Lovely But Deadly

Several hours after watching "Lovely but Deadly" I'm still somewhat flabbergasted, and I cannot quite figure out what exactly I have been watching... This movie doesn't make any sense, but not in typical terms of idiotic plot or illogical narrative structure. It doesn't make sense in a way that my brains cannot process how misfit the lead characters and the high school setting are in relation to the plot.

"Lovely but Deadly" (although the VHS-copy I watched overwrites the original title with "Deadly Avenger" in a totally different style and font than the rest of the opening credits) deals with a tough girl who joins a high school to expose the drug-dealing network that caused her younger brother to die from an overdose. The synopsis sounds like normal exploitation material, but the execution is not. You'd expect for a rebellious ghetto-girl go undercover in a gritty ghetto-school and battle against vicious ghetto-thugs and corrupt coppers, but no sir! The girl is question is a cute and slender cheerleader - albeit with some serious Kung-Fu fighting skills -, the school is a traditional all-American and upright high school in a sunny Californian coastal community, and the thugs are average looking jocks, school paper journalists, musicians, and well-dressed prominent locals.

One could state the unusual cast of characters and settings are original surprise-aspects, but no. It feels unnatural and impossible. The film balances back and forth between being a mixture of "High School Musical", "Porky's", "Class of 1984", and a cheap James Bond rip-off. On the bright side, this flick is never boring (apart from the too many full-length songs) and features a few totally absurd highlights, including a catfight during a fancy house party, a speed boat chase that results in an (exaggeratedly massive) explosion, a quarterback who shameless says to a girl that she has to wait 15 minutes because he just had sex with another girl, spontaneous nudity from random and nameless cheerleaders, and a poor kid who gets steamed (!) to death. Familiar faces in the cast include Richard Herd and Irwin Keyes (in his usual role of brainless goon). "Lovely but Deadly" is not a good film, not nearly, but worth discovering for fans of unusual exploitation.

My review was written in July 1983 after a screening at Thunderbird Drive-In of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

In an era when the B-grade action film market is dominated by lookalike martial arts pictures and vengeance mellers, "Lovely but Deadly" is an entertaining novelty, combining elements of both genres into a teenage wish-fulfillment format. It represents a tough sell commercially, but pic will provide pleasant diversion for both action fans and students of current trends.

Filmmaker David Sheldon has adapted the current vigilante trend in films to teen pics, with pert young brunette Lucinda Dooling toplining as a California high school student, Mary Ann Lovett (nicknamed "Lovely"), mounting a one girl campaign to wipe out the drug dealers and higherups in her community, in order to avenge her kid brother's drug-induced death.

Sheldon styles Dooling as an underage female version of James Bond (with topgrade martial arts skills to boot), a gimmick which proves to be fun since she is a normal-looking young gir rather han such macho femmes as Pam Grier, Cheri Caffaro, Monica Vitti, Cornelia Sharpe and Marilyn Chambers who have previously essayed similar roles. Also to the film's advantage is the staging of Bond-like action scenes in prosaic settings such as the school locker room. If you can't compete with $30,000,000 budgets, you can at least have fun with the format.

Cast mixes old pros (Marie Windsor as heroine's aunt, Richard Herd and John Randolph as behind the scenes heavies) with young talent with generally effective results. Dooling, in particular, overcomes the occasionally preachy anti-drugs script with her forceful, physically convincing performance. Teen genre conventions such as cheerleaders' action and several rock songs belted on camera by the anti-hero slow up the narrative, but the final action payoff on the docks which karate teacher Susan Mechsner and her class of diminutive high school girls come to Dooling's rescue from assorted thugs is priceless.

Lensing is cheap, using available light for many scenes. The musical score by Robert Ragland is in the same rousing bag as his recent "10 to Midnight" offering and features a scene-setting title song which has the tone of a Shirley Bassey-Bond theme.

Lucinda Dooling plays high school babe Mary Ann 'Lovely' Lovitt, who takes revenge on the drug-dealing scuzz responsible for the death of her brother; however, the real star of this film is the boom mic, which makes quite a few appearances from the top of the frame throughout. Such is the shoddy nature of Lovely But Deadly, a cheap, poorly acted, clumsily directed but unintentionally funny revenge drama that features gratuitous female nudity, bad disco dancing, unconvincing karate, a cat fight/food fight, a couple of terrible musical numbers, death by steam, and a character who refers to himself as Captain Magic.

Thoroughly cheesy and horribly dated, the film is far from great, but its nasty early-'80s trappings and sheer ineptitude make it reasonably entertaining nonsense if in the right frame of mind. My favourite scene was Lucinda and her all-female karate pals training, their uniform a short zebra patterned tunic paired with black tights - practical and stylish! The film also features some characters with really silly names, including football stud Mantis, pathetic nerd Cricket, wannabe pop-star Javelin and brutish thug Gommorah.

Just about worth wasting your time with if you're after a trashy laugh. 5/10.

Lovely uses sexual attraction to trap drug dealers. Once she exposes them she beats them up and leaves them for police.

The film starts out strong with a great scene of the female protagonist beating the crap out of a drug dealer and forcing him to OD, leading me to think this was going to be some sort of personal revenge flick. Instead, while revenge is a factor, it's a little less personal as she aims to take down the entire system and put people in jail. Ho hum, but drugs are a pretty big problem in her high school. How big? Well, gangsters are sending their thugs into the school to beat up students, cheerleaders are getting pimped out, and the drug consumption is apparently so high it needs to be brought in by boat in multiple crates on a regular basis. Or so we are led to believe, although I tend to wonder how anyone even managed to graduate in a situation like that. It grows increasingly ridiculous as the film goes on and comes completely unglued by the time it ends, but it's still fun, dumb stuff. Some decent chest meat on display and I actually liked a couple of the fight scenes--especially the beat-down at the beginning. Could have been better, but it's still good exploitation junk.