When the moon is full, the clock strikes midnight, all the normal people are safety asleep, and the desire is strong for extreme cinema...it is in moments like those when a Zebedy Colt film is the only game in town.
‘Colt’ was in reality the multi-talented and endlessly fascinating Edward Earle Marsh (1929-2004), whose lengthy career in showbiz began as a child actor in 1930s Hollywood. As an adult Marsh became an important figure in the growth of the LGBT community, first adopting the ‘Zebedy Colt’ name for his groundbreaking 1969 queer cabaret album ‘I’ll Sing For You’ in which Marsh’s rich voice was let loose on songs from musicals that had traditionally been sung by woman –‘I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy’, ‘The Man I Love’ and ‘Bill’ from Show Boat- but were here given a subversive, homosexual twist by being interpreted by a man. Reverting back to his real name, Marsh enjoyed many successes on Broadway appearing in an award winning 1975-76 production of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, and acting as Anthony Newley’s understudy in ‘The Roar of the Greasepaint- The Smell of the Crowd’. Marsh drifted into hardcore porn in middle age, resurrecting the ‘Zebedy Colt’ name in order to maintain some distance between these film appearances and his theatre work. Like any true artiste though, Colt poured blood, sweat, tears and other bodily fluids into his pornographic work, notoriously performing oral sex on both his male and female co-stars Jamie Gillis and Terri Hall in 1975’s The Story of Joanna. Colt is equally mesmerising and disturbing as the amyl nitrite abusing, superfreaky rapist-murderer ‘The Night Walker’ in Sex Wish (1975). To the degree that a former friend of mine suffered nightmares about ‘The Night Walker’ for weeks after watching that film. Zebedy Colt has a habit of getting under your skin.
The adult films that Colt directed were no less committed, passionate and fearless. Sexual taboos are tackled and trampled underfoot; holes are punched in the walls of socially acceptable behaviour. Unmistakably 1970s and NYC in spirit, these films were products of an era that let its hair down, where hardcore porn, BDSM and bi-sexuality were openly on show like never before. Colt’s films absorbed aspects from genres like horror (The Devil Inside Her, Unwilling Lovers) and hillbilly sexploitation (The Farmer’s Daughters) but took advantage of the opportunity to push the envelope even further. After watching Colt’s hardcore interpretations of these genres, even the most edgiest of horror and exploitation takes on these themes appear conventional and restrained in comparison.
Terri’s Revenge is a star vehicle for Colt’s Story of Joanna co-star Terri Hall, as well as his own contribution to the rape-revenge genre, popularized by such mainstream fare as Death Wish and R-rated exploitation variants like Act of Vengeance aka Rape Squad. Everything about Terri’s Revenge is dirty, dirty, dirty. It opens with Terri Hall walking dirty, deserted streets near the NYC docks, captured on filthy film stock while malevolent, hard rock music blasts away on the soundtrack. Despite the knowledge that a film crew was present nearby, you’re still alarmed at the danger Hall was placed in by being asked to pound these mean streets in an area that looks like a natural breeding ground for muggers and rapists. These scenes obviously having been shot in the very early hours of the morning, probably to avoid any unwanted interest from the public, or awkward questions about filming permits. Such behaviour is though in keeping with the character she plays in the film, also called Terri, who like Bronson in Death Wish, makes herself a deliberate target for scumbags in order to then dish out vigilante justice. “I’ll get even, not just with Chad, but with every man” vows Terri, just before the opening titles, which play out as a series of mock newspaper headlines with Terri’s maniacally laughing face superimposed over them.
Wandering around the waterfront, Terri remembers happier times with her husband Chad and contemplates where it all went wrong. “When I first met Chad he was the most adorable boy I’d ever met in my life”. A series of explicit flashbacks illustrate the couple’s initial happiness, including some open air love making in a field, amidst the remnants of a picnic.
On paper some of the dialogue here feels a bit Mills and Boon (“I love you so much, my darling”, “when we were first married, I was in paradise”) but Hall breathes creditability into it, and Colt is surprisingly adept at portraying heterosexual bliss as much as he was homosexual bliss on the ‘I’ll Sing For You’ album. You genuinely believe that Terri and Chad are very much in love. Still, as with those early scenes in Death Wish with Bronson and Hope Lange relaxing on the beach, everything here feels a little too idealistic. There is the foreboding sense that something very bad awaits round the next corner, which will shatter this pretty picture into pieces.
