Bad Cinema Diary TM The “L” Pages from Ladies to Lust LADIES OF THE LOTUS (1986 - Canada) dir: Lloyd A. Simandl & Douglas C. Nicolle; w/ Richard Dale, Angela Read, Patrick Bermel, Darcia Carnie. Some skin; a lotta lingerie. Fashion models are being abducted & shipped off as sex slaves, and the only one who can save them is a well-meaning peeping tom. Or some such drivel. Okay, the flick’s only real purpose is to show some young ladies in lacey undies, but they really didn’t have to punish the audience for it. The music sucks, the photography sucks harder, the acting sucks like a black hole, and the script sucks like the supermassive black hole at the center of the Galaxy of Cosmic Suckiness. It’s not merely a bad script, it’s an annoying, insulting paste-up job of half-baked ideas, throw-away characters, snapped story threads, and utterly unexplained plot points. And the ladies in their undies? I’m afraid that part isn’t much better. I’ve seen cornfields photographed with as much erotic artistry. Yet another finger-down- our-throat by Simandl. LADY DRAGON 1 & 2 see the Cynthia Rothrock page LADY FRANKENSTEIN (1971 -- Italian/Brit) prod & dir: Mel Welles; w/ Joseph Cotten, Sara Bay, Paul Muller, Peter Whiteman, Herbert Fox, Mickey Hargitay. It’s a little boring at the start, but hang on, the second half is totally deranged! Guess what -- Baron Frankenstein had a daughter who also trained as a copyright©2009 Bruce V. Edwards Bad Cinema Diary TM surgeon. When the monster kills her father, she carries on his work, trying to restore the Frankenstein reputation. In that pursuit, she seduces the baron’s wimpy assistant into letting her transplant his brain into the body of a hunk (whom he has to murder first, of course). She sets her sights on being the ten-ton queen bitch of the universe. This flick’s even got a vague homage to the original -- the monster grabs a girl & tosses her into the river... but this girl is adult & naked. Not at all a waste of time for sufficiently perverse viewers. LADY IN A CAGE (1964) dir: Walter Grauman; w/ Olivia de Haviland, James Caan, Jennifer Billings, Jeff Corey, Ann Sothern. A rich old lady gets stuck in her home elevator and she is helpless as vicious hoodlums ransack her house. It mixes social commentary & mindless violence in a rather predictable way, and on the whole is slow & preachy. There are some very good characters, & the cast gives terrific performances -- the script even has a glimmer of an original, wicked little twist. However, nothing is really made of it and the whole thing grinds to an undramatic halt. An interesting flick, even if a little unsatisfying. LADY JAYNE, KILLER (2003 - aka Betrayed) prod & dir: Mark Lester; w/ Erika Elaniak, Adam Baldwin, Julie du Page, James Remar. No skin; no gore. A sexy lady assassin has just ripped off the mob and decides to get out of town by hitching a ride with a suburban mom & her teenage son -- well, I suppose they never said she was a smart assassin. And the flick turns out to be more about the tough little mommy trying to protect what’s left of her family from mobsters and crooked cops. Elaniak is only slightly embarrassed in the wholesome mom role, while Baldwin seems to have spent the flick sleepwalking. However, du Page is excellent as the delicious but sadistic hitlady -- it’s just too bad she had to waddle through a bonehead script that’s the sort of thing one would find at the bottom of an old file cabinet. She does have fun with the role, but it’s not near enough to rescue this flick from the depths of mediocrity. copyright©2009 Bruce V. Edwards Bad Cinema Diary TM LADY SCARFACE (1941) dir: Frank Woodruff; w/ Dennis O’Keefe, Judith Anderson, Frances Neal, Mildred Coles, Eric Blore. A tough-as-nails fem leader of a holdup gang is pursued by a detective cliché who is in turn pursued by a lady reporter cliché. Things get sticky when a case of mistaken identity is thrown into an already bungled payoff drop. Although Anderson’s great performance has to be considered wasted on this, the flick does have a small touch of originality and a few nice moments. A near miss in its genre. LADY SNOWBLOOD (1973 - Japan) dir: Fujita Toshiya; w/ Kaji Meiko, Kurosawa Toshio, Daimon Masaaki. No skin; lotsa blood. In Meiji Japan, a young lady is conceived, born, and trained from birth to exact merciless revenge for the death of her family. It's an oddly lyrical tale of vengeance and violence... and its influence on Tarantino's Kill Bill is obvious. There is not a tremendous amount of action in the flick, but