Made smack in the middle of that wasteland decade for the British horror film, The Perv Parlour is an insane but relentlessly puerile effort from Josh Collins and Alex Chandon that seeks to disguise its juvenile attempts to be outrageous behind a mind warping and frankly incoherent narrative. The eponymous Perv Parlour is a time travelling brothel from another dimension that sets down temporarily in an alternative, steampunk Victorian London where it is visited by royal gynecologist Professor Rumphole Pump. As demonic forces gather to invade and subjugate our reality, it’s down to Pump and his dim-witted sidekick Watty to save the day – but can they resist the temptations placed in their way?
Do we really care? Certainly by the time this incompetent and ridiculous 16mm fan-made offering is over we’re close to giving up the will to live. It definitely has lots of ambition, though the deliberate camp, smirking, juvenile attitude towards sex and all-too-obvious attempts to shock (reminiscent of early John Waters) are simply to affected to be effective – their production company is luridly named Red Hot Bazoomas for God’s sake so you can’t say we weren’t warned… Using Barbie and Ken dolls to stage startling hardcore porn scenes (thus disarming censors) may have some amusement value once, but their repeated appearances throughout the film eventually become tiresome.
The incoherence of the narrative is wearing too – the flashy, psychedelic technique is undoubtedly impressive given the paucity of resources at hand, but certainly can’t make up for the fact that the film simply goes nowhere and has nothing to say. It’s just a tired, childish, knockabout farce by people who’d OD-ed on pop culture and were determined to regurgitate those influences on an unsuspecting public. Had this been a short, we’d have had a winner here, but stretched to feature length it just becomes unbearable, a plotless, meandering work of self-indulgence.
The Perv Parlour stemmed from the club scene that co-creator Josh Collins was active in during the early 90s. He was instrumental in the establishment and success of the Gorilla Go Go, a London rock club where the clientele were encouraged to dress up as gorillas, and which eventually mutated into the Frat Shack, a similar venture. It was under the auspices of the Frat Shack that The Perv Parlour was born and the soundtrack was supplied by many of the 60s-style psych-bands that were regulars at the club, among them Vibrasonic, Armitage Shanks and The Diabolics. The score is the only thing about The Perv Parlour that’s in any way enjoyable, a fun compilation of authentic 60s fuzz frenzy that would have made a very fine soundtrack album.
Curiously, the contemporary reviews for The Perv Parlour were largely positive (“everything excessive, loud, cheap, ugly and lurid is exploited to the full to create a disconcerting sensory overload, with plenty of mutant sixties rock ‘n’ roll” – Flesh and Blood; “Collins’ demented movies hark back to the first films of John Waters, eschewing art and commerce in favour of fun and shock value” – Celluloid Jukebox) thus encouraging more of the same in the somewhat better – though not by much – Pervirella (1997). Collins and Chandon directed this semi-sequel together before Collins returned to the club scene and Chandon went on to direct Cradle of Fear (2001).
The EOFFTV Review 