It was all going so well, but then –to nab a line from one of Colt’s ‘I’ll Sing for You’ songs- “....along came Bill”. Terri arrives home early to find Chad and his friend Bill, you get the feeling something is wrong here when Bill immediately starts checking Terri out, right there in front of her husband. After Chad suspiciously makes his excuses and leaves, Bill strips off, ready for sex and begins hitting on Terri. Telling her that he’d gotten the okay from Chad fails to convince Terri, and when she rebuffs his advances Bill turns violent, slapping her about, tearing her clothes off and raping her on the floor. After a demeaning anal rape in which Terri pleads “take it out, it hurts in my ass, please”, Chad returns home but in a cruel twist of fate it seems Chad had masterminded the whole ordeal. Rather than turning out to be her knight in shining armour, Chad sneeringly refers to his wife as “a little hellcat” and helps pin her down while Bill finishes off, before Chad also joins in with raping his wife.
The casting here feels a little off though, rather than coming across as aggressive, woman hating heterosexuals, there is a slight air of homosexuality about Chad and Bill. Especially when they start giggling to each other, whilst Terri is forced to blow the pair of them. The men’s lack of inhibitions about getting naked in front of each other, or having their cocks in constant close proximity to each others, is also telling. Colt did seem to have a weakness for using muscular, well hung bucks in his films, irregardless of whether their personalities fitted the character. Rod DuMont, who makes for a somewhat ineffectual Satan in Colt’s The Devil Inside Her, is another example of this type (although DuMont’s ability to masturbate whilst talking backwards is an admittedly impressive party piece.) It feels as if Bill and Chad should be watching daytime soap operas with Terri, and complimenting her on her hair, rather than dragging her to the ground, tearing off her clothes and raping her. It is possible however that this was an intended effect, Terri’s narration appears to hint that Chad might be gay “he was all I wanted in this world, but it seemed I wasn’t all he wanted, he’d stay out at night, God knows what he was doing”. Could Chad and Bill be a team?, and this desecration of his marriage and his wife, be part of their lashing out at heterosexuality in general, and woman in particular?
As with her signature role in The Story of Joanna, Terri Hall’s persona here is of a refined, sophisticated lady who nevertheless can take a phenomenal amount of abuse yet can also get back up off the floor and dish it out with a gusto that commands respect from people of both sexes.
Seeking a partner in crime, Terri relates her story to an unnamed British girlfriend of hers (Jeanette Sinclair) who has also been recently sexually assaulted by her boyfriend. Using the gentle art of persuasion- and a dildo- Terri works her British friend up into both a state of ecstasy and a state of rage, by masturbating her with the dildo whilst pressing her for details about the rape. Flashbacks reveal that Britgirl had walked in on her stoned out, slob boyfriend cheating on her with another woman. Hugely pissed off “you fucking, bloody pig, you make me wanna puke” she goes at him, fists flying, only to get overpowered and tied to the bed. Despite her character’s helplessness, Jeanette Sinclair’s fiery personality dominates the scene as she unleashes a non-stop torrent of abuse, insults and put downs worthy of The Exorcist “you motherfucker...listen man, I’m really gonna get the fuzz”. Were it not for the shackles tying her to the bed, you just know she’d make mincemeat of this guy. In contrast Sinclair’s male co-star seems authentically stoned and more than a little unnerved, simply by being in the same room as her. Alas, all her threats unfortunately do little to deter the boyfriend from raping her or –in his perverted piece de resistance- urinating over her.
