You’ll find it in the depths of Prime Video, provocatively labelled “Private Property – a psycho-sexual thrill ride”. In the accompanying artwork, a stilettoed blonde bombshell displays her rear to camera, her black and white image garishly colorised in purple and yellow. Among the listed cast, character actor Warren Oates is the biggest name, while if you’ve heard of the film’s director, Leslie Stevens, at all, it’s possibly as one of the minds behind the late-70s TV’s Star Wars knock-off Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
Such a package could easily be mistaken for cheap streaming dregs. And Private Property most certainly is cheap, shot as it was largely at its director’s house for less than $60,000, a tiny sum even in 1960 when the film was released to minor outrage from those who saw it. Dregs, however, this shady home invasion thriller ain’t.
Beginning seemingly at the end of a twisted Kerouacian travelogue, Private Property opens with weary young travellers Duke (Corey Allen) and Boots (Oates) stopping by a coastal SoCal gas station and attempting to rob it. When model housewife Ann Carlyle (Kate Manx) rolls through in a shiny new Corvette, Duke sees a prize victim to whom the simple-minded Boots can lose his virginity, and promptly hitches the pair a ride to her Hollywood Hills home in pursuit. There, Duke inveigles his way into Ann’s apparently picture-perfect life while her husband is away, her welcoming him in first out of pity, then desire, and him finding he may not even need to coerce his lonely quarry into sex.
