Lovely But Deadly

One scene in 'Lovely but Deadly' has rightly become legendary among those who go for this sort of thing. Lucinda Dooling, her startlingly cut (for 1981) muscles rippling, subdues the high school pusher, forcing him to take an overdose of his "own medicine," all the while speaking to him in the calmest, sweetest tones imaginable, absolutely in control.

The rest of the film is good cheesy fun -- best watched with some buddies and a six pack -- but the one scene is dangerous erotica. We have never really had a genuinely tough movie heroine who caught on with the general public (although Kathy Long, Jillian Kesner and Lucinda Dickey certainly had the stuff) and "Lovely But Deadly" stands as the one claim Dooling might have had for this title.

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.

I fear that this was what passed for Hollywood trying to be 'feminist' in 1981, and while it was a step above Charlie's Angels in that, it missed the mark by a good bit.

The movie opens with an utter looser drowning himself in the ocean while high on drugs, and oh boy, are we lucky he didn't live long enough to breed a bunch of children as stupid and whiny-faced as he was; to me, this moment was most likely to win my applause. (please don't rescue him, I thought, pretty please?)

Then his sister goes on a revenge spree toward the drug dealers (as if tuna boy hadn't decided to and chosen to and hunted down dealers and spent his own money on drugs, but whatever, let's not blame him in any way). And she kicks ass, in a vaguely pretty sort of way. Some of the other actresses are exploited more by the director, but the lead remains dressed and serious throughout.

It all hangs together within the sphere of reality in this film, which bears no resemblance at all to the reality that you and I inhabit, or that we inhabited in 1981, but I suppose in these days of 50% of movies being about superpowers, I shouldn't be complaining about this level of unreality.

I almost want to give it a third star for the character name "Mantis Manajian," which is the most original thought the screenwriters had. The extra star I did give is because the lead and her kickboxing girlfriends can kick high. Good for them.

But it's a bad, bad film.

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.

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.