Mike Davies and Jonathan Yudis have created a homage to the cheap '70s Grindhouse movies of yesteryear that captures the free-spirited excess of those ultra-low budget sex and splatter flicks in such amusingly accurate detail that it could easily pass for an authentic Russ Meyer film of the period.
One could see this as a straight rip-off, since Meyer's strange style was so identifiable that one cannot help but be blinded by the loving care and effort Yudis has taken to re-create almost every aspect of the director's eccentric film-making (non)-technique: the strangely barren desert settings, the bizarre, almost arbitrary library music cues, and the sudden, non-linear edits — usually involving large-breasted women running around for no better reason other than the sheer joy of watching large-breasted women running around ... especially when they do it in slow motion! Yudis gives us all this; and the look of the film is very much at one with the cheery sunniness of Meyer's innocent brand of sleaze — which saw itself as representing 'Freedom' for the free love generation (a man's right to ogle women with big breasts, with impunity!) — but Yudis also adds a layer of comedy splatter which largely takes the film out of Meyer's chosen oeuvre, into the realm of such bad taste trash classics as Basket Case (1982) and Street Trash (1987).
This saves it from becoming just a straight homage to Meyer and his particular obsessions; and Yudis and Davies have combined the playful sex comedy genre with the gory excesses of B movie splatter so seamlessly that one can see their 'Stag Films' production company doing well out of making a fair few more of these harmlessly bad taste, comedy-sex-splatter flicks in the future.
The largely unknown cast (which include Yudis as a muscle-bound homosexual Nazi car mechanic, and his toddler son as one of the garage workers -- I kid you not!) prove themselves wonderfully adept at capturing that slightly crazed style of overacting which made many of Meyer's films so unique. Perhaps the only actor whose previous work is likely to be known to any of the audience is that of buxom porn actress Mary Carey (Being Ron Jeremy [2003]) who is perfectly cast as a modern-day representative of Meyer's mammary popping vixen clan. Carey plays Cheryl, the foxy, jail-bait home-help for dirty old man, Hezekiah (Darrell Sandeen) — a desert-dwelling ranch owner who makes bizarre meat sculptures in his back room, and who also has quite a taste for spanking the perfectly-formed buttocks of his very willing home help. However, when Hezekiah's son, James (Sean Andrews) arrives home from college, Cheryl decides to take the virginal youth in hand — quite literally — and the two begin a not-very-well-concealed affair.
Davies' script finds plenty of Meyer-esque humour in Hezekiah's misogyny and in Cheryl's unashamed voraciousness, but when Cheryl is bloodily murdered, James begins to think his father's mad obsession with his "meat woman" sculpture which he calls Ophelia, may have deranged his mind. No sooner has Cheryl made her exit than a replacement in the form of sultry brunette Alisha (Sally Jean) arrives; when she too is dispatched (not before more raunchy escapades for bewildered James), it is up to nurse Patty (Juliette Clarke) to take up the gauntlet and solve the mystery. This comely young lady has a few secrets of her own though, and the final revelation of just who is behind the murders of these buxom beauties tips the film even further into surrealist comedy which involves -- again, no kidding, here! -- a stop-motion animated penis!!
With it's delirious combination of (not so) innocent fun -- mildly mocking of political correctness with cartoonish scenes like the one involving a small child being drop-kicked like a football -- Pervert manages to shock without going far enough into bad taste territory for it to ever be properly offensive. The tongue is kept very firmly in cheek (so to speak!) and the cast manage to convey a sense of ironic reverence for the film's source material while still delivering what the cover promises: breast, blood ... and a snake!
The disc comes with a fair dollop of extras in the form of a 'making of' documentary which chronicles the whole project from pre-production, to the frantic shoot, to the post-production in some detail, despite the 25 minute running time. There are trailers, and also what is billed on the case as an "extended lesbian scene" -- this turns out to be a longer edit of a sex scene from the film between Mary Carey and the rather lovely Juliette Clarke, although "longer" doesn't necessarily mean more explicit. This is an ideal no brainer feast for the eyes and over-exited loins of lovers of trash cinema everywhere -- rated "H" for horny!
