Posted by Joey Peters on Jan 29, 2025
Pervirella is a 1997 British steampunk sex comedy exploitation film. Usually, bad comedies make the worst bad movies overall. Humor ages like milk, and failed attempts at comedy ferment into something even worse. Most of the intended jokes in Pervirella fail to land, but the movie puts so much effort into obviously bad ideas that it still contains something of interest. Pervirella is a spectacle of shit that might be worth picking through to find the kernels of... well not golden corn but maybe bronze? Copper?
It’s not quite pornography, at least not in my definition. Genre is one of those terms, like “working class” which has been twisted and deformed so far past it’s original meaning that the word has accreted a couple definitions. The most common vulgar meaning of genre connotes a mere marketing term. Superheroes, romantasy, if you like this you’ll like this. At it’s core, though, there really are genres of art defined by how they are constructed, who constructed them, and what they are trying to convey. Pornography to me is a genre of art where the deeper meaning it’s creators mean to transmit is sexual arousal. While there’s no shortage of nudity or simulated sex acts in Pervirella, everything is staged and shot in a garish parody of sex that loses basically all it’s erotic power. But that’s not to say it’s not pornographic. The sexuality on display is definitely not the softcore I would expect watching Skinemax in 1996 with the volume turned all the way down, but likewise the actual sex acts are very crudely simulated. It simply isn’t hardcore. If I had to put it along the core spectrum I would say it’s al dentecore. Mostly soft, but with the hint of hardness at the center. In specific, the movie has tons of titties, a fair amount of asses both female and male, and a ton of phallic imagery and poorly simulated penises.
The movie starts off with three mock trailers to establish the world. Condon has expanded so much Queen Victoria goes to war with the world and when that fails she builds a wall so high even birds can’t get over. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be London with a C, not Condom? It feels like that should be the joke though? Many things in this movie feel like they came up with the first idea and immediately started shooting without any other prep. Like maybe they had half a first draft script and hadn’t even proofread it, forget editing it. Queen Victoria goes absolutely ape shit and is eventually build into a golden throne to keep her alive and immortal, while she violently crushes anyone who isn’t a total dum dum. It doesn’t feel like a specific parody of anything, it’s just a mess of random bullshit, but it has tons of model work, so you’re not focused so much on the “jokes.”
10,000 psykers must be sacrificed every day to keep Queen Victoria alive on her golden throne
Next is a parody of James Bond named Amicus Reilly who steals the elixir of life from the Amazon, also to keep Queen Victoria alive and immortal. It’s a straightforward parody of a James Bond trailer. It’s short and to the point. It’s not particularly funny but it has a more coherent idea behind it. It just feels like a joke that doesn’t land, although it later turned out to be foreshadowing.
The third parody is some kind of sexploitation movie about the Cult of Perverts and their leader Demon Nanny. Victoria violently cracks down on the cult. She hires Professor Pump to infiltrate the cult and he is immediately seduced by Demon Nanny. Like the first pseudo-trailer this one is also pretty incoherent and doesn’t really feel like a trailer for a separate thing.
This entire stylistic flourish somewhat reminds me of the opening sequence of The Dragon Lives Again; a weird Hong Kong movie about Bruce Lee’s ghost going to Hell and fighting Dracula, James Bond, The Man With No Name, Popeye the Sailor Man, and Emmanuel from the series of soft core porno movies of the same name. Yes, that is real.
The first thing that left me scratching my head is that the elixir of life and golden throne thing are two separate plot devices that aren’t connected. It’s another thing that feels like if they did a second pass on the script they could have made the elixir of life the fuel for the golden throne or something? As it is it simply makes the plot more convoluted and incomprehensible. Another thing that really doesn’t work is about half of the time when Queen Victoria is on screen she looks directly at the camera and says, “Hey Lois, remember that time I said ‘I am not amused?’ Heheheheheheheh!” in a perfect Peter Griffin voice.
To the movie’s credit, the production design has tons of effort, love and spit built into it. You can see every drop of sweat spent here. There are numerous model shots of elaborately built cities and adorably shitty pyrotecnics.
The special effects look great, but that doesn’t mean they look naturalistic. Everything in the model shots look like it was made from paper mache in a great hurry and most of the props look like someone took a sex toy and random garbage, glued them together, spray painted them and dangled them from a sting and said that’s an air ship. That’s a submarine. They knew what movie they were making and they built toward that. If it looked any better than the worst special effect from 70’s Doctor Who it would be an abject failure. I would even go as far to say the model work looks lush from the right perspective.
