The Beautiful, the Bloody and the Bare / Behind Locked Doors

REVIEW
The Something Weird label continues their archival unearthings of obscure exploitation cinema with another double-feature disc, this time pairing 1964’s colorful (and delightfully titled) The Beautiful, The Bloody, and The Bare with 1968’s truly bizarre Behind Locked Doors, both from the vaults of legendary exploitation producer Harry Novak. Truthfully, it might be best if one considered this a single-film release with another film thrown on as negligible extra feature, as it’s difficult to summon any enthusiasm for The Beautiful…. A typically tedious “nudie-cutie” skin flick from the era, the film features some richly saturated color cinematography, but little else of note. The slim tale of a nudie photographer who goes nuts and kills his models when he sees the color red (a plotline somewhat similar to the one utilized by gore auteur Herschell Gordon Lewis the following year in Color Me Blood Red), The Beautiful… mainly consists of lengthy segments of the aforementioned nude modeling, capped by a gory climax that – while more explicit than most horror efforts of the era – looks quite time in comparison with the mayhem on display in the previous year’s Blood Feast, H.G. Lewis’ gorefest debut. Investigate Beautiful director Sande Johnsen’s superior Teenage Gang Debs instead. Behind Locked Doors is something else entirely, and this thoroughly bizarre oddity makes the DVD well worth a look (once again, the secondary feature on a Something Weird double-bill proves superior to the main title). The sordid saga of two young women, Ann and Terry, who become stranded at the isolated country house of sinister mortician Dr. Bradley and his hyperbolically domineering sister, Behind Locked Doors takes on a variety of perversions throughout its running time, from simple whippings to fetishistic necrophilia, but the tone of the film is oddly darkly comic. As Ann and Terry become imprisoned in the house to serve Bradley’s monstrous experiments, events become increasingly surreal and outlandish, and the film manages to successfully alternate between genuinely creepy, moody moments, and amusingly self-aware excess. Worth a look.