a.k.a. The Dwarf / Abducted Bride
company: Box Office International
year: 1973
runtime: 92′
country: Denmark / United Kingdom
director: Vidal Radski
cast: Torben Bille, Anne Sparrow,
Tony Eades, Clara Keller
dvd company: Severin Films
release date: March 31, 2009
retail price: $29.95
disc details: Region 0 / NTSC / single layer
order this disc from Amason.com
reviewed from a screener provided
by Severin Films LLC
“You know what to do – when you are finished, ring the bell . . .”
Unemployed writer Peter and wife Mary are down on their luck and in search of a cheap roof to put over their heads – they find what they’re looking for in a derelict old apartment building run by washed-up celebrity Lila Lash and her creepy dwarf son Olaf. While Peter goes out in search of work Mary takes to snooping around their new home to see if she can find the source of the mysterious noises she’s been hearing at night. When Peter is sent to Paris as part of his new job, Mary snoops herself right into trouble . . .
It turns out Lila Lash is keeping her pockets full and her celebrity dream alive by running a sex slave business from her attic, with son Olaf luring adolescent women [at least they're supposed to be adolescent - the "child" Olaf is seen abducting in the film's opening must be at least 25 or 30] to the apartment with his collection of cute toys, beating them with his cane, and injecting them with heroin before forcing them to sate the desires of his paying customers. Lila and Olaf have had their eye on Mary since she moved in and, with her husband away [unknowingly playing the part of drug runner for the local heroin distributor], take their opportunity to add her to their growing collection of doped-up sex dolls upstairs.
Peter initially believes Olaf and Lila’s story about Mary becoming fed up with her life and running away – then he puts two and two together, realizing that his employer is smuggling heroin into the country in shipments of teddy bears. The cops are keen on shutting down both the drug operation and the sex-slave ring, but will they reach Lila’s boarding house in time to save Mary from the clutches of the anonymous johns or, worse, Olaf himself?
Oh SINFUL DWARF, what to make of ye. I’m sure this went relatively unnoticed when initially released stateside in 1974 by Box Office International – but, as has been the case with many a film of this sort, a few years festering on a video store shelf has been more than enough to garner the title a bit of notoriety. Filmed by a Danish crew in London and in English, it’s certainly an odd little effort – I’d half suspect it to have been intended as a joke were certain aspects of it not so vile. Versions previously released outside of Denmark were reportedly cut a bit, an issue remedied by this new Severin Films disc, which is the first US DVD offering of the title [there have been previous releases in Japan and the Netherlands]*.
DWARF is essentially a repulsively sexed-up take on Robert Aldrich’s elderly-celebrity-gone-insane epic WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE – if Betty Davis had chained Joan Crawford up in the attic, drugged her, and forced her into prostitution, then it would have turned out something like this. The chief draw of the production, the sleazy soft-core sex, is pretty banal for the most part, with scenes of the young sex-slaves being ravaged by their clientele being neither titillating or repulsive, really. If director Vidal Raski intended them to be disturbing then he certainly missed his mark – don’t expect anything along the lines of the hardcore intensity of similar scenes found in THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE, which was released the following year. Raski misses his mark again by attempting to insert a bit of comic levity, of all things, into one of the sex scenes by having the john bob his posterior in time with one of Lila’s frequent musical numbers [which best the sex scenes on the cringe-o-meter handily].
If there’s one thing THE SINFUL DWARF has over the multitude of its Euro-sex contemporaries it’s former family film star Torben Bille as the hobbling and maniacal Olaf. I’d say that Bille was channeling Jack Nicholson’s character from THE SHINING, with all of his demented smiles and similar ticks, had that film not come out a full six years after DWARF. Torben provides the only really memorable performance of the picture and does a reasonable job of making himself out to be a disgusting little man. He can also be credited with giving the film its only effectively disturbing moments, including a scene in which he molests the kidnapped wife with his cane. Bille would go on to be a rather prominent fixture of Denmark’s 70s exploitation scene, appearing in the likes of AGENT 69 IN THE SIGN OF SCORPIO, a hardcore spy flick, amongst others.
