The Lonely Sex is a nasty grimy little sleazefest. I should explain first up that I have no idea what most of the characters’ names are, apart from a girl named Annabelle. There’s not a lot of dialogue in this movie and Hilliard isn’t too strong on introducing his characters to us.
There’s this young guy who obviously has a huge problem with women. He tells a bored barmaid all about it. When he was a teenager he tried to join a gang but the initiation involved having sex with a hooker and he couldn’t manage to do the deed so he couldn’t joining the gang. His Dad found out about it and laughed at him.
He’s really interested in women but he has no idea how to approach them and they keep laughing at him and he just gets more obsessed.
At the beginning of the movie he sees a young couple in the woods. They’re not making out, just being romantic. This upsets our young protagonist. He goes back to his little shack and listens to a preacher on the radio but that upsets him more.
Meanwhile Annabelle has a problem. There’s this creepy middle-aged guy (we eventually find out his name is Matt) in the boarding house where she lives. He’s a friend of her father’s. We saw the guy right at the beginning of the film, spying on a girl getting undressed. This guy is obviously trying to hit on Annabelle. He tells her how much he likes seeing her in a bathing suit. And he keeps accidentally walking into her room while she’s undressing. He says he keeps forgetting which room is his even though he’s lived there for a couple of years.
Our main protagonist, the young guy with the problem, encounters a young woman in the woods. In a surprisingly effective scene (with music being used very effectively to misleads us as to his intentions) he tries to approach her but as usual he messes up and he gets really mad, with unfortunate consequences. He really needs help. Maybe everything he does is a cry for help? Or maybe he’s just a psycho?
Later he meets Annabelle in the woods. She falls over and knocks herself unconscious, he picks her up and takes her back to his shack. When he tries to talk to her we can see why he never has any success with women. He decides to keep her. He doesn’t seem to know what he wants to do with her, he just wants to keep her.
He consults a doctor, who happens to be Annabelle’s father. Annabelle’s father believes that psychos just need help and understanding. His friend Matt (the peeping tom) gets really angry with him for that. Matt believes that such people should be shot down like dogs.
It all seems likely to end very badly.
The unnamed protagonist is played by an actor named Karl Light. Nobody in this film can act but Light at least manages to appear convincingly deranged.
The movie does have a point to it. Whether you’re a psychotic weirdo or a respectable member of society depends on outward appearances. Is the protagonist a villain or a victim? Is it a crime to be creepy and inept? The points it’s trying to make may not be exactly profound but it does make them.
It’s all a bit amateurish but also at times surprisingly effective.
There’s some mild nudity (in two scenes that bookend the film and do so neatly enough). The violence levels are mild.
The print I saw wasn’t too hot but it was quite watchable. I’m told that the Vinegar Syndrome DVD release is better but I haven’t seen it.
In its own scuzzy way The Lonely Sex works. Recommended.
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