With everything built and assembled in such a cheap manner it’s often times hard to tell what the hell is going on. The same actor that plays Queen Victoria plays the main villain, Sexton Ming, I think? Queen Victoria has heroic amounts of meatloaf on her face that I guess is supposed to make her look old? There is also a real world artist named Sexton Ming who married a song from a Captain Beefheart album, who is more notable than this movie, and he is credited in the movie as playing Queen Victoria at least, making this quite difficult to DuckDuckGo. Everything about this movie is kind of confusing.
The Man, The Myth, The Legend: Sexton Ming
The narrative proper begins when the Demon Nanny gives birth to Pervirella and she is immediately assassinated by Sexton Ming, who is some kind of double agent working to pit the Cult of Perv against Queen Victoria. Before he can harm the baby Pervirella, however, her father, Professor Pump, grabs her and escapes to a laboratory. He and his assistant Monty experiment on the baby for reasons that aren’t entirely clear and she suddenly becomes eighteen years old. I think the intent is her demonic heritage from her mother did this, not the science?
Abraham Lincoln as Professor Pump
Sexton Ming tries to do something confusing that doesn’t entirely make sense and the heroes get a psychic message from the Queen Amazon who tells them “Bring her here and keep her away from Sex…” with the message being cut off before they can be told to keep her away from Sexton. Sexton books it to Queen Victoria to narc on all of them but then the Professor, Monty and Pervirella show up to ask if they can go to the Amazon for some reason. There’s a small bit of world building that explains this, but it doesn't really make sense even in the context of a sexploitation movie. It’s needed to progress the plot so that’s what happens. Queen Victoria needs more life elixir, so she makes them all go together in Sexton’s air ship.
The air ship takes the long route along the Earth for some reason. One night Sexton is trying to do something nefarious with an extremely phallic belt and meanwhile his wife (I think? Again, movie not super clear) is trying to fuck the Professor’s assistant Monty. There’s a running bit about women wanting to fuck Monty despite him being a big doughy dumb guy with bad facial hair. If I put that in a movie it would clearly be some kind of power fantasy. As it is in the movie I find it rather offputting. The necklace Pervirella got from her mother gets knocked off and she transforms into a succubus and tries to fuck Monty to death. Comic pratfalls happen and the air ship crashes somewhere in Africa.
From here on out Pervierella is a road trip movie where our heroes visit various locales and dumb shit inspired by adventure fiction plays out. The first example is Pervirella falls in some quicksand. She gets sucked all the way in, but everyone manages to get together and pull her out. Along with her some white guy keeps hold of her ankle and gets out along with her. He has a vaguely South Asian accent and explains that he’s from a secret city of gold, and they all decide “screw the Amazon, let’s go to this city of gold.” Given the way the next couple sequences work out be damned glad they didn’t meet any actual Africans.
Primo Gen X fetish material
It turns out Amicus Reilly is the king of Sangri La for some reason. I was somewhat surprised to see him in the movie again. The little James Bond parody trailer at the start was a single somewhat coherent thing and is incongruous with the rest of the movie. There appear to be a couple Asian actors (as in literally two, but they’re background extras) and otherwise all of the actors are white people in vague Asian dress; some of them South Asian, some in East Asian.
There's one character who has a fu manchu mustache glued to his face, but for the most part when it has a white person playing a character who archetypically or logically wouldn't be white they don't feel the need to paint him yellow or brown of black. The movie had over a hundred named actors (often times playing two or three roles, and again, it’s confusing because they’re grouped in the credits by which group of characters are being played, so one actor might get listed as Dirty Perv and “Abo” Surfer). You don’t get points for not doing the Talons of Weng-Chiang. I am not well versed enough in Australian racism to tell if “abo” is a slur, it certainly gives me the vibe, though. I expect Ozzies and Brits hadn’t realized racism was bad by 1997.
Sexton attacks the city with an army of robots I guess he had on the air ship? They did actually appear before this but very briefly as part of a montage of machine parts moving so I assumed they were supposed to be poetic. No such luck. Reilly summons ninjas to fight them. The worst fight sequence in all of film happens. In many other places the high concept and ironically bad production design rescues the dire everything else, but even the fight choreography here is a joke that doesn’t land. I think it’s supposed to be parodying in kung fu movies when hits clearly don’t land but the stuntmen act as if they did anyway. But there’s nothing about this that is salvageable. It’s an impressive feat to make a battle between ninjas and robots boring, but this film manages it. After all that evidently his robots blow up, which I guess leaves the air ship unusable for some reason?
Reilly gives our heroes flying carpets and they ride them to Oz. Aboriginals, again, all played by white people, and specifically modeled after African tribesmen who would show up in adventure fiction, see them. Sexton drops some garbage off the side of the carpet and kills one, which causes the others to chuck spears at the flying carpet until it crashes. They are surrounded by the scary white guys in loin cloths with masks and bones through their nose. Then Pervirella takes off her necklace and fucks them into submission. The aboriginals turn into surfer dudes from a 1960’s movie and they give our heroes a submarine they have for some reason.
