Tuesday, March 12, 2024

The Body Snatcher (USA, 1945)

 
"It is through error that man tries and rises. It is through tragedy he learns. All the roads of learning begin in darkness and go out into the light."  
 
The eighth, and final, feature-length movie to feature the great Boris Karloff ([23 Nov 1887 – 2 Feb 1969] of The Mummy [1932], The Ghoul [1933], House of Frankenstein [1944], The Terror [1963], Mad Monster Party [1967] and so much more) and the great Bela Lugosi ([20 Oct 1882 – 16 Aug 1956] of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla [1952], Scared to Death [1946], One Body Too Many [1944], The Corpse Vanishes [1942], Black Dragons [1942], Island of Lost Souls [1932] and so much more) together on the silver screen,* The Body Snatcher is, simply put, another fine horror film produced Val Lewton (7 May 1904 – 14 Mar 1951) during his short but productive period as a producer at RKO. Lewton was appointed head producer of B films at RKO in 1942 and, by his departure in 1946, he had released some eleven such films, only two of which — Mademoiselle Fifi (1944 / full film) and Youth Runs Wild (1944 / trailer) — fall completely outside the realm of "horror". The Body Snatcher is one of his final triad of films at RKO prior to his being let go, and was followed by The Isle of Dead (1945 / trailer) and Bedlam (1946); all three atmospheric films feature Boris Karloff as the headlining star.  
* The other seven are: Edgar G Ulmer's early classic The Black Cat (1934 / faux trailer), Karl Freund's Gift of Gab (1934 / full movie), which almost doesn't count as their (separate and short) appearances are (seriously) a joke (scene), The Raven (1935 / trailer), The Invisible Ray (1936 / trailer), Son of Frankenstein (1939 / trailer), You'll Find Out (1940 / trailer), and Black Friday (1940 / trailer).
Trailer to
The Body Snatcher:
Based loosely on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson (3 Nov 1850 – 3 Dec 1894) originally published in 1884, the script to The Body Snatcher was written by Philip MacDonald (5 Nov 1901 — 10 Dec 1980)* and "Carlos Keith", otherwise known as Val Lewton. Wisely enough, they kept the story's original setting and time, delivering a leisurely paced narrative punctuated by well-timed moments of unpleasantness and/or horror.
*
Other credits of MacDonald include the kiddy film Tobor the Great (1954 / full film); Mickey Spillane's early attempt to become a screen actor, Ring of Fear (1954 / full film), the early catfishing neo-noir Strangers in the Night (1944 / full film), and Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940 / trailer).
A tidy little period piece, The Body Snatcher takes the character names of Stevenson's tale but liberally changes many aspects of the story, adding a time-padding character or two — like the maid (and secret wife) Meg Camden (Edith Atwater [22 Apr 1911 – 14 Mar 1986] of Strait-Jacket [1964 / trailer] and Die Sister, Die! [1978 / trailer]), a sympathetic woman whose primary function is to explain things we need to know or play Cassandra — and even an entire new secondary subplot, that of pretty widow Mrs. Marsh (Rita Corday [20 Oct 1920 – 23 Nov 1992] of The Black Castle [1952 / full movie] and her paraplegic daughter Georgina (Sharyn Moffett [12 Sept 1936 – 23 Dec 2021]). They come to Edinburgh in the hope that Dr. Wolfe "Toddy" MacFarlane (Henry Daniell [5 March 1894 – 31 October 1963] of From the Earth to the Moon [1958 / trailer] and The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake [1959 / trailer]) might be able to help Georgina, and though Dr. MacFarlane says he would be able to, the rather stiff and supercilious doctor refuses to do so, on the grounds that his activities as an instructor are more important than helping the little girl. 
This, actually, is one of the diffuse reasons the young Donald Fettes (Russell Wade [21 Jun 1917 – 9 Dec 2006] of The Ghost Ship [1943 / scene] and the rather pointless A Game of Death [1945 / full movie]) inexplicably remains as MacFarlane's assistant long after he knows he should leave. Fettes learns rather early on that MacFarlane procures the corpses for his anatomy classes from the coachman cum body snatcher John Gray (Karloff), and is soon enough irrefutably confronted by the fact that Gray is not above killing for a body. But despite Fettes' oft-verbalized intentions to quit his position and the school, he never really manages to do so – indeed, towards the end of the film, he even assists MacFarlane in snatching a buried body.
The Body Snatcher opens with a few stock footage shots to establish the location of Edinburgh (don't look too closely, or you might notice a few truly modern automobiles for 1831), and for the most part the interior scenes and the exterior sets (the latter left over from RKO's The Hunchback of Notre Dame [1939 / trailer]) do a decent job for conveying if not Edinburgh than at least Europe. (The notable exception here, of course, are the scenes set on a noticeably painted and fake set; the low budget of the film is never so obvious as in those moments.) Considering that the whole narrative is set in Edinburgh, however, the movie features surprisingly few Scottish accents — one, to be exact: that of the aged, grieving mother Fettes meets in the cemetery, but then, she was played by a real Scot, the seldom-credited character actress Mary Gordon (16 May 1882 – 23 August 1963), a woman best known as Mrs. Hudson, the landlady and housekeeper to Universal's Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films.
Accents and Russell Wade's rather flaccid and shallow portrayal of Fettes aside, however, The Body Snatchers is a well-acted movie. Henry Daniell makes a convincing Dr. MacFarlane, giving him layers that make the character far more than just a self-important, upper-class blowhard; while the viewer might be put off by his attitude and arguments, his sincerity of cause often shines through and that does make him a tad more sympathetic than he deserves to be. Bela Lugosi, despite his secondary position on the film posters and prominence in the film's trailer, has probably around five or six minutes screen time at best as Joseph, the somewhat simple-minded janitor of Dr. MacFarlane's school. Skulking around the school hardly takes acting chops, but he holds himself well during the important scene at Gray's home and is subsequently the focus of one of the film's shock scenes.
Bela Lugosi's Dead 
by Bauhaus:
As for Boris Karloff, well, in The Body Snatcher he truly delivers a tour-de-force performance as John Gray. When introduced, he is all smarm and convincingly child-friendly as he delivers Mrs. Marsh and Georgina to the doctor's door, but the split-second change in facial expression that occurs when Meg Camden opens the door and gives him an icy look already does wonders in revealing what he actually is as a person: an erudite and smiling but cold and merciless killer, and a vengeful narcissist consumed by hate — and intelligent, not only enough to know that he is all that, but capable of seeing into people for what they are, as he ably proves during his aggressive verbal takedown of Dr. MacFarlane at the local inn. Gray is scary, and not the type of man you would want to have to have dealings with, and it is somehow believable that were it possible to reach from the darkness of death to get revenge, he would be one to do so. Whether he actually does so, however, is more or less left to the viewer to decide.
Like most Lewton productions, most of the horror and menace found in The Body Snatcher is subdued or inferred or situational, but the film does get a bit more physical than typical of Lewton during the two fight scenes and then definitely tosses all restraint out the window during the final scene in a horse-drawn coach. A truly memorable scene that is more than just a nod to the original short story, though in this film the resolution turns more towards the psychological (and the concept of one's own inner demons) than Stevenson's original tale, the resolution of which sits squarely in the supernatural. Despite whatever changes, however, the resolution as found in the movie is nevertheless visually horrific and chilling — who can watch the movement of the corpse's arms without cringing? — and it is easy to see how that scene (among others) caused subsequent censorship problems. In England, in fact, they pretty much cut the crux of that climactic coach scene out, which surely rendered the film a head-scratcher.
Lewton made a wise decision when he handed the directorial duties to future four-time Oscar winner Robert Wise (10 Sept 1914 – 14 Sept 2005), who by then had already proven his directorial capabilities at RKO when he took over the directorial duties of The Curse of the Cat People (1944 / trailer) and subsequently made Lewton's only RKO flop, Mademoiselle Fifi (1944).* Aside from the good performance he elicits from his cast, he also gives the "action" scenes a sense of urgency and violence, and also manages to deliver a few truly beautifully tragic and terrible scenes of subtle horror, the best of which involves the blind, singing street beggar (Donna Lee [17 Jan 1930 – 3 Apr 2011], whose limited roughly five-film career of uncredited parts began with RKO's A Face in the Fog [1936 / full movie] and ended with Bedlam [1946]) walking into the darkness of a narrow passage with Gray's horse and buggy following soon behind. One sees nothing, but darkness and sudden silence hits harder than anything that might have been shown.
* He went on to make two film faves of a wasted life, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 / trailer) and The Haunting (1963 / trailer), and has a filmic oeuvre that spans from the divisive forgotten like Born to Kill (1947 / full movie) to the divisive famous like The Sound of Music (1965 / trailer).
Fans of yesteryear's horror cannot go wrong with The Body Snatcher: it is an enthralling, well-made horror film that keeps you watching from the start until the end, ably assisted by some great direction and a fantastic Boris Karloff. And that is what makes it a good movie for anyone with a penchant for older films — but face it, if the only kind of horror films you like are first cousins to, say, Freddy or Jason or Michael Myers films, then you should give this class act a wide berth.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Autopsy: A Love Story (Aridzona, 2002)

