| “The Mother of all dwarfsploitation films.” |
| |||||
Sinful Dwarf, The
DVD/APPROX. 95 MINS/1974/ENGLAND UNRATED
DVD/APPROX. 95 MINS/1974/ENGLAND UNRATED
10
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Former children’s show host Torben Bille took a break from patronizing kids to star as a demented, possibly retarded, pimp in The Sinful Dwarf.
Bille, a diminutive actor, had a “Santa’s little helper” stature that worked to his advantage when performing for children. However, he sought to
put this to an opposite ends here, attempting the performance of malevolence as opposed to safe innocence. Produced by infamous exploitation
huckster Harry Novak, The Sinful Dwarf is a grotesque perversion of the innocence that Bille was used to embodying: innocuous and tiny, he uses
a toy dog to lure a hopscotch playing teenager to his attic room where he knocks her out, addicts her on heroin and turns her into a prostitute: he
runs his attic as a sex-slave brothel populated by naked addicts. Like most pimps, he needs new girls.
Bizarre, unnerving and hilariously overplayed by the gleeful Bille, indulging his every built-up hatred for the children he made a living entertaining,
The Sinful Dwarf unfolds as a demented parable of the perversion of childhood innocence by malevolent male pathology. At one level a grotesque
parody of British familial melodrama – with Bille the monstrous son of a alcoholic, mad mother who leases out rooms to financially strapped couples
while keeping their brothel stocked with heroin – the film turns infantilism into horror. That a seemingly harmless dwarf is so sexually immoral a
man as to imprison, torture and prostitute adolescent girls renders Bille’s every exaggerated gesture with a quality unique to the exploitative
casting gimmick of a dwarf actor – “sinister innocence”. The result makes for one of the most unrelentingly unnerving of exploitation films.
Bille truly looks innocuous and therein lies the deceptive guile of this garish, carnival-barker attraction of a horror film – this is grind-house freak
show horror in the fine tradition of Freaks, The Mutations and The Sentinel. With some nude romping, whipping and copious sexual abuse by the
support cast, the film mixes sexploitation dungeon titillation with physical abnormality and psychological aberration – the dwarf peeping on the
fornicating couple before leading a client to his stable of heroin whores. What is also quite interesting about this peculiar exploitation (or
“dwarfsploitation”) hybrid is that Bille’s physical abnormality is used to denote his malevolence. In this, the film is surprisingly clever: Bille is
horrifying not just for the childishness equated with his diminutive stature but his legacy as a children’s show host – his stature is used for its twin
connotations of childishness and abnormality to embody a concept of perverse innocence. Although admittedly a casting gimmick, Bille uses the
opportunity to essay this mixture of perversion and innocence in a manner rarely offered to actors of his stature.
The exploitative casting gimmick would make Bille the object of horror but the actor uses his ability and reputation to make himself the subject of a
self-consciously bizarre mix of infantile behaviour and perverse sexuality. His dwarfishness in this manner is a metaphor for the evils of arrested
development – no longer a child, he still lives with his mother and has displaced his sexual urges onto voyeurism and pimping. Although the use of
physical disability to signify sexual perversity is problematic, such is a common trope in exploitation film – the evocation of “difference”. But the
makers of The Sinful Dwarf do not stop with this, they make Bille in effect childish, sexually sadistic and self-indulgent. In this, the dwarf
symbolizes the id as monstrous because of the sexual infantilism of its indulgent urges.
That is not to say, however, that The Sinful Dwarf is entirely conscious about these aspects. It is aware of the associations but favours a series
of grotesque tableaux, probing ever deeper into the immoral depths of the title character and his peculiar relationship with his mother, who
performs Carmen Miranda numbers while her son the dwarf plays piano accompaniment. Indeed, in scenes like this and those of helpless naked
women injected with drugs and pimped out to young men (the resultant rapes verging on hardcore), The Sinful Dwarf reveals itself as comedy.
