The Love Captive (1969) User Reviews

The Village, the way it used to be!

[reptilicus · 29 November 2003]

This sexy but often incoherent feature was made in 1969 but looks like it was done some 10 years earlier. Filmed in black and white probably due to budgetary restrictions and shot entirely MOS (without sound) with a narrator and badly dubbed voices this film harks back to the earliest of the Adults Only movies from the earliest days of the modern soft core genre. It begins with a travelogue of Greenwich Village in New York and spotlights a lot of places that to-day are long gone. There are plenty of topless clubs, a movie marquee advertises "Andy Warhol's FLESH" and the bar where Bob Dylan used to hang out can all be glimpsed. The jigsaw puzzle style plot involves a girl who checks into a hotel ($5 a night! Those were the days!) and promptly goes next door to a museum called "Manzini's Museum of the Macabre" (a real life attraction at the time) offering a collection of handcuffs and strait jackets once owned by Harry Houdini. The girl decides she wants one of the strait jackets and lingers in the museum after it closes to pilfer one. While she is locked in a vampire climbs out of a coffin and two nude women dance. A werewolf (or maybe it's a cat man?) attacks a vampire woman while a black woman, referred to by the narrator as "the dark girl", in a leopard bikini dances. Meanwhile back at the fleabag hotel two plainclothes cops place a microphones against the walls and play a recording that says "You can run but you can't escape justice!" for people in the adjoining rooms. Why they are doing this is never explained, but then neither is anything else in this movie. A dominatrix named Sybil comes to the museum, seduces the owner and gets him to leave for the weekend while she takes over and turns the place into a museum/brothel. Why? Who knows! A lesbian is forced to have sex with a sailor and suddenly decides she likes men after all! The girl who stole the strait jacket (which turns up back in the museum a few scenes later) has the hotel clerk naked and tied up in her closet! Why? Don't ask me! Okay so the movie makes no sense, how many of the old Adults Only movies did? The girls are pretty but the sex is unerotic and in some cases kind of scary! So why watch this movie? To get a look at Greenwich Village as it was back in the Old Days, that's why.