augustian If memory serves me right, this is the first Doris Wishman film I have seen. To me, it can be likened to seeing a car crash by the side of the road: it is tragic, awful but something tells you to keep looking. After Arthur Barlen has had a penis transplanted from his dead friend, Felix, he goes on a raping and murdering spree whenever he sees gold earrings. His detective uncle (Larry Hunter, who reminds me of Burt Young of Blood Beach 1980) has the task of tracking down Arthur.Doris Wishman certainly seems to be something of an acquired taste. There are pointless shots of objects such as a telephone base and carpets as people walk over them. Walking along the streets is also a good one. Then there is the off-screen dialogue. This film is supposedly classed as a "roughie" but compared to other films of the genre it seems quite tame. Maybe it is because the DVD version reviewed runs for only 71 minutes instead of the database figure of 77 minutes and the more extreme stuff has been cut; but why? Surely we should be able to make up our own minds.

Vornoff-3 This is a movie about a man's penis, however that penis is never shown (what would Lacan say?). It falls into the category of "roughie," which is to say that the plot makes it sound nastier than what we actually see on the screen. Essentially, Arthur, a young virginal man who envies his friend's sexual prowess arranges to have the friend's penis transplanted to his own body when the friend conveniently dies of a rare virus. Having heard that his friend was really into women with gold earrings, Arthur finds that he can no longer control himself when any woman wears gold earrings, and he assaults them, rapes them, and sometimes kills them (it's not clear why he kills some and not others, except that some of them have to survive to tell the tale or the plot doesn't work). Of course, this being a smut film, all the women Arthur encounters wearing gold earrings are of course young and pretty. The rapes are also fairly tame, even by roughie standards, which I tend to attribute to the director, Doris Wishman (an actual woman as opposed to the many pseudonymous women in the business at the time). She also uses the movie as a means of exploring the many ways women respond to rape – some of them blame themselves, some of them are angry at the world, some of them decide they actually liked it after the fact, etc. She also touches on some interesting questions of the then-illegal status of abortion, as the doctor who performs this mad operation is an illegal abortion-doctor. Of course, Doris was no feminist, and this film is today mostly a goofy example of smut from a pre-penetration era, but there isn't another like it, even in the oeuvre of Edward D Wood.

capkronos No, PERCY (1971) wasn't the first penis transplant movie. The sultana of sleaze, Doris Wishman (one of the only women directing exploitation movies at the time), directed and wrote this oddball softcore horror drama first. Arthur (Juan Fernandez) can't get it up, so he seeks the aid of a doctor who transplants his recently deceased friend's member onto him. Soon the operation goes sour and he finds himself in hiding after he kills his girlfriend. For some reason gold earrings set him off! In flashbacks, he seduces, rapes and/or murders other women. One is played by porn star Kim Pope. Another is a fat lesbian, and she gets sick after they do it and hovers over the toilet as Wishman's never-stable camera tilts down for a nice shot of the ladies zitty rear-end!There's plenty here to entertain cult movie and Wishman fans (including lots of her trademark bizarre camera placements and tracking shots) and at times hints of (gasp!) substance rear their ugly head before being immediately trampled over by the next ridiculous or implausible plot move, terrible performance or laughable line of dialogue.The version I saw was unrated, but could get a soft X rating for all of the soft core sex scenes and nudity.Score (only if you're a sleazehound or Doris fan): 5 out of 10

DWilster A classic Wishman theme: male sexual insecurity plus female sexual desire (represented here by golden earrings) equals lots of violence. But somehow it's less intense than her earlier roughies, perhaps because of the larger cast or more frequent scene changes (invariably proceeded by "walking on the sidewalk" filler).