Heartbreak Hotel

By JAY COCKS

PRIVATE PARTS

Directed by PAUL BARTEL

Screenplay by PHILIP KEARNEY and LESRENDELSTEIN

The dark doings dealt with here all center on a rundown hotel right across from MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles. The place is a shabby paradise for dazed runaways, phony clergymen, transvestites, voyeurs and ugly old ladies. There is even a fiend loose in the musty corridors. He keeps committing ghastly crimes, mostly murder by dismemberment, and he is sloppy about disposing of the bodies. Limbs are littered all over. All in all, it is just about the most treacherous place for a night's lodging since the Bates Motel in Psycho.

Private Parts concerns an adolescent girl from Cleveland who puts up at this hotel, which is managed by her dotty aunt Martha (Lucille Benson). The girl is called Cheryl (Ayn Ruymen), a name that can be pronounced correctly only while cracking gum, and she is in for a bad time. Not only do the tenants stalk her and spook her, but her passion for a rather creepy photographer risks more than simple heartbreak. The movie is rather delirious camp, wonderfully photographed by Andrew Davis and directed by Paul Bartel with the fervor of a carny barker at a freak show.

At its best, Private Parts is a smooth parody of hellhouse horror melodramas, with an unsparing musical score by Hugo Friedhofer that furnishes a crescendo every five bars. The cast, however--except for Lucille Benson, who is gruff and quite good--seems to consist mostly of rejects from Central Casting, and the villain (John Ventan-tonio) looks like someone who spends most of his time in the balcony of all-night movies.

Bartel, making his feature debut, exhibits a great deal of somewhat perverse and not necessarily admirable skill. Private Parts tends to be short on horror and long on kinky grue, like a gross animated cartoon. Its most outrageous scene is one between a lovesick voyeur and an inflatable plastic dummy. The distributors, MGM, are keeping quiet about Private Parts. One can appreciate their apprehension.

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