Fairly tame and unexciting, Mantis in Lace is about a stripper in a club who tries acid one night while out with some groovy cat and has a bad trip. She hallucinates weird lights and patterns on the guy's face. Then she stabs him repeatedly with a screwdriver. End of date. She proceeds to go find other guys and brings them back to her place and does the same to them. I was expecting more from this one. It's very, very low-budget, even by films of this type. The main actress isn't anything to write home about and the lensing by stud cinematographer Lazlo Kovacs isn't that hot. It also drags in a big way. This feels almost like a short that was padded to feature length.Film has none of the mind-bending visuals or stylistic flourishes of Rotsler's brilliant "Like It Is" which was also released in 1968.

"Mantis in Lace" (1968) is, in four fairly equal quarters, a soft-core skin flick, a psychedelic drug movie, a slasher horror film AND a police procedural. In it, we meet Lila (Susan Stewart), a young and gorgeous topless dancer who takes LSD one night with a guy she's picked up. After hallucinating pretty severely for a while, Lila kills the young dude with a screwdriver and chops him to bits with a meat cleaver. This scenario is repeated three or four times while a pair of (surprisingly UNdorky) L.A. cops tries to track the maniac down. Yup, that's pretty much all this film has to offer. One of Lila's victims, I might add, is Stuart Lancaster, who might be a familiar face to all the Russ Meyer fans out there; another, a macho rapist, most certainly deserves to be diced at Lila's hands. The picture feels very padded with numerous topless dance numbers (the opulently cantilevered legend Pat Barrington looks pretty impressive, actually, doing a frenzied belly dance; come to think of it, she would do a bit of "tripping out" herself that same year in the film "The Acid Eaters"), long makeout scenes, a lovemaking bout between the topless club's manager and a job applicant that adds nothing to the plot whatsoever, and loads of colorful hallucinations. It has been lensed by Laszlo Kovacs, who would depict an even more harrowing lysergic experience in the following year's "Easy Rider." (Actually, I found the aural component of Lila's trips much more freaky than the visuals.) Sadly, the viewer never learns anything concrete about Lila's background, or why the drug sets her off the way it does; indeed, the only thing we can discover about her comes from the film's admittedly hypnotic theme song. Concluding with an ironic albeit extremely telegraphed ending, "Mantis in Lace" is ultimately a real mixed bag; a psychedelic psycho curiosity that should have been better. Oh...this Something Weird DVD features over 100 minutes' worth of alternate film footage. Far out, man!

Cheeky smut is perfect entertainment for sleaze aficionados. Photographed by Bogdanovich's frequent cinematographer László Kovács whose experiments with psychedelic colors during Lila's(Susan Stewart)drug trips are quite an experience. The film concerns the homicidal tendencies of a stripper triggered by LSD during Lila's sexual confrontations with men in a candle-lit abandoned warehouse for rent. Lila picks up various males for whom she encounters at the club she works, an unusual assortment of men, who have no idea what lies in store for them as they take part in passionate love-making as she succumbs to possible past incidents which re-awaken as the LSD overtakes her senses. After stabbing the men she beds with a screwdriver, Lila chops their bodies up with a cleaver disposing of the corpses in cardboard boxes in the warehouse, leaving them in vacant areas. The film shows two weary detectives pressed into solving the serial killings, this rash of homicides is growing in number and Lila shows no signs of stopping. The acting is obviously sub-par with this dime-store cast of unknown faces and the dialogue leaves anything to be desired. Stewart, in the lead as Lila, is quite beautiful(..often bearing her breasts during rather lackluster dance-routines)yet rather vacuous. The film luridly shows the club crowd's enthusiastic reactions to the performance artists on stage as they bare their breasts for the public..László Kovács camera gets in very close, his eye-lens peering provocatively as the strippers' bodies move in various dance routines. This film made me feel like I was a paying customer..that was how the director and his photographer often focus completely for long periods on the strippers and their routines. This will definitely be embraced by that crowd who adores trash and twisted premises like this film has. There's a soft-core sequence between the club owner that Lila works for and a potential client that seems to be in the film merely to satisfy an audience looking for a sex scene. I wouldn't call this a good film, but I certainly think it achieves what it sets out for..giving a specific audience exactly what they crave. The abrupt ending leaves anything to be desired.

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.