Victoire Laly, Kita Updike and Serenity Rosa in The Misandrists (Cartilage Films)

In the countryside somewhere (Germany?) a soldier (Same Dye) collapses and is found by two girls (Kita Updike and Olivia Kundisch) and brought into their boarding school to mend. The premise sounds like the 1971 Don Siegel’s cult classic The Beguiled, right? But in a twist, the all-girls school is actually a cover for a radical feminist group called the Female Liberation Army, and therein we have entered the wonky transgressive world of art-house filmmaker Bruce LaBruce.

The FLA is led by Big Mother (Susanne Sachsse), the zealous dictatorial leader of a school for wayward young women that teaches all subjects from the point of view of feminism (HERstory instead of history, and so on). Big Mother believes that women have been enslaved by men since the dawn of time and that, in this time of reckoning, if women only have sex with each other, over time they will evolve so that reproduction will be possible without the need for a man’s sperm.

She calls this form of reproduction parthenogenesis. Big Mother’s big plan is for the girls to make a pornographic film depicting an all-female orgy and then the group will storm cinemas and make the women watch it to light them onto the path. That’s how women will take over the world. Ironically what Big Mother and her followers say they hate about the male sex is exactly what they resort to in order to overthrow the patriarchy: oppression by means of violence.

Big Mother’s school is not a great place for the soldier to wind up when he is ailing. One would think from the aforementioned story line that the movie could start off as a rousing thriller, but that is but one of many subplots. In fact, there are so many contrived characters’ backstories thrown in that plot becomes irrelevant. But whenever a supposed big, juicy secret about one of the women is learned, there is no dramatic weight to the reveal because viewers never knew much about her in the first place. The movie has an exploitation vibe throughout, even kind of porny; the plot feels slapped together in between gratuitous sex scenes.

All expectations one might have for a traditionally well-made narrative pretty much go out the window. The acting is excruciatingly amateurish and the characters one-dimensional. Ninety-five percent of the screen time is made up of characters walking and talking or sitting and talking, and every line of dialogue is essentially exposition. The camerawork is very basic; all of the shots are static.

The movie does contains some pornographic and graphic moments that viewers have come to be expected from LaBruce (L.A. Zombie), such as the aforementioned orgy and footage from an actual sexual reassignment surgery. Perhaps cult cinephiles may want to rush out to see this because it offers something different and transgressive, and if that’s the itch that needs scratching this weekend, then by all means, go see it.