The Deadly Females (1976) Reviews

• Winter of Discontent

  gavcrimson2004-03-06

  Warning: spoilers. The Deadly Females' director Donovan Winter was an ex B-movie actor who made only a handful of features yet nevertheless quickly earned himself a reputation as an eccentric and a tough-guy who once literally hit back at his critics. Winter had directed the proto-careerist sex comedy Come Back Peter in 1969;essentially a dirty book version of Alfie the film mechanically depicted the sexual encounters of a charmless Casanova. The film's most distasteful scene featured the hero being overpowered by nude twins who tire of tearing his clothes off and turn their sexual attentions to each other. For a double-shocker the quite graphic scene of lesbian incest was acted out by real life twins Mary and Madeleine Collinson later to feature in Twins of Evil. It's a taboo scene that appears to have been missed by the censors not to mention over lustful Hammer fans. The film's downer of an ending reveals everything to have been the fantasy of a no-hoper Butcher's assistant and the film turns from colour to black-and-white. The Deadly Females opens with of a picture of suburban happiness as a man sets off to work while his wife and kids wave goodbye to him on the doorstep. He drives to an airport where he is abruptly bumped off by an Italian assassin-a brief cameo from Rula Lenska,of all people,whose Italian accent is not so hot. Leading Lady Tracy Reed plays a bored housewife and owner of an antiques shop whose polite upper-class demeanour belies a double life as the leader of a band of elite Kensington Hit-Women. From the opening scene,the premise and the director's background you expect the film to pan out as a Sweeney-era actioner with sexploitation trimmings. It doesn't,instead the film uses the Kensington Hit-Women as a connecting device to a series of vignettes depicting unhappy marriages in which the wife or the husband is destined to search out the Hit-Women's services and order a hit on their spouse. In one scene a ghastly old bag berates her husband with `You're almost fifty,lines like rail-tracks,bags under your eyes.and you're impotent'. The real villains of the piece however are the male characters who range from an adulterous husband to a couch potato who screams at his French wife 'I bought you a colour television.NOW WATCH IT'. The film's freakiest scene features a grey haired businessman cowering at the feet of his other half who is dressed as a nun and at his request gives him a whipping. In the midst of the kinky role playing he throws the pseudo-nun on a bed and forces himself on her. After the sordid encounter she heroically delivers the film's best line `Tart I may be,thanks to you,but cheap I am not'-looks like another job for the deadly females. Reed advertises her business right in the middle of the newspapers,albeit under cryptic terms like 'disposal service'. Tracy explains to a client that in the 1970s women should no longer be financially dependant on men. Women need independence and a job,something her girls have as hired assassins. 'We live in the savage Seventies' she shrugs. In order to lure the targeted husbands to their deaths the deadly females pose as femme fatales and dispassionately offer their bodies. The cast includes sexploitation actresses like Heather Chasen and Olivia Munday and even low-level hardcore actor Steve Amber;in spite of that most of the films nudity is provided by middle-aged and physically out of shape men;a perversely anti-erotic touch. The creep with a nun fetish gets sent deadly female Mary who is dressed as a nurse and offering a free massage. No Come Play with Me extra is she,the nurse refuses to undress,call him anything but `Sir' or break her cool demeanour. Miffed at the lack of sparks flying between the two,he pulls off his underpants revealing a full frontal which is unlikely to sway her. She baths him like a geriatric then snaps his neck and slits his wrists to make it look like a bathtub suicide. Tracy herself fancies some action and sets her slights on the playboy business associate of a client. In order to justify the hit to herself she sets up a situation where he has to do an underhand deal behind his partner's back and come on to her,even though he knows she's married. He fails both tests so gets thrown off a balcony. Not really the black comedy that the plot might suggest,the film highlights the depressive nature that Winter films like Escort Girls adopted in the Seventies. Occasionally intriguing as the product of an exploitation director who suffered delusions about his own films' importance,Winter uses The Deadly Females to comment on male and female relationships,feminism and the 'savage Seventies' the film was made in;and for all his seriousness the script is rich in memorably overwrought dialogue. Reed and her sex actress co-stars adapt well to the offbeat casting and the assassinations have a genuinely disquieting edge to them in the icy detachment the deadly females go about their business. Winter seems disturbed by this himself and at times appears less interested in staging the murders and more fixated by the clean up;regularly including heavy detailed scenes of the deadly females making sure the murders look like accidents. Whether or not any of that justifies the sluggish pace though is an altogether different matter. With way too much of the 105 overlong minutes consisting merely of characters arguing in dimly lit rooms as a cinematic experience it's akin to sitting in a late night club,listening in on couples' conversations after they've had one too many drinks and begun to loudly air all their marital grievances. Predictably the films clumsy aspirations to be taken as a serious piece of social commentary,by amongst other things having all the murders preceded by shots of tabloids whose headlines topically name-check the IRA and the Black Panther,did not wash with British critics of the time and unfortunately illustrate why Winter became an easy target for ridicule.

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• Deadly Boring Females

  jkstevens572001-04-30

  In this film, the titular Deadly Females like to have tea, chat, stand and sit. Oh yes, they also kill people in some of the the most unspectacularly boring scenes I've ever witnessed. Just stultifyingly bad cinema. I really dislike those kinds of reviews on IMDb that sort of yell at me in all capital letters "never [to] see this movie!!!" or some such, because often these reviewers are straight-up morons who don't really know what they're talking about--but I've never been more tempted to join the capital-letter yellers in my life.

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