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A Saint… A Woman… A Devil

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    Ian Jane
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  • A Saint… A Woman… A Devil



    Released by: Vinegar Syndrome
    Released on: March 11th, 2014.
    Director: Peter Savage
    Cast: Joanna Bell, Marc Stevens, Helen Madigain, Bobby Astyr
    Year: 1977
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    The Movie:

    A hardcore porno version of Flora Schreiber's Sybil, 1977's A Saint… A Woman… A Devil (also known as Sylvia) is the only known credit or the mysterious analingously astute Ms. Joanna Bell. Originally released by VCX and then again by After Hours Retro, the movie lives again thanks to the efforts of Vinegar Syndrome. Interestingly enough, the film was written and directed by 'Armand Peters' also known as Peter Savage and Peter Petrillo, a real life New York mobster who dabbled in moviemaking and who appeared in small roles in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull (which he also produced and helped write), Vigilante and, surprisingly, Doris Wishman's Double Agent 73!

    The film tells the strange story of the titular Sylvia (Joanna Bell), a woman who suffers from multiple personality disorder. Any time she becomes sexually aroused, one of her personalities will become dominant and she'll stop at nothing to get the physical satisfaction she wants. We learn this very early on in the film when a sleazy looking door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman (played by Marc Stevens) comes calling and winds up receiving more than he bargained for. Sylvia may look innocent enough when her hair is pulled back and her glasses are on but once she gets in the mood she'll eat your ass. For real! Joanna Bell shows a very strange penchant for male ass eating in this movie, which is kind of a rarity in dirty movies of this era.

    At any rate, Sylvia's behavior confuses her friends, some of whom start to wonder if she might be possessed by a demon or something. She sees a psychiatrist named Dr. Balaban (played by Peters himself) who does his best to help her, but it looks like Sylvia has bought herself a one way ticket to a sexually repressed and religiously bizarre crazy town.

    Sylvia is an interesting movie not only for Bell's truly bizarre performance but also because it honestly strives to be an intelligent psychological thriller. It doesn't quite get there but you can tell that the director had his heart in the right place and that some effort was put into the script. That said, this is still a porno movie and it falls into the same traps that most 'porno with a plot' films fall into, and that's the requisite sex scenes. Though they're integrated into the plot fairly well, they can sometimes pull you out of the movie but to Peters' credit, they're well shot and enthusiastically performed.

    Front and center in all of this is Bell, a genuinely interesting performer. She's not traditionally attractive but she has a certain quality to her that makes her completely watchable. And when Bell goes for it? She goes for it, taking on all comers, male and female alike. One has to wonder whatever happened to her and why she didn't make more movies as she's obviously into the role she plays in this picture. Aside from Bell and Marc Stevens, look for cameos from pretty hippie chick Helen Madigan, Bobby 'the Human Flea of Porn' Astyr and big, goofy Sonny Landham (who would later star in Predator and run for office in Kentucky). The rest of the cast appear to have just been locals, possibly friends or family members who wanted to appear in the picture, and it seems unlikely they were professional performers.

    While the film isn't particularly well shot or well edited, it does move at a decent clip and it's never dull, in fact it's quite entertaining. There are enough strange elements here to make this an interesting excursion into seventies sleaze. It's not sexy enough to work as masturbation fodder and it's not professional enough to succeed as an artistic statement but it is definitely weird enough to work really well as a quirky, hardcore exploitation movie. And if hardcore isn't your thing? Well, just skip ahead on to the extras. It's also worth mentioning that the version of the XXX cut on this disc is one hundred and eight minutes, which is considerably longer than the ninety-one minutes XXX version that was released by After Hours a few years ago and the extensions are mostly to dialogue scenes and character development scenes including one obvious addition in which we see a key part of Sylvia's childhood (complete with an underage actress - in a completely 'safe' role, nothing dicey here).

    Video/Audio/Extras:

    Vinegar Syndrome presents the feature framed in its proper aspect ratio of 1.85.1 scanned at 2K from original 35mm elements and it looks very nice. There are some scratches here and there and a bit of print damage pops up from time to time but generally speaking, this is a very solid picture. Colors look excellent throughout and detail is consistently impressive (save for one or two shots that look to have been shot either out of focus or with an intentional soft focus look). Skin tones look nice and natural and black levels are deep without obscuring shadow detail.

    The film gets the Dolby Digital Mono treatment, in English and without any optional language options or subtitles provided. Clarity of the mix is fine. The score sounds good here and the levels are properly balanced, as such, the dialogue is easy to understand. There is minor hiss in a few spots but it's not really a big deal.

    Extras? Well, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is at least understandable and it's that the William Lustig (who worked on the movie in his younger days) commentary track that was on the After Hours DVD has not been carried over (it was a good one). The good news? The R-rated version is included here and it's more than just the XXX version with the penetration shots cut out as it actually features some interesting alternate shots. The movie does work better in its uncut form to be sure, but yeah, for those not into full strength XXX, this is a perfectly entertaining alternative.

    The Final Word:

    A Saint… A Woman… A Devil is a genuinely bizarre movie, a truly weird mix of kinky sex and amusing attempts at twisted psychological horror featuring reasonably good production values and a completely off the wall performance from Joanna Bell. Vinegar Syndrome's release doesn't include anything in the way of extras outside of the R-cut but it does present the feature version in its longest known form and in very impressive condition.






























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