Okay, we'll admit it: dunno how we did it, but when we procured the DVD to this film here, we actually though that we were getting a copy of that ancient slice of Eurotrash, Armando Crispino's 1975 horror flick Autopsy, a.k.a. The Victim and Corpse and, in Italian, Macchie solari ("Sunspots"). Our bad: instead, we got this newer and definitely far more low-budget independent flick from the state of  Aridzona that is far less horror than black comedy — not that we laughed all that much.
Trailer to
Armando Crispino's Autopsy:
If life were film school, than the Aridzona-based, independent Guy Crawford would deserve an A for concept: as the title already reveals, the movie takes on a pretty extreme topic that needs some balls to approach* and that, at least for some folk (you know who you are), definitely whets the curiosity. Unluckily, when it comes to execution, the film never rises above an F- and, as a result, Autopsy: A Love Story flounders badly and wallows deeply within the lower realms of a D filmdom. If one watches it to the final scene, one does so less because the surprisingly restrained (for its topic) movie is actually watchable than because one is simply curious to see how sloppy of a bow the narrative is going to be tied into. (Or, as in the case of our weekly Bad-Film Night, because the sacred rule is "What goes into the DVD player, stays in the DVD player" — the "until the end" is a given.)
* For other people who had balls, check out the arty Canadian film Kissed (1996 / trailer), or the wonderfully sleazy grindhouse classic Love Me Deadly (1972 / trailer) or Lamberto Bava's Eurotrash anti-classic, Macabro (1980 / trailer), not to mention Riccardo Freda's The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock (1962 / full movie), all of which are better in one way or the other.
Trailer to
Autopsy: A Love Story

As if often the case, the trailer (above) is better than the movie itself. Quick and to the point, its selling phrase/tagline deserves an Oscar. As it says, Charlie Bickle (John Mills) has a problem: he has met the girl of his dreams, but she died three days previously. She drowned, in fact: a suicide, we see in the film how she (Dina Osmussen*), an attractive gal in what might qualify as a semi-sexy negligee, pops some pills and sinks to the bottom of the filled bathtub. That she spends three days there, however, is hardly likely, for even if the water were cold she would be bloated and floating, and the water dirtied by the involuntary release of things that get released when the sphincter and other such muscles or organs relax in death. But who wants to let facts like that stand in the way of a love story based on immediate (if one-way) attraction?  
* Unluckily, she is not very convincing as a corpse, never coming close to the level of verisimilitude achieved, for example, by the much more nude Olwen Kelly (as "Jane Doe") in the straight-out supernatural horror movie The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016/ trailer).
That Charlie even "meets" Jane (as in: Jane Doe) has to do with his job at the sleazy morgue he works at, run by the choleric Dr Dale Brodsky (Joe Estevez*). Here, again, the mechanics of the industry is presented from the angle of truthiness rather than fact. For example, though Dr Brodsky supposedly has a lively trade in human organs, the bodies lie around for periods of time that makes tall internal organs suitable for little more than a compost heap.** Likewise, bodies resulting from a suspicious death — did Jane "Bathtub" Doe die of suicide or was she drowned? — generally require an autopsy by a coroner, and despite the film's title and the removal of the same pile of offal from a few different bodies, no actual autopsies are performed.  
*
There is a reason why more people have heard of his brother, Martin Sheen, than of Joe Estévez, and it's not just because Martin took on an Anglo Saxon name and entered the biz roughly 18 years earlier: Martin usually can act, Joe usually cannot – which explains his continuous presence in B, C, D and Z films. In Autopsy: A Love Story, he comes across as if he is working less from scripted dialogue than riffing from a vague plot outline.
** Organs that could even possibly be sold (illegally or legally) for subsequent transplantation need to be transplanted within a timeframe of, for example, 4 to 6 hours (heart and lungs), 8 to 12 hours (liver), or 24 to 36 hours (kidneys).
And as for the slice and dicing, but for one quick scene that seems to use real operation footage, the little (notably pointless) vivisection done is performed by Charlie, the morgue's Guy Friday handyman. Okay, some states don not require that a coroner has a medical degree (dunno about Aridzona), but Charlie is definitely more a janitor kind of guy.
Autopsy also agitates in a world in 99% of the dead remain unclaimed and no one cares what happens to body: up until the arrival of Jane Doe's living twin sister Jill, no family ever comes around to view any of the dead or claim any given body for burial or cremation or donation to Body Worlds. For a narrative set within the world of morgues and coroners and corpses, the apparently shot-on-video movie displays surprisingly deep ignorance of the business and dead people.
Autopsy: A Love Story — to an extent, like many Crawford directorial projects (see, for example The Catcher [1998 / trailer],* Starved [1999 / trailer] and Dark Places [2005 / trailer]) — is hampered by a mundane directorial eye, an extremely lazy script, an obvious lack of budget, laughable "gore" and make-up, and the thespian non-talents of a barely palatable cast of family and friends and a Z-actor. In turn, Autopsy is also sorely undermined by a noticeable lack of laughs for a black comedy. Most of the few that do occur arise from the interaction between the dimwitted Charlie and his demanding, physically handicapped girlfriend Mary (Ginny Harman), and there are a few scenes of Charlie and Jane's relationship in its making that garner a smile, but for the most part the movie leaves you with the feeling of, well, that you're truly wasting roughly 1.5 hours of your life. In the end, there simply isn't enough there to make Autopsy worth bothering. So don't.
* Notable for its baseball-bat male rape scene, which luckily (?) does not go too into detail... and calls to our mind a true story of our past, in the days when, if one was not into the bar scene, one used personal ads in newspapers or city mags to meet people instead of websites like Tinder. Here in Germany, once upon a time, we put a personal in a city mag for a woman we knew, timed so that we could give her all the collected responses as a birthday present. Dispersed between all the typically vanilla responses, there were also the typical dick picks, which of course made the rounds and instigated great mirth at the party. (Hey, guys: if you think you're dick picks don't get shared, guess again.) But amidst all the uncircumcised European wiener, there was a true show-stopping masterpiece: a picture of dark-skinned, nude and not-lacking young man with a full-sized baseball bat sticking out of his ass (thickest part in), adorned with the statement, Ist doch Kunst, wah? ("It's art, isn't it?"). Oddly enough, his envelope, complete with contents, was the only one to mysteriously disappear that night...

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

B.o.Y.: The Women of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Part XVIII – Edy Williams, Pt. III (1983-90)

Trailer to
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls:

"Using unknowns you avoid highly exaggerated salaries and prima donnas."
 
In case you didn't already know: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Russ Meyer's baroque 1967 masterpiece, one of only two movies he ever made for a major Hollywood studio (in this case, Fox), is without a doubt one of the Babest movies ever made. While we have yet to review it here at a wasted life (if we did, we would foam at the mouth in raging rave), we have looked at it before, many times, beginning back in 2011, in our R.I.P. Career Review of Charles Napier (12 Apr 1936 – 5 Oct 2011), and again in 2013 in our R.I.P. Career Review for the Great Haji (24 Jan 1946 – 10 Aug 2013) — both appear in the film. (Since then, again in virtually every BVD-Babe blog entry listed below.)
 
"This is not a sequel. There has never been anything like it!"
Advertisement tagline
 
In Haji's entry, we were wrote, among other things, the following: "Originally intended as a sequel to the 1967 movie version of Jacqueline Susann's novel Valley of the Dolls (trailer), Meyer and co-screenwriter Roger Ebert instead made a Pop Art exploitation satire of the conventions of the modern Hollywood melodrama, written in sarcasm but played straight, complete with a 'moralistic' ending that owes its inspiration to the Manson-inspired murder of Sharon Tate and her guests on August 9, 1969. Aside from the movie's absolutely insane plot, the cinematography is also noteworthy — as are the figures of the pneumatic babes that populate the entire movie. For legal reasons, the film starts with the following disclaimer: 'The film you are about to see in not a sequel to Valley of the Dolls. It is wholly original and bears no relationship to real persons, living or dead. It does, like Valley of the Dolls, deal with the oft-times nightmare world of show business but in a different time and context.' [...]"
 
"Any movie that Jacqueline Susann thinks would damage her reputation as a writer cannot be all bad."
 
