It’s strange how similar horror and porn can be.  I kept thinking about this while watching the 1973 grindhouse horror film Miss Leslie’s Dolls.

This movie has three college students, one guy and two women, and a young female professor of theirs holing up in a creepy house in the middle of nowhere as a storm rages outside.  We quickly establish both young women want the guy, and some of the conversation suggests they wouldn’t mind sharing him together.  No changes would be necessary to cast the professor as Velma in a porn parody of Scooby Doo, what with her large round glasses, prim demeanor and tight sweater.  No points for guessing she’s a repressed lesbian.

A great deal of dialogue concerns loosening up and letting go of one’s inhibitions.  I kept asking my wife, “This is about to turn into porn, right?”  And yet, strangely, it never did, only suggesting lesbian sex and a possible threesome.  Also, you may have noticed I watched this with my wife.  I am the luckiest man on Earth.

But there’s one character, the central one, which I haven’t mentioned yet.  That is Salvador Ugarte as the title character, the least convincing trans person in the history of cinema.  I hope I’m not spoiling it for anybody when I say the big twist near the end is the revelation Miss Leslie is a man, but I suspect any toddler could see through this ruse.  I was astonished the other characters all fully believe this is a woman.  Then again, everybody’s acting in this is so bad I wasn’t even convinced they believe that.

Compounding the strangeness of this character is a woman’s voice is dubbed in for Ugarte’s, yet his lips and her voice sync, at best, at random.  Any sane filmmaker would have recorded the woman’s voice first, but I suspect they did this the other way around.  Regardless of how it was done, the poor audio synchronization adds a level of surrealism.  Miss Leslie has a black cat that meows a lot, and I wondered if the audio was that of a cat of the opposite gender.  It would just seem to round out the general incompetence here.

The plot (though there is not much of it to be found) has Ugarte trying to transfer his spirit to the body of a young woman.  He preserves the previous failed attempts in a wax museum of sorts in his house.  Each corpse “doll” is in a standing position, all of them around a flame that is somehow always burning.  The importance of the flame was lost on me, aside from a general “occult” vibe conveyed by a glowing moon suspended in the background.

As the meddling kids in this film believe Ugarte is a woman, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that they also fail to immediately recognize the dolls as preserved corpses.  Well, one of the young women does, but the others convince her otherwise.  Also, she doesn’t try to convince them to leave the house, even after the storm that brought them there has stopped.  Myself, I would have wondered how “wax” statutes were holding up so well in constant close proximity to an open flame, but what do I know.

The highlight of the picture for me is the dolls.  It is the one element that was genuinely unnerving to me, though I also couldn’t stop thinking about The Master’s wives in Manos: The Hands of Fate.  There is a development in the third act involving them which I didn’t foresee and which had the kind of uncanniness other low-budget fare like Carnival of Souls sometimes achieved.

Also, the obvious lacks of funds and the high grain of the film stock make this a slightly disturbing experience.  The closest analogy I can think of is the first time one watches The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and you start to wonder if you are watching a truly dangerous film.  I don’t want to oversell it, but I found myself nagged by not only the possibility this could suddenly turn into straight-out hardcore pornography, but that it might turn into something far worse. 

The movie does try for a bit of sympathy for Miss Leslie, though I don’t think anybody would mistake this for an early attempt to portray trans people in a positive way.  Miss Leslie is still a homicidal maniac and the trappings of a gender-identity crisis are merely the lazy psychology such films of the time frequently employed to provide motivation.

In the UK, Miss Leslie’s Dolls was on a double-bill with The Erotic Adventures of Zorro.  That makes a weird kind of sense, as the bad acting, flat line readings and overall horniness gives the impression this will cross the line into porn at any second.  It doesn’t do that and, instead, this low-budget, sleazefest ends up being a curiosity: a deeply terrible film where some glimmers of interesting ideas still manage to emerge.

Dir: allegedly Joseph G. Prieto, though the booklet accompanying the blu-ray concludes nobody really knows who directed this

Starring…you must be shitting me–nobody in this even has a profile pic on IMDB

Watched on Network UK blu-ray (all region)