I took a look at The Crucifier, which was Bill Zebub's "other" film with bondage, and this one left me pretty cold. As a movie, it's at once pretentious and boring, and tries to go for a creepy atmosphere instead of a real story, but succeeds only in being a tedious mess. That part I could live with if it didn't also drop the ball with the bondage aspect, but it failed there, too.
It wasn't because of his casting, since many of the Scream Queen chicks are in this one, and even some attractive new faces, but they're all pretty much wasted. The beautiful Kerri Taylor is topless, bound and gagged in all of her scenes, but you almost wouldn't know about the gag part because Zebub makes her wear a face-covering mask for nearly the entire time! Why deprive us of seeing her face, especially when she's gagged? That's a big mistake in my book.
The only part that gave me hope was near the end, when the mask is removed and she is tied arms over head to a beam on the ceiling and used as target practice by a guy throwing stones. But even that was poorly done, badly edited so that it was obvious she was not in any kind of danger. We see the stones hit the wall and not even come close to hitting her, but then there's a cut and suddenly she has all these bloody spots on her body. Hello, we missed something there, Bill!
The rest of the women, either topless or else very scantily clad, are all tied to crosses. None of them are gagged, but then there's no screaming, no struggling, no cries for help of any kind (in fact, no live sound at all in any of their scenes, another miscue). They simply stand out there like mannequins (albeit pretty cute ones). So while it's nice to see more naked skin, the fact that there's no distress makes them just wasted eye candy.
Since Zebub is making another horror film that is supposed to incorporate more bondage, it should be interesting to see if he takes the exploitative approach of Scream Queen (a very good thing) or goes for more of an atmospheric art film like this earlier effort. You've got to have more than just attractive models, Bill. You have to know what to do with them, too.