Its plot follows a troubled young woman who suspects a deviant serial killer is living in her aunt's dilapidated hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

Judy's boyfriend, Mike, arrives at the hotel searching for Cheryl, and is met by the Reverend Moon, an eccentric guest who dresses as a priest.

Inside, she discovers a transparent inflatable sex doll on his bed, and numerous avant-garde photos of nude women lining the walls.

That night, Jeff, a young man who works at the locksmith where Cheryl copied the keys, invites her on a date to a rock concert.

Martha raves that George's spirit has been liberated from his body, and that she raised George—who is her biological child—as a man so that he would not be "tainted" by wanton female sexuality.

Cast notes: The film was written by Philip Kearney and Les Rendelstein, based on real-life people they had met in Los Angeles in the 1960s.

[1] Producer Chuck Hirsch showed the script to Paul Bartel, who had made the shorts The Secret Cinema and Naughty Nurses.

[3] Roger Greenspan, who reviewed the film for The New York Times on its release, wrote: [Bartel] succeeds in some details and fails in others.

But the attempt, even when it isn't quite working, is a good deal more interesting than most...Private Parts is at least a hopeful occasion for those of us who love intellectual cinema and at the same time care for the menacing staircase, for the ominous shadow, for empty rooms shuttered against the light of the afternoon...Bartel is a young director whose previous short films have shown a genius of title (Secret Cinema, Naughty Nurse) not entirely matched by their content.

Private Parts is no triumph, but it does mark a giant step forward toward the successful blending of precocious perversity and satiric good sense that seems the fated direction of his career.

[1]The Philadelphia Daily News's Joe Baltake praised the film's cinematography and Bartel's "stylish" direction, describing it as "a veritable spook carnival about a seedy L.A. hotel brimming with eerie corridors, creaking doors and strange tenants who are into all sorts of perversions...

Private Parts, in total, is a very high-class addition to the horror film genre—every bit as scarey [sic] and arty as Roman Polanski's Repulsion.

"[8] Will Jones of the Star Tribune wrote of the film: "A great deal of skill and technique have been lavished on all this trashy nonsense, and with Ms. Benson's wholehearted and enthusiastic devotion to the role of freaky old Aunt Martha, who turns out to be freakier than any of her guests, it has the look of well-made, high quality trash.

"[9] Reviewing it in a 1978 release the Los Angeles Times called it "a sylish, actually bravaura piece of Grand Guignol that could be sick if it wasn't so hialarious.

"[10] Mon, Mar 06, 1978 ·Page 48 In a retrospective assessment, Bruce Reid of The Stranger noted the film as being ahead of its time, writing: "Private Parts knew America was full of lonely, sex-obsessed misfits a decade before David Lynch came on the scene.