Only the insanity which is life would permit a work where the director of “Ren & Stimpy’s Adult Party Cartoon,” Jonathan Yudis, would offer a softcore mystery horror comedy replete with sound effects which smack of being the product of a coven of drunken, well-lubricated elves on acid who were recently treated to grande lattes on the house. We’ll leave the claymation penis out of the mix for now.
Pervert!–starring former California gubernatorial candidate and lesbian porn star Mary Carey, and that includes a gay hip-hop redneck mechanic (Jonathan Yudis), as well as an old lecher whose penchant is for honoring the female form via meat sculptures–is a die-hard homage to the groundbreaking satires of the late Russ Meyer. For example, as Hezekiah (Darrell Sandeen) is scolded by his son, James (Sean Andrews), for burying bodies without the requisite casket, the former retorts, “Well, worms need to eat too.” Yet the surprisingly astute comic mayhem isn’t limited to one line as, given a choice, the winning quip is undoubtedly, “If your mother could only see you know, she’d . . . die . . . again.”
This isn’t to imply that Yudis’s feature is a masterwork despite the fact that it is every bit as effective as any of Meyer’s iconoclastic films. A softcore feature, by its inherent nature, must sacrifice substantive potentiality to earn its genre branding. However, despite the necessary compensations which the director is obligated to make to garner his ticket into the club, Pervert! is stunningly effective while consummately entertaining in a field were story and character are all-too-often sacrificed for what quickly becomes the lesser good. Granted, at the appearance of a shape shifting dildo many will instantaneously dump any fond memories which they might have accumulated up to that point, yet Yudis nonetheless rewards the faithful at the daunting disclosure of the complexity and psychological stress which such a figure must inherently undergo.
To be honest, Pervert!, when taken outside of its genre, does merit at least one viewing for I cannot fathom a work where the sound department had as much fun. Aside from milking each and every movement, gesture, and event that takes place onscreen, music editor Angelo Palazzo–a culpable member of the parties which brought forth the aural treats for Doug Liman’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Dean Parisot’s Fun with Dick and Jane, Karyn Kusama’s Æon Flux, and Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers, among others–ingeniously includes a gross of unexpected, yet fascinatingly appropriate, effects along the way to make Pervert! twice the reward which it already is. This says nothing of the soundtrack itself, one which is in desperate need of Ritalin, for Elliott Goldkind, who is responsible, in part, for the music in such works as Jonathan Dayton’s Little Miss Sunshine, Rupert Wainwright’s remake of John Carpenter’s The Fog, Chris Wedge’s Robots, and David Mamet’s Spartan, joins Matt Piedmont, the man behind a gaggle of Saturday Night Live episodes, to create one of the most entertaining, aurally comic romps in all of cinema as they pull from every imaginable source in the history of music to attenuate the lunacy of the hopelessly insane which is Pervert!.
For a novice to the field of sexploitation, Jonathan Yudis’s Pervert! is a good introduction to the potentialities which the genre possesses as the feature effectively mocks most every contemporary social taboo in the books. It does so while remaining mindful that the story comes first and never does so at the expense of the agenda at hand: unrepentant satire in the guise of unabated fun. However, unlike many features, sexploitation or no, Pervert!’s soundtrack is one which refuses to be ignored in that, as the years pass and storylines fade from memory, one will fondly recollect what was heard, if not what was seen, though, admittedly, I doubt many will easily forget the caricature of a homosexual backwoods hip-hop artist . . . .
-Egregious Gurnow
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- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
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- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
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