THE ROOM OF CHAINS

For fun, two men kidnap and torment women in bondage. According to my Dad’s friend, “Disco” Bob Schmul, the key component for a “#1 Best Party” is a vagina with a snake hanging out on it. And guess what? This movie is a #1 Best Party! The Room Of Chains is total garbage. It’s French. But it’s not very “French.” There are no correlations to be drawn with Jean Rollin’s hypnotic elegance or N.G. Mount’s grotesque bliss. Rather, the film taps into Andy Milligan‘s self-loathing, melodramatic veins, sucks ’em dry, then stops by a sexy chateau from Umberto Lenzi’s Eyeball to memorialize the occasion. Plus, a snake and a vagina. Georges has a wife named Florence. But, he also has a lover named Marc. When not running an antique store with his wife, Georges employs the services of a grimacing brute to steal women from their bicycles and chain them in a basement. The brute kinda looks like Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge if Alan Partridge wore pink dishpan gloves and a Beatles wig. He also rubs up against the girls. The basement stairs hide a peephole, and that’s where Georges and Marc lie on their stomachs and peep, then expound on hilariously limp psychology. A woman exposes her breasts to police officers. Twice. Daydream inserts feature a naked church organist while flashbacks explore the joys of a snake-on-a-vag atop a satanic altar. Towards the end, the film decides to shift its focus towards a couple who are totally in love. Then someone says, “Hey, did you hear? She was raped last night!” and everyone else says, “Ha-ha!” Presented with true-crime flair (“The story you are about to see was taken from the composite files of the French civil police”), Room is plotless exploitation with no tact, be it considerate or off-the-rails. Given its benign attitude, the film could have easily become just another 75 minutes of impassive perversion. Like Schoolgirls In Chains. That would have been fine. I’d have admired the landscapes and possibly fallen sleep. In fact, I did sleep. Just for a second. But a shrieking piano woke me up. Room Of Chains undermines technical rationality for no reason whatsoever. It’s jury-rigged art. And I like that. I like it when films like this emerge as drunken, artsy chaos. Just people messing around, abusing spaz edits, odd camera placements, freeze frames, and cacophonous musical interludes, while sidestepping the hassle of intellectual significance. In other words, this is successfully creative exploitation. Especially in the hands of a French director who chooses extreme close-ups of talking mouths as a preferred method of communication. Still, chaos remains chaos without a substantial through-line. Director Gerard Trembasiewicz understood. Because his faux-art fairy tale is capped with a superb score from psychedelic experimentalist Guy Skornik. It’s a bashing, hook-filled tryst between the LSD symphonics of France Gall’s “1968” and the lazy mod of Acanthus’s Shiver Of The Vampires soundtrack. None of it made me cringe. All of it made me smile. Skornik’s compositions are the glue for a thoroughly-dumb-yet-perpetually-cool evening of giant mouths, evasive sex, and one very happy snake. A couple married and well off men decide to have some fun by kidnapping various French girls and chaining them up in a basement, which has been turned into a torture chamber. THE ROOM WITH CHAINS is an early French exploitation movie that seems to have gotten a dirty reputation. I'm going to guess that it got this bad reputation because not too many had seen it and someone who had seen it decided to try and sell it off as something much worse than it actually is. The film has a reputation for being rather graphic and dirty but it certainly falls well short of that probably due in part to what couldn't be shown in France at the time this was made. With that said, there are some interesting things in this Gérard Trembasiewicz film. There's no question that the highlight of the picture are the various scenes in the basement. Again, one really shouldn't be expecting any gore or even blood for that matter but I liked how these scenes were staged. We get a red tint during these torture chamber sequences as well as a rather funky music score. The atmosphere in these scenes were quite good and the ladies are even better. With that being said, there's really not too much that happens in this film. The stuff in the basement doesn't happen too often, which is a shame because it's so much more entertaining than everything else, which includes the men talking way too much as well as an investigation that goes nowhere. The performances are decent for what they are but there's really nothing here that jumps off the screen.