Film Review: Bizarre Lust of a Sexual Deviant (2001)

SYNOPSIS:

A prowler is on the loose in the city. He stalks women, chloroforms them, and then molests their unconscious, naked bodies. Only Angie knows the secrets behind the masked intruder. Will Angie stop this deviant from molesting more women? Or will Angie herself become this man’s next slumbering victim?

REVIEW:

Bizarre Lust of a Sexual Deviant is a shot-on-video movie from 2001 written and directed by Zert Sineca (his only writing/directing credit to date) and co-written (credited with a “story idea” tag) by Ron Bonk (man in charge over at SRS Cinema, as well as writer/director of a number of films including She Kills, Ms. Cannibal Holocaust, and a segment of the Hi-8 anthology). This film was actually the very first to come out through the short-lived Sub Rosa Extreme production company.

Filmed in St. Louis, Missouri, Bizarre Lust of a Sexual Deviant follows the story of a masked stalker on the loose who is breaking into single women’s homes, drugging them, and then molesting them, leaving a Polaroid photo behind at each crime scene. The police are baffled, as the victims have little to no memory of who attacked them. The only way to figure out who might be ravaging the city would be to find someone who has shown a proclivity for sexual fetishes involving unconscious women, but where would you find this man?

Bizarre Lust of a Sexual Deviant probably sounded like an awesome idea for a movie when it was first thought of, but once it hit the scriptwriting and filming stages, it ran into some problems. I’ll say this up front: the idea isn’t horrible at all, and the end is actually pretty cool. It almost makes up for some of the miscues along the way. But the problem is, there just isn’t enough meat to the story. The shell is there, but there isn’t even enough story to fill a short 70 minute run time.

We open on a well dressed man with a briefcase attacking a girl about to take a shower, chloroforming her, and then touching her naked, unconscious body, all set to strobe lights and flashes of color. But soon the girl wakes up and turns the tables on the attacker, and loud drumbeats kick in, and when Scott Loomis (Jason Christ, who also plays Frank Logan in Eric Stanze’s Ratline) wakes up confused, we realize it was all a dream. The problem here is, add a black mask and a camera to the attacker, and we pretty much get this scene again two more times. He attacks the girl in his dream (Jessie Seitz), then a brunette at an office (Mara Davinci), and then a punk looking girl named Mary (Emily Haack, also from many of Eric Stanze’s films). Pretty much the same thing each time, to the point that it starts to feel like this will be the entire plot, or lack thereof.

At the same time, we do have a couple character building scenes that clear the picture up, at least a little bit. We know that Scott is having lots of personal problems; he calls his ex-girlfriend multiple times, leaving long awkward apology-type messages on her answering machine; he had lost a job, then gets one through a friend, but can’t even make it in to the first day at work; and he fills his time with booze and self-loathing. He even starts cutting himself eventually. None of that excuses his crimes, but at least we are able to see a little of where he’s coming from. Unfortunately, all of that character building takes up about as much time as when we watch Mary and her boyfriend talk about the future and new jobs and take a scenic walk around town, all of which culminates simply in her boyfriend never being seen again and Mary becoming just another victim. Too much filler for such a short movie.

I’ve been a little harsh here, but the weird thing is, Bizarre Lust of a Sexual Deviant isn’t even a horrible movie. It’s a tad on the dull side, but it could have been so much worse – how many films have done this type of thing, a series of women being tortured, without providing a single bit of story to the events? Too many, that’s how many. And this one actually ties it up at the end in a bit of a twist, not wholly unexpected but somewhat satisfying anyway. This is not a film I would go out of my way to track down, but for collectors and the like I could see the merits of picking up a copy.