Cult Movie Reviews: Tortured Females (1965)

Tortured Females is a very obscure 1965 American sexploitation movie. It’s more or less a roughie, in concept at least.

The great thing about these 60s sexploitation movies is that all you needed was a fair helping of nudity and you’d get distribution. As to what kind of movie you made and how you made it, that was totally up to you. If you could raise a few thousand bucks, or even a few hundred bucks, you could just go ahead and make a movie. It could be in any genre from crime to science fiction to horror. It could be dark and grim, or lighthearted and goofy. And you didn’t have to worry that some suit from the studio front office would show up and tell you how to make your movie. We’re talking total artistic freedom, total artistic control.

Jean-Luc Godard once said that to make a movie all you need is a girl and a gun. To make a 60s sexploitation movie all you needed was a camera and a girl willing to take her clothes off. Sometimes the results were terrible but it’s amazing how many of these movies are pleasingly oddball and incredibly entertaining. Usually much more entertaining and interesting than the average serious art-house movie, and much more entertaining and interesting than the average indie movie of today.

Tortured Females opens with a square-up message assuring us that this is a serious and vitally important warning to innocent young maidens about the ever-present danger of white slavery. Which is certainly guaranteed to whet our appetites.

It takes a long time for the plot to kick in, although the square-up and the prologue have given us a fair idea of what’s coming. The first quarter of the movie is straight nudie-cutie stuff. Two girls get up in the morning and prepare to go out. This provides the opportunity for lots and lots of nudity.

Then Helen (Denine Dubois) heads off to visit a relative in the country (in her awesomely cool T-Bird). The car breaks down and she sets off on foot and she’s in the middle of nowhere and she is hopelessly lost. So what does she do? She takes all her clothes off. So we get lots more nudity.

I should add at this stage that Denine Dubois is very pretty and has a stunning body so being forced to see her naked so often isn’t exactly an ordeal.

Helen thinks her luck has changed when a guy named Chick offers her a lift in his truck. He’ll take her to the ranch house. But first he rapes her.

When she gets to the ranch house she realises she’s been kidnapped by white slavers. She gets beaten up by Carl (he’s the boss) and then thrown into a room where two naked women are chained. And then the monkey man arrives. Yes, the monkey man.

And Helen meets Marga. She’s the obligatory predatory lesbian but she’s seriously weird, with the craziest crazy person eyes you ever saw.

And then, for no reason whatsoever (apart from the fact that the script was almost non-existent and they had to find something to film) some of the girls put on a strip-tease show for Carl. And it’s a strip-tease show that is subtly but disturbingly odd.

The plot (what little there is of it) is a standard roughie plot. What’s fascinating is the execution. Every scene manages to be odder than you expect. Every scene is wrong somehow, but wrong in an interesting way.

At times the movie almost has a David Lynchian feel. It’s like we’ve entered a bizarre alternative universe where dream and reality are all mixed up together. What makes it fascinating is that there’s absolutely no suggestion that this is a dream. There’s no suggestion whatsoever that Helen is imagining all this. It’s just the way the scenes are staged that makes it feel like a drug dream or a mad person’s hallucinatory nightmare.

60s sexploitation movies often look like they were shot in somebody’s spare room, usually because they were shot in somebody’s spare room. That’s the case here but the room (or rooms) is just so stark and bare that it looks incredibly artificial. It’s like a stage set for a puppet show.

I doubt if the director (Arch Hudson) had any such intention but this movie ends up being quite surreal. And even if it’s unintentional surrealism it’s oddly effective subtly unsettling surrealism.

Denine Dubois’ acting is rather odd and disconnected. At times when she should be terrified she seems more like a little girl having an adventure. This is yet another aspect to the movie that gives it that slight surrealist feel.

The movie was shot without synchronised sound. We get a continuous voiceover narration from Helen.

Tortured Females was released on a Something Weird triple-header DVD, along with the slightly disappointing but quite interesting Mr Mari’s Girls (1967) and Two Girls for a Madman. Tortured Females gets a quite reasonable transfer. It’s a miracle that some of these sexploitation movies survived at all so it would be churlish to complain that the transfer isn’t dazzling and pristine.

I wouldn’t say that Tortured Females is so bad it’s good. I’d say that it’s so subtly off-kilter that it’s good. If you like oddball movies with lots of nude girls it’s highly recommended.