Top Girl

The late not so great Joe D'Amato has a deservedly bad reputation based on his dozens of bad films, notably with Laura Gemser, but Top Girl represents an extremely lazy programmer, notably worse than his usual output. Budding film students should check it out -yet another catalog of what to avoid.

Filmed in L.A. (at least some quickie exteriors including a frequently repeated shot of the office building used as transition to indoors -probably filmed back in a studio in Rome), this is simplistic cinema by the numbers: avoid anything that might be difficult to stage or cost money. Though made in the '90s, it most closely resembles a mid-1960s softcore porn film but is much duller. The badly dubbed, sleepwalking cast seem to be enunciating in English (poor sync) but might as well have been reciting the alphabet as in early Fellini shoots. D'Amato seems conflicted regarding the porn content for fans: most bed scenes (not all) have the man on top chastely covered up for the camera, but there is also a random insert closeup of male-hand-fingering-female-groin that belongs in a stronger film -nothing hardcore at all.

Trite story of a simple beauty lured to Hollywood by a talent competition to select a soap opera leading lady ends up recycling clichés about Tinsel Town that date back a good 50 to 80 years ago. Heroine is played by Carla Solaro, a bland version of Anna Nicole Smith (minus the humor), who gets pawed by the male cast, notably in one of the phoniest rape-her-while-she's-drunk scenes I can remember, for which colorfully monikered villain Claudio Kleen (yes, that credit is actually on screen for this bald dude) should have paid Gold Film rather than taking a salary.

This marks the film debut, per IMDb, of unsympathetic leading man Robert Madison, son of fine Cowboy star Guy Madison. I didn't know this fact until I had finished watching the film, but did notice that when Robert & Carla walk down the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the camera lingers on a medium closeup of father Guy's star on the sidewalk. A nice, sincere touch, the only one in the entire running time.

This is a film only recommended to die hard fans of Joe D'Amato (like me), those who would watch absolutely anything made by him. Produced in 1996, and being one of the rare non-porn items in the latter part of his filmography, it lacks all the magic that once distingued the work of Massaccesi.

The plot is too ambitious for a extremely low budget. It is about a young woman who is chosen to replace an actress in a popular soap opera and ends up falling in love with the unscrupulous director of the show.

D'Amato didn't have the money to depict the routine of a TV show's making of, and as a consequence the building that represents the interiors of the "important" TV network is always empty, with the same feeling of flagrant misery that we see in the films of Ed Wood. Curiously, D'Amato is sometimes called "The Evil Ed Wood", and films like this live up of this nickname. Also indicating how precary this production was, there is no scene featuring the soap opera, which is weird given how this element is central to the plot.

The sex scenes are very poorly simulated, like if the director was not feeling any enthusiasm in shooting them. D'Amato once said that making porn was mortally tedious, so he needed to make a real movie once in awhile to keep his sanity. Nevertheless, judging by "Top Girl", he seemed equally bored in having to direct softcore porn. The direction suffers from a deep sense of laziness and the final product is not very superior to the typical XXX flicks crafted by him in the same period, except that here we have more scenes of dialogues.

No one in the cast stands out. Carla Solaro was beautiful and had the proper body for erotic scenes, but her character development was below the standard for B movies. And Robert Madison not only had a boring face, but had the charisma of a stone.

In the opening credits, we read "diected by", missing the "r"!!!! It was the first time I saw such a thing and this says a lot about how the film was made without conviction.

As pointed in the beginning of this review, "Top Girl" is mostly for D'Amato's devotees. Perhaps, fans of Z cinema in general can also find some enjoyment.