You’d have to be nuts to expect any sort of artistic sensibility out of a down-and-dirty exploitation cheapie like this, and it certainly lives up to that expectation. It should fare pretty well with those fond of Jess Franco and his ilk, with rampant nudity and depravity to be had by all. THE SINFUL DWARF is definitely on the low end on the exploitation spectrum, but this release will undoubtedly find its niche. It’s charming to see Severin so gleefully focused on their efforts to dig muck like this up from the bottom of the barrel – god bless them for that.
Severin presents THE SINFUL DWARF quite faithfully with a progressive full frame 1.33:1 transfer – I’m sure this was cropped for theatrical exhibition, but the film itself is so haphazardly composed that it’s impossible to tell if there ever was an intended OAR – said to have been sourced from a 35mm print dug out of a janitor’s closet at the Danish Film Institute. How happy you are with it will depend largely on your expectations going in, and I recommend setting them low. DWARF looks as bad as, if not worse than, most 16mm blow-up productions, exhibiting very little in the way of fine detail and massive amounts of grain – contrast and colors are both constantly fluctuating. Given the discreet lack of print damage, I’m inclined to say that all of the above is due to the original shooting conditions. Severin’s transfer preserves DWARF in all of its aesthetic repulsiveness, and that’s just fine with this reviewer. Audio is a serviceable Dolby Digital 2.0 mono track in the film’s original English – all of the stiltedly performed dialogue comes across just fine, particularly Torben’s disturbing interjections [in a thick Danish accent, of course].
Supplements are expectantly limited but amusing all the same. First up is the mock mini-docu THE SEVERIN CONTROVERSY, which has John Severin interviewing a couple of “disgruntled” fans about how their lives were ruined by renting DWARF on VHS in the early 90′s. There are some good lines to be had here – John’s own ‘I’m not going to pull this movie – I’ve already invested six, seven hundred dollars . . .’ for instance – and the whole featurette is good for a few laughs, even if it won’t be something you’ll come back to time and time again. Aside from the featurette, there is the expected theatrical trailer [under the title ABDUCTED BRIDE] as well as two radio spots that run 30 seconds and a minute, respectively.
As I mentioned earlier, THE SINFUL DWARF has already been released in Europe and Japan, but Severin’s disc may well be the version to own. The 2 disc special edition from Denmark is an unnecessary affair containing both the uncut and export versions* but scant in the way of supplements otherwise, while the Dutch and Japanese releases appear to contain only the film. The retail price is high [$29.95!] on this new Severin title, unfortunately the norm for obscure genre releases as of recently, but it can be pre-ordered at considerable savings from online retailers like HKFlix.com and DeepDiscount.com. This is another one of those discs that I can’t recommend to everyone for reasons that should be obvious by now, but fans will definitely want to indulge.
* ADDENDUM: 03/14/2009 – I turn out to have been wrong about this – much like THE BEAST IN SPACE, earlier reviewed here, and any number of other lesser Euro-sleaze efforts, there are actually two distinct versions of THE SINFUL DWARF. The one contained on the Severin Films release is the softcore export version – an alternate hardcore cut, the pornographic footage produced alongside the softcore, was released in Denmark but, to my knowledge, nowhere else. The Danish 2-disc release contains both the export version reviewed here and the hardcore alternate cut.
I have no idea if Severin Films has the intention of releasing the alternate hardcore version in the United States, but will look into it and report my findings here. I can’t imagine wanting to sit through an X-rated cut of this film, but there seems to be a market for it [if online discussion of the subject is any indication].
ADDENDUM: 03/16/2009 – So what are you missing out on by watching this softcore cut versus the hardcore version? Not a whole hell of a lot – the majority of the film, including the first sex scene, play out exactly as they do in the softcore cut. Sex scene number two has around forty seconds of revolting insertion needlessly tacked on, while sex scene number three is augmented with around a minute of hardcore oral sex. The decidedly non-hardcore molestation of Mary by Olaf is extended with an additional minute of Olaf cackling and shoving his cane at stuff.
That’s it. The hardcore segments are so paltry as to be distracting more than anything else and, having seen them, I’ll go out on a limb and say that the export version of THE SINFUL DWARF should prove more than enough for most viewers.
ADDENDUM 11/26/2009: The hardcore version of this film is now officially available on US DVD, and can be ordered from Amazon.com.
