If you look up writer-director Roberta Findlay online then you will see her credited as a "noted adult and exploitation cinema filmmaker". That's the first line of her description on IMDb anyway. So it's not very surprising that I haven't reviewed any of her films here before. I don't think I've seen anything else that she's done. Given what she delivers here, I'm not averse to checking out other titles from her directorial career.
Tara Chung plays Karen, the woman who is due to go through some of the torment that the title promises. Karen has some serious mental health issues, which doesn't stop others around her from thinking that she may be willing to get down 'n' dirty with them. And sometimes she is happy to get naked and engage in some special happy happy time, but there's often a point when she'll be pushed to react strongly and violently. Which is a real mood-killer, you can be sure of that.
Making use of familiar moments seen in other psycho-sexual horrors of the 1960s and 1970s, Findlay seems to struggle here when it comes to mixing in the character study moments and the requisite sex scenes. The examination of a fragile and crumbling mental state is perhaps a bit better than expected, although not at all subtle or nuanced (of course), but it's very hard to interrupt that developing storyline with some random sexy time.
It helps that Tara Chung works so well in her main role. Having only acted in a handful of movies, from the information I could find anyway, Chung has the ability to be cute and sexy one minute and frantic and dangerous the next. There are other people with main roles here (Jennifer Jordan, Jake Teague, Jeffrey Hurst, Crystal Sync, etc), but they're very easy to forget as soon as the movie is over. Chung isn't, although that's to do with both her screen presence and the material she has to work with.
Give this to twenty different film-makers and you'd end up with twenty very different films. Findlay knows what she wants to do though, and the end result is interesting for the fact that it's filtered through a '70s sexploitation lens. It's just not wholly satisfying. Things would have been improved if Findlay had committed to one particular direction, be it the sex or the insanity and potential horror. It's paced much like a tame slasher movie, and the very last scenes provide a very interesting, and rare, depiction of a killer overwhelmed by their own emotions, but nothing is helped by the juxtaposition of specific events, nor by the tone of the whole piece.
Interesting, but far from the best example of this kind of thing, whichever way you look at it.
6/10
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