Bad Girls Go to Hell

Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965)

** (out of 4)

Doris Wishman directed this sexploitation cult classic, which is one of the better known films out there. A married but bored housewife gets raped by the apartment janitor and eventually kills him. She flees from the scene hoping to start a new life in NYC but everyone she meets either physically or sexually abuses her. Like many other sexploitation flicks, this one here was shot in grainy B&W without sound, which was later dubbed in. The best thing about this film is the pretty good, if rough, editing, which cuts to various scenes very well. This film was still early in the sex genre so there isn't too much nudity but Wishman plays with the viewer with her fast cuts and quit edits. There's not much that really goes on but I was still caught up in the film.

An ex-girlfriend of mine used to drive around with a bumper sticker that said: "Good girls go to heaven… Bad girls go everywhere!" I always found that hilarious and the title of this little 60's exploitation film instantly reminded me of it. "Bad Girls Go To Hell" is another glamorous and ultimately sophisticated accomplishment of the great writer/director Doris Wishman; the woman who pretty much single-handedly popularized the so-called "roughie" exploitation movies during the sixties. The films of Mrs. Wishman may perhaps not be very good (in fact, she was quite often referred to as the female Ed Wood) but she definitely had … well … balls! This film is boring, poorly acted, ineptly directed and desperately stuffed with padding footage to reach a half-decent running time, but still I can't bring myself to harshly criticize it. The year was 1965 and here she was – Doris Wishman - showing girls' bare bottoms, attempted rape and even quick nipple flashes. The plot of this film sounds acceptable enough, but in fact it's really silly and laughable. When the Meg Kelton is taking the trash out in her see-through nightgown on a Saturday morning, her sleazy janitor attempts to sexually assault her. You can tell this man is really sinister because he has a Slavic accent, ha! When Meg goes to his apartment later on - I haven't got the slightest idea why she does that, though – he tries to rape her again and she kills him with a glass bowl. The poor girl panics, obviously, and impulsively decides to leave her house and husband and flee to New "Hell" York. Once there, Meg's life only gets worse and worse. She successively ends up with a friendly man who turns into an abusive monster when he drinks, a lesbian stripper, a married couple of whom the husband is yet another rapist pig and an elderly lady with a creepy police officer for a son. Poor, poor Meg! If she wasn't such a bad actress, I might have felt really sorry for her. And then Gigi Darlene, the girl who plays Meg, is still the most talented one in the whole cast by far. "Bad Girls to Hell" has a stupid ending, but then again, it was still okay in the sixties, I guess. If you're familiar with this type of cheap and raunchy Z-grade cinema, you know what else to expect, right? We're talking dialogs clearing added during the post-production phase, inexplicably large amounts of filming people's feet, monotonous go-go- dancing music, etc, etc

My first Doris Wishman film, which a friend told me was supposedly one of her best (if so, then I'd hate to see her worst)! This thing concerns a young woman who first gets attacked by her janitor and so flees away into the big city where she incomprehensibly manages to become involved with all sorts of sick and abusive strangers along her path, yet naively and inexplicably keeps moving in with them! Kind of perversely funny watching her shack up with each guy only to soon be carrying her same suitcase away with her in the middle of the night again and again.

* out of ****

Sometimes bawdy, sometimes gaudy, definitely mid-60's urban in feeling and then there's gorgeous GiGi Darlene! Perhaps one of the early (only?) B-movies to attempt the "Dream Sequence" thing, where the audience finds out that Meg's shlepping from one serial rapist and sexual deviant to another while on the lam is nothing more than a dream. A dirty, sexually overturned bad-girl dream. Or is it? The acting as well as the sound is laughable at times, being over-emphasized or just plain cheap- but then again that is part of the innocence and charm that now you'd find in this film. Listen closely while she's on the run.. you'll hear the ONE horn from some distant '57 Plymouth over, and over, and over again. (simulating what I guess was supposed to be NYC traffic!) Hylarious!

Meg, apparently frustrated by her hunk-a-luscious husband going to a "meeting" on a Saturday, decides to don her skimpiest sheer house dress & pom-pom slippers and clean the apartment. Little does she know, the janitor(I've decided he's a Russian Immigrant) scopes her out in the hallway , and realizes that he, too has pent up lust and .. well - you'll see.

For the time, the sets,backdrops, and locations are all really cool to see - and you'd have to be half dead not to STILL look at GiGi Darlene and swoon. Even by today's standards, she's a babe! But aside from that this movie has it all.. Alcoholism, Fetishism, lesbianism ( I'm an acrobatic dancer!) and some of the corniest scenes you'll ever witness. Gee, it's GOOD!

Watching Doris Wishman movies is like driving past a car wreck; you know you're gonna see something awful if you look, but you just can't help yourself! The Something Weird DVD edition of "Bad Girls Go To Hell" that I just watched is paired with another Wishman epic, "Another Day, Another Man," and it makes for one perfect(ly awful) double feature. In "Bad Girls...," a young woman kills her janitor, comes to NYC and is attacked/seduced by practically every person she bumps into. A nice twist ending DOES mitigate some of the weirdness that precedes it. In "Another Day...," a woman with the hugest bouffant hairdo you've ever seen becomes a call girl to pay for her hubby's doctor bills. But these capsule descriptions can't possibly describe the level of sleazy teasing that these films are all about. While neither features ANY frontal nudity at all--odd, given the fact that Wishman's "Nude on the Moon," made five years EARLIER, was replete with nudity--the level of leering is not to be believed. Now I know what a raincoat-wearing old man in a 42 St. theatre in the mid-60s must have felt like. Trust me, you will need a HOT shower after watching these sleazy flicks. Lingering shots of a tossed-off brassiere lying on the floor are Wishman's idea of titillation. And her direction really does make Ed Wood look like Orson Welles. She seems incapable of shooting anything without including meaningless shots of inanimate objects. And there is no synchronized dialogue to speak of. As the "Psychotronic Video Guide" so rightly puts it, "it's a rare occurrence when a few words happen to match the lips." So why have I given these flicks two stars? Because you stare at your TV screen in utter disbelief, occasionally cracking up, and by the end realize that you HAVE, somehow, been entertained. And since neither film is much longer than an hour, the experience flies by pretty quickly. Thank God.