DVD.  But...the anti-heroine is supposed to be just fifteen years old and in today's very Politically Correct environment, reviving a film that depicts an underage girl as the object of desire of a mentally disturbed adult male--it could simply be too "hot" to touch.  Which would be a shame because this kinky horror flick is much more that just the sum of its "parts."

Article copyright © Hank Reardon

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