Teenage Seductress (1975)

Amateurish sleaze about a young woman who seeks revenge on her absentee father by tricking him into an incestuous tryst, Teenage Seductress is a weird hybrid of domestic drama and gutter-level sexploitation. Thanks to its barrage of bad acting, cheap-looking cinematography, and clumsy storytelling, the picture has the texture of a low-budget porno flick. Yet the movie includes only two brief nude scenes, and there’s a lot more talk about screwing than there is actual screwing, with most of the screen time consumed by meandering dialogue scenes and such exciting actions as driving around the countryside and putting away groceries. Shot in Taos, New Mexico, the picture showcases a fair amount of local color, particularly during a party scene in which artists and hippies, like, hang out and, like, smoke and, like, do their thing, man. The picture’s leading lady is cult-favorite starlet Sondra Currie, whose sisters are ’70s rockers Cherie Currie (of the Runaways) and Marie Currie. Sondra Currie is quite inept here, conveying neither intensity nor purpose while depicting her character’s pursuit of a demented goal. (On the plus side, she musters some zing when delivering the climactic line: “I’m gonna fuck you, Father, like you fucked me!”) Costar Chris Warfield, as the unsuspecting father/lover, fares somewhat better, sketching a portrait of a middle-aged artist who’s clueless about the wreckage that he’s left in his wake. Less meritorious are Warfield’s behind-the-camera contributions, since he cowrote the anemic script and provided the film’s direction, if that’s the right term for storytelling utterly devoid of intention and perspective. Excepting devotees of Currie’s screen work, it’s hard to imagine anyone digging the experience of watching Teenage Seductress, even with the bizarre scene in which the face of the heroine’s dead mother is superimposed over a showerhead while the mother hectors her troubled offspring.

Teenage Seductress: LAME