Synopsis
A group of men and women travel to a Carribean resort to discover themselves sexually but unfortunately one of them has also discovered that they like to murder people too.
1974 Directed by Beverly Sebastian, Ferd Sebastian
A group of men and women travel to a Carribean resort to discover themselves sexually but unfortunately one of them has also discovered that they like to murder people too.
"All Shannon needs to do is find herself a football team."
The Single Girls was directed by the same couple who directed 'Gator Bait, but other than Claudia Jennings, there's not much here that resembles that much better film. This one is about a therapy group that goes to an island resort to get to know each other better in that good, ol' '70s way of turning the lights out so people can cop a feel without being seen, but someone's murdering people and hiding the bodies. The editing really is the main problem with this one. Scenes just end abruptly to go to another that seemingly has nothing to do with anything just watched.
Rating this is doubly difficult thanks to a truly terrible 16mm to vhs to dvd transfer, but regardless, there's no reason to watch this aside from Claudia Jennings.
But . . . I mean, it's more fun than Deathsport, if for no other reason than she's not visibly trashed on cocaine and booze.
So to sum up:
Deathsport < The Single Girls < Sister's of Death < Truck Stop Woman < Unholy Rollers < Moonshine County Express < The Great Texas Dynamite Chase
I will report back after I finally see Gator Bait.
Before collaborating on what would become their most famous film together, GATOR BAIT, husband-and-wife producer/directors Ferd and Beverly Sebastian hired drive-in starlet Claudia Jennings for this ribald murder mystery set on an island off the Southern California coast. 1970’s PLAYBOY Playmate of the Year, Jennings quickly made a mark in several films, including low-budget hits GROUP MARRIAGE and THE UNHOLY ROLLERS, and television guest shots, such as the seductive record exec who turns Greg Brady into Johnny Bravo.
Jennings plays one of many groovy members of a weekend encounter group led by shrink Wayne Dvorak (THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING CASE), who encourages the participants to get naked and touch one another. Some of them — but not nearly enough — are…
Aka Bloody Friday.
It's a shame because a story set on an island where beautiful girls and weird gentlemen come to do a kind of therapy consisting of sex with each other, and at the same time they begin to be killed by someone... it should be something more than what ends up being . The picutre lingers halfway throughout while you wonder how isn't this a little more something?
I wish this movie was better… it has all the elements, but not the right execution. A group of horny singles descend on a resort for what’s promoted as an encounter group, but it’s all about the hooking up. Someone starts killing them; talk about sexual hang ups! Like DIRTY O’NEIL, the key appeal for any interested viewer will be the ladies in the cast. Claudia Jennings can do no wrong, and her SISTERS OF DEATH co-star Cheri Howell is sultry elegance. Future Scientologist nut job Joan Prather is terrific, as always, Robyn Hilton does her BLAZING SADDLES schtick, SPACE THING star/Rooney, Jr. spouse Merci Montello makes a pretty corpse in the opening scene, and Jean Marie Ingels is amusing…
The premise is perfect exploitation fodder, as a serial killer wreaks havoc on a Caribbean island that just so happens to host a sexually progressive group of gorgeous women and (mostly) awful men.
What a shame then that the movie skimps on both the gratuitous murder and the sex'alicious stuff. As with Pretty Maids All in A Row, which I watched last week, The Single Girls feels like it was made in the wrong era. This specific blend of sex and violence absolutely flourished in the nineties.
Sadly, this movie never manages to strike the right tone for the subject matter and by the time the super-obvious killer is revealed I was kind of wishing Claudia Jennings' character had been given more to do.
Our impromptu Claudia Jennings Fest continues unabated with this, the second film Claudia did with Ferd and Beverly Sebastian, but this one is not nearly as good as Gator Bait. In fact, this may be the rarest of Claudia's films and likely because it isn't very good. Several swingin' folks attend a Group Encounter Session. where they touch and feel and bare their souls in a spiritual prelude to getting laid. This goes on for a loooooong time such that you really get sick of these people and their 70's hippy bullshit and can't wait for the killer to start picking them off. The female archetypes are virgin, slut and nice girl and Claudia gets to be the nice girl.…
Claudia Jennings Retrospektive No. 4
An sich ein eher behäbiger Proto-Slasher, der sich über weite Strecken als eine Mischung aus Gesellschaftssatire und Sexploitation gebiert. Das passt natürlich vorne wie hinten nicht (höhö), da er genau spielerisch das zu kritisieren versucht, was er im gewissen Maße selbst praktiziert. Aber es ist ja nunmal ein Exploitationfilm, das sollte man ihm nicht ankreiden. Es ist eher ärgerlich, dass er dabei nicht wirklich witzig oder spannend ist. Aber zumindest gibt es nackte Haut und ein paar Kills. Und nach nicht einmal 80 Minuten ist der Spuk dann auch schon wieder vorbei.
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Claudia Jennings Retrospective No. 4
In itself a rather sedate proto-slasher, which for the most part presents itself as a mixture of…
I love Gator Bait so I had high hopes for this since it's Claudia Jennings teaming up with the same directors but man oh man was this rough. It's almost impressive how chauvinistic this movie is with all the toxicity on display. According to the men in this, women's sexual freedom is only cool until they decide they want to sleep with someone else, even though they themselves openly admit they're only getting involved in the stupid therapy group to get laid in the first place.
Claudia's presence can't save this unfortunately and she's somewhat under-utilized anyway. Dissapointing.
Part of the fun of watching proto-slashers is to see where they defect from what was to become cliché, and see where they pre-empt what was to become cliché. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about THE SINGLE GIRLS is that it seems to be spoofing the subgenre a good four years before John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN (1978) supposedly invented it! Admittedly, it is mostly rather dull titillation (at least in its first half), but picks up significantly later for some proto-slasher delirium and endlessly quotable dialogue (where else could you hear such gems as, “Just wait till my agent sees what they did to my boob!”?).
Shallow Sands is a fantasy island resort built in the mind of a heterosexual, white,…
A movie with enough fodder for an entire dissertation on 1970s false feminism. In a single scene, a woman tells a man that she can have him if he fulfills her fantasy, which she then describes as a full-on rape scenario. Then he says, "After that, can I do whatever I want?"
"Yes," she gasps.
Bonus quote:
"All Shannon needs is a football team."
Note that this stellar, #metoo conscious dialogue in the context of a film whose plot is a group of women and men attending a "seminar" where they can discover their sexuality, only to discover that a serial killer is among them.
Does 1970s exploitation get any more ridiculously wonderful than this?
Nightmare USA. Low-grade DVD bootleg.
La psicodelia horror y chic habitual en el tandem Beverly y Ferd Sebastian, esta vez sobre un grupo de sibaritas y aprendices de libertinos (algunos muy estúpidos) de fiesta en una isla entre los que se encuentra alguien al que le va el asunto de matar peña.
Demasiada cháchara y fiestecita o juego idiota, pero los Sebastian conocen bien los estratemas puros del grindhouse y podían llegar a ser muy modernos (Beverly se encargó años más tarde de mi adorada ROCKTOOBER BLOOD, un metal exploit de culto), como demuestran los créditos iniciales y la introducción. Fabulosos.
Por lo demás, curioso culebrón con algo de sangre, aburrido y no tan mal rodado en su contexto de Serie Z para autocine (aunque los Sebastian hagan cosas muy raras con la cámara a veces).
En España fue editado en video como PLACER SANGRIENTO, y también se le conoce como BLOODY FRIDAY.