Pervert!

"Sex, death and gore. Is this the best movie ever?" asks Maxim magazine. In a word? No.

Russ Meyer's exploitation films such as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls certainly have their place in the canon of cinematic history. Their rude, crude comedy and outrageous style combined with a knowing (albeit wonderfully skewered) self-awareness and satirical social commentary to make them justifiably cult classics. It is Pervert!'s purported mission to pay distastefully affectionate homage. So begins the expected low-budget cavalcade of weirdo backwater characters interspersed with much jiggling and shrieking by buxom, topless women.

College student James (Sean Andrews) returns to his estranged father Hezakiah's (Darrel Sandeen) remote desert farm. His mother long since passed away, James finds dad shacked up with the large-breasted, small-clothed and rampantly promiscuous Cheryl (porn star Marey Carey). When not distracted by Cheryl's stripping and bouncing, James is disturbed by his father's penchant for art sculptures made from butchered meat joints. Then the arrival of more likely lasses leads to a bizarre series of gruesome murders. Is Hezakiah turning into a psychopathic killer? Or should James look closer for the horrible truth?

Who cares? Well, prepubescent-teens, frat-boys and anyone with their puerile-o-meter deliberately disengaged might. This is strictly for the cheap booze-addled and maturity-lite brigade.

Jonathan Yudis checks in the Meyer essentials, from the loopy tunes, the to-the-audience preaching and lurid colours to cheap sets, gratuitous flesh and askew camera angles. Oh, and the exclamation mark in the title! Truly bad special and gore effects abound as things progress to their madcap, very Street Trash-lite conclusion. Well, there's as much abounding as the tiny budget would allow, given that this was patently made on a sweaty Converse boot-string. Plenty of shots of heaving, manhandled bosoms and lurid ways to eat corn on the cob are, of course, a given. There's just about the look of a cheap Russ flick, but this alone doesn't a good film make.

It's made with such gusto that it unavoidably conjures a certain base charm and prompts a polite recognition that people were working quite hard. This is soon withdrawn as it's clear the film is missing the underlying counter-culture intelligence of the Meister Meyer. It's as if Yudis were more interested in cobbling silly and gross scenes together into a movie than in thinking about why to make a movie that can use comical outrageousness to best effect. With this it miserably misses the point of Meyer, fails as a proper homage and comes across as little more than Yudis' calling card. Ultimately Pervert! is just low-brow for low-brow's sake and reeks more of "look at this and then look at me", than Meyer's sly "look at this and then look at yourself".