Plot
Cheryl Stratton gets into an argument with her roommate Judy, and decides to move out. Cheryl steals Judy's wallet and, rather than return to her native Ohio, visits the King Edward Hotel, a dilapidated hotel in downtown Los Angeles that is operated by her maternal Aunt Martha, whom she has never met. The brusque, conservative Martha allows Cheryl to temporarily stay in the King Edward, which she considers one of the "last respectable hotels in the city." Martha's central provision for Cheryl's stay is that she not wander the hotel at night. Cheryl soon notices that the guests and residents of the hotel are very unusual.
Soon after settling into her room, Cheryl senses she is being watched. Judy's boyfriend, Mike, arrives at the hotel searching for Cheryl, and is met by the Reverend Moon, an eccentric guest who dresses as a priest. Mike is attacked in an upstairs hallway by an unseen assailant, who decapitates him before throwing his corpse in the hotel furnace. Later, over dinner, Cheryl inquires about Martha's daughter; Martha states that the child was conceived via artificial insemination, and implies that she is dead.
Cheryl soon takes notice of George, a mysterious, handsome photographer who lives in the hotel, and whom Martha allows to keep a darkroom in the basement. While exploring the hotel, Cheryl realizes there are peepholes throughout, some of which allow a direct view into her room. George begins to leave sexually aggressive notes for Cheryl, which progress to gifts of lingerie which he suggest she model for him. Curious, Cheryl steals the hotel master keys and has copies made, which she uses to enter George's room. Inside, she discovers a transparent inflatable sex doll on his bed, and numerous avant-garde photos of nude women lining the walls.
Judy arrives at the hotel searching for Mike and wanting to reclaim her stolen money. Martha directs her to the basement darkroom, where an unseen assailant murders her. That night, Jeff, a young man who works at the locksmith where Cheryl copied the keys, invites her on a date to a rock concert. Meanwhile, George fills his inflatable sex doll with water and affixes a blown-up headshot of Cheryl onto its face. He then draws his own blood into a hypodermic needle, before injecting the blood into the doll.
George and Martha later get into an argument in which George accuses her of ruining his life by attempting to "protect" him from slatternly women. That night, Cheryl dresses in the lingerie George left for her, and erotically undresses in the bathroom, aware George is watching her from a peephole. After she leaves her room, George enters it and takes back the lingerie, which he uses to dress his inflatable doll. Martha finds the discarded doll in the trash the next morning, and orders Cheryl to return home. Jeff arrives later for his date with Cheryl. As they head to the concert, Jeff mentions he previously dated a woman named Alice, a model who disappeared from the hotel, and mentions that she was frightened of George. Cheryl, who feels protective of George, is angered by this and aborts the date, returning to the hotel.
Jeff follows Cheryl to the hotel, and confronts George, who is in his room listening to a taped audio recording of Alice's murder. George bludgeons Jeff with a bottle and drags his body to the darkroom. When he returns to his room, he finds Cheryl posed on his bed in the lingerie. Cheryl assumes the two are going to have sex, but is horrified when George produces a hypodermic needle, which he attempts to stab her with. An altercation ensues in which Cheryl inadvertently kills him by pushing over a large stage light that falls on his head. Martha, alerted by the noise, enters the room. When she unbuttons George's shirt to feel for a heartbeat, she reveals that George has breasts, and is not a man at all, but a woman who has been cross-dressing and presenting as a male. Martha raves that George's spirit has been liberated from his body, and that she raised George—who is her biological child—as a man so that he would not be "tainted" by wanton female sexuality. Martha briefly suggests that Cheryl become her "new son", but swiftly changes her mind, attacking Cheryl with a large butcher knife.
The next day, Jeff's father arrives at the hotel with police, who recover an unconscious Jeff in the darkroom, alongside Judy's corpse. Upstairs, they discover George's body alongside Martha's, which is now dressed in Cheryl's lingerie outfit. Later, as the police depart the hotel, Cheryl emerges from upstairs in a daze, repeating to herself Martha's phrase that the King Edward is "one of the last respectable hotels in the city" and that she must be "extremely selective" about its clientele.
Release
When the film was test-screened for audiences, the results were so bad that MGM—who had acquired the film in July 1972 [7] —decided to release the film under their Premier Productions subsidiary, along with two standard horror films; it was then shelved. Nevertheless, the film was copyrighted by MGM and not Premier Productions. [2]
Bartel said "I thought it was sophisticated and delightful but for the people who came to see the film and viewed it from a very basic level, it didn't work. They resented the abrupt change of mood and were not able to accept the comedy. You had to be deatched from the film and not take it seriously in order to appreciate what I didwith the film." [6]
Despite MGM's lack of interest in promoting the property, the studio passed on the opportunity to sell it to Roger Corman's New World Pictures when they expressed interest in buying it. [1] The film did not perform well at the box office. [1] In the United Kingdom, it was granted an X rating. [3]
Critical response
Roger Greenspan, who reviewed the film for The New York Times on its release, wrote:
[Bartel] succeeds in some details and fails in others. But the attempt, even when it isn't quite working, is a good deal more interesting than most...Private Parts is at least a hopeful occasion for those of us who love intellectual cinema and at the same time care for the menacing staircase, for the ominous shadow, for empty rooms shuttered against the light of the afternoon...Bartel is a young director whose previous short films have shown a genius of title (Secret Cinema, Naughty Nurse) not entirely matched by their content. Private Parts is no triumph, but it does mark a giant step forward toward the successful blending of precocious perversity and satiric good sense that seems the fated direction of his career. [1]
The Philadelphia Daily News 's Joe Baltake praised the film's cinematography and Bartel's "stylish" direction, describing it as "a veritable spook carnival about a seedy L.A. hotel brimming with eerie corridors, creaking doors and strange tenants who are into all sorts of perversions... Private Parts, in total, is a very high-class addition to the horror film genre—every bit as scarey [sic] and arty as Roman Polanski's Repulsion . It's well worth seeing." [8]
Will Jones of the Star Tribune wrote of the film: "A great deal of skill and technique have been lavished on all this trashy nonsense, and with Ms. Benson's wholehearted and enthusiastic devotion to the role of freaky old Aunt Martha, who turns out to be freakier than any of her guests, it has the look of well-made, high quality trash." [9]
Reviewing it in a 1978 release the Los Angeles Times called it "a sylish, actually bravaura piece of Grand Guignol that could be sick if it wasn't so hialarious." [10]
Mon, Mar 06, 1978 ·Page 48 In a retrospective assessment, Bruce Reid of The Stranger noted the film as being ahead of its time, writing: "Private Parts knew America was full of lonely, sex-obsessed misfits a decade before David Lynch came on the scene." [11] The film was included in the 2003 book Fangoria 's 101 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen: A Celebration of the World's Most Unheralded Fright Flicks.
