Purportedly restored from a rare 35mm print “discovered in a janitor’s closet at the Danish Film Institute”, Severin’s DVD release of THE SINFUL DWARF proves that the well of Euro sleaze is indeed bottomless. The titular dwarf (a phrase I had planned on using, just not today) runs a boarding house with his mother, a former diva. It’s enough of a cover to allow young Olof (a terrifically disturbing performance from Torben Bille) to keep a stable of heroin-addled girls hidden in a secret room where he tortures them into submission and then pimps them out to local men, who presumably know how to keep a secret.
The “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble” skit from The Kentucky Fried Movie contains what I’ve always thought of as a fond tribute to this masterpiece of depravity, a film that could be aptly described as the type “they don’t make anymore”. Bille was apparently the host of a children’s show in Denmark, and given the surprisingly explicit nature of the sex on display here, it’s doubtful that he retained this as a fall-back career. As the filmmakers and actors have either passed away or successfully distanced themselves from the project, the DVD’s only extra is a humorous short produced by Severin that focuses on a couple petitioning Severin not to release the film because of the negative effect it had on their lives after seeing it in a theater. The image itself is full-frame and in better shape than it probably deserves to be.
THE SINFUL DWARF ( Dvaergen, 1973). Directed by Vidal Raski. Written by William Mayo, story by Harlan Asquith. Cast: Torben Bille, Anne Sparrow, Tony Eades, Clara Keller, Werner Hedman, Gerda Madsen.