Director: Jean-Louis Costes, Yves Pierog
Year: 1995
Country: France
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Exploitation
Plot:
Living in a struggling relationship, a couple into bondage and BDSM attempting to find new ways of supporting themselves when they encounter financial woes, and when they stumble upon the idea of making a snuff tape of their neighbors’ wife are driven to extreme lengths to accomplish their goal.
Review:
Overall, this was a pretty bland and uneventful genre effort. The main thing here is the rather frank and honest depiction of their relationship as a couple heavily involved in the BDSM culture, which is the main appeal in the feature. Showing how utterly dominated he is by the girl, who dresses him down in feminine clothes, leads him around like a dog, and is utterly reliant on leading him around through various humiliation tactics that signify how under her thumb he really is. Even with the failed prostitution idea that goes sour for him, the fact that she takes charge and orders him into the abduction and eventual kidnapping that leads into murder, and the idea for making homemade snuff tapes. However, these are neither erotic nor scary, as the matter-of-fact nature of the scenes and flimsy means of producing everything so even with the grimy concepts at play the visuals are quite underwhelming.
That also goes along with the highly confusing setup that tries to pack in several excessive storylines that don’t need to be there. The relationship with the neighbors who are going through their own struggles could’ve meant more had there been more time to understand what they were going through since we’re barely given much about who they are beyond the husband being sexually stymied and her being unwilling to go with anymore. This ends up causing the series of scenes showing the delivery of the tapes to his house of how they’re torturing her to be weirdly engaging and sexually stimulating to her husband who spends more time pleasuring himself to his wife’s torture than actually trying to rescue her from the people who are right next door given than they’re plainly visible in the video itself. Not giving any of these some context just makes for a confusing and directionless storyline.
However, that also highlights how little context the rest of the stories here get which is what makes this a generally underwhelming effort. The fact that they go from a couple that is highly into domination and humiliation in their relationship to openly kidnapping a woman off the streets, taking her back to their place where they tie her up, torture her and film it as a ransom for her husband to pay them some extra money to make ends meet is a series of leaps the film never addresses. Relying exclusively on the brutality and shocking nature of what they inflict on her and each other is what this one has going for it, and while that all tend to be grimy and sleazy and somewhat depraved in the best way possible that hardly any of it makes sense is what ultimately holds this one back from what it could’ve been.
Overview: **/5
A generally watchable exploitation effort in the sense of watching all the degenerate behavior on display but only held back by the lack of context or explanation for anything, those aspects are enough to get an idea about the film. Those who appreciate the exploitative elements will be the ones who enjoy this one the most but all others who are turned off by the negatives here should heed extreme caution.
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