Pervert!

Pervert! (2005)
Directed by Jonathan Yudis
Artistic Value: ½
Entertainment Value:

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Synopsis
James (Sean Andrews), a young college student, plans to spend the summer with his aging, widowed father, Hezekiah (Darrell Sandeen). Upon arriving at the man's home, James discovers that Hezekiah is now living with Cheryl (Mary Carey), a sexually voracious young woman, and is spending his spare hours making sculptures out of raw meat. Within a short time, James and Cheryl start a sexual relationship of their own, but, after Hezekiah learns about this, Cheryl mysteriously disappears. The old man promptly heads into town and returns with another young woman, Alisha (Sally Jean), who is shortly thereafter murdered. Believing that his father killed both of the women, James contacts a retirement home in the hope that he can put the old man in it and so keep him out of trouble. The home sends out a nurse, Patty (Juliette Clarke), who ties Hezekiah to his bed and begins a relationship with James, but more deadly shenanigans ensue.

Analysis
Jonathan Yudis's Pervert! is an homage to the exploitation films of the past, particularly to those made by Russ Meyer, and it is, for the most part, successful as such. The copious amounts of nudity, the outlandish violence, and the numerous attempts at goofy comedy with which Yudis has filled his movie all add to its appeal. There is no denying that the director has made a work of sleazy trash, but doing so was obviously his intention.

The film really is deliberately bad. Most the performances are exaggerated, and several of them (especially those of the actresses) are painfully wooden. The sets are cheap. The special effects are atrocious, and the humor is utterly lowbrow. If the potential viewer does not have a liking for the intentionally camp, he is not going to like Pervert!, but if he does, I suspect that he will find much in it that he enjoys.

For one thing, the film is constantly raunchy. Of course, given its title, I cannot believe that fact is going to surprise anyone. There are frequent sex scenes, endless dirty jokes, and countless sexual innuendoes. The charms of the actresses are constantly being displayed. Actually, it soon becomes clear that showing off the women's bodies is as important a part of the movie as is its story. Happily, all of these elements are reasonably well executed. They might not always be cleverly done, but they are done with such enthusiasm and such honesty that they are entertaining.

I might add that Yudis apparently has nearly as much love for busty women as Meyer did, or, at the least, he has paid homage to the latter by including in his movie several actresses with substantial breasts and meaty figures. The director does not conceal their endowments either. They invariably appear either in revealing costumes or nude. Over and over again, Yudis revels in presenting some woman bathing herself, bouncing up and down, driving topless, having sex, or pouring honey over her breasts. Even after including all these scenes, the director, perhaps fearing that he still had not provided a sufficient number of exposed female chests, has inserted a few more. He frequently cuts away from his narrative to show some woman or another doing nothing but jiggling about in front of the camera. Just to make sure that the viewer gets to see enough of these moments, the director simultaneously provides multiple images of the woman. There is not, however, anything graphic in the movie; in fact, Pervert! is not even particularly sensual (a couple of the women are little too heavy to be that attractive), but its simple, leering naughtiness is a lot of fun.

While it is unlikely that those who do not enjoy these gleefully adolescent sexual antics are going to like the movie - they do make up a large part of it - the director has supplemented such elements with a weird story filled with often nearly surreal details. Hezekiah's sculptures are truly bizarre, and more than a little disturbing. James is, at one point, threatened by a huge rattlesnake that is so obviously fake it makes the scene in which it appears hilarious. Then there is the hillbilly mechanic (Jonathan Yudis) to whom James takes his car. This man, who talks using hip-hop slang and whose chest, left bare by his sagging overalls, is adorned with a swastika tattoo, is both peculiar and ridiculous.

Spoiler alert!
If all the strangeness and naughtiness already mentioned were not enough to keep the viewer interested, the director, in the movie's final act, throws in one more bit of insanity that is sure to elicit more than a few laughs. He reveals the perpetrator of the crimes he has depicted. It is the hero's penis. The man's organ is not only detachable. It is capable of moving on its own, which it does with great energy. Brought to life by means of stop-motion animation, the thing even interacts with the other characters and, using its large expressive eyes, communicates its emotions.

Finally, I should add that Pervert! is not focused exclusively on sex, humor, and weirdness. It also includes more than enough gruesome violence to keep even fans of horror movies interested. At one point, for instance, a woman's head literally falls off of her neck, from which fountains of blood begin to spray. In another scene, a woman is penetrated by James' roving homicidal penis, which then burrows its way through her body to pop out of her mouth , and, in a third sequence, a man is shot in the chest so that his still beating heart is exposed. The film is pretty grisly, although always in a darkly humorous sort of way.
Spoiler alert ends.

I have to admit that Pervert! is a bad movie, but it is a lot of fun too.

Review by Keith Allen

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