Lovely But Deadly

Lucinda Dooling portrays Mary Ann "Lovely" Lovett, an over-age High School student who uses her martial arts skills to battle the vicious drug ring responsible for the death of her younger brother. Although the film is ultra low budget, the fighting scenes amateurish and the acting non existent, this little film is a real find. Backed by an energetic "James Bond-like musical score, "Lovely" is powered by charm and enthusiasm. The cast of unknowns tries hard and the script is on occasion entertaining, if not witty. Although to be honest, a bigger confrontation between Lovely and the drug ring's mastermind at the very end would have really improved the final product.

Lucinda Dooling's acting mainly consists of grimacing at the camera, but shows enough presence that I was disappointed to find she has only made a handful of screen appearances.

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.

Just like you may drive by a multi-car crash pile up on the highway and you witness first hand the carnage, fire and overwhelming smoke clouds, you just can't take your eyes off of the scene. So does the film Lovely But Deadly wreak of a Grade B film but you will find yourself glued to how corny this film really is.

This is a perfect Drive-In cinema special with continuous corny dialogue and characters names like Lovely, Javelin, Mantis, Gommorah, and Cricket.

Oh, and the film is also filled to the brim with chick fights and plenty of action by the film starlet Mary Ann 'Lovely' Lovitt (Lucinda Dooling) kicking the macho men's butts. One hilarious fight scene takes place around the 25 minute mark between Mary Ann 'Lovely' Lovitt and three (3) male thugs dressed in fencing gear with swords. This choreographed fight scene appears to me as if Miss Lovely moves step by step on a "numbers map" slowly stepping from numbers 1 through 1,000. She tries hard to make this scene look realistic and so do the three thugs and maybe just maybe the film editors forgot to remove the "Slow Motion" edit during this perilous fight scene.

All in all the film may fail miserably as Mary Ann 'Lovely' Lovitt fights the good fight to put the bad drug dealers behind bars who were responsible for her brothers drug overdose induced death. Having said that the film tries Sooooooo hard to be taken seriously that you just won't be able to look away.

For that reason I rate this film a 5 out of 10 IMDb rating.

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.

An all-white moralistic remake of "Coffy" (the 1973 Pam Grier blaxploitation classic), presenting karate-ing cheerleaders and highschool girls, evil drug dealers, a little catfight and lots of unintentional laughs. The opening credits of "Lovely But Deadly" are presented over a static shot of a high-school dance in 1981. The music, being performed and orchestrated in a 007-like style, sounds outdated, exaggerated and does not fit in the cheesy late 70s sets in the background. The sweet rotten smell of campiness instantly rushes in. "How low can they go?.../ How high can they fly?" - that's what the title song lyrics say and that's what you're starting to ask yourself. "Lovely But Deadly" is about a young lady named Mary Ann Lovett (an admittedly real cute brunette named Lucinda Dooling) and her friends just call her Lovely. In the beginning, her brother drowns in a ridiculously far fetched drug-related accident. Angry as hell, Lovely decides to stop drugs in her high school, starting with killing "Captain Magic," the only really likable character so far, who has some incredible dialogue before Lovely stuffs drugs down his throat and he dies. Dead too quick. The next bad guys will be treated to better visual effect: let's get some martial arts action into the movie. Well, Lovely and all the other girlie fighters have obviously been trained in the secret arts by just watching a half-minute-preview of some Hongkong flick. So we get to see sheer incredibly clumsy fight scenes. Well, after all "everybody was Kung Fu fighting" those days... Talking of music: There is also a Rock Band in the movie, because Lovely's cheesy boyfriend is the lead singer of a band of smartasses who, during a class and out of the blue, are performing (poorly dubbed) a truly "electrifying" love song. All in all, a genuine classic of poor white drive-in trash. Yet probably too bad to ever get some cult approach.