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Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Good idea lost in the noise

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Mantis in Lace is very much a product of the late 60s, with the ending of censorship and the freedom to experiment with edgier themes. Released in 1968, this film was probably one of the first color soft-core flicks to be released. The special effects are cheesy, the murder scenes are unconvincing, the dialog is hammy, and the plot is paper thin. But what do you expect? The story centers around a cute dancer, Lila, who has a drug problem. She has sex with guys who naively falls for her. Lila, while hallucinating, murder guys after wards. The murders are then investigated. The sex scenes are mainly non-pornographic with usually only the bare back and sides being shown. The 60s are very much the experimental age with some bizarre-looking hallucination scenes. I call it weird art. There is a cut scene that features an even more bizarre hallucination. And it tops it off with a gruesome gory murder that combines bare breasts, blood, and gore. It is something that was and probably is still too explicit to be shown to normal viewers.The heart of the film are, of course, the topless dancing featured by three or four young women. They are very nice to watch, even though a couple of the girls are quite ugly. Mantis in Lace will very much remain a part of film history. Overall recommended, if this is your type of stuff.

Well it's safe to say that Mantis in Lace doesn't have a lot in the way of a storyline. This is obvious from the outset as a sequence that should have took little over five minutes is dragged out to around half an hour, but the lack of plot line isn't important as William Rotsler's psycho thriller is really all about atmosphere. This film precedes a load of these films that were made in the seventies, and is certainly above average for its type. Most of the runtime is taken up by gratuitous nudity and phoney looking violence, as well as a fair helping of scenes involving drug use; and all of this is fine with me! The plot revolves around LSD and features a sweet young stripper who is picked up in a bar by a man. He gives her the drug and this begins a hallucinogenic nightmare as she promptly kills him and then proceeds to pick up other men from the club and take them back to her place, where they suffer a similar fate to her first 'boyfriend'. The twist is that she kills all of these guys with garden tools! There's also a rather lacklustre police investigation going on...Despite the slow pace and thin plot, the film is entertaining for fans of this sort of stuff. Director William Rotsler builds up a fabulous trash atmosphere, which benefits the completely trashy plot line. The film stars Susan Stewart, who perhaps isn't the greatest actress of all time; but she plays her part very well and gives the film the added benefit of some eye candy. She looks good without her top on. A lot of the film takes place inside a strip club, which is an excellent setting for a film like this. The comic relief comes from the two inept police officers, who spend more time coming up with silly theories and cracking jokes than they do actually investigating the crime. But then again, this wouldn't be much of a trashy thriller if it featured decent coppers! There are practically no surprises at all in the plot and it's always obvious what is going to happen - at least it is until the end when Mantis in Lace finally shows some ingenuity (but don't expect too much). Overall, this is a nice little thriller and comes highly recommended to fans of this sort of stuff!

A terrible exploitation film of the late 60's with a sweet actress in the lead role. The cops are really terrible (as actors and cops). The only standout part of the film is the presence of the incredible Pat Barrington. There's nobody quite like her. This director has made better films (The Agony of Love). The sound quality is particularly bad.The title song is excruciatingly awful as is most of the muzak. As I mentioned, if not for Pat Barrington, this would be totally unwatchable. Ms. Barrington should have played the lead instead of playing the belly dancing stripper. She has attributes the other females in the cast do not possess.