Russ Meyer films are always populated by amazing breasts sights, but Beyond the Valley of the Dolls literally overflows its cups in an excess of pulchritude that (even if somewhat more demurely covered than in most of his films) lights the fires of any person attracted to women of the curvaceous kind that preceded today's sculptured plasticity. The film is simply Babe Galore.
Bebe Louie & Phyllis Davis in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
And so we continue our look at the flesh film careers of the breasts women of the Babest Film of All Times, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. The size of the women's breasts roles is of lesser importance than the simple fact that they are known to be in it somewhere, and so far we have looked at the cleavage known unknowns and mildly knowns in the background and the headlining semi-knowns in the front in eighteen blog entries — with more breasts babes to come. Our entries focus on their nipples careers in film, if in a meandering manner, and we have slightly more than another half-year to go before we're finished drooling with the project.
 
So far, we have looked at the T&A careers of the following:
Part I: The Non-babe of Note — Princess Livingston
Part II: Background Babe — Jacqulin Cole
Part III: Background Babe — Bebe Louie
Part IV: Background Babe — Trina Parks
Part V: Background Babe — Lavelle Roby, Pt. I (1968-76)
Part VI: Background Babe — Lavelle Roby. Pt. II (1979-2021)
Part VII: Killer Babe — Samantha Scott
Part VIII: Background Babe — Karen Smith
Part IX: Background Babes — The Five Mysterians
Part X: Background Babe — Gina Dair 
Part XI: Background Babe — Cissi Colpitts, Pt. I (1970-80) 
Part XII: Background Babe — Cissi Colpitts, Pt. II (1981-88)
Part XV: Background Babe Veronica Ericson
 
And now, we continue our a look at Edy Williams, the only woman in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls that can claim to have been married to the movie's director (from 27 June 1970 – 7 Nov 1975). Edwina Beth Williams was born 9 July 1942 in Salt Lake City, Utah, but grew up in Oregon and Southern California. A model and beauty contest winner, she eventually signed a multi-year contract with 20th Century Fox and began appearing regularly in movies and television, if mostly as background filler. Her first true role of note is probably her breathy interpretation of Hatrack in The Naked Kiss (1964, see Part I). Breathy sexiness became the id that became and remained her trademark, which is perhaps why she remains best known (outside of cult film circles) as the eternal starlet forever displaying her talents at the Cannes Film Festival. During the sixties, her career trajectory slowly worked its way upwards, achieving its highpoint with her double whammy of Meyer's hit Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970
, see Part II) and his subsequent flop The Seven Minutes (1971, see Part II). Thereafter, her parts got smaller or more obscure or cult-oriented. Since 1990, she has pretty much disappeared from the dimming limelight if not from public. Today, one could well ask "Whatever happened to Edy Williams?"


Chained Heat
(1983, dir. Paul Nicholas)

"You know what they say in China? They say: ciao!"
Lester (Henry Silva)
 
If you exclude her non-appearance in The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington (1977, see Part II), it took eight years before Edy Williams had another "real" film role. The real star of this German-American production is, of course, Linda Blair (of Hell Night [1981]), who does her first nude scenes in the movie, including that WIP mainstay: a topless shower scene. Other great cult names are also present: John Vernon, Stella Stevens, Sybal Danning, Henry Silva (of Alligator [1980], Lust in the Dust [1984] and so much more), Penthouse Pet Monique Gabrielle, and the great Tamara Dobson ([14 May 1947 – 2 Oct 2006] of Cleopatra Jones [1973]), who has a sizable role in what (sadly) proved to be her last film appearance. The film did well enough to get a non-related sequel: Chained Heat II (1993 / trailer) with Brigitte Nielsen (of Red Sonja [1985]), as well as some half dozen other flicks that simply added "Chained Heat" to their titles, clickbait-like. None of the subsequent films were directed by German bad-film director Paul Nicholas (a.k.a. Lutz Schaarwächter), but he did do another WIP film later, The Naked Cage (1986 / trailer), populated by no-names instead of cult faves. 
Trailer to
Chained Heat:
"Yeah, film scholars will talk about the editing of the stair sequence in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925 / trailer) or Hitchcock's shower scene in Psycho (1960 / trailer). But film history would be a total bust if it did not mention the topless shower encounter between Linda Blair and Sybil Danning. King Kong vs. Godzilla? You ain't got nothing on this showdown of epic proportions. [Video Junkie]"
As perhaps to be expected in a movie as chocked full with cult names as this one, and that features an extended full frontal nude shower scene of Blair and Danning together, Edy Williams (as Paula) tends to be overlooked by most reviewers, despite the fact that she's in that same scene and just as naked.
"The plot: "[Chained Heat] has everything the genre needs, in addition to a pretty great cast. Linda Blair (of Hell Night [1981]) stars as the wrongly accused Carol Henderson, who goes to prison and appears topless in the shower. The warden (John Vernon) has sex with girls in his hot tub and videotapes them. Prison officer Captain Taylor (Stella Stevens of The Terror Within II [1991]) and her guard boyfriend Lester (Henry Silva of Alligator [1980]) run a kind of drug/prostitution ring on the side. Ericka (Sybil Danning) leads the prison's white gang, and Duchess (Tamara Dobson of Cleopatra Jones [1973]) leads the black gang. Lastly, the gorgeous 'B' movie scream queen Monique Gabrielle appears as one of the warden's hot tub babes. Eventually the prisoners team up and take on the crooked prison officials. If you're going to see any one 'women in prison' movie, this one will do fine. [Combustible Celluloid]"
"There are good movies. There are bad movies. And then there's Chained Heat, a women in prison epic so stupefyingly out of whack from its opening frames that words can't describe it. Only the shakiest thread of a plot runs through this insane, darkly lit chunk of exploitation excess, crammed to the corners with a cast of drive-in veterans and every possible cliché you can imagine, driven to its silliest extremes. Steamy showers, prison riots, rapist guards, evil wardens... yup, it's all here, but you've never seen it like this. [WIP Films]"
Theme to
Chained Heat:
"By the end of the movie, all the baddies are dead, and the prisoners I guess are all friends. The big thing with Chained Heat is that it has recognizable faces throughout; every second you're spotting someone recognizable. And this is a big accomplishment for WIP film, a genre usually relegated to the absolute bottom of the barrel. A few problems: Some of the characters we're introduced to go nowhere. Bubbles (Louisa Moritz [25 Sep 1936 – 4 Jan 2019] of New Year's Evil [1980 / trailer]) and Blue Eyes (Jody Medford of Mutant [1984 / trailer]) basically disappear. I was glad to see Edy provide the FFN, but that's literally her only part. I suppose there were just too many characters to have time to fit each into the story line. Of course, since it's a WIP film, it follows the template. So, if you're expecting anything new or interesting, think again. It's paint-by-numbers WIP, but I wouldn't have it any other way. [Video Zeta One]"
"[Chained Heat] is one of my favourite women in prison films. There are plenty of naked women coupled with campy dialogue. It's everything a movie like this should be. [Last Movie Review on the Left]"
 
 
Lady Lust
(1984, dir. "Arthur Ben")
Director "Arthur Ben", a.k.a. Arther Ben, Art Ben, Arthur Benn, Ben, R. Dorfman, Rod Dorkman, Arthur Penn, Gerry Toll & Otto von Lickit, is assumedly named Ron Dorfman in real life. Seeing that this flick's scriptwriter is named a suspicious "Pamela Penn" — related to "Arthur Penn", perhaps? — we wouldn't be surprised if that is a Dorfman pseudonym as well, especially since most of her scriptwriting jobs are for his films.
Not many "serious" reviews of this flick out there, though the film is easy enough to find for free on any number of porn sites. But back in 2015 at imdb, lor_ saw the kern of the matter: "Today's celebrities take note: Lady Lust is a good example of how one day's big deal/celebrity news is tomorrow's fish wrap [...]. This movie was ever so briefly a big deal 30 years back, signaling the hardcore film debut for Edy Williams, the erstwhile Russ Meyer star who was a popular personality of the time, not unlike Tonight Show guests Charo and Carol Wayne ([6 Sept 1942 – 13 Jan 1985] of You Are What You Eat [1968 / full movie]). She didn't really go XXX, merely fronting in a porn film a la the even more famous (and just as forgotten) stripper of two decades before Carol Doda ([29 Aug 1937 – 9 Nov 2015] of Honky Tonk Nights [1978 / full movie]) was wont to do. [...] But Lady Lust is a real movie, shot on film in 1983 right when video production was poised to take over. And more dramatically, it is a professional, watchable movie [...]."
Edy gives an interview
(as of 8:40):
The "plot"? The generic description found on a multitude of porn sites: "Lady Lust is the story of two sisters, Suzanne Cross (Edy Williams) and Irene (Kimberly Carson). Both lead wildly different lives. While Irene is a happily married mother of two, Suzanne is a single and highly sophisticated woman of the world. During a brief visit, each gets to explore the other's intriguing sex life. And you get to see it all in glorious and graphic detail." Sounds, basically, like a thousand other porn movies... and it is about as well-acted. 
In this occasionally hardcore movie, Edy has a softcore heterosexual scene with Michael Gaunt (that's him chewing on her foot above), a nude dance, and a softcore lesbian tryst with Sharon Mitchell. Sharon Mitchell, one of the most prolific porn stars in X-rated film history, has been known to have an occasional small part in non-porn film, like Maniac (1980 / trailer) & the forgotten Feast (1992). Michael Gaunt, who showed up to dig a grave in City of the Living Dead (1980) and worked with both Roberta Findlay (A Woman's Torment [1977 / trailer]) and Doris Wishman (Let Me Dies a Woman [1977 / full film below] and Come with Me My Love [1976] / full NSFW movie), is supposedly still active in local theatre today. 
The full film —
Let Me Die A Woman:
As for director Ron Dorfman, he's had other past projects that demand greater respect than this low-rate and forgettable swansong project of the Golden Age: should the imdb be believed, he was one of many camera operators on Gimme Shelter (1970 / trailer); he edited Agnes Moorehead's low-rate filmic farewell, Dear Dead Delilah (1972 / trailer); he (as "Gerry Toll") was cinematographer of the exploitation classic, Joel M. Reed's Bloodsucking Freaks (1976 / trailer), as well as on that director's anemic follow-up project Night of the Zombies (1981 / trailer) and on the early NYC sexploitation gem, The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful (1970). His first directorial project, Groupies (1970), which he did alongside Peter Nevard, is an intriguing document of its time...
The full film —
Groupies (1970):

