“How much piss do these convicts HAVE?!”

I picked this film up a while ago based souly on the marketing advertising it as one of the more notorious ‘Roughie’ pictures of the 70s. Which was enough of a batsignal to pull me in, but I didnt *quite* realise what I was getting stuck into…This thing is a mess. a dirty…DIRTY mess.

The films just over an hour long and has a plot so loose its hanging around its ankles. We open on a farm with a banjo weilding title theme song that sets up all the characters, Ma and Pa are farm owners, and Pa is restless for some action with Ma, meanwhile the farmers daughters Martha, Jane and Kate are fascinated with this whole ‘Sex’ thing and regularly drop by the house to catch their own parents ‘in the act’. The local farm hand ‘Fred’ is also on the scene and wants all three of the daughters, who tease him relentlessly for it.

And based on the first 10 minutes of this film, I thought I thought I was going to be in for a fairly generic ‘farm based’ adult feature with maybe a little rough housing and mildly incestuous themes (as is expected in farm porn) But it genuinely surprised me at just how depraved the film gets in places. As what follows is an extended sequence where the daughters rape and pee on Fred, who swears revenge. only; THEN, the film cuts to 3 new characters who are escaped convicts on the run. They find the farm house, find ma and pa and decide to incapacitate Pa, so they can have their own fun (against her will) with Ma.

things pretty much devolve from there into rape based, water sport rampant, sodomizing incestuous insanity from there on in. and while a LOT of this film made me feel a bit uncomfortable, the absolute rediculousness of this film on a technical and thematic level made it genuinely too funny to turn off.

For a starters, the film itself is chaos. We open with the intros to the characters, cut to ma and pas sex scene (which repeats the same 2 minutes of sex footage out of sequence for a full 8 minutes) with AWFUL…AWFUL ADR overdubbing that sounds like two furbys having a conversation through a tin can telephone.

The film then jumps BACK in time to reshow the ma and pa sex scene from the daughters perspective, but nothing new is added apart from some footage of the daughters looking through the window and reacting to the sex. we then get the Fred rape scene, in which the actress who rapes Fred is shown either bottom half being penetrated, or top half reacting to being penetrated, but you only see a full body shot once. it’s SO weird. at first I thought the actress had quit out and they’d had to get another adult actress in to shoot the penetration scenes, but then towards the end of the scene you do get ONE full body shot of her having sex, and then it cuts back to the weird ‘top half only reaciton shots’ or ‘bottom half being penetrated’ stuff…

We then jump WAY back in time AGAIN to go through the entire films run up to this point AGAIN from the cons perspective as they flee from the law, find the daughters raping Fred, head up to the house and find Ma and Pa at it, and decide to run a train on Ma.

and what follows from that is LITERALLY all over the place. Im fairly confident the film only existed as one sentence pitches on cocktail napkins. NOONE seems to know what their lines are or how to deliver them, the writer clearly had NO idea how to structure a script because, everytime he forgets to add in something about a character, the film just…BEGINS AGAIN, from that characters perspective to add in 1 extra scene where they clarify that the character DOES know something.

The tone is bizarre flitting between graphic and unpleasent depictions of rape to utterly surreal line deliveries that literally made me wheeze laughing. I dont know what Zebedy Colt thought he was doing here. But in terms of leaving a lasting impression. He has.

The directions incredibly high level, we’re trench deep in that period of 70s adult features where everyone looks ill, even the film stock looks ill and sickly. everythings starkly overlit, and everything has a dirty seedy green and brown vibe to it. 90% of the shots here are done for function over style, Colt makes, the BIZARRE choice to shoot most of the sex scenes in 3 different styles: Top half with actors and actresses clearly gyrating on nothing, but reacting. Bottom half – which is basically just awkwardly placed, murkey, unpleasent penetration shots. and probably the least appealing of the 3 options; extreme eye shattering closeups of genitles. Im talking top to bottom, left to right, barely focussed shots of butt holes, vaginas and penises looking unclean and unpleasent. I brought a yoghurt up with me to watch with my movies tonight, its staying in its pot now.

direction of the cast seems to be nothing more than telling them bluntly what to do ‘Do her doggy style and say something like ‘Do you like piss bitch?!’..and even then the cast dont *quite* nail even that. its just…obscenely rough around the edges.

And thats not even getting into the cine, as mentioned you have the 3 different shot types for the sex scenes. But this whole thing looks atrocious, its largely shot free hand, shots are hideously composed, have no colour coordination, no attempt at visual story telling, and because of the lighting everythings blown out and its a wonder we can see anything at all.

But easily, the worst…THE WORST. part of this movie, is its edit. I thought my DVD copy of this was broken, I honestly did. So…from the top. Because they didnt shoot enough footage of the sex scenes, they just repeat the footage over and over until the ‘pop’ shot. meaning 2-3 minutes of footage can end up running for 7-9 minutes. they didnt bother recording sound during the sex scenes, so they’ve had to ADR ALL the porn scenes. I hope you like the sound of a man slurping soup directly into a microphone thats recording WAY hotter than it needs to, because that WILL be blasting out at you at an unreasonably loud volume whenever a blowjob scene happens.

The ADR doesnt always match up with whats happening on screen either, sometimes its just actors pissing about in a vocal booth saying anything that comes to mind, no matter how ludicrous or strange. (This is an element I actually really like because they’re genuinely hilarious)

The editor seemingly didnt know how to cut a narrative together, so as mentioned, the film flip flops around in time showing the same sex scenes 2- 3 times from each of the characters different angles with very little difference between each run. Theres NO attempt to try and intercut these 3 plots into one coherent story. they literally do just, restart the film every time they want to add something in.

The film will randomly cut WAY too early (mid sentence during conversations) or WAY too late leaving people just standing around. At at least two points, the film abruptly stops mid sentence and just…sits on a dirty block brown screen for 2-5 seconds before hard cutting to a totally different scene. they frequently intercut flash frames from other parts of the movie randomly into the sequence. and the finale is quite literally a seizure inducing flash frame extraviganza of ALL the footage leading up to the end of the film haphazardly thrown together with no rhyme or reason…I felt like I’d entered the 2001: A Space odyssy time tunnel…I sincerely believe this film was edited in a blender.

The cast are all manic, WAY over the top and just plain weird, which again, Is something I really enjoyed because, their delivery choices and physical presences are all SO awkward and strange, it makes simple lines instantly quotable. Not a SINGLE decent performance in the entire movie…but you want a quotably bad performance? this films got you covered.

And the soundtracks mostly banjo tunes apart from the title track which has a bonus narrator added over the top for good measure. its cut about as well as the footage, so…yeh. its WILD.

Its rare these days that I get genuinely surprised by an adult feature, and with ‘The Farmers Daughters’ I wasnt expecting anything *too* surprising. But this films genuinely nuts. I have no other way to describe it. Its the ranting incoherency of a horny HORNY man who wanted to share his pent up frustrations with the world. I could see some people calling this work offensive, but I think ‘The Sam Raimi Defence’ applies here. In the sense that this work is SO over the top and rediculous that I dont think anyone could ever take it serious, letalone an advocation.

If your into ‘Roughie’ cinema or ‘adult films’ I’d absolutely say this is worth catching at least once, it’s in the same pedigree as films like ‘Batpussy’ for just how incoherent and fever dreamy it feels. You’ll feel fine for the first 10 minutes, but just be ready for that skillet to the side of the head! its a doozy!

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/the-farmers-daughters/