At this point, I do feel the need to interject in order to point out how much I adore Jeanette Sinclair in this film, a great unsung cinematic badass if ever there was one. After watching Terri’s Revenge, I guarantee that you will never forget this woman. The question over whether Jeanette Sinclair is actually British or not has held me in suspense for well over a decade now. If her accent is a put on, then it is an extraordinarily convincing one. Utterly natural, without any of the exaggerated ‘Cockney’ twang that even authentic Londoners are prone to adopting when acting for an American audience. If Sinclair’s accent is genuine, then it really does cause my heart to swell with patriotic pride to think that a Brit could hold her own in a fucked up, 1970s NYC roughie. Colt appears to take perverse pride in shattering the American perception of Brits being reserved and polite with Sinclair’s character. He gives her dialogue so filthy and low-down it would make a docker blush and a trashy streetwalker wardrobe worthy of Frankenhooker. Sinclair’s acting style recalls the ‘enthusiastic amateurs’ of early John Waters films. What you tend to remember most about Sinclair’s performance is her bloodthirsty hollering of “LETS KILL THE WHOLE LOT OF THESE MOTHERFUCKERS”.
“Men are so awful” Terri tells her, which given the horrors both women have been subjected too, seems an almost comical understatement, ditto Britgirl’s response “I have discovered that”. Fed up and fired up, the two women decide to turn vigilante and dish out punishment to male rapists. Using Terri’s connections with W.A.R, an anti-rape organisation (W.A.R stands for ‘Women Against Rape’) that keeps taps on recently released rapists, Teri uses W.A.R’s files to track the men down and lure them back to her apartment. Once caught up in this spider’s web, the men find themselves on the receiving end of the abuse and degradation for a change. In a sequence resembling an extreme dominatrix session, a man is whipped by the two women, slapped about the face, bitten on the cock, and forced to go down on Sinclair while Terri dildos him in the ass. Suffice to say that is one sex offender who will never play the piano again. At this point I was going to praise the women of Terri’s Revenge at the expense of Charles Bronson, by pointing out that Bronson never dished out that kind of vigilante justice in his movies...only to remember that ol’ Charlie did indeed stick it to an evil perp with a dildo in Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (1989). A Letterboxd list of “Movies in which sex offenders are themselves violated with dildos” surely beckons (see also: ‘Femmes De Sade’ and ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ’).
Soon the women’s antics are making the news and encouraging other abused women to commit copycat crimes. Economically depicted by a series of newspaper headlines proclaiming ‘Women on a rampage’ and ‘Man raped by 3 women’. A Dragnet style voiceover, by Colt himself, claims “the public at large are alarmed and amused by the female vigilantes....but this is no laughing matter”.
Basking in their newfound celebrity status, the women parade around in matching T-Shirts and leather studded wristbands. In a startling example of breaking the fourth wall, Terri speaks directly to the audience, summing up her crime spree as “a delicious combination of pleasure and revenge”...perhaps the film’s own best epitaph. It’s far from over yet though, and incredibly Terri’s Revenge saves the most shocking for last, as the NYPD send police Lieutenant Henderson undercover in what turns out to be an ill-advised attempt to bring the women to justice. Placing his portfolio amongst W.A.R’s files on rapists, Henderson starts hanging around the waterfront. A big dude, with a goatee, shades and a leather jacket, Henderson certainly looks the part of an evil rapist on the prowl. It’s enough to convince Terri to take him back to her pad, where she projects a kinky European porno loop featuring Vikings raping and pillaging (most likely ‘The Vikings’ by Lasse Braun) then fucks Henderson while ‘I Can’t Keep from Crying Sometimes’ by Ten Years After plays on the soundtrack. The sight of film footage being projected onto Hall’s naked body, that soundtrack choice, and Henderson’s fourth wall breaking remark that Terri is “a real spaced out chick” help give the scene an unexpectedly late 1960s psychedelic feel.
After they have had sex, a post coital Lieutenant Henderson finds himself at the mercy of Terri and her British cohort. Henderson happily blows his cover at the first sight of trouble. Protests about his real identity falls on deaf ears though “a cop and a rapist, ha, ha”. Fuck it, Terri and her friend decide to have fun with him anyway. While Britgirl attacks him with whips and a paddle, Terri ties up the dude’s balls...creating what can best be described as a large, purple, mushroom shaped mound of genitalia. That line from Videodrome “where do they get actors that can do this” tends to play in your head while watching this ball breaking grand finale, as Britgirl sits on the guy’s face demanding “eat my pussy, you bastard” while Terri gamely, but unsuccessfully, tries to hump his man made...sorry female made, pseudo-penis. Excruciating to watch as this scene is, the severe masochism of the actor, and his ability to handle this amount of pain, demands a certain respect, I guess.
