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!

Mantis in Lace is very much a product of the late 60s, with the ending of censorship and the freedom to experiment with edgier themes. Released in 1968, this film was probably one of the first color soft-core flicks to be released. The special effects are cheesy, the murder scenes are unconvincing, the dialog is hammy, and the plot is paper thin. But what do you expect? The story centers around a cute dancer, Lila, who has a drug problem. She has sex with guys who naively falls for her. Lila, while hallucinating, murder guys after wards. The murders are then investigated. The sex scenes are mainly non-pornographic with usually only the bare back and sides being shown. The 60s are very much the experimental age with some bizarre-looking hallucination scenes. I call it weird art. There is a cut scene that features an even more bizarre hallucination. And it tops it off with a gruesome gory murder that combines bare breasts, blood, and gore. It is something that was and probably is still too explicit to be shown to normal viewers.The heart of the film are, of course, the topless dancing featured by three or four young women. They are very nice to watch, even though a couple of the girls are quite ugly. Mantis in Lace will very much remain a part of film history. Overall recommended, if this is your type of stuff.

Sweet stripper Lila (adorable redhead Susan Stewart, who has a really cute funny foreign accent) gets turned on to LSD by a creepy hippie guy. The bad acid causes Lila to go lethally bonkers. She takes various lecherous men to her grotty warehouse love nest, kills them, and hacks up their bodies with a meat cleaver. Director William Rotsler gleefully pours on the abundant gratuitous nudity and tacky gory violence (the blood looks just like red paint -- and probably was exactly that). Laszlo ("Easy Rider") Kovac's garish, kinetic cinematography, a couple of lengthy simulated sex scenes, the wonderfully wiggy psychedelic freak-out sequences (poor Lila has horrific visions of a laughing fat jerk holding bananas and dollar bills!), some pot smoking, the hypnotically funky theme song, and the hilariously dated hip slang ("Groovy pad you got here; it's a little kinky, but it's out of sight") are all completely far-out, man! Busty'n'lusty 60's skinpic starlet Pat Barrington of "Orgy of the Dead" fame performs two sizzling hot bump'n'grind numbers on stage to a rowdy crowd. Russ Meyer film regular Stuart Lancaster has a nice part as a wannabe helpful psychologist. An enjoyably sleazy soft-core psycho sexploitation hoot.