Deja View

The Craven Sluck (1967)

DIRECTOR: Mike Kuchar
WRITER: Mike Kuchar
COUNTRY: U.S.
CAST: Floraine Connors, Bob Cowan, George Kuchar, Donna Kerness, Bocko the dog
GENRE: comedy, short, independent, sci-fi?
MISCELLANY: bw; 20m; on DVD as bonus material with "Sins of the Fleshapoids"

Screw "Sex in the City" and "Desperate Housewives." I'd rather watch "The Craven Sluck."

It's the hair on the soap opera. The STD in the seven-year itch. It sends up domestic drivel with its cardboard cutout parody, trashing the petty intrigues that are glamorized in pricier productions.

Meet Adele, a bombed-out shell of a Marilyn Monroe. Her hair is a tousled bed of bleached straw. Her enormous chest pops out of a shirt that grips her body as tightly as she clings to her waning youth. Her footwear of choice for walking the dog: high heels. She ham-glams it up for the camera in lingerie, striking poses that radiate sexual frustration.

Adele's husband makes her "ashamed of her torso" and fails to notice her "womanly charms." When we meet Brunswick, he sends a fist out of The Wall Street Journal, checking his watch. "When will that peroxided WOMAN face up to the responsibilities of being a WIFE?" he wonders, perhaps drawing a distinction.

His inattentiveness cannot satisfy Adele's appetite for adoration, so after her failed suicide attempt, rendered comedic by its lameness and Brunswick's blind, blundering foil, she finds Morton, a leather-pants-clad cad with a bad bowl cut.

In a stroke of casting ingenuity, Morton's wife, Florence, is a man in a skirt and a wig. Literally. Was she always that way? Or did Morton's infidelity redefine her? Or is Morton in the closet?

Florence seems to be faking an injury to milk some sympathy from Mort, who kicks her around when she moves to change the channel on a violent TV program he's watching. He reconciles by serving her toilet water in a teacup. Then leaves the apartment and hooks up with the first woman he sees.

When confronted with Morton's marital status, Adele seems unable to connect the dots that she's married, too.

But Floraine Connors plays the boiling-over sexpot to perfection; her silly smile and misguided adventures endear her to us. Morton's wife and Adele's husband both are played by Bob Cowan, to hilarious effect.

It's all set to a soundtrack scraped off the cheesy easy-listening platters that no one bought at the yard sale. And a surprise sci-fi ending puts the story in perspective.

"Craven" is not striving to be good. It's not (exactly) striving to be bad, either. But it does chop its subject matter down to size with its utter lack of sympathy and subtlety.

When Adele and Morton embrace, for example, the camera cuts away. We know it's not intended as an understatement, because it cuts away to a dog crapping and lingers awhile as it smells its feces. The message seems to be that poop is more interesting.

— Becky