John Waters remains the supreme shock-humanist of the American '70s, but when the cinema of transgression is assessed, Paul Bartel's neglected feature debut should get more than a nod. His young heroine (Ayn Ruymen) is a Midwest runaway, introduced behind curtains peeking at the sexual athletics of her considerably less virginal roommate. Hanging on to her teddy bear, she hopes to ditch watching for doing, and the West Coast skid-row hotel ("one of the last respectable places in town") presided over by her rotund, primly sinister aunt (Lucille Benson) provides her with a nice starting point. Locked in, Runymen's carnal curiosity propels her through the building's long corridors, each room opening up to a different flavor of kinkiness -- walls of bare-assed musclemen pics behind a tinselly Jesus figure, a clear plastic blowup doll with somebody's photographed mug plastered on. Courted by a nebbish store clerk (Stanley Livingston, My Three Son squareness turned up), her interests instead gravitate toward dark, mysterious photographer John Ventantonio, who, when not snapping nightly gropes for porno mags, is penetrating his inflatable muse with a syringe full of his own blood. Next to the functional, deadpan blandness of his later Eating Raoul, Bartel serves the libidinous romping with full-on De Palma luridness, Hugo Friedhofer's score pouring film-noir fondue over every shot. Yet the movie's underground effrontery runs deeper than pet rats dropped into kitchen garbage disposals -- for Bartel, no sex act or desire is as grotesque as the repression of it, and the Benson-Ventantonio pairing provides the woolliest master-class on pycho Puritanism since the seminal forays of Hitchcock and Michael Powell. With Laurie Main, Ann Gibbs, and Dorothy Neumann.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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