EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally ran in Drive-In Asylum #26, which you can buy on Etsy.
Nothing is ever truly lost. For example, Miss Leslie’s Dolls, a movie that opened in Pensacola, Florida on December 19, 1972 and played in Fort Walton Beach on March 3, 1973 and the Ft. Pierce Drive-In Theater, the home drive-in of star Charles Pitts, before seemingly disappearing from U.S. screens forever. According to Kim Newman, it also played in the UK in 1973 as a support feature to The Erotic Adventures of Zorro.
For some time, no one was even sure who made it, but it’s thought that it was directed by Joseph G. Prieto, who also directed and wrote Shanty Tramp, Savages from Hell and Fireball Jungle, as well as acting as the second unit director for the Richard S. Flink-directed Six Shes and a He and the Alfredo B. Cravenna-directed, Santo and Blue Demon-starring Las Bestias del Terror. There’s some confusion that he may also be Joseph P. Mawra, who directed – of course – Olga’s House of Shame, White Slaves of Chinatown and All Men Are Apes, as Pitts remembered the director’s last name being Mawra. In truth, no one is really sure. I kind of like that we still have undiscovered things left in our world.
It was written by whoever Prieto was and Ralph Remy Jr., the cinematographer for Shanty Tramp, El fantástico mundo de los hippies, the aforementioned Las Bestias del Terror, Fugitive Killer and The Guy from Harlem.
Once you get past the beginning – a monstrous man removes a nude girl’s dead body from a grave – this settles into what seems to be the typical horror film plot: buttoned-up Boston University Professor Alma Frost (Terri Juston, whose other credits are three adult films and Little Laura and Big John, which starred Fabian and Karen Black) – is supervising three of her students by the names of Lily (Marcelle Bichette, The Gruesome Twosome, Swamp of the Ravens), Martha (Kitty Lewis) and Ray (Charles Pitts, Supervixens, The Girl Most Likely To…, Skatetown U.S.A., King Frat and Hardly Working which is what I call a career). As you can imagine, a thunderstorm has caused them to stop for help at an old dark house.
And here’s where things get odd.
This old dark house is owned by Miss Leslie Lamount (Salvador Ugarte, a Cuban actor who was only in this one film but wrote hundreds of episodes of the telenovelas Lo que el cielo no perdona and Infamia). In seconds you will realize that she is a he, but before that registers, she’s telling Martha that she reminds her of a woman she once cared for and who was lost in the very same fire that claimed the life of her mother when their doll factory caught on fire.
“She was the only one that knew and understood the painful sorrows of my innermost secrets. We loved each other. Had she survived the horrible occurrences of that awful night, my life would have been a happy one,” says Miss Leslie. Shades of House of Wax, this is also her excuse for keeping so many statues of women in her basement.
Still with me?
Roy wanders the manor and discovers a red curtain that is lit from inside. Maybe he thinks it’s Helena Marcos, heh? But no, it is a stage with female mannequins posed around a goblet of fire. As you can imagine, this freaks Roy out, and he runs to show Lily and Martha.
Leslie soon comes in with Alma and explains what they are seeing. These aren’t dead girls but instead wax dolls, and this is all part of Miss Leslie’s religion, showing the flame of eternal life and symbols of her creative longing for beauty.
At this point, would you stay here? Would you allow this strange host to serve you sandwiches, coffee and wine? No, you’d get away as soon as you could. Instead, everyone gets drugged on what Miss Leslie has made and starts bed hopping a year before The Rocky Horror Show played stages and three before it was a film. I don’t think it was an influence, but it definitely is in the same world, a cult-leader transsexual freeing several people from their sexual hang-ups before becoming an axe-wielding maniac.
Martha gets with Roy, which upsets the repressed Alma who is sharing a room with them. Alma leaves, only to find Lily, and finally gets her into bed, revealing that under that trenchcoat and tight hairdo, she’s a wild redhead. Lily finds her way into bed with Martha and Roy, all while Miss Leslie speaks to her mother’s skull, telling her that she will have Martha’s body and that she will never go to the mental home her mother had selected for her.
She follows this reveal up by knocking out Roy and starting her killing spree. And look, as much as I’d like to not reveal to you everything, I just have to write about what I’ve seen. Because under the mask that Miss Leslie wears every day is the burned face of the only survivor – the male survivor – of the doll factory inferno. After killing Martha by fear alone and hacking Lily to pieces, she drugs Alma, chases her through the woods like this has gone from underground art skin film to Italian Gothic – is the road that far, really? – and leads her to a cemetery where she disintegrates before possessing her forever, walking back to the house to unlock Roy from his bonds.
Roy says, “Miss Frost– your voice – you sound like Miss Leslie.” She laughs and says, “I want your love, darling, I need it…I’ve been longing for a moment like this!”
That’s the happy ending we all wanted.
This is a movie that fits into the worlds that movies like Thundercrack, Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood, Ed Wood, Andy Milligan and Jess Franco all seem to inhabit. Transmissions from people not properly attuned to the way that we live in this reality, trying to make movies that can reach us and yet remain just to the left of our consciousness. Even fifty years after it was first shown, it has a strange and abstract power, given an X rating not for any violence or sex, but probably because it just all feels so sleazy. Something somewhere is off.
Miss Leslie’s Dolls was never released on VHS or DVD, but was released for the first time when British distributor Network unleashed a Blu-ray in 2018.
It’s a sex movie that isn’t all that titillating. A horror movie that isn’t scary. And a movie that is still weirder than almost anything else you’ve seen outside Behind Locked Doors, a movie that this could almost be a spiritual sibling of.
Sources
- Temple of Schlock: The Endangered List (Case File #1)
- Kim Newman: Miss Leslie’s Dolls.