 
Hollywood Hot Tubs
(1984, dir. Chuck Vincent)
The same year that Edy Williams appeared in a "real" sex film, she appeared in this jiggle comedy directed by a name familiar to anyone who has a slight interest in the Golden Age of Porn. Director Chuck Vincent (6 Sept 1940 — 23 Sept 1991) made a number of Golden Age X-rated "classics", including Roommates (1981 / cut trailer) and Jack n' Jill (1979 / NSFW film), was the executive producer of one of Harry Reems' last non-porn appearances, RSVP (1984 / trailer), and dabbled with mainstream with such films as Warrior Queen (1987 / trailer) and Deranged (1987 / full movie) and a gaggle of lame T&A jiggle comedies like this flick here, Hollywood Hot Tubs (1984). Vincent died untimely and too early of AIDS at the age of 51. 
Trailer to
Hollywood Hot Tubs:
The plot, from Letterboxd: "A teen (Paul Gunning) and his friends get into trouble for vandalizing the Hollywood sign, and rather than going to prison he opts to work for his uncle's hot tub repair company. The sleazy salesman (Stafford Morgan [26 Jan 1935 – 24 Sep 2018] of The Witch Who Came from the Sea [1976 / trailer], Schoolgirls in Chains [1973 / trailer], The Forest [1982 / trailer], The Alpha Incident [1978 / trailer] and The Capture of Bigfoot [1979 / trailer]) drums up business by sabotaging the tubs at Hollywood Hot Tubs and by wooing the owner. The nephew begins falling in love with the secretary (Donna McDaniel of Angel [1983 / trailer; see Susan Tyrrell] and Frightmare [1983 / trailer]) at his uncle's company, but risks losing her when caught in compromising but unintentional situations while he goes about his duties as tub repairman." (For a very detailed synopsis, check out the AFI Catalog.)
 
Edy Williams plays Desiree, a leather-clad patron (?!) of a massage parlor, who gets nude and seduces Shawn while he's there to work on a tub.
"Everything that can be done to, with, for, in or around hot water finds its way into a plot that goes from the quick and the dirty to the gothic. Each half-hour delivers a coupling in this not-too-funny comedy full of booze, broads and bubbles. The final party offers lookalikes of Burt Reynolds, Lauren Bacall and Bozo. Only the last is convincing. [Variety]"
Scene from the film:
Cinematic Revelations is one of the few to have anything positive about the movie, nothing of which sounds ironic, despite the fact that they gave it a C-rating: "Chuck Vincent has fashioned an entertaining, humorous motion picture with Hollywood Hot Tubs. There is a nice flow overall to the film, with Mr Vincent ensuring a sweetness, and innocence in its tone, despite the subject matter dipping its toes heavily into bawdiness in many an instance. [...] The comic repartee between characters, the one-liners, realizations, all work in a natural manner, without reducing the characters into caricatures. The raunchiness is delivered with ease by the cast, and a lack of self-consciousness. In a related way, the array of comic set pieces have been carefully arranged for maximum impact, with some being genuinely funny, in spite of the heady nature of some of these. [...] Hollywood Hot Tubs has a talented cast who all provide enthusiastic performances, giving the movie a big boost. [...] The movie has a very good grasp of mise-en-scene which is reflected in many departments. [...] Outdoor location filming is also noteworthy, with the overhead shots of Los Angeles providing viewers with a bird's eye view of its milieu. [...]"
From the film —
Donna McDaniel sings In Your Eyes:
Hollywood Hot Tubs had a "sequel" made in 1990, the even more obscure direct-to-video Hollywood Hot Tubs 2 – Educating Crystal, which less people saw and even less people remember.
Terrible song from
Hollywood Hot Tubs 2 – Educating Crystal:
 
 
Bad Manners
(1984, writ. & dir. Robert Houston)

"If you guys want to circle-jerk, I can go in the tent."
Girl Joey (Pamela Adlon)
 
A.k.a. Growing Pains. Edy Williams plays someone named Mrs. Slatt, above, who shows up briefly with hubby Mr. Slatt (Hy Pyke [2 Dec 1935 – 28 Sept 2006] of Dolemite [1975 / trailer], Slithis [1978 / trailer] and Hack-O-Lantern [1988 / trailer]) as prospective adopting parents. No reference is ever made to her in any of the few reviews of Bad Manners that we could find online.
Trailer to
Bad Manners:
Director Robert Houston started his film career with a high note: he plays the subliminally gay son Bobby in Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and crappy The Hills Have Eyes II (1984), the latter a humongous filmic turd infamous for giving even the dog a flashback to the first film. He also appeared in The Great American Girl Robbery (1979), which we looked at in our Babe of Yesterday look at Marilyn Joi (Pt IV). Before disappearing from the film biz, Robert Houston went onto becoming a successful (as in Academy Award-winning) documentary director, but initially he made a few quirky and obscure movies, of which Bad Manners is the second. Of his non-documentary directorial projects, his directorial "debut" — the English language Shogun Assassin (1980 / trailer below), made from two episodes of the Lone Wolf and Cub* film series (1972 thru 1974) — has long become a cult classic.
* Specifically, Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx (1972 / trailer) and Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (1972 / trailer).
Trailer to
Shogun Assassin:
The plot to Bad Manners cum Growing Pains: "Piper (Greg Olden) is the new kid inside a rough orphanage who befriends Mouse (Michael Hentz) who looks up to Piper as a sort of tough guy hero. When Mouse gets adopted by a snotty rich couple (Martin Mull, Karen Black) Piper convinces the orphans to break out of the orphanage and rescue him. [Scopophilia]"
"The pace is fast, the thrills are exciting. Watching the film is like a rollercoaster ride. While you may not get much out of it, boy is it wicked fun to watch! It's about kids with attitude and energy, about disobedience and rebellion — and the slogan printed on the poster does not lie in promising that: 'Those kids will steal your heart.... (your wallet, your tires, your sanity)'. [Sky Kid]"
Bad Manners
Theme song by The Sparks:
"[...] John Waters had for years said he wanted to make a film for a child audience, and you could only wonder whether it would have ended up something like this, a relentlessly bad taste experience that you only imagine was intended for the younger viewer, since the youngsters were the main characters. However, that was without taking into account its jokes. [Spinning Image]"
 
 
Hellhole
(1985, dir. Pierre De Moro)

"You're not mentally ill, you're emotionally disturbed."
Dr. Fletcher (Mary Woronov)
 
