Review of Stud & The Bitch, The

Introduction

When Truffaut famously muttered that British cinema was a contradiction in terms, it could never have been conceived that he could have prophesied the coming of a movie like ‘The Stud’, or, if you prefer, its sequel, ‘The Bitch’ which couldn’t have fulfilled his statement much better. Adapted from the Jackie Collins novels (I must admit, to my disdain and self-disgust, that I haven’t read them, but I can say most assuredly, that based on this evidence they are without question masterpieces of modern literature), her sister Joan stars as Fontaine Khaled (yeah, right!) a night-club ‘hostess’ with her sticky fingers in more than a few lucrative silk-lined suit pockets and an endless supply of sluts and gigolos at her whim. Plausibility, as you can clearly tell, has left the building.

Video

The transfer is only bad: scratchy, dirty, pan and scanned, bad colour but okay in terms of detail. The visuals themselves are simply awful: if it’s not a dreary ripoff of ‘Saturday Night Fever’ in the opening credits it’s the mucky ‘boudoir’ soft-core sex scenes or the self-consciously ‘funky’ club sequences. The year’s most boring party, the world’s most ugly movie.

Audio

In a word: awful. Every utterance, whether dialogue, music or creaky, foley sound-effect, is accompanied by a grating drone of static. As a result, the dialogue (such as it is) becomes almost incomprehensible amongst the drone of the crappy disco score.

Features

A mildly amusing trailer for each film, which is basically an excuse to plug the big names on the soundtrack. Nothing else.

Conclusion

Ostensibly one long (and I mean long!) movie, ‘The Stud’ and ‘The Bitch’ manifest two distinct tales of hedonistic opportunism: the extremely unlikable ‘Stud’ Oliver Tobias works his ‘magic’ to get into Ms. Collins pants in order to climb the social ladder and of course to indulge in some flagrant venture capitalism (natch); and ‘Bitch’ Collins deals with some extremely dodgey foreigners, while dragging anyone into the sack who gives her a second look, presumably to give the whole agonizing exercise the pretence of a plot.

To call these movies terrible seems almost beside the point, but, this is a review after all so here goes: Tobias tries valiantly to out-sleaze the entire cast but ends up looking like a 30-something Oliver Reed whose been thrown out of the house by his mum. And Collins, with her concave arse and gerbil face is about as erotic and sinful as microwave macaroni and cheese. As for director Quentin Masters, he directs with about as much flair and class compassion as his name would indicate, making ‘The Stud’ the marginally crueler and more misanthropic of the two. Gerry O’Hare plies a slightly more conventional route in ‘The Bitch’, which somehow manages to make the whole endeavor seem even more stolid and depressing… oh well, why pick favorites?

I know these days we’re supposed to have an ironic embrace of terrible movies from the near-past, but films like this do wonders in illustrating the fallacy of that convention: a soulless, sexless attempt to cash in on the neon-kaleidoscopic swinging of ‘Saturday Night Fever’. It may predate it, but ‘The Bitch’ captures the muddy-focused cruelty, snobbery and sordid side of Conservatism with a worrying prescience. Unbelievably, unthinkably, unspeakably and unquantifiably awful. Enjoy!