WATER POWER
Alpha Blue delivers another uncut film on dvd, this time the Shaun Costello disturb-a-rama WATER POWER based on the real life exploits of "The Enema Bandit", Michael Kenyon. This haunting love story features our old pal Jamie Gillis as a creepy Jamie Gillis like guy who breaks into apartments and forces enemas on women. It's fairly icky as you would imagine and is pretty close to a low budget slasher in terms of style and execution. But if you wanna get arty I suppose you could make a case for it being a Bresson "man alone in a room" flick of maybe a Paul Schrader-esque character study. Costello had shown his horror movie leanings on his FORCED ENTRY, a mix of roughie sex picture with some LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT thrown in. WATER POWER opens with music that even seems a little like Bernard Herrman's CAPE FEAR and PSYCHO scores.
So Gillis' character likes hookers and porno and witnesses an enema being given to a girl at the whore house he visits. Veteran adult actor Eric Edwards pretends to be a doctor who gives enemas. I suppose it was pretty exciting for guys into that kind of thing and it does get pretty fetishistic about the different equipment. The Hermann like score is cranked up to give it a psycho descent into madness feel. Gillis goes homes muttering about "cleaning out these bitches" and a maniac is born. When he's not thinking about enemas he spies on his neighbor with a telescope. We hear more of his interior monologue about cleaning up the whores as he keeps a weirdo journal, or replaces the faces of women in enema mags with pictures he's taken of women he's come across. After he rapes and does his thing with a stewardess, some cops get in on the case. There's a scene with two teenagers and then in a twist his last victim is a female cop that was on the case.
Just as a slasher flick, it works on a low budget level. Gillis is certainly creepy enough and all the stalker/ slasher tricks are there. Well, not all but a lot of them. It's pretty effective for what it is. Even the sex scenes seem to be secondary from the character of Gillis, as a enema obsessed Travis Bickle like psycho. It looks as good as any low budget New York set psycho picture too, say something like DRILLER KILLER. The scene with the teenagers was the shitiest but not as much as virtually anything on the internet. Ultimately, gross and disturbing but put together with some skill on Costello's part.