Friday, April 25, 2014

Cargo of Love (1968)

Director: Anton Holden

Writer: ???

Composer: ???

Starring: Sheila Britt, Gloria Irizarry, Tony Pascal, Sam Stewart, William Countryman, Barbara Wallace, Charles Abrams, Jean Parker, Angelique, Janet Banzet, Rita Bennett, Richard B. Shull

More info: IMDb

Tagline: The true story that begins where the newspaper headlines ended!

Plot: A young woman answering an ad for a traveling companion winds up drugged, kidnapped and in the clutches of a white slavery ring.

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again?  No.

If you like rape (and 9 out of 10 people do, group studies have shown) then you'll dig the opening of this picture.  She gets fed up (I know, right?) and answers an ad in the paper.  She's flown out to who knows where, fooled into thinking she's going to be pampered, gets drugged and sent to a wooded house where she's forced into prostitution.  It's like ripped right out of my childhood, Scoob! There she's forced to do all kinds of salacious things.


The music, probably stock library tunes, is fucking off the charts amazing.  It's like it was written for a good James Bond clone from '64.  It's very brassy and groovy and it's the best part of the picture.  Sure, there's the nudity but it's the music that grabbed me by the former short & curlies and made me take notice.


Send in the sexy undercover secret agent!


She infiltrates the prostitution ring (in like a minute), finds the one girl we followed from the beginning (I've no idea why she singled her out other than we've been following her - why not the other girls, too?) and they escape together.  The chase is on to get them back but the race is on to save them by the agent's boss.   SPOILER ALERT!!!  The ending doesn't make a lick of sense, as if I were watching an edited version.  The girls are running in the dark woods.  Two guys are running after them and a third guy is on his own.  I'm presuming the two dudes are there to save them and the single there to capture them.  The one dude ends up dead and then we see the two girls lying dead in the grass.  It's just implied they're dead 'cause we don't see or hear anything.  One second they're running, the next they're prone.  Then there's a little scene back at the house of slaves with the leader chick berating one of the girls and a quick succession of two second scene from throughout the picture.  The End.  What?  Look, it doesn't matter. We're not watching these for the plots.  Fortunately this one had one but they probably just said fuck it in the end and moved onto the next picture.  Still, it's got some nice nudity and it's not that bad of a roughie, a type of film that began in the early to mid-60s that featured violence against women including torture, kidnapping, rape and murder.  This is a decent entry in that interesting sub-genre of films from the 60s.  It's available from Something Weird Video.  I love those guys and gals.

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