Private Parts (1972)

George was never any good with the ladies.

Cheryl is a teenage girl that runs away from her home in Ohio with her friend to live in California. After getting caught peeping on her friend while screwing her boyfriend, Cheryl leaves and moves into a creepy old hotel in the city run by her Aunt Martha. Martha is a puritanical old woman obsessed with funerals and has a strange relationship with her tenants. The hotel is filled with a bunch of screwy people, including a homosexual priest who sticks his nose in everyone else's business, and George, a sex-starved photographer who most of the movie centers around. During her stay there, Cheryl finds things left on her bed (notes, sexy outfits, etc) and becomes aware that someone in the room next door is watching her through holes in the wall. Cheryl takes a liking to George and learns he's the one watching her in the bathroom. Martha does her best to keep the two apart, for both of their safety, but fails in doing so and everything gets really weird at the end.

To tell the truth, this movie didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I picked it up because it was directed by Paul Bartel (his directorial debut, actually) and I loved his work in "Eating Raoul" and "Rock 'n' Roll High School". I was never quite sure if this was supposed to be a horror movie, suspense thriller or black comedy, and it seemed to bounce around from each of those genres throughout the movie. I kept waiting for it to make sense, but when it ended, I still had no clue what was going on. I have the feeling that if I sat down and watched it again it would make more sense to me. The pacing was a little slow at times, but never so bad that I wanted to turn it off. There were some funny moments in the film, though intentionally or not is debatable, and the scene with George in bed with the doll was genuinely creepy. The acting was pretty good, overall, but the actress who played Cheryl was irritating. There was more than one nude scene, a decent amount of blood (including a beheading) and the score by Hugo Friedhofer was really suspenseful and eerie.I dunno, I guess it was okay...

2/5