Review

Producer David Friedman is probably best known for his involvement in the pioneering 1960s gore films directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis (i.e. Blood Feast, 2000 Maniacs, etc.), but most of his output as a producer lies within the genre of sexploitation, not horror. Something Weird Video has now compiled three of Friedman’s softcore skin epics onto one disc, and thrown in a collection of Friedman trailers and a typically riotous commentary track on the main feature, providing more bang for your buck (ahem…) than any digital-age pervert could possibly expect. The disc’s main feature, A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine (so titled, wonderfully, because newspapers wouldn’t advertise the title Maneater), is easily the package’s highlight: a mind-bogglingly misogynistic fantasy about a sadistic temptress with a penchant for seducing men to the brink of intercourse, and then shrieking “Rape!” for her own amusement at seeing her confused male consorts flee in terror. Smell of Honey star Stacey Walker has become a sexploitation cult figure largely on the basis of this film alone (she only appeared in one other feature), and it’s not hard to see why: a honey-blonde white-trash seductress with a come-hither stare offset by severe eyebrows and pouting lips, Walker is the film’s highlight, and she offers a surprisingly sharp performance. As for the decidedly un-PC gender politics on display, the film is—like many of the 1960s “roughies”—often uncomfortable viewing, but it also has tongue placed firmly in cheek. Insert your own double entendre here. Friedman wrote and produced Honey, but he only served as distributor on the other two features, and his care for the quality of his productions is sorely missed in the other two entries: Sweet Sickness is a largely disposable sexploitation effort about a struggling actress, albeit noteworthy for a hallucinatory drug orgy sequence; Brick Dollhouse is an often astonishingly inane murder mystery about female roommates in an apartment complex that exists solely as a loose hour-long framework for repetitive scenes of disrobing and nude dancing. Entertaining time capsule pieces, both films can’t hold a candle to the genuinely unnerving, and nonetheless amusing, sadism setpieces of Honey.