This is a pitiful grotesquerie played for laughs! Its budget constraints are obvious – much of the film is indoors in the one house – and its
psychology is as warped as the exploitation genre can get. To say this film is demented is to underestimate it: violent rape with an explicitness
increasingly pornographic is staged to psychedelic rock, the twisted pathology combining for a wallow in some of the most amoral sex fantasies in
exploitation horror.
One of the grungiest and most unpleasant exploitation films ever made, The Sinful Dwarf has something of a legendary status in the genre and
this Severin DVD is the first ever release of this unforgettable curiosity in the USA. Like the best exploitation, The Sinful Dwarf is an exhausting
viewing experience, challenging in its headlong dive into the sexual perversity underlying the image of the innocuous. The film gets deeper into
sex and drug perversion with every scene, contrasting the heroin-addict brothel (a filthy attic) with the dwindling memories of the mother (a former
exotic dancer now turned madam) for a total debunking of the concept of the sanctity of the bond between mother and son. Exploitation as a
genre is inherently amoral and The Sinful Dwarf uses this amorality for a sensationalist retch at the sheer degrading repugnance of the human
condition: though played for laughs, this is a deliberately unattractive and harrowing film which ranks amongst the sleaziest and scuzziest of films.
Humanity and human sexuality is presented here at its scuzziest: this is exploitation so audacious it must be seen to be believed – Santa here is
the neighbourhood heroin dealer. At times redolent with the sense of cabaret in a sex dungeon, The Sinful Dwarf delights in its bleak
assessment of the human condition, juxtaposing cabaret and torture to provocative effect. As exploitation, The Sinful Dwarf is exceptional,
utilizing the budgetary restraints and conceptual minimalism of the genre to confront the audience with a systematic erosion of all standards of
sexual and cinematic decency and restraint. This film is more than a mere dwarfsploitation curio, it is a clever black comedy about the sheer
desolation of the human spirit – the final scenes with the drooling, mad Bille sadistically sneering as he rapes his way through his own brothel are
simply astonishing: the disturbing and titillating freedom of amoral sexually perverse fantasy made possible by exploitation cinema alone amongst
film genres.
Bille, a diminutive actor, had a “Santa’s little helper” stature that worked to his advantage when performing for children. However, he sought to
put this to an opposite ends here, attempting the performance of malevolence as opposed to safe innocence. Produced by infamous exploitation
huckster Harry Novak, The Sinful Dwarf is a grotesque perversion of the innocence that Bille was used to embodying: innocuous and tiny, he uses
a toy dog to lure a hopscotch playing teenager to his attic room where he knocks her out, addicts her on heroin and turns her into a prostitute: he
runs his attic as a sex-slave brothel populated by naked addicts. Like most pimps, he needs new girls.
Bizarre, unnerving and hilariously overplayed by the gleeful Bille, indulging his every built-up hatred for the children he made a living entertaining,
The Sinful Dwarf unfolds as a demented parable of the perversion of childhood innocence by malevolent male pathology. At one level a grotesque
parody of British familial melodrama – with Bille the monstrous son of a alcoholic, mad mother who leases out rooms to financially strapped couples
while keeping their brothel stocked with heroin – the film turns infantilism into horror. That a seemingly harmless dwarf is so sexually immoral a
man as to imprison, torture and prostitute adolescent girls renders Bille’s every exaggerated gesture with a quality unique to the exploitative
casting gimmick of a dwarf actor – “sinister innocence”. The result makes for one of the most unrelentingly unnerving of exploitation films.
Bille truly looks innocuous and therein lies the deceptive guile of this garish, carnival-barker attraction of a horror film – this is grind-house freak
show horror in the fine tradition of Freaks, The Mutations and The Sentinel. With some nude romping, whipping and copious sexual abuse by the
support cast, the film mixes sexploitation dungeon titillation with physical abnormality and psychological aberration – the dwarf peeping on the
fornicating couple before leading a client to his stable of heroin whores. What is also quite interesting about this peculiar exploitation (or
“dwarfsploitation”) hybrid is that Bille’s physical abnormality is used to denote his malevolence. In this, the film is surprisingly clever: Bille is
horrifying not just for the childishness equated with his diminutive stature but his legacy as a children’s show host – his stature is used for its twin
connotations of childishness and abnormality to embody a concept of perverse innocence. Although admittedly a casting gimmick, Bille uses the
opportunity to essay this mixture of perversion and innocence in a manner rarely offered to actors of his stature.
