There were all types of sexploitation films, and they had many different underlying themes and aims. Russ Meyer's aim seemed to be to glorify the female as a fully voluptuous, fully powerful, and fully remarkable creature. The female to Meyer is "more" than the male. The sheer joy he takes in her physicality proves this, plus her mythic strength and power over the male. This movie, PERVERT, is exactly the opposite. The women are completely subordinate to the men. Their sexuality is seen from the outside, and has no real power. The women are viciously slaughtered. Even the gooniest, most degenerate, oldest, or stupidest males are stronger and smarter than the females. This is cheap sex comedy a hundred times removed from adult sexual issues. The attitude towards the women is like that of teen males who hate women because the sexiest women aren't available to them, and because a woman's sexuality is totally abstract to them. It's actually quite Victorian in that sense. It's full of a type of fear and curiosity of the female that emerges in times of great repression. SPOILER ALERT: Worse still, the "killer" that is terrorizing the females (the detached penis of the protagonist), is never related psychologically to its owner, so that an opportunity for discussing male violence or a split between the civilized and savage parts of male desire, is missed. Indeed, the claymation penis is the only character that is given a personality. It has rage, humility, bashfulness, shame, makes cutesy faces, etc. This is all of course a cheap joke. Especially as this killer penis rapes women, destroys their insides, and comes out through their mouths, behaving like a knife, eviscerating them and making them explode with blood, then scuttles across the desert like a cowboy hero out for revenge. Ha ha. Other jokes draw on racism, homophobia, ageism, etc. As an attempt to make fun of redneck values it doesn't work, as the film doesn't offer an alternate point of view, so it seems to condone the values it's sending up. Therefore, as satire it fails miserably. The filmmakers seem to revel in the bad values, almost nostalgic for them, and to be making this film as a way of re-entrenching them through humor. As a female, I find as much humor in this travesty as a black person might find in a comic send-up of a KKK lynching, all of course from the point of view of the racists. Humor is always based on the audience sharing values with the jokes being made, and so all of the people loving this film might want to take a look at themselves and why they think it's funny.
Review of Pervert!