Pierre De Moro's third and final directorial project, though he never actually finished it: "[...] Director De Moro only had a three film career (the others, if you're really interested, are the lame family films Christmas Mountain (1981 / full film) and Savannah Smiles (1982 / trailer), but that's not entirely true. Although he started Hellhole, he apparently didn't finish it, that honour going to Tom DeSimone, director of such gems as Hell Night (1981), Reform School Girls (1986 / trailer; see Lavelle Roby) and Angel III: The Final Chapter (1988 / trailer; see Dick Miller). [EOFFTV]"
Hellhole, in any event, is what we here at a wasted life love: pure trash. It's a WIP film, more or less, in that this time around instead of the women being locked in a prison, they are all locked in a nuthouse. Watch the full film at Internet Archives
Trailer to
Hellhole:
Two years earlier, co-scripter Aaron Butler scripted the earlier mentioned WIP film with Edy Williams, Chained Heat (1983). As mentioned, the legendary Tom DeSimone (director of Hell Night [1981] and so much more, especially gay porn [often as "Lancer Brooks"]) was subsequently pulled in to shoot (uncredited) additional scenes. "Additional editing" was then done by Lee Harry, who says at Cool Ass Cinema: "At the time I was co-owner of a struggling post-production company. An editor friend had been offered the Hellhole job, but considered it beneath him. I met with the post supervisor, Lawrence Appelbaum, and he offered me more money than I had seen in years. [...] It 'starred' the late Ray Sharkey, who appeared to be in his heroin phase, Marjoe Gortner, Edy Williams, the Russ Meyer bombshell, and the great Robert Z'dar. I was hired to cut the reshoots, which were basically sex and violence scenes. It didn't offend my sensibilities because I had a baby on the way and needed the money." (Unbelievably enough, Mr. Harry fails to mention the fact that the great Dyanne Thorne [14 Oct 1936 – 28 Jan 2020] is in the movie, too, playing the crazy patient Crysta.)
Marjoe Gortner suddenly has qualms:
At All Movie, Cavett Binion has the plot: "It's hard to be critical of an exploitation film that revels so gleefully in its awfulness. To begin with, we're presented with dazed, glassy-eyed heroine Susan (Judy Landers*), whose condition is readily explained by a bout with amnesia brought on by the brutal murder of her mother (Lynn Borden [24 Mar 1937 — 3 Mar 2015] of Frogs [1972 / trailer] and Black Mama White Mama [1973]) at the hands of a sleazy villain, Silk (Ray Sharkey [14 Nov 1952 – 11 Jun 1993]). She is sent to the prison-like Ashland Mental Hospital for therapy, at first blissfully unaware of the diabolical mind experiments being performed on the all-female patients in the title dungeon by leering mad doctor, Dr. Fletcher (Mary Woronov of Night of the Comet [1984] and so much more), who's done more than her share of leering in films of this type. Sharkey's Silk not out of the picture — he's lurking about the grounds, hoping to wring some secrets from our heroine about the documents he tried to obtain from her poor mom. The usual women-in-prison accouterments abound, from glue-sniffing lesbians to lecherous guards. [...]"
* In Hellhole, "Judy Landers's Susan seemed sane simply because Judy's one of the few actress with the innate ability to appear as if she was born without a brain. And, as we all know, it's kinda hard to damage a brain when there's no brain to damage in the first place. [House of Indulgence]"
Chased!
Edy Williams (you see her in the trailer) "is on hand for the sole purpose of showing some skin", which she does as a patient named Vera, whom Silk approaches at one point to get info on Ron (Richard Cox of Seizure [1974 / trailer], with Jonathan Frid), an orderly at the institution who eventually gets the girl by saving Susan.
"If you like women, and I mean, really like women, you'll definitely want to check out Hellhole, the developmentally challenged Cadillac of women in prison movies. It's got every kind of woman your unvarnished heart could possibly desire. Of course, the catch being that all the women are somewhat meshuggeneh. However, if you're like me, and you can't stand being around women who have all their faculties in order, then have I got a treat for you. It's got women who swing axes, body-blow absorbing nurses, sandbox girls (there's nothing hotter than the sight of a grown woman playing in a sandbox while wearing a nondescript hospital gown), beastly women who lurk in dark boiler rooms, jacuzzi lesbians, mud-bath connoisseurs, Christian fundamentalists with crimped hair, glue-sniffing lesbians (actually, the jacuzzi lesbians and the glue-sniffing lesbians are one in the same, so it should read 'glue-sniffing lesbians who like jacuzzis'), shock-haired psychotics, overly enthusiastic shower fight bystanders, and skittish binge eaters. Oh, my, I'm getting tingly just thinking about all the mentally unstable ladies who populate this film's rough and grimy universe. [House of Indulgence]"
"Will Dr. Fletcher ravage the sultry Susan? Will Silk ravage the sultry Susan? Will the lesbian babes of the asylum ravage the sultry Susan? This film spends 95 minutes topping each previous gratuitous scene. Everything about Judy Landers, from her demeanor, satin shorts, revealing hospital gown, kinky nurse uniform, and general state of helplessness plays well to the gratuitous nature of this exploitation film. For a guilty pleasure, enjoy Hellhole, directed by Pierre DeMoro. [Zisi Emporium]"
"If you wanna find a sleazy one for the night, then this will fill your VCR nicely. You get boobs, butts, girl/girl action, some bad fight scenes, and a mad female scientits all in one film! Wasn't quite as good as I just made it sound, but fun none the less. You get to see Edy Williams nekid a few times. You get to see one of them big-tittied Landers girls stare blankly and squeak out unintelligent dialog (just like I do in every review). You get to see the morons left over from the mad Dr.'s experiments. Not a gory film nor that great a w.i.p., however it'll give you a few good chuckles. [Buried]"
 
 
Rented Lips
(1987, dir. Robert Downey Sr.)
Not considered one of the director's highpoints, Rented Lips was written by and also stars some guy named Martin Mull. Edy Williams plays a porn actress named Heather Darling, a part originally intended for Valerie Perrine. And, yes, Robert Downey Sr.'s son Robert "Iron Man" Downey appears to play a porn star named Wolf Dangler.

Rented Lips was a flop and seems to exist in several different edits. Here at a wasted life, we would think a film so universally panned cannot be as bad as they say — judge for yourself. 
One version of the full film:
"A documentary filmmaker (Mull), who has spent the last 15 years making films like Aluminum: Our Shiny Friend, is finally given the chance to make the documentary on Indian farming he has always wanted to. The catch? He must simultaneously direct a porn film. But as he tries to make the porn film, which he turns into a musical called Halloween in the Barracks, he must deal with a temperamental actor, a fundamentalist preacher, and other obstacles. [80s Movie Guide]" A more-detailed synopsis of what sounds like a mess can be found at the AFI Catalog.
Scene without Edy:
"What in the world went wrong with Rented Lips? Certainly no movie written by and starring Martin Mull and directed by Robert Downey should be this bad. It's a joke, right? No such luck. This film about inept movie makers botching up the movies they're making is so bollixed up itself — full of jokes that misfire, gags that drag and a plot that leaks out like methane gas — that you wonder whether the story behind the film is funnier than what we're watching. [Michael Wilmington @ LA Times]"
Film in film —
Edy acts with Robert Jr.:

 
Dirty Laundry
(1987, dir. William Webb)
For a while, William Webb specialized in low-rent C-films like this comedy thriller: poorly made forgettable stuff with an odd array of no-names and slumming "names" in need of rent money. Then he stopped. No one noticed.
Edy Williams pops up to play the Poodle Lady; you see her in the trailer. Former Olympic pretty boy Carl Lewis makes his acting debut in the movie playing a cop (you see him above, not from the movie, and in the trailer), as does former Olympic pretty boy Greg Louganis (below, from his 1987 Playgirl layout). Dirty Laundry never got an official theater release, going straight to home video.
The plot: "The film follows a young man (Leigh McCloskey, "an author, visionary artist and visual philosopher", of Inferno [1980 / trailer], Cameron's Closet [1988 / trailer] and Lucky Stiff [1988 / full movie]) who visits his local laundromat where a big scene is made when a young couple starts fighting loudly. A man with a sack full of cash is doing a drug drop at the same time in the laundromat and the two bags get mixed up. Soon a local drug pin is on the hunt for the young man and a female reporter when they discover he has the bag of cash instead of the bag of his dirty underwear. [Horror Society]" 
Trailer to
Dirty Laundry:
"Other than using actual film, Dirty Laundry appears like a side project for some college students, those usually shot on video. At least the California scenery often looks great, a minuscule positive in a movie that offers near zero entertainment value, and instead injects visual melatonin into the brain. [DoBlu]" 
Full movie:
"The classic plot device of switched bags that look the same but have far different things inside is the basis for 1987's Dirty Laundry, which might be a perfect example of a 1980s direct-to-video movie. [...] If the cheesy music score and unmistakably 80s colors don't immediately grab you, the cast list certainly will — we've got legendary singers Frankie Valli AND Sonny Bono playing bad guys [...]. Carl Lewis plays a slick-looking but not too bright cop tracking the action in an obvious attempt to parody Miami Vice, which was popular at the time. This is one of those movies that could easily be a complete dud but it's saved by its age and now-dated visuals along with the noteworthy cast who might have just needed a paycheck when signing on. Most of the humor predictably falls flat, relying mostly on the bad guys' ineptitude [...]. [DVD Talk]"

Of course, [almost] every film also has its defenders — as does Dirty Laundry, over at The Movie Elite, which says: "A simple, connect-the-dots comedy/caper with its feet firmly entrenched in the cocaine-swilling '80s, Dirty Laundry is a delightfully unsophisticated movie with random punks, casual racism, girls in bikinis, old ladies with guns, Miami Vice spoofing, kung fu, and a chase in an ice cream truck. Honestly, what more could you ask for? It's dumb, sometimes tasteless, and clumsier than a Police Academy sequel, but I had a really fun time with it. Never released theatrically, but dumped to home video during the VHS video boom, Dirty Laundry could have used even more tasteless and sexist gags, but as it is, it's a goober of a time capsule."