what's here is painted in blood -- and weaving it together is an effective drama of lost souls and cast-off regrets. It certainly does everything you would expect from a manga-based exploitation film, but then does the unexpected by actually being a damn good movie. LADY SNOWBLOOD 2: LOVE SONG OF VENGEANCE (1974 - Japan) dir: Fujita Toshiya; w/ Kaji Meiko, Harada Yoshio. One bit o' skin; mild gore. The sequel finds our lovely walking meat slicer stumbling into a den of revolutionaries, and so she becomes... a political activist. Oookay, I didn't see that one coming. Really, this seems like someone else's movie, with our lady dropping in to kill a bunch of people at the climax. While it is a very good looking film, the plot is feeble and the fight scenes are, for the most part, rather ordinary. Still a decent flick, but quite a let-down after the first film. copyright©2009 Bruce V. Edwards Bad Cinema Diary TM LADY TERMINATOR (1988 - Indonesia - aka Revenge of the South Seas Queen; Nasty Hunter) dir: Jalil Jackson (aka H. Tjut Djalil); w/ Barbara Anne Constable, Christopher J. Hart, Claudia Angelique Rademaker, Joseph P. McGlynn. Tidbit o’ skin; mild gore. An eel slides up her vagina and so she’s possessed by the spirit of a horny witch out for revenge. She’s off to ice some descendant of an old enemy, but in her spare time, she seduces guys and lays ‘em & slays ‘em (simultaneously, thanks to her now eel-powered vagina). But then she turns out to be unstoppable by mere bullets because they really wanted to turn it into a juvenile rip-off of Terminator, even to the point of copying entire scenes (except with less budget and no talent). Yup, it’s cheap and senseless and there’s nothing in here that can be appreciated at face value. So thank goodness for incompetent filmmaking, awesomely bad dialogue, and a cast of people who will never know what it is like to act. Really, this is a hilarious piece of crap; it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie bad enough to keep me laughing out loud -- I needed that. Movie quote: the terminatrix has been bombed, blasted and burnt to a cinder and now she’s stomping around shooting laser beams from her eyeballs and slaying everyone in sight... so the good guy says, “Keep shooting! I thinks she’s weakening.” LAKE PLACID 2 (2007 - for TV) dir: David Flores; w/ John Schneider, Sarah Lafleur, Sam McMurray, Cloris Leachman. A tidbit o' skin; mild gore. Some really big croc's eat half the cast (and that doesn't amount to much). They try to dress this up like an 'A' flick, and it is competently made and does have very nice photography. But it's all sunk by trite characters (and a dull cast to play them, some of whom fail miserably to disguise their eastern European accents), cheap CG critters, minimal locations, and script that can only be this unoriginal by deliberate design. Not only does it lack originality, but it is devoid of excitement, humor, and anything else that might have made it worth the time. The crocodiles of the world are deeply insulted. copyright©2009 Bruce V. Edwards Bad Cinema Diary TM the LAND THAT TIME FORGOT (1975) dir: Kevin Connor; w/ Doug McClure, John McEnery, Susan Penhaligon, Keith Barron, Anthony Ainley. A U-boat & some castaways discover a prehistoric island... something almost interesting happens and then the island blows up. The script just sort of ambles along, and the monsters -- well, to be fair, they’re very nicely done puppets & full- size mock-ups, but they’re just puppets & mock-ups and they look really lame. (Okay, they’re better than the garbage in Land Unknown, but it’s still hard to get scared by a T. Rex that looks like Barney with teeth.) the LAND UNKNOWN (1957) dir: Virgil Vogel; w/ Jock Mahoney, Shawn Smith, William Reynolds. A research helicopter over Antarctica stumbles into a Jurassic Park -- unfortunately, it’s already occupied by a loony from a previous expedition (not to mention the usual toothy critters). The script isn’t bad at all, but the story drags and the dinosaurs stink. The plywood & bailing wire T Rex, in particular, is pathetic. LARVA (2005) dir: Tim Cox; w/ Vincent Ventresca, Rachel Hunter, David Selby, William Forsythe. No skin; a smidge o’ gore. The new veterinarian must go up against distrust and the Evil Corporation when experimental cattle feed turns ordinary parasites into a swarm of bat-like munch-monsters that proceed to devour the town. Yup, it’s yet another Boaz Davidson MFTV critter flick, and like most of them, it’s fairly well crafted and pursues formula slavishly.