Product Details

• Format: NTSC
• Studio: Quality Video
• VHS Release Date: June 21, 1995
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: B00000FYWR
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #525,981 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Blackest of Sex Comedies - A Noir Romeo & Juliet, June 14, 2005

By 

Glenn R. Urbanas (Richmond Hill, New York USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deep Red [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Jerzy Skolimowski wrote this after Polanski's 'Knife in the Water.' His first English language film is an excursion into the mind of a romantic, sexually repressed 15 year old boy (John Moulder-Brown) who is obsessed with a young woman (Jane Asher) who is an habituee of the Newford Bathhouse, where most of the film is shot. In this seedy, watery world, filled with the alienated and maladjusted who live only for sex and sport, the girl of his dreams does 'favors' for those willing to pay. Rebufing the boy's awkward advances, she encourages him to do as she does. Disgusted and fascinated by her apparent contradictions, he longs to take her away from what he conceives as a hellish place of degradation. Skolimowski exhibits real insight into aspects of British character and the film brilliantly shows the dark side of the 'swinging London' of the late 60s, full of foreboding, the imminence of moral collapse, and disenchantment with illusory hedonistic ideals. The young hero, despairing of success in his 'white knight' endeavor, finds pathetic and fleeting satisfaction for his longing with a cardboard cutout of his beloved, foreshadowing and symbolizing the ultimate end of innocence and the substitution of voyeurism and onanism to maintain the faded ideal of romantic love. With Polanski's 'Repulsion' a powerful antidote to adolescent notions of idealized love.