 
 
Mankillers
(1987, writ. & dir. David A Prior)

"And you ran away from women?"
John Mickland (William Zipp)
 
Trailer to
Mankillers:

A.k.a. 12 Wild Women. One can only wonder that it took so long for Edy Williams to find herself in one David A. Prior's typical vehicles, as he did indeed enjoy hiring the forgotten. 
Here, Edy Williams shares a little limelight with the then-forgotten, now-unknown Edd "Kookie" Byrnes ([30 Jul 1932 – 8 Jan 2020] of Any Gun Can Play [1967 / trailer] & Reform School Girl [1957 / trailer]), not to mention the on-the-skids Gail Fisher (18 Aug 1935 – 2 Dec 2000). As to be expected, both Williams and Byrnes have minor parts that probably took less than half a day to shoot. That's Edd way down below getting a knife in his gonads.
Edd Byrnes & Connie Stevens sing
Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb:
"Arguably the foremost auteur of grade-D action movies in the 1980s and early '90s, director David A. Prior (5 Oct 1955 – 16 Aug 2015) is to '80s action what Cirio Santiago was to '70s exploitation: cheap, prolific and interested only in delivering the bare essentials of the genre. Prior's movies could care less about plot or character. He only wants to put as much violent, sweaty action as can be packed into 90 minutes. At this, he is successful. The quality of said action is another story. [...] David A. Prior is such a unique voice in the genre; comparing him to Ed Wood is too reductive, but he is similarly prolific, similarly passionate about the kinds of movies he made and similarly lacking in the resources to truly bring his oversized visions to the screen. If not for companies like Olive and Slasher Studios, Mankillers would likely have vanished alongside the VHS format. Now it will never die. [F This Movie]" 
From the film —
Freedom by Steve McClintock:
Plot: "John Mickland (William Zipp) is one very bad dude. He's a drug runner, murderer, white slave trader/human trafficker, and will torture you with a chainsaw if he doesn't like you. So, with that information in hand, CIA agent Rachael McKenna (Lynda Aldon, below on a magazine cover) begins the hunt for Mickland. With only the logic of 'women are more effective in the field', she tells her superiors she needs a battalion of 12 women. She goes to the local prison and rounds up some babes, telling them if they help her on this dangerous mission, they will be freed. The women agree and begin an intense training regimen. When their training is cut short, the inexperienced women and their leader must face off against Mickland and his many minions with the odds stacked even further against them. Will they be the ultimate Mankillers? [Comeuppance]"
Needless to say, David A. Prior was "inspired" by an older, far more popular and male-dominated movie, Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967 / trailer). 
"The cover of this leads one to believe this is an Andy Sidaris/Julie Strain-style sexy actioner, and that isn't what it is. Yes, there's plenty of women clad the way you see above, but there's no sex, no nudity, nothing of that sort. What this is, is an AIP actioner from 1987 that, without having a Z'Dar or a Cameron Mitchell or anyone like that, still works in that fun, AIP vein. Zipp as the baddie just straight kills it, whether it's the mullet or the slicked-back ponytail look, as he's doing enough blow to make Scarface uncomfortable and cutting guys up with a chainsaw, you can't help but love it. Yes, the premise is crazy, and yes you see things like the same guy killed twice, but when David Prior is giving us a shoot-em-up on a budget, I'll take all of it. [Direct to Video Connoisseur]" 
Scene with Stand Tuff,
sung by Jimmy Hammer:
"So here's my big complaint on this movie. Your lead actress is an attractive big-breasted woman. She assembles a team of large-breasted women. Not only that, but she recruited them from fucking prison! She then dressed them up in the most skimpy camouflage gear known to man or bikini model. So why, if you have all of these elements together, DO YOU NOT SHOW ANY FUCKING NUDITY FROM THESE WOMEN WHATSOEVER!? There's nothing, nada, from these women. No full frontal, no titties, not even a goddamn buttcrack is shown! What happened? Was someone (as my wife put it) supposed to be the designated 'titty lady' but they kept trying to put it on the other girls? Lord knows they weren't hired for their acting ability or fucking personalities. EDY WILLIAMS, A PERSON WHO WILL TAKE IT OFF EVEN WHEN YOU DON'T WANT HER TO, DIDN'T GET NUDE! What the fuck movie... just What. The. Fuck. [Wide Weird World of Cult Film]" 
Mankillers
the full movie:

"Mankillers is pretty much what you would expect if you're well-versed in the wonderful world of '80s low-budget cinema. The acting is hard to endure at times, the writing isn't the greatest, and the overall quality is sub-par at best. While these things would generally ruin a movie-viewing experience, they don't actually hinder the enjoyment one can get from Mankillers. Oh no, this is one of those films that borders on 'so bad, it's good.' [...] Mankillers isn't one of the best flicks out there, but it is certainly an entertaining watch. Pretty girls, explosions, and enough '80s cheese to keep you satisfied for weeks are good enough reasons to check this one out. Round up a couple of buddies, grab some brews, and enjoy the lovely obscurity that is Mankillers [...]. [Repulsive Reviews]"
 
 
The American Scream
(1988, writ & dir. Mitchell Linden)
A one-shot-wonder of a project that flopped because no one could figure out what it was meant to be... or maybe simply because no ever actually heard about it. Prior to its shoot, the LA Times wrote on 17 Jan 1988, "The American Scream. Shooting in Camp Nelson and L.A. sexpot Edy Williams leads the way in a black comedy [...]." Yeah, she led the way in a cameo as Greta the Stripper in a stripper scene that surely took only a few hours to shoot, one of four woman who supply the '80s exploitation film mainstay, T&A, for this decidedly contentious and strange film. 
DVD release trailer with Edy's talents:
The Bloody Pit of Horror has a plot synopsis: "Goofball dad Ben Benzinger (Pons Maar of The Blob [1988]) and family head up to a rented cabin at a small, wintery town called Wilson Creek. Coming along are his hair-obsessed, airhead wife Barbara (Jennifer Darling of Kaena: The Prophecy [2003]), rocker Peeping Tom teenage son Brent (Matt Borlenghi of Cannibal Hookers [1987 / full moive]), virginal teen daughter Bridgett (Kimberlee Kramer a.k.a. Riley Weston) and two of the kids' friends; Larry (Kevin Kaye) and Roxanne (Jeanne Sapienza). On the way there the teens spot a killer clown standing on the roadside, then look into a passing car to see a man murdering an infant because he's jealous his wife is breast-feeding it (!) Meanwhile, the parents sing 100 Bottles of Beer. They all reach their destination (you know, forgetting to inform the authorities or any of that), then head off to town to a diner where the weird townspeople all stare intensely and behave strangely. At their cabin, Larry sees a priest (Blackie Dammett [7 Dec 1939 – 12 May 2021], the daddy of Anthony Kiedis) trying to murder a young woman. That night when they attend a Polka Dance, Brent is accosted in the bathroom by a pervert who wants to watch him piss and the girls see a man getting decapitated. A country bumpkin with a stuffed pet dog (George 'Buck' Flower [28 Oct 1937 – 18 Jun 2004] of Village of the Damned [1995], Wishmaster [1997] and so much more) relates a flashback to when his children were killed before getting shot in the head. So, it's time to leave, no? Guess not. [...]"
"This is at one of the lower levels where it's professional enough to be watchable, but awkward and incoherent enough in the writing, staging and editing to take on a sort of outsider art weirdness. You want it to work better but you also have to appreciate the accidents that make it unique. Pretty much every piece of action, from dropping a suitcase down the stairs to all the murder scenes, is completely disorienting. Its lack of coherence almost constitutes a style. [Vern's Reviews]" 
Most people seem to hate the movie, but the generally hard to please The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre rates it as "Of Some Interest": "[The American Scream] was panned by almost everyone that watched it for being an incoherent and incomprehensible 80s horror movie. Besides the endless parade of strange people and bizarre acts of violence, the weirder thing is that the teens never seem to be fazed much by all the murderous mayhem, and continue with life as normal. The thing is, and I may be wrong here, it's not meant to be watched as a horror movie about a killer town. It's a surreal satire on generation gaps in a somewhat similar way to Society (1989 / trailer), expect without the splatter. Babies are viciously exploded, teenagers are hunted for sex but are also hated to the point of murder, and the local preacher is the worst of all, because it is the standard adult disgust of immoral teenage behaviour that has been transformed into surreal violence. And the teenagers are used to that. Except that teenagers also grow up and become the next generation of teenage-hating adults. So there you go: It's a surreal social commentary movie that uses horror. Whether the director intended this is another question, since the movie is still rather strange and somewhat put together."
Scream Queen Debra Lamb has a small role where her throat is slit in a shower. Over at Geek Juice Media, she remembers the shoot: "I remember working on The American Scream well. We filmed it several hours away from L.A. up in the mountains. It wasn't Big Bear — I can't remember the exact mountain we were on, but the location was a teeny tiny mountain town that had a great local bar, which a lot of the scenes were shot at. It just so happened that an old friend from Santa Monica High School, Kevin Kaye, was playing Larry in the film. He did a lot of musical theatre back in high school. We were in drama together. It was a lot of fun, and I got to play the archetypical 'victim' that gets chased by the maniacal killer (Blackie Dammett) while wearing a negligee and ballet slippers through the snow in the forest in the dead of night, and of course I fall down, and end up in a motel shower naked wrapped in stretch wrap. Ahhh — those were the days!"
The full film:
"Similar in plot to H.G. Lewis' immortal 2000 Maniacs (1964 / trailer) but without as much over the top gore, The American Scream is as entertaining as it is goofy. Aside from a strange and unusually dark 'home movie' segment inserted into the movie that feels like a found-footage snuff film (and which, to be fair, definitely ties into the storyline), the tone in the rest of the movie is pretty light, as likely to play things for laughs than for scares. Not afraid to throw in some nudity (and it isn't always good nudity) or crass humor (we get an 'up-skirt' sight gag in the opening scene), Linden keeps things moving at a pretty solid pace. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where the main storyline is going, but we get a few genuinely amusing twists in the film's last half hour that help to keep things interesting and fun. [Rock Shock Pop]"
"The American Scream is a profoundly odd movie. [...] It's one of those inexplicable examples of misguided genre flicks which stray so far from their expected course that they can possibly wander, blinking and disoriented, into the realm of art (or least outsider art). By the end, this movie may resolve itself as metaphor (an overwhelmingly incompetent one, to be sure, but still identifiable) for the existential dread of identity loss which hovers around the hazy but perceptible precipice of adulthood. Or, it might just be some movie where they ran out of budget and didn't shoot the scenes where it would explain what the hell was going on, so that's a possibility too. But either way, it's a truly odd duck. [We Are Cursed to Live in Interesting Times]"
 
