Indecent Desires (1967)

Indecent Desires, made in New York in 1967, is another slice of mega-weirdness from legendary sexploitation auteur Doris Wishman, brought to us by those terrific people at Something Weird Video. This time Wishman offers us a heady mixture of voodoo and sexploitation.

A sad loner, the kind of guy that women cross the street to avoid, has become obsessed by an attractive young blonde woman. He finds a discarded blonde doll, a doll that reminds him of the woman he’s obsessed with, and it soon becomes apparent that this doll has some kind of voodoo-type psychic link with the woman. When he fondles the doll, she feels herself being fondled. In fact she feels everything the doll feels.

If that all sounds rather creepy, it is! The blonde woman, Ann, naturally starts to think she’s going mad. She decides to break things off with her boyfriend, since she doesn’t want to impose her craziness on him. And it’s difficult to know where to turn for help when you have no idea what is happening to you. Her best friend Babs is too busy with her own sexual escapades to be of much assistance. Ann’s isolation intensifies, and she ends up locking herself away in her apartment while she becomes steadily more unbalanced and confused, rather like Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion.

Wishman’s eccentric approach to film-making suits this sort of material perfectly and the movie has an effectively disturbing ambience to it. Great black-and-white cinematography by C. Davis Smith adds to the mood of paranoia and depravity. and The acting works well for the kind of film it is, with Michael Alaimo being wonderfully sleazy and menacing, while Sharon Kent conveys Ann’s descent into madness surprisingly well.

Indecent Desires works quite well as an off-beat horror movie, a bit like a Twilight Zone episode but with lots of added nudity and sleaze. Something Weird’s DVD transfer can’t be faulted - the image quality is superb. I recommend this one.