If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you combined a taxidermist, a sister with stabbing issues, and an endless supply of horse tranquilizers, congratulations: you’ve just described Deviation. José Ramón Larraz’s 1971 sleaze-fest is the kind of movie that makes you feel like you need a tetanus shot just for watching it.
The setup is straight out of a cautionary pamphlet they’d hand out in rural England: young couple crashes car in the countryside, accepts help from weird strangers, and ends up in a nightmare stew of drugs, embalming fluid, and sex at gunpoint. Honestly, if you see someone in a taxidermy apron waving you inside their creepy mansion, just die in the car wreck—it’s a faster exit.
Julian, the resident Norman Bates knockoff, is a taxidermist who has graduated from squirrels to people, and his sister Rebecca is one stabbing away from a frequent flyer card at the loony bin. Together, they run their country house like a combo platter of Texas Chain Saw Massacre and a bad swinger’s party in rural Dorset. Paul, our unlucky male lead, gets drugged, humiliated, and then stabbed by Rebecca, who apparently treats murder like an afterthought, the way you might stub out a cigarette.
Olivia, meanwhile, spends the movie being drugged, groped, and dragged through scenes that feel like rejected outtakes from a government-funded anti-drug PSA. “Endless orgies,” the synopsis says. Endless, yes—but they’re about as erotic as wet laundry hanging in the rain.
The movie even throws in a senile medium named Auntie who warns Olivia to get out before it’s too late. Auntie’s right, of course, but she’s also in the same house, which makes her less of a Cassandra and more of a hypocrite with a wig. Add in an elderly chemist who supplies the drugs and then gets seduced and killed—because apparently Deviation needed to pad its runtime with geriatric foreplay—and you’ve got yourself one hell of a fever dream.
The ending? Olivia wakes up in a hospital, traumatized and hallucinating that the staff are Julian and Rebecca. Which is exactly how the audience feels: trapped, drugged, and hallucinating that the projectionist is out to get them.
Final Verdict:
Deviation is what happens when you let a taxidermist write the sex scenes and a junkie edit the script. It’s sleazy, sloppy, and so utterly joyless it makes embalming fluid look refreshing. Larraz would later get better at turning sex and death into art, but here it’s just a long, sweaty grind that leaves you wondering if the real deviation was wasting 89 minutes of your life watching it.