 
Dr. Alien
(1989, dir. David DeCoteau)
Originally titled I Was a Teenage Sex Mutant. One David DeCoteau's early non-porn ventures, made just when he was sliding off his meaty hardcore career to enter B-dom.
DeCoteau is one of our anti-directors here at a wasted life, if only because so many of his films generally show so little interest in the art of filmmaking. (See: Creepozoids [1987], perhaps one of his best movies; Blonde Heaven [1995], directed by "Ellen Cabot"; Talisman [1998] and Curse of the Puppet Master [1998], both directed by "Victoria Sloan"; and Retro Puppet Master [1999], directed by "Joseph Tennent".) 
Trailer to
Dr. Alien:
Going by what the Empire Film Fan Website, however, Dr. Alien might be one of his "better" movies: "Probably DeCoteau's least interminable effort from the Empire / Beyond Infinity days, largely due to game performances from his youthful cast, and from lead actor / intergalactic sexual lab rat Billy Jacoby in particular. Cameos from Elizabeth Kaitan, Linnea Quigley and 50s beefcake Troy Donahue, and Gregg Cannom's cheap and funky sci-fi FX also add to the likeability factor. Screenplay by Kenneth J. Hall." Odd that they don't see it fit to mention Edy Williams, who does a cameo to play a gym teacher named Miss Buckmeister, one of the many women that the lead character (Billy Jacoby) bonks during the movie. As for Billy Jacoby, he beat someone truly of note during the casting: if we're to believe what The DeCoteau says over at Racks & Razors, "On Dr. Alien, Brad Pitt auditioned for me. I'm still kicking myself that I didn't hire him!"
Bad Movies Org, which says "Boy is it ever hard to get bored watching this movie," has the plot: "The film's alternate title is I Was A Teenage Sex Mutant (Sort of grabs your attention doesn't it?) and with the likes of Linnea, Ginger Lynn, and Michelle Bauer frolicking through it you know it's something special. Just take one hopeless nerd (Billy Jacoby a.k.a. Billy Jayne) and add a syringe of intergalactic Spanish Fly, pretty soon he is growing a stalk out of his head, knocking out the local bully, and getting jumped by every woman on campus. The stalk growing out of his head (No, not that one silly.) has a pair of lips on the end, when a woman takes one look at the puckering appendage she goes wild with desire. It also gives the horny lady a case of temporary amnesia, so afterwards the unfortunate Wesley has to deal with irate boyfriends or direct accusations of date rape. [...]"
From the film –
Sex Mutants sing Killer Machine:
"The plot and design of Dr. Alien is nothing more than an excuse for a ribald T&A movie. Besides some great shots of well-endowed women, there are some really good shots of Bobby Jacoby wearing his chucks in this film, so what more could a virile chucks guy want for a diverting couple hours of entertainment. In a way, it's too bad that the writers tried to put in so much story, because when the film gets serious, you wish you could see more scenes with the beautiful Judy Landers [as Ms. Xenobia / Dr. Alien] or with the girls on the soccer team who grab Wesley in the locker room. There is another hilarious scene when Wesley brings the members of his new metal band home for dinner with his straight-laced parents. It reminds you a little of Spinal Tap (1984 / trailer) as each band member plays his part to the limit. The alien story line and effects are pretty lame however, and you wonder why they decided to come up with the weird antenna that grows on Wesley's head when he is aroused, if the aliens can take on human form in all other things. But if you try to make too much sense out of this film, you will just be frustrated, and probably won't enjoy it for what it is. [Chucks Connection]"
Mondo Bizarro, for one, didn't enjoy it: "David DeCoteau's track record remains intact! The plot of this movie is stupid and a little insulting. Let's just say that women don't come off well in this movie. I thought gay men understood women! It's just an excuse to show a bunch of boobs and tell a bunch of stupid jokes. I could lie and tell you that there was something really interesting to talk about here. There's not. [...]"
As for the three sets of breasts above, let Yum-Yum, our Lady of Indulgence over at The House of Self-Indulgence, explain: "Exuding a Stephen Sayadian brand of élan, the dream sequence involving Wesley being seduced in a lightless, smoke-filled netherworld was epic in terms of off-kilter brilliance. Standing before the disoriented youngster, undulating in an erotic state of deceleration, were Laura Albert (Dr. Caligari [1989 / trailer below]), Ginger Lynn Allen (New Wave Hookers [1985 / theme]), and Linnea Quigley (Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers [1988 / trailer]). In charge of arousing his woolgathering subconscious, this legendary trio humped the murky air with a cock-teasing grace, as Judy Landers looks on in a pair of purple new wave shades." 
Trailer to
Dr. Caligari (1989):
"[Dr. Alien] is exactly what an eighties teen sex comedy should be — cheesy, sleazy and fun. Interestingly, during filming David DeCoteau received word from studio executives that 'the bank has just shut down the entire company and seized everything. But they don't know you're shooting this picture, so just keep rolling and get it in the can before someone finds out.' DeCoteau didn't let the actors and crew know because he didn't want them to worry. He said it turned out to be the most enjoyable of any film he'd done. I would have to agree. Something about that dire situation led to a 'no fucks given' mojo, leading to an exceptionally entertaining flick. Also of interest, when Empire Pictures folded during production of this film, company head Charles Band launched Full Moon the very next day and utilized Dr. Alien as a bargaining chip to strike a lucrative distribution deal with studio Paramount Pictures. The more you know. [Video Zeta One]"
 
 
Jake Spanner, Private Eye
(1989, dir. Lee H. Katzin)

"First the Ex-lax goes to work and then we do."
Jake Spaner (Robert Mitchum)
 
