Lady Revanche

I haven't been able to decide if this movie is so bad it's good, or, to quote Enid Coleslaw, "so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again." No matter, it forced me look much the same way a pile of weird coloured vomit might, and it offers up a number of scenes that you won't forget even if you want to. There's a sneering young Ray Liotta telling a pigtailed Pia that her creative writing trophy looks like a penis. A bit later, there's Ray again, molesting Pia, not with the appropriately shaped trophy but a garden hose. There's a firm chinned Pia telling her domineering Mom that she wants to go to bed with Ray's geezer father, Walter. There's the actress in the graveyard scene yowling the best line ever written by Pia or anyone else: "WWWWHHHYYYYYYY!" There's that garden hose again, as Walter waves it Pia's face and roars "Is this more to your liking!?" There's Pia and her date so turned on by closeups of each other masticating salad that they start tearing each other's clothes off. There's Pia showering but forgetting to remove her dress. Perhaps best of all, there's Pia's typewriter, but instead of keys there are the miniature talking heads of those who have tormented her the most (afterwards, I was afraid to open my laptop). And finally there's Pia at "The Awards" exposing Hollywood for the cesspool it is, spitting out the second best line ever, "I guess I'm not the only one who has ever had to **** her way to the top." I see I have already spent more time commenting on "The Lonely Lady" than I have on far better pictures, so I'll quit. Be forewarned, though, that once you start watching you probably won't be able to take your eyes off the screen until two hours of your life have vanished forever.

The memory banks of most of the reviewers here must've short-circuited when trying to recall this Cubic Zirconia of a gem, because practically everyone managed to misquote Lloyd Bochner's Walter Thornton, when in a fit of peevish anger, he hurls the phallic garden nozzle at his new wife, Jerilee Randall-Thornton, (a nearly comatose Pia Zadora) which was used to sexually assault her earlier in the movie...but I'm getting ahead of myself. In any case, poor Lloyd could've been snarling that line at the speechless audience as much as he was his put-upon co-star.

Hard as it is for most of us to believe, especially these days, nobody in Hollywood sets out to INTENTIONALLY make a bad movie. This is certainly not the most defensible argument to make, since there just seem to be so damn many of them coming out. But then again, there is that breed of film that one must imagine during the time of its creation, from writing, casting and direction, must've been cursed with the cinematic equivalent of trying to shoot during the Ides of March.

THE LONELY LADY is in that category, and represents itself very well, considering the circumstances. Here we have all the ingredients in a recipe guaranteed to produce a monumentally fallen soufflé: Pia Zadora, a marginal singer/actress so determined to be taken seriously, that she would take on practically anything that might set her apart from her peers, (which this movie most certainly did!); a somewhat high-profile novel written by the Trashmaster himself, Harold Robbins (of THE CARPETBAGGERS and DREAMS DIE FIRST fame); a cast who probably thought they were so fortunate to be working at all, that they tried to play this dreck like it was Clifford Odets or Ibsen; plus a director who more than likely was a hired gun who kept the mess moving just to collect a paycheck, (and was probably contractually obligated NOT to demand the use of the 'Alan Smithee' moniker to protect what was left of his reputation.) Like Lamont Johnson's LIPSTICK, Meir Zarchi's I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, Roger Vadim's BARBARELLA, Paul Verhoeven's SHOWGIRLS or the Grandmammy of Really Bad Film-making, Frank Perry's MOMMY DEAREST, THE LONELY LADY is still often-discussed, (usually with disgust, disbelief, horrified laughter, or a unique combination of all three), yet also defies dissection, description or even the pretzel logic of Hollyweird. Nobody's sure how it came to be, how it was ever released in even a single theater, or why it's still here and nearly impossible to get rid of, but take it or leave it, it IS here to stay. And I don't think that lovers of really good BAD movies would have it any other way.

The depth of the creative bankruptcy in this film is most evidence in the final scene. The writers gave Pia Zadora's character a reasonably interesting name, Jerilee. (That's as close as I'll come to complimenting this picture). Then, when the nominees at the Oscars are being read, another screenwriter is named Jerilee, too. Bafflingly stupid.

This is one of the few movies so bad that it would even be passed over by nude-scene-hunting horny teenagers. Everything about is bad. There is not a single redeeming quality, not one scene that works, not a single character that isn't a benign, idiotic one-dimensional drip.

I can't call this the worst film ever made but it's close. However, the single worst scene in a movie I have ever seen is Pia Zadora's nervous breakdown.

Quite simply a waste of vital resources. 1/2* out of ****.

Immediately after renting and watching this movie several years ago, a friend and I decided that it defined the absolute zero on the movie scale. There was nothing about the movie that could have been done worse than it was. To this day we still rate movies, even very bad ones, by how much better than "The Lonely Lady" they are.

A long time ago I saw an interview with Eleanor Perry, who wrote the screenplays for, among other things, "Last Summer" and "Diary of a Mad Housewife," and she related that she had been asked to write a screenplay for the Harold Robbins' book "The Lonely Lady." She said that she sent in a treatment and it was rejected because they didn't think she understood the difficulties of a female screenwriter in Hollywood. She then said "I think they got someone else to write it." The interview was filmed before the movie was released. She died in 1981, and I bet the first thing she did on arrival in heaven was personally thank God for saving her from involvement in the result.

When I initially saw this movie in the '80s I thought it was so bad, I couldn't watch it all the way through. Subsequent viewings of it on TV were the same. I never really saw the whole movie in it's entirety. I seemed to always come in at the same parts, either the garden hose scene or the psychedelic/Andy Warholish nervous breakdown scene. It was never shown on commercial television here in Toronto, it always seemed to be played on the premium movie channels (First Choice/Superchannel,later to be TMN/Moviepix) I guess they received this movie for really cheap from the distributor. Watching it recently in it's entirety was a real eye-opener! I don't know if it's the nostalgia factor, or just the fact that I am older and going senile, but I thought that this movie was "so bad, that it was so good" The bad acting, and the awful characters that are very unlikable would make most people turn off this movie. For me I went out and bought the video! I don't blame Pia Zadora's character for going off the deep-end at her typewriter. It just seemed most of the characters were really vile-I take it that this was to show how ruthless Hollywood can be...what a joke! If you want to see a comedy about how a movie should not be made, check out "The Lonely Lady"-it's a great waste of time!!