Reissued in tandem by Vinegar Factory with a similar Albert Zugsmith picture "The Incredible Sex Revolution", this tedious farrago is ego-tripping, untalented cinema at its nadir. I kept wanting to yell at my small screen (fortunately I didn't suffer through this mess in its short life 50 years ago as a theatrical entry) "Put a sock in it" to auteur Albert.
Probably inspired by Orson Welles' tour-de-force (and in a way yet to be equaled) opening shot to the Zugsmith production "Touch of Evil", Big Al stages a showy opening sequence lasting about 15 minutes that is pretentious and dreadful. The film is based on a book by Dr. Krafft-Ebbing and the star of earlier "Sex Revolution" encores as a shrink named Dr. Krafft, treating lovely patient Sandra Lynn.
Opening is silent action and chasing around madly in his car by antihero Ronald Warren, a crappy performance as a psychotic jerk whose parents are to blame. Central gimmick of a mania for roses, whether truly a medical condition or not, is simply nutsy and stupid, and Zugsmith is even more stupid than his characters to expect any audience to buy into it. The whole film falls into a category of cinema that unfortunately is alive and well - the concept of making movies about subjects so arcane they have not been handled before -leading to ludicrous results.
I discovered this yet-to-be identified officially genre after watching "A Bridge Too Far" 38 years ago - all the critics agreed it was idiotic to mount a super-production (that Joseph E. Levine film was one of the costliest made in the world at that time, even more expensive than De Laurentiis' misguided "King Kong" remake). But here was a WW II story of failure that had not been told to a mass audience before -yeah, right, an audience would rather celebrate "The Longest Day" than brood over a horrendous blunder.
So getting back to Zugsmith, he dredges up perhaps the least interesting psychosis in the book -this rose mania. Who cares? The movie whips up a dramatic frenzy concerning it, and even the requisite stupid "false ending" (a la the atrocious and influential ending of "Carrie") mocks the rose nonsense. But the viewer must sit through a torturous unfolding of sick minds as embodied by poor actors, not just Warren, but overacting by Lynn, terrible papier mache acting by Barbara Hines as her supposedly sexpot mother and yet another horrible mother from Regina Gleason. The only conclusion one can draw after suffering for 101 minutes is that Zugsmith hated his own mom.
But as usual, he uses screen writing as his vehicle to demonstrate how well-read he is, how erudite he is, and above all how much meticulous research he's done. So the actors, and not just the boring shrink Lee Gladden (palmed off to us again as a real-life shrink and scholar) are wont to recite lots of useless information, boring and unbelievable. From a Vinegar Syndrome point-of-view (the distributor is dedicated to unearthing and preserving all manner of trash that can be included under the phony rubric "Sexploitation"), the chief value is a lengthy sequence that brings the film to a halt at a party with lots of actresses going topless. Fine and dandy for 1966 but I confess to not being able to get worked up in 2015 over such a display given the non- stop exposure to pornography currently abroad in our society.
And so even with this crutch included (and alternate "soft" footage with the partial nudity minimized), "Roses" fails to constitute entertainment as we know it, and as far as enlightenment goes, Albert Zugsmith is one of the last places I would go in search of that.
