I discovered The Sinful Dwarf (1973) in one of these “top 10 most shocking, weird, disturbing, nasty movies of all-time” YouTube videos. As I had never heard of this movie title, let alone of the film genre “dwarfsploitation” itself, I decided to give it a try.
To be honest, I am not even sure if there has ever been a sub-genre called “dwarfsploitation” or if some clever people just invented the term in order to build a cult around some crappy movies. Just in case there are other ones, please tell me in the comment section below.
The premise of The Sinful Dwarf is crystal clear from the beginning and there is not much to reveal. To sum it up, it’s all about a mentally retarded, physically disabled and vertically challenged “Jack Black” (thank God he isn’t an African-American Jew too) who, together with his alcoholic and ex-showgirl mother, runs a slavery junkie brothel concealed as a cheap pension.
The movie is a perverse, sleazy, dark and grim exploitation flick, composed of the same repetitious, monotonic patterns which always eventuate in graphic ’70s softporn scenes. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, but I have to admit that the main character, Olaf the dwarf (Torben Bille) doesn’t work for me and consequently renders the primitive movie structure ineffective. Director Vidal Raski’s aim was to portray a sadistic and depraved, giggling little man who treats women like mere objects and who should prompt loathing and hatred but in the end he only manages to grate on my nerves extremely fast. Nonetheless, there is something about the movie which made me feel a bit mal à l’aise. Not that I was “shocked” by the movie’s outstanding level of perversity, but the grungy setting and filthy ambiance combined with the sex-slaves’ (Anne Sparrow, Jeanette Marsden, Lisbeth Olsen, and Jane Cutter) rape scenes achieve their effect, and the latter ones almost couldn’t have been more humiliating towards women.
All in all, I don’t recommend this movie because of the failure of the main character. I am pretty sure though that a lot of viewers won’t agree with me and will get the full exploitation dose by watching Torben Bille as the sinful dwarf. Personally, I think that if you are interested in what these drug addicted sex-slave exploitation movies are all about, you should watch the Swedish rape and revenge movie Thriller-En grim film as it is the better evil. Decide for yourself!