A.k.a. Hoodwinked and The Old Dick. Director Lee H. Katzin (12 Apr 1935 – 30 Oct 2002) made an occasional feature film, like What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969 / trailer) or World Gone Wild (1987 / trailer) or Five Bold Women (1960 / full movie), but his specialty was TV movies, of which this late career Robert Mitchum project is one. Based on the novel The Old Dick, by L.A. Morse, which, contrary to the sound of its title, is not a porn tale about a geriatric's prick told in first person. Edy Williams has a cameo as "Sun Haven Lady".
"Jake Spanner, Private eye: Jake Spanner (Mitchum) is a retired private investigator. He hopes to take advantage of this well-deserved rest to indulge in golf. But he is going to return to service, because his friend Sal (Ernest Borgnine) comes to ask him for help: his niece has just been kidnapped, and a ransom is requested. Money, drugs, mafia. [Notre]"
TV announcement:
"If one can be judged by the company one keeps, then Mitchum has fallen on very hard times, for here he is surrounded by a just-picking-up-my-paycheck crew, most of whom, blissfully, have but cameos: Sherry [sic] North and Edie Adams, who look as if they've spent the last few years eating birthday cakes for breakfast; Dick Van Patten; Stella Stevens; and Kareem Abdul Jabbar who has a one-word role; and Edy Williams, the former Russ Meyer 'actress' best known for bouncing her ample bosom at the annual film festival in Cannes. [Chicago Tribune]"
 
 
Nudity Required
(1990, dir. John T. Bone)
Edy Williams shows her boobs in Nudity Required as the bondage-dressed gal Isabella. A rare non-porno project of John T. Bone (11 Feb 1947 – 26 Jan 2019), a.k.a. Willy Wanker, Harry Horndog, R.T. Longhampton, and John T. Bones — but, oddly enough, not as John T. Boner — and born as John Bowen. Learn everything you want to know about him and more by listening to the two-part interview at The Rialto Report: The Hunt for the Real John T Bone – Part 1 & The Hunt for the Real John T Bone – Part 2. Bone's film career ended long before he went to jail in 2015...
The script was supplied by Bone and Daniel Benton, the latter of whom, with this film, moved from acting to scriptwriting — though in a few of his low-rent projects, like Exorcism at 60,000 Feet (2019 / trailer), he did both. 
The full film —
Nudity Required:
Over at WIP Films, someone had trouble following the plot: "As far as I can tell, there's some mobsters and shit, some double-crossing or something, a bunch of money and some Russians of course and somehow our heroes Buddy (who's also a deadbeat dad) and Scammer (yes there is actually a fucking character named 'Scammer') get to stay at the head mafia dude's fancy digs, where they decide to pretend to be filmmakers in order to see some naked boobs, and wind up really making a movie that looks much better than this one. Oh yeah and there is also a homicidal Mexican guy in the movie that does all the typical things that Mexican people do like make really hot tacos that cause smoke to come out of peoples' ears, dress up like a Taco, and just act like a Latino with a fiery temper in general. And for some reason, the main mobster guy narrates the film from time to time. No one in this movie can act, or even attempts to try except for GILFY Julie Newmar, who brings great gusto to her role as a saucy Russian mafia diplomat or something who looks to be at least 60 yrs old here and falls for Buddy (the greasy, hairy, eyebrows guy... yuk)."
Bad music from
Nudity Required:
Over at Letterboxd, they don't get the plot 100% right but know why movies like Nudity Required get made: "TITS! That's precisely why this movie exists. The plot is paper thin but somewhat meta. A couple of meatheads luck into inheriting a mansion and decide to make a film for the sole purpose of having naked women around. Somehow the fake movie gains a legit producer and they end up making a cheesy flick that contains a ton of nudity. This wasn't an absolute waste of time, as there were some good jokes and I quite like Julie Newmar's character. And of course, TITS."
Of the two guys playing two casting-couch lotharios, Brad Zutaut's limited career includes the "better" T&A (?) teen comedy Girlfriend from Hell (1989 / trailer), while Billy Frank is found in Hobgoblins (1988 / trailer) and Grotesque (1988 / trailer).
Seeing that Nudity Required was directed by a pornster, we feel that the imdb's apparently in-house porn reviewer lor_ should have some say about the film as well: "Living up to its title, cornball sex comedy Nudity Required is merely an excuse to show off topless women. On that basis, it will appeal to video audiences looking for nothing more. Shot in 1988, pic is almost a remake (unauthorized) of Nico Mastorakis' year-older Glitch! (trailer below), sharing a similar storyline. Surfer bums Billy Frank and Brad Zutaut accidentally lift the lease to a Beverly Hills mansion at an airport from visiting Soviet arms-reduction negotiator Jule Newmar (wild casting). They move in, and Newmar decides to share the manse with them. Duo decides the best way to pick up girls is to pose as film producers, placing an ad in the trades noting 'nudity required' for actresses. Gung-ho would-be Ty Randolph [a.k.a. Mindy Miller of Amazons (1986 / trailer)] bulls her way into a job as production manager, gets her pal Rhonda Gray [of Paul Hunt's Twisted Nightmare (1987 / German trailer)] hired as director of the nonexistent project, and before you can say 'Glitch', cameras are rolling on The Love Boat Murders, toplining Newmar and Edy Williams. [...]" 
Trailer to
Glitch! (1988):

 
Bad Girls from Mars
(1990, dir. Fred Olan Ray)
Finally! Edy Williams appears in a Fred Olan Ray movie! She plays Emanuelle — in a movie that was originally titled Emmanuelle Goes to Hollywood. Yep, for the first time in decades, she plays the lead character in a movie! (Okay: D2V movie.) The other main female character, Myra, is played by the legendary and brainy Brinke Stevens (of Necromancy [1972] and Slumber Party Massacre [1982 / trailer] and so much more).
 
"We need healthy young earth studs to repopulate our world — we need your love rocket!"
Terry (a.k.a. Elise di Medici)
 
"Bad Girls from Mars. Now there's a title that shows promise. I saw that Jay Richardson was in it and got excited. Where Richardson goes, naked breasts are sure to follow. I was ready for some cheesy, breast-filled sci-fi action. It turns out that I was only half-right in my expectations. Bad Girls from Mars is really a spoof of low budget film-making. The B-movie filmmakers are trying to make their epic Bad Girls from Mars but their leading ladies keep getting killed by a bad-poetry-writing maniac. They decide to bring in a professional. A large-breasted blonde (Edy Williams) shows up and takes her top off regularly. They know they've found the right woman for the job. Many more women will go topless before they get this flick in the can. [Dr Gore]"
Trailer to
Bad Girls from Mars:
"At first, I was disappointed that Bad Girls from Mars was actually not about Bad Girls from Mars, but the making of said film. My disappointment soon dissipated once chicks started popping their tops. Seriously, there's a big old healthy set of boobs on display just about every five minutes in this movie. With that kind of breast exposure, the flick could've been a documentary about shoelace making and I would've been glued to my seat. The acting is also pretty good. Williams has done everything from Russ Meyer movies to straight-up porn and she shows a flair for comic timing here. I'm not saying she's the screen's funniest comedienne, but her breathless line readings of such dialogue as 'The smell of garbage turns me into a wild woman!' sure made me laugh. The flick also stars Brinke Stevens (who gets naked too) and Ray regular Jay Richardson (who fortunately doesn't); both of whom are pretty funny. [Video Vacuum]" 
"This is really fun. [...] Ray does a great job of handling the spoof aspect in a way that doesn't become too gimmicky, which is hard with this kind of movie. In a way it kind of feels like a Godard French New Wave film, in that it was a comedic commentary on the D industry the way Godard's films were a commentary on the then mainstream Hollywood industry — the main difference being, where Godard would've had Jean-Pierre Leaud reading a socialist diatribe, Ray had one of his female stars showing her tits. This is definitely what you come to a '90s sex romp for, and Ray delivers. [DTV Connoisseur]" 
"This was Fred Olen Ray in his prime — back before the bottom fell out on B-movies. In just a few short years, as Julie Strain has explained on numerous occasions, you no longer had these mid-level B-movies. You had either big budget films or something filmed in some dude's backyard with his iPhone. So, it is nice to enjoy a movie during these glory days, when it could land on Movie Gallery and mom-and-pop video store shelves across the country and be rented by legions of teens (like myself) who could appreciate its cheesy and sleazy goodness.[Video Zeta One]"
 
 
Faster Pussycat – You're So Vain 
(1990, dir. Rock Schenck)
The video to this crappy cover version features a slightly lost-looking Edy Williams. We probably wouldn't include it, were the name of the group not an homage to Russ Meyer's roughie classic, Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (1965 / trailer), which, famously enough, stars the icons Tura Satana and Haji, not to mention Lori Williams (of no relation to Edy) and, less often mentioned, the Playboy playmate for December 1966, Sue Bernard (below), as Linda, the annoying good girl of the film.
Edy Williams did a few more things, but we find none worth looking at... but who knows what the future might bring. Night of the Living Edy Williams? Return of the Living Edy Williams?
 
Up next:
 Babes of BVD, Part XII — Erica Gavin
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