By Richard Winters
My Rating: 3 out of 10
4-Word Review: Woman fights off rednecks.
Desiree (Claudia Jennings) is a peasant woman living in the swamplands of southern Louisiana. To help her bring in an income she takes part in poaching of snakes. Deputy Billy Boy (Clyde Ventura) and Ben (Ben Sebastian) are sitting in a boat in the swamp waters when they catch Desiree in the act of poaching and decide to chase her down and arrest her, or try to use it to their advantage by getting some sex out of her in return for not taking her in. Desiree though proves to be more cunning than they expected as she out races them in her boat and then when she is finally cornered she throws the bag of snakes that she has into their boat, which allows her time to escape. The deputy then must fight off the snakes by using his gun to shoot them, but in the process accidentally shoots and kills Ben. He later tells his father, Sheriff Joe Bob Thomas (Bill Thurman) that it was Desiree that shot Ben and not him. The Sheriff then goes to the boy’s father (Sam Gilman) and when given the news the father decides to chase Desiree down himself with the help of his two other sons (Douglas Dirkson, Don Baldwin) and exact a violent revenge.
This was the 7th film written and directed by Ferd Sebastian and the 4th that he did alongside his wife Beverly. It’s most likely their best known effort and came about through their friendship with Claudia Jennings. Jennings, a former Playboy model, acted in one of their other films, another B-exploitationer known as The Single Girls, and struck-up a friendship with the husband and wife filmmakers and asked them to come-up with a script in which she could star. Beverly then wrote this script seemingly overnight, I’m not sure if it was actually written in that short of time, but judging from its creativity, which is very low, it’s not that hard to believe. It was then shot in a matter of 10-days in March of 1973 at Caddo Lake, which is a state park and bayou that borders Texas and Louisiana.
The film does start out with a good speed boat chase and it captures the swamplands in vivid detail and with the exception of one scene that takes place in the town of Thibodaux, Louisiana, everything else gets done in the swamps making it seem like its own little universe. The Sebastains do wisely keep their son Tracy Sebastian, from uttering any lines of dialogue as he plays Desiree’s mute kid brother who had his tongue cut-out, which is good as he later starred-in On the Air Live with Captain Midnight and it’s just a shame he couldn’t have played a mute there as well as he gives what I consider one of the worst performances ever put on screen, but here since he can’t talk his marginal acting ability is not as apparent.
Despite the few good points the movie is otherwise a failure where the tension wanes instead of intensifying as it should. Part of the reason for this is that the story spells everything out right away and offers no surprises, or twists. The boat chases are diverting at first, but soon turn stale as they become too prevalent and almost like a loop reel where we’re just seeing the same thing done over and over again with nothing new getting thrown in. The characters, particularly the male ones, are written as being extreme southern caricatures who are too one-dimensional to being even remotely interesting and I genuinely felt sorry for actors Gilman and Thurman who had already been in the business for many decades at the time and had even been in some better financed studio films, so to have to come down to starring in this brainless dreck had to feel like a low point, but I guess a paycheck is a paycheck.
Jennings’ presence doesn’t add much as she’s seen only sporadically and most of the film time is given to the bickering male yokels. She doesn’t, despite her past of being a Playboy Playmate, appear nude as that gets left to Janit Baldwin, who plays her kid sister Julie, which will disappoint male viewers who will most likely come into this expecting the pretty Jennings to be the one who gets unclothed. When Claudia does speak it’s a trainwreck too as she sounds like someone from Europe instead of a rural southern chick. Her character is also poorly defined and doesn’t really grow, or fleshed out enough to make her seem like a real person, but instead remains more of an enigma.
Spoiler Alert!
Some on IMDb describe this as a early variation of I Spit on Your Grave, but that really isn’t accurate. In the Meir Zarchi flick the rape attack takes up the majority of the film time while here the attack isn’t even on the main character, but instead the younger sister, which is also quite brief. The female character doesn’t kill off the men one-by-one like in the other one as here the men end up killing each other for the most part, with the character’s younger brother taking care of one of them, and the final one is left to live.
Had this been more violent and explicit I might’ve forgiven the rest, but overall it’s quite tepid. It’s basically a tease of a movie that promises way more than it delivers and it’s so entrenched in stereotypes that it makes you feel like you’ve seen it, or something quite similar, a hundred times before. Sure there’s a ‘surprise twist/reveal’, but this one could see coming early on as the father of the boy who is killed and who goes after Desiree with a vengeance keeps commenting on how attractive he found her mother, which doesn’t take a genius to read into that and know most likely what he’s implying. In any case it’s not much of anything even on a B-movie level, but nonetheless got made into a sequel in 1988 though without star Jennings who died in a car accident in 1979.
My Rating: 3 out of 10
Released: October 12, 1973
Runtime: 1 Hour 28 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Ferd and Beverly Sebastian
Studio: Sebastian International Pictures
Available: DVD-R
Scopophilia 