Together they cross the Pacific. Pervirella has a sex dream about Monty and Sexton has his ass turn into paper mache and it gets bit by a piranha. When they reach South American Pervirella takes a bath in a lake and immediately a cyclops sees her and starts furiously jacking off. The cyclops costume is appropriately huge and looks like something that would get laughed off the set of the BBC Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series. They do some forced perspective that actually looks pretty competent and all our heroes try to escape the cyclops, who chases them down, jacking all the way, until it’s caught in a net trap and the Amazons appear. Sexton and I guess his wife are separated and planning something nefarious.
If this is a racist caricature I don't recognize it so uh, good job I guess?
Pervirella is taken to the queen and to be given a magic seed that makes a plant dick sprout out of your head like Pikmin. The Prof and Monty are cordoned off for their own safety because the epic yearly Amazon orgy is about to happen and I guess the worry is they might be overwhelmed with fuck-energy or whatever? It feels like there’s going to be a reveal that the Amazon queen is secretly evil and doing evil plans or something, but this never actually materializes. The Amazons are just a civilization of badass punk ladies cosplaying as Poison Ivy and their weak ineffectual men they fuck once a year. The production design is about on par with the Ace Garden Center Playset they used for primitive planets in the first couple seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, when they could only afford a half dozen potted plants, whatever leaves they could find on the studio back lot and a couple colored lights.
Sexton and his wife attack the Amazon orgy. The Prof and Monty try to get to Pervirella to rescue her but Sexton gets there first and abandons his wife, but not before stabbing the Queen of the Amazon and stealing her seed dick. It’s probably for the best the parodic portrayal of Amazon natives owes basically everything to generic portrayals of the mythological Amazons and not anything what-so-ever to actual Amazonians.
Sexton for some reason has the motorcycle from Easy Rider and he drags Pervirella to Las Vegas and the Prof and Monty chase him on foot. This sequence feels like they ran out of time to actually shoot it, so it’s a montage of Sexton and Pervirella on the motorcycle two feet in front of the cyclorama and some actors in bad America themed costumes walk by. If they actually had some kind of skit for this part it might have taken some of the sting out of the weird bits in Shangri La and Australia. Take the piss out of us bloody ugly Americans you poncing wankers, but the movie doesn’t care. It’s rushing to the end and trying to get itself over with, which I suppose is fair enough. The movie does generally have an anti-anglo sentiment, but it’s more of a “fuck it we’re trying to be as offensive as possible” kind of thing, rather than fairly portraying the rotten and fetid nation of England. It hits different when you use that tone on victims of Blighty’s imperialism too.
Sexton steals a plane and the Prof follows his example, then they have a dog fight. This is another example of the model work in this movie and it’s charmingly shitty. It’s unfortunately quite brief and Monty shoots down the Prof’s plane accidentally and they crash into the ocean.
Sexton makes it back to Blighty and Queen Victoria gives him command of the army, then he does a coup and takes Pervirella to the Perv base to implant the seed in her. Sexton’s wife and the Amazons save Prof and Monty and take them to the final battle. Pervirella gets free. Sexton is implanted with the seed, which turns him into a fucked up tree.
A dick tower rises above Condon and spurts gouts of flame
The movie isn’t completely terrible. The model work and production design are interesting, if nothing else. The main actors know what movie they’re in and they neither stray too far into camp or solemnity. It is the rare failed comedy that still has positive attributes to support it.
But Pervirella is also far from great. The writing is dog shit at best. When they attempt something shaped like satire they use the first thing shaped like a joke they can come up with and film it straight away. Most of the minor players wallow in camp to a ridiculous degree. The “fight choreography” is the biggest joke in the movie and the least funny. But the worst part of the movie remains the weird scenes in Shangri La and Australia.
It’s not “so bad it’s good” but for bad movie connoisseurs it might not be “so bad it’s unwatchable.”
But none of that matters. Ultimately Pervirella isn’t easily available in any legitimate form. No streaming platform is brave enough to have a bad 90’s sexploitation comedy on it. Nobody has thrown it up for posterity on The Internet Archive. If you’re a weird enough film crank to be able to track it down you might at least find it interesting. Will there be a great Pervirella renaissance? I mean, I hope not, and I doubt Quentin Tarantino would uncover it and clear the way for a restoration and Bluray release. Or I guess more likely Edgar Wright, he is actually thanked in the credits (somewhat amazing because this came out like ten minutes after he started his career). But I have been wrong in the past.
A selection of the Special Thanks (???)