Saturday, September 30, 2023

'Deviation' (1971) - José Ramón Larraz as J.R. Larrath.

Larraz proved himself remarkably adept at creating macabre, off-beat, evocatively shot erotic psychodramas, deservedly lauded for his genuinely unsettling mini-masterpiece 'Symptoms'. The prodigiously gifted Iberian genre filmmaker creates an equally skewed vibe with his dope-raddled, spectacularly smutty beatnik boff-fest 'Deviation'. Following an late night automotive mishap, a blandly bickering couple are offered succour in a distinctly doomy domicile by openly hedonistic, morbidly oversexed taxidermist, Julian (Karl Lanchbury) and his erotic con-conspirator, the strikingly sinister strumpet, Rebecca (Sibyla Gray).

Shaken by the accident, the querulous couple swiftly discover that their horny hosts are an unusually gregarious pair, uninhibitedly holding wild, chemically-enhanced sex orgies within their eerily isolated mansion. Wonderfully warped, and wickedly lascivious in equal measure, Larraz's deliciously degenerated, off-kilter exploitation gem is ripe for rediscovery. Not without missteps, the goofy hippy patios is hilarious, and there's rather more soft-core shunt than grue, but, Larraz is an estimable, uniquely stylish perpetrator of far out fleshly phantasmagoria, and 'Deviation' remains a tantalizingly lurid trip into THC-soaked 70s saturnalia.

 












 


 

 

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