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For
connoisseurs of trash cinema, watching this low budget grotesquerie
is the equivalent of having to take a dump in the scuzziest
public toilet imaginable... You just gotta do it, even
if you know an industrial strength antibacterial will be required
afterwards.
Young
English newlyweds Mary (Anne Sparrow) and Peter (Tony Eades)
may be very much in love but that doesn't pay the rent — they're
in dire financial straits. A down on his luck TV writer and
playwright, Peter desperately searches for work as what little
money they have steadily dwindles. Needing a cheap place to
stay while he hunts for a job, the couple secures affordable
lodgings in the ramshackle boarding house of drunken, scar-faced
former cabaret singer Lila Lashe (Clara Keller). Mary is thoroughly
creeped out by the joint, due more to the presence of Lila's
adult son Olaf (Torben Bille) than the gloomy, grimy amenities.
As well she should be. Olaf, a leering, raspy-voiced midget,
walks with the aid of a cane and is perpetually fiddling with
stuffed animals and wind-up toys.
He also keeps a trio
of drugged, naked women imprisoned in a secret sex dungeon in
the attic.
Olaf and his equally
horrid mother run a white slavery/prostitution operation. Young
women are kidnapped, stripped, injected with heroin and rented
out to a procession of anonymous johns. In a rather convenient
arrangement, Lila and Olaf get regular supplies of smack from
a toy shop owner nicknamed Santa Claus who also provides Olaf
with his (inanimate) playthings. Once the captive girls start
requiring too much of the stuff to remain docile, they're disposed
of (murdered and dumped somewhere, obviously, although this
is only suggested) and replaced with fresh meat. A new 'recruit'
will soon be needed, so Olaf casts a lustful eye on Mary, what
with her penchant for very tight pullovers and going braless.
Left alone most of the time while hubby looks for work, she
begins to suspect that something strange is going on in the
boarding house. Odd noises, a feeling of being watched and a
procession of strangers coming and going at all hours give her
the willies. When Peter at last finds a job, one which will
take him out of town for awhile, Olaf and Mum make their move.
Mary is snatched, stripped naked and chained up in the secret
attic room with the other victims. Pumped full of dope, she
doesn't have the strength nor will to resist the degradations
inflicted upon her. Peter eventually returns from his business
trip only to find a typewritten Dear John note, supposedly from
Mary, stating that she's left him and run away...
The
Sinful Dwarf is a
bona fide 'room clearer'. Pop this baby in the player during
a movie-watching party, especially in mixed, supposedly hip
company, and observe with amusement as the guests rapidly disappear.
It's a sex film concerned not with titillation or eroticism
but degradation and violation, a "roughie" able to
go much farther than its comparatively tame forebears of the
early to mid-1960s. (The only consensual sex scene involves
the married couple; even in this instance the mouth-breathing
Olaf watches them shag through a peephole in the wall.) Thriller/suspense
elements — will Mary and the other girls be rescued?
— are purely secondary and very clumsily handled, with the resolution
to that question hinging on a ridiculously improbable coincidence.
I'm no prude, but
neither am I keen on protracted molestation scenes if they're
not important catalysts to plot or character motivation. Here
they are not. They just make an already ugly little exploitation
pic even more vile. There's actually a hardcore porn version
which I haven't seen, adding two or three minutes of gynecological
penetration footage (hopefully only during the consensual sex),
but the film really doesn't need any of that — it's low enough
in the gutter as is. What gives The Sinful
Dwarf its psychotronic pedigree is the performance of
Torben Bille, an actor on a Danish children's TV program at
the time it was made. All of the thesping is atrocious, his
included, but there's just something weirdly compelling about
him. Bille may indeed look like a miniature Jack Black — as
the DVD packaging blurb suggests — or a living, breathing Chucky
doll, but to me, with his insane mugging and freaky giggle,
he's more akin to a demented, diminutive Klaus Kinski. Bille's
performance is simultaneously disturbing and laughably
cheesy, an unusual achievement whether intentional or not. (He's
aided and abetted, it should be noted, by a sometimes bizarre
music score.)
And yet whatever else
the film might be accused of (besides misogyny), it shouldn't
be slammed for maligning "little people". The Olaf character
isn't an evil perv because he's vertically challenged. After
all, his mother and their customers — normal-sized folks — are
every bit as heinous. Good thing that the movie never resorts
to dwarf tossing. (The final scene doesn't really count.)
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