The Video Vacuum

George Weiss, the man who bankrolled Glen or Glenda produced this brazenly politically incorrect “expose” on lesbianism.  Any modern day lesbian watching this archaic “documentary” will surely be offended.  Fans of dated exploitation junk (like me) should get a few laughs out of it.

The film starts out with a concerned narrator  giving us statistics about lesbians (some of which are repeated in order to pad the running time out to an hour long) while we see a bunch of people walking in and out of supposed gay bars.  Then in filmed segments, the audience is treated to scenes of a lesbian photographer coaxing her comely models out of their lingerie.  The biggest chunk of the flick is devoted to a young lesbian’s “Coming Out Party” which culminates in her getting gang-banged by a group of “butch” women.

The funniest thing about Chained Girls is that it thinks words like “dyke”, “bull dyke”, “butch”, and “baby butch” are real scientific terms.  The off screen narrator also gets some laughs just because he’s so damn over earnest about the whole thing.  I also liked how most of the “documentary” scenes were just captured by the director sticking the camera out of the car window at random passersby.  (Ah yes the days when you could film a documentary and didn’t have to leave your car.) 

Sadly, the laughs dry up around the second half when the documentary scenes give way to the scripted ones.  It’s then when the film starts to lose its Ed Wood-ian charm and becomes downright dull.  Oh, and we never once get to see the girls chained to something.  Bummer.  

AKA:  Caged Girls.

A secret society of lesbians called the Daughters of Lesbos throw a dinner party where they each relate how they came to be Sapphic sisters.  The first chick got dosed with a date-rape drug laced with Spanish Fly by some skeevy perv before swearing off men forever.  The second gal masturbated all the time before hooking up with her summer camp counselor.  The next broad picked up a female Flower Power hitchhiker who was into Free Love.  The last girl was also raped by a man but she at least had the guts to get revenge by cutting off a very sensitive area of his anatomy.

Despite the promising set-up, Daughters of Lesbos isn’t a whole lot of fun.  What bugged me about this flick was that the sex scenes (which comprises about ¾ of the film’s running time) were all boring and not very erotic.  They also suffered from a lack of variety (basically either the lesbians get raped or the lesbians play with dildos) and poor editing.  The silver lining to that cloud was that unlike some 60’s skin flicks, this one shows a lot of bush.

I really wish that Daughters of Lesbos had focused more on the revenge aspects of the plot instead of being little more than just a series of flashbacks.  The fact that there was no sound, only the female narrator’s voice also irked me too.  Still, she does get some great dialogue like, “She was forever the butch!”

AKA:  Dominique in Daughters of Lesbos.