Description

In an upper-middle class Long Island community, two couples find their lives mingling through both social get-togethers and some infidelity on the side. Otis (Teague), a sexually insensitive psychiatrist, is totally oblivious to the obvious discomfort of his wife, Estelle (Jordan), when they’re in bed, and his sneaky relationship with Frances (Sync) is falling apart as well as she goes back into the arms of her own husband, Don (Hurst). However, that drama is nothing compared to what’s going on upstairs with Frances’s sister, Karen (Chung), who’s mentally deteriorating and causing disruption about whether she should be put into a mental institution. One night when she overhears a domestic squabble, Karen packs up a suitcase and takes off for a family beach house where she makes herself at home and promptly has hallucinations about a masked attacker as she showers. That violence filters into real life when electrician “Larry the Lineman” (Gaunt) shows up and triggers her homicidal urges during a sexual encounter that crosses the line, but that’s just the start of Karen’s nightmare as the property starts to fill up with corpses.

Featuring an unhinged central performance by newcomer Tara Chung (a mysterious figure who only made two other films), this shocker is obviously riffing on Roman Polanski’s Repulsion with its insane leading lady offering very few words and displaying symptoms of several stripes of sexual psychosis. However, the beach-side atmosphere, heavy splashes of blood, and occasionally dreamy artistry (including a very Jean Rollin-esque finale) give the film an identity all its own, with Findlay obviously putting far more effort into the dialogue scenes and shock moments than the sex scenes (which is betrayed by one of the worst fake money shots in movie history, complete with visible tubing). In fact, one of the era’s hottest up and comers at the time, Marlene Willoughby, not only keeps her clothes on but puts on a wild outfit as a snooping neighbor who barges into the house at the worst possible moment. You’d be hard pressed to pinpoint much in the film as erotic, with Chung’s frenzied self-gratification in the shower and on the beach coming off as quite terrifying and unlike anything a male filmmaker would have tried to pull off at the time. Adding to the atmosphere is a strong, melancholy music score by regular Findlay composer Walter Sear, resulting in a film that’s tough to shake off if you catch it