SPOILERS The late William Rotsler was an award winning novelist, sculptor, WW2 veteran, photographer and from the mid-Sixties to the early-Seventies a sexploitation director. Rotsler was prolific but his 1968 picture Mantis in Lace is his most well-remembered. Rotsler was also a contributing editor to the UK's Cinema X magazine- a way ahead of it time publication that covered all manner of horror and sex exploitation films. Coincidentally another character who popped up regularly in the pages of Cinema X was Mantis in Lace's producer Harry Novak, whose productions like Please Don't Eat My Mother and Below the Belt were the subject of articles and glossy pictorials. Cinema X also made cover girls out of the stars of Novak's productions like Uschi Digart and Rene Bond. In the UK Mantis was rejected/banned outright by the British-Censor and like much of Novak's output released only in membership cinema clubs (under its alter-ego ‘Lila' and sometimes double-billed with Bob Cresse's Love Camp 7). The film starts as it means to go on, as stripper Lila (Susan Stewart) does a cute dance-act for a crowd who look like they're going to storm the stage any second. Not surprisingly given that she spends her on-stage time topless and her off-stage time in barely much else Lila is never without a strip-club habitual to take back to her warehouse love-nest, where she entertains men with a mix of stripping, music and the chance of a one night stand. When one of her boyfriends brings a new element to the party- LSD(‘the stuff dreams are made of') he gets more than he bargained for. Lila freaks-out on acid big time, stabs the guy with a screwdriver during their lovemaking, then chops him up with a meat-clever. Taking vast quantities of LSD, Lila develops the split personality of meat-clever favouring psychotic by night and happy stripper by day. Among the sleazes getting on the wrong end of various garden implements is Ackerman (Russ Meyer regular Stuart Lancaster) a psychiatrist doing ‘field research on the psychedelic generation'. Ackerman's psychobabble bores Lila but what the heck he's taken back to the warehouse and hacked up anyway ‘you look funny like that'. Discovering Lila's dismembered victims in cardboard boxes are two detectives whose investigation into the murders draws them to the seedy side of LA- giving Rotsler ample opportunity to shoot lots of vintage late-night Sunset Strip footage- (‘Topless, Bottomless,LSD revue'-proclaims a marquee). With its sexy, drug fuelled plot Mantis in Lace was no doubt the film for audiences who craved boobs and psychedelia from their movies back in 1968. ‘Then' dialogue like ‘what's your bag' and ‘my law says groove baby' dates the film, but in the best possible sense and the ace cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs makes the ‘groovy' Mantis in Lace worth a look. Alongside Hollywood's favourite way of depicting acidic experimentation (a thousand swirling light effects from hell) Rotsler and Kovacs offer up subliminal glimpses of LSD-inspired horrors like mad surgeons, chopped up melons(!), and disembodied hands terrorizing our heroine- made all the more effective by the fast editing from Novak's business associate Pete Perry . For the purpose of the trip scenes Mantis even invents its own medical condition in Banana-phobia, yes it seems that LSD brings out Lila's hatred of bananas, so while all her boyfriends have a jolly good time with the sex kitten all poor Lila sees is visions of a fat man in a mask waving the offending fruit in her direction- the symbolism of which I doubt even Lancaster's psychiatrist could fully explain. The irritatingly catchy theme song by one Lynn Harper is guaranteed to forever haunt anyone who watches the film (‘Lila-Mantis in Lace-and she has a pretty face'). Several versions of Mantis in Lace existed, and at least two remain in circulation. The version on DVD is ‘Lila' the sexy version where the girls take their tops-off, while in the shorter Mantis in Lace the girls modesty remains intact and with the focus on Lila's meat-clever antics the film plays more as a Drive-In horror movie. Each version has dialogue and scenes the other doesn't. Unique to ‘Mantis' is a sequence where Lila slices into a sandwich only to start imaging it's a human hand, while the ‘Lila' version serves up a backstage oil massage scene designed to showcase the equally unnatural sight of Orgy of the Dead star Pat Barrington's bust, as well as an out of the blue sex scene between a would-be-stripper and the club's bartender- who auditions the girls the casting couch way. The man on top in the latter is actually Bethel Buckalew who later took credit for directing Novak-produced sex extravaganzas like The Dirty Mind of Young Sally and Southern Comforts (he wasn't behind the camera for any of those films- but that's another story). Nice as it is to see a sex film director, or even a would be one, prepared to do on camera what he would ask others to do, this bartender balling does seem like a needless diversion in light of the fact that the actions of these stock characters have nothing much to do with a film whose erotica is provided by strip-acts and whose sex scenes usually end with the men folk getting hacked-up. Although short on plot and not as explicit as the raunchy soft-core movies Novak's Box-Office International would turn out in the Seventies, the hallucinogenic and innovative Mantis in Lace probably constitutes Mr Box-Office International's finest hour (or five if you add the two versions, the 100 minutes of outtakes and the other DVD extras together). The cherry on the cake is the lead performance by Susan Stewart who whether she's playing sassy, vulnerable or downright evil dominates the film- it's a shame that nothing else in her career (which fizzled out with 1976's The First Nudie Musical) compares. When last heard of Stewart was working as a real estate agent, and hopefully isn't as handy with a meat-clever in real life.