PRIVATE PARTS (1972)

After running away from home, Cheryl goes to stay with her elderly aunt who runs a old hotel in Los Angeles' skid row.  There's only a handful of tenants but they are a strange bunch, especially the elusive George who enjoys hiding behind peepholes like he's Norman Bates and rubbing on the wall while Cheryl bathes.  He also has a creepy water-filled plastic sex doll that he decorated with a picture of Cheryl's face and...well, you should probably just see for yourself what he does with it.

Paul Bartel's PRIVATE PARTS is groovy little sexually confused movie that takes influence from the European Giallo films of the time then tosses in some Hitchcock and kinky sex and tops it off Bartel's own unique vision and end up with something pretty neat.  The pace is too slow and there's not enough weird tenants or violence, but it's still a fun film that I can't help but appreciate.

Decapitation, awesome Los Angeles locations, two scenes that (at least to me) seemed to have left an impression on Martin Scorsese, a brief Paul Bartel cameo as a drunk in the park, one nice nude scene by Ayn Ruymen, great supporting cast of familiar faces, a kinky story that shows surprisingly (and disappointingly) little sex.

I bet this was a fun watch back in the seedy grindhouses of the early 1970's.  Recommended for fans of confused psychosexual killer movies.

Two years before Martin Scorsese's ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE.

These two shots (above and below) seem very similar to the famous shot of Robert De Niro used four years later in the TAXI DRIVER poster.