Private Parts

Bartel's first feature is a version of his perennial theme: caricatured straight middle class values brought up against caricatured sexual excesses. The heroine is a teenage runaway (straight out of a Beach Party movie) who takes refuge in a seedy San Francisco hotel populated with freaks, perverts, and nuts. The funniest of the latter is the guilty leather queen with a secret phallic shrine in his room; the most inventively conceived is the transvestite photographer who uses a hypo as a phallic substitute and has a thing about dirty bath-water. Bartel himself doesn't remember it too fondly, probably because the plot's demands sometimes get in the way of the humour, but it is in exceptionally poor taste, and the tone is quintessential Bartel.