The exploitative casting gimmick would make Bille the object of horror but the actor uses his ability and reputation to make himself the subject of a
self-consciously bizarre mix of infantile behaviour and perverse sexuality. His dwarfishness in this manner is a metaphor for the evils of arrested
development – no longer a child, he still lives with his mother and has displaced his sexual urges onto voyeurism and pimping. Although the use of
physical disability to signify sexual perversity is problematic, such is a common trope in exploitation film – the evocation of “difference”. But the
makers of The Sinful Dwarf do not stop with this, they make Bille in effect childish, sexually sadistic and self-indulgent. In this, the dwarf
symbolizes the id as monstrous because of the sexual infantilism of its indulgent urges.
That is not to say, however, that The Sinful Dwarf is entirely conscious about these aspects. It is aware of the associations but favours a series
of grotesque tableaux, probing ever deeper into the immoral depths of the title character and his peculiar relationship with his mother, who
performs Carmen Miranda numbers while her son the dwarf plays piano accompaniment. Indeed, in scenes like this and those of helpless naked
women injected with drugs and pimped out to young men (the resultant rapes verging on hardcore), The Sinful Dwarf reveals itself as comedy.
This is a pitiful grotesquerie played for laughs! Its budget constraints are obvious – much of the film is indoors in the one house – and its
psychology is as warped as the exploitation genre can get. To say this film is demented is to underestimate it: violent rape with an explicitness
increasingly pornographic is staged to psychedelic rock, the twisted pathology combining for a wallow in some of the most amoral sex fantasies in
exploitation horror.
One of the grungiest and most unpleasant exploitation films ever made, The Sinful Dwarf has something of a legendary status in the genre and
this Severin DVD is the first ever release of this unforgettable curiosity in the USA. Like the best exploitation, The Sinful Dwarf is an exhausting
viewing experience, challenging in its headlong dive into the sexual perversity underlying the image of the innocuous. The film gets deeper into
sex and drug perversion with every scene, contrasting the heroin-addict brothel (a filthy attic) with the dwindling memories of the mother (a former
exotic dancer now turned madam) for a total debunking of the concept of the sanctity of the bond between mother and son. Exploitation as a
genre is inherently amoral and The Sinful Dwarf uses this amorality for a sensationalist retch at the sheer degrading repugnance of the human
condition: though played for laughs, this is a deliberately unattractive and harrowing film which ranks amongst the sleaziest and scuzziest of films.
Humanity and human sexuality is presented here at its scuzziest: this is exploitation so audacious it must be seen to be believed – Santa here is
the neighbourhood heroin dealer. At times redolent with the sense of cabaret in a sex dungeon, The Sinful Dwarf delights in its bleak
assessment of the human condition, juxtaposing cabaret and torture to provocative effect. As exploitation, The Sinful Dwarf is exceptional,
utilizing the budgetary restraints and conceptual minimalism of the genre to confront the audience with a systematic erosion of all standards of
sexual and cinematic decency and restraint. This film is more than a mere dwarfsploitation curio, it is a clever black comedy about the sheer
desolation of the human spirit – the final scenes with the drooling, mad Bille sadistically sneering as he rapes his way through his own brothel are
simply astonishing: the disturbing and titillating freedom of amoral sexually perverse fantasy made possible by exploitation cinema alone amongst
film genres.
| BUY DVD @ AMAZON.COM |
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||
| Search Review Database: |
| All written material is © from 2006 to Present at DVD Resurrections. This website is for informational and entertainment purposes only. The opinions which are expressed within these pages are solely those of DVD Resurrections. No copyright infringement is intended or implied. |