In a victory for sexual equality our female vigilantes –like Bronson in Death Wish- suffer no consequences for their actions, and at the end of the film are still on the loose and as dedicated as ever to vigilantism. Colt’s voiceover informs his audience to be on the lookout for a “raven haired girl by the waterfront”. A warning to the misogynists who’ve shown up for this film, a promise to the part of Colt’s audience who’d gladly put their balls in a noose for Terri Hall. Colt’s films court all kind of tastes.
A common criticism of the rape-revenge genre as a whole is that the rape and sexual assault scenes are revelled in, yet the depiction of the revenge against their male perpetrators is comparatively minor and dispassionate. An accusation that I don’t think holds much water with Terri’s Revenge. Scenes of men being violated and having their balls tied up, match if not surpass the abuse the women suffered earlier on in the film. Unlike many hardcore roughie directors –who seemed singularly hung up on the abuse of women- Colt’s eye for the sexual here is more healthily diverse. There’s some consensual outdoor lovemaking at the start for the ol’ romantics, before the film makes good on the roughie formula of seeing women being beaten down and degraded. This is followed by a soupcon of consensual lesbianism by Hall and Sinclair, before Terri’s Revenge goes all fem-dom, and plays to those among us who can’t truly love a woman unless she is sitting on your face and calling you a motherfucker and a fucking pig. There is something for everyone in Colt’s little world.
While some –especially in this day and age- might rush to judge Colt a cold blooded misogynist on account of this film, the celebratory nature of the women’s revenge on the men, and Colt’s glorification of it, paints him as an unlikely woman hater. Anecdotes about Colt the actor becoming deeply distressed during the filming of the scene where his character has to cut Terri Hall’s hair off in The Story of Joanna (some retellings of that story even claim the scene reduced Colt to tears) suggests a far more sensitive soul than his films would indicate, backed up by the tender nature of the ‘I’ll Sing for you’ album.
Colt’s achievements in film are even more remarkable given how little he must have had to play around with. Colt’s regular financier/producer Leonard Kirtman having something of a reputation of being the cheapest of the cheap in NYC. A reputation that going by Kirtman’s occasional forays into bargain basement horror filmmaking (Carnival of Blood, The Curse of the Headless Horseman) wasn’t unjustified. Colt though had the ability to turn what insulting scraps of a budget Kirtman threw at these movies into red hot intensity. Terri’s Revenge looks to be even more low-budget than your average Colt/Kirtman film. An example of Kirtman’s cheapness can be found in the fact that footage from the opening outdoor sex scene here also found its way into another of their films ‘Unwilling Lovers’. The use of footage from the European porno loop to extend the running time, and unauthorised use of ‘I Can’t Keep from Crying Sometimes’, also comes across as another of Kirtman’s cost cutting measures.
In the hands of a lesser pornographer, this could have just been crass padding, but Colt is far more creative in his use of stolen footage and music. Given Colt’s friendship with Kenneth Anger (the two men attended USC together and were part of the clandestine gay community in 1940s Hollywood) you can’t help wondering if Anger’s movies were an inspiration here. Colt’s use of well known pop music and mindfucking imagery does feel very Ken Anger, albeit in a heterosexual context. The frenzied, feverish nature of the music makes for a perfect black marriage to the visuals, with the porno loop becoming progressively more berserk, as women are led around in shackles by the Vikings, then viciously raped and sacrificially murdered on altars. The end result of this combination of aggressive music and sexually shocking footage is nothing short of explosive.
The experience of watching Terri’s Revenge is akin to a live, hard rock gig. It is an intense, intimate, adrenalin pumping spectacle, with the people up on stage driven by sweaty, boundless energy and a desire to lose control. Terri’s Revenge is a Pandora’s box, to open it is to let loose extreme times and the extreme characters who inhabited it, a past with balls...big, bruised, swollen, purple balls. Zebedy Colt films prefer to rule in hell than spend a lifetime in pursuit of a mythical heaven.
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