Well, the film goes out with a sort of sputter as Sidney returns to save the day in a sloppily edited fight scene with Buck. It�s sorely disappointing after the tense build up of the sex scene to have Becky relegated to little more than a spectator to the action. I think it would have been great to see Becky go berserk and wreak havoc, and have Sidney show up just a little to late to stop her, in what could have been a wonderful Last House on the Left rip off. Alas, I wasn�t there to offer director Greg Valtierra (his only notable credit to this point was working on the sound on Just Before Dawn) my advice. The Teaser ends up being a middle of the road sexploitation film, that shows some signs of unrealized potential.
Like the movie itself, Something Weird�s DVD is a bit peculiar. First off, it�s wonderful to see a Bond themed disc with all the extras centered on Ric and Rene. One of the more interesting extras is a 40 minute or so self referential short called Shot on Location�and filmmakers today think they�re being clever with all this deconstructuralism bs. Also included is a second feature, Frankie and Johnnie�Were Lovers and a bunch of Bond trailers. What I find a bit confusing is that the Frankie and Johnny feature is the soft version. Not that I expected to see a hardcore feature on a SWV/Image disc, but I wish there were some explanation as to whether the hardcore footage is strictly inserts or where they shot originally to be in the film. From the trailer it�s hard to tell, but they kind of look like inserts. The same issue comes up with the trailer included for Teenage Sex Kitten. This trailer is badly butchered. I�m sure this wasn�t done by SWV for the purposes of this DVD, but rather to be sent around to theaters playing the soft version of the film. Still, this is a little disheartening to know that there could be other versions of the films out there that I wouldn�t even know about. I thought the liner notes for Jess Franco�s The Female Vampire were admirable in that they described all the additional versions of the film floating around and described which release was being presented and why. The hard versions of the Frankie and Johnny trailer as well as the one for Teenage Sex Kitten can be seen on the Alpha Blue Archives compilation titled Rene Bond Sex Kitten. This is still a worthwhile release, I would just like to see more information in the future, even printed on an insert. I hope we can avoid another debacle like the one surrounding the cut release of Doris Wishman�s The Amazing Transplant! |
