Nymph (1975)

Before he found his niche making TV shows and family-friendly features, director William Dear worked in exploitation cinema, though he displayed no flair for generating trash. Consider Dear’s wretched debut feature, Nymph, a meandering drama about a young man who ventures into the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in order to collect his father from a hunting trip because of a family emergency. An attractive young woman tags along for the voyage, though she’s hardly the sexpot described in the movie’s title; quite to the contrary, she’s inhibited by ’70s standards, refraining from intimacy until after she spends several days with her respectful would-be paramour. In fact, the only real sex in the movie, despite the come-on moniker, is a rape scene that happens inside the protagonist’s mind. Yet the lack of saucy content is hardly the biggest problem with this ineptly edited picture. Vast stretches of Nymph comprise shots of animals, bridges, cars, forests, trailers—really any old damn thing that captured Dear’s pictorial fancy—juxtaposed with rotten songs and/or voiceover tracks. Maybe 25 percent of the picture includes actual synchronized sound. And except for the bit when the protagonist and his girl run afoul of rednecks, virtually nothing happens. Dear cuts between dull scenes of the young couple chatting as they drive and even duller scenes of the protagonist’s father wandering through the woods, thinking aloud (by way of voiceover) about the elusive 16-point deer he wants to kill. Nymph is a numbingly uninteresting barrage of disassociated vignettes culminating in an ending so cryptic as to be pointless. The fact that Dear was able to build a career from such humble beginnings is remarkable.

Nymph: SQUARE