The credited director on The Abnormal Female is George Rodgers, with the screenplay credited to Martin Lathrop. This movie is the sole movie credit for both these guys but it was pretty common practice to make movies such as this using pseudonyms so there’s probably no way of knowing who actually made this film.
The Abnormal Female dispenses with plot altogether. The idea is that there’s this psychiatrist who is treating a bunch of women for severe sexual dysfunctions. The women’s stories are then presented to us in flashbacks.
These women are so sexually perverted and dysfunctional that they actually enjoy sex. They clearly need a psychiatrist to teach them to become normal women, in other words to stop enjoying sex. This may well have been an intentional joke on the part of the film-makers. The sexploitation film scene was after all not just a money-making activity. There was, on the part of at least some of the people involved, that they were reacting against the puritanism of Eisenhower-era America and pushing the boundaries of what was considered acceptable entertainment.
You do have to remember the historical context. Just ten years earlier Hollywood movies were showing married couples sleeping in separate beds and a mere glimpse of a nipple was considered to be disgustingly pornographic. It was only in 1959 that it became possible for erotic movies to be made reasonably openly without the film-makers facing the prospect of imprisonment for obscenity. Even in the 60s it was necessary to be extremely careful.
It’s startling just how quickly American sexploitation movies evolved. In 1959 Russ Meyer made the first nudie-cutie (the delightfully good-natured The Immoral Mr Teas). At that time you could show T&A but you couldn’t even hint at actual sexual activity. You had to find a way to present naked girls in a totally non-sexual context. By 1969 you could make a movie like The Abnormal Female, with lots of female frontal nudity and some pretty graphic simulated sex scenes. It’s much more graphic than similar movies made a year or two earlier.
So back to the movie itself. The good doctor’s first patient is a sadist. She gets off on whipping her boyfriend and subjecting him to horrors like the lemon juice torture. Yes, I also had no idea that it was possible to have a lemon juice fetish. She’s the only patient who engages in sex that could be seriously described as kinky.
The second patient’s perversion is that she has sex with a man who isn’t her husband. That’s bad enough but her real perversion is that she enjoys it.
The other patents are into things like threesomes and casual sex. You know, shocking stuff like picking guys up in bars and taking them home. One girl is so twisted that she has sex with a guy in the back seat of a car. I honestly had no idea that a woman could be so depraved.
What you always hope for in classic American sexploitation movies are wtf moments and this movie does have a few (such as the aforementioned lemon juice thing). What really makes this movie weirdly intriguing is the bizarre tone. We have girls who are having sex and they look like they’re thinking about what colour the new curtains for the living room should be. Or the girls look vaguely confused. Or just bored. It’s as if the director forget to tell them to look like they were enjoying sex and it didn’t occur to the actresses themselves.
One thing that has to be said is that the women in this movie are definitely attractive. And they get very naked very frequently.
The highlight for me was the discotheque scene. This girl is cruising for men and she joins a guy on the dance floor. This discotheque has a dance floor that could best be described as intimate. It’s about the size of a living room in a very small apartment. In fact I’m pretty sure the scene actually was shot in the living room of a very small apartment. The dance floor is crowded with couples. OK, it’s not that crowded. There’s a grand total of one couple. Which is just as well. There wouldn’t have been room for two. And paying extras would have blown the budget which, let’s face it, may have amounted to a few hundred dollars.
There are much much better sexploitation movies than this one. The sex scenes manage to be moderately explicit but oddly un-erotic, although the very lack of eroticism is perhaps bizarrely erotic (it depends on your tastes).
The transfer is rather good. Something Weird really had a knack for finding decent quality prints (and often the original negatives) of movies such as this that had been long forgotten.
And you do get three movies plus some typically odd but amusing Something Weird extras.
Tragically these Something Weird releases are becoming hard to find.
The Abnormal Female is a movie best enjoyed with lots of beers and lots of popcorn.
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