The flaws of "Liquid Lips" are obvious, especially its "scene missing" where the ending should be. But I really enjoyed returning to it after many years and appreciated its good points.
Basically the second half of "Around the World with Johnny Wadd", as a stand- alone it suffers from that Siamese twin knife-job to the script. However, the necessity of its birth creates unusual results.
Chief of these is the emergence of an action movie without the action. Post- modern filmmakers, notably Rudolph Thome in his wonderfully deadpan 1969 movie "Detektive", love to re-create film noir or merely Bogie gumshoe stories with the action scenes minimized or removed. Chinn does the same thing in order to save a buck.
So there are very few set-ups in "Lips" and physical action consists mainly of Holmes as Wadd driving his Mercedes convertible through San Francisco or briefly making like a tourist, both 2nd unit type stagings. The final scene is omitted completely, with a quickie voice-over of Wadd saying how great the heroine was in saving the day (unseen) as we watch duo merely strolling by the bay.
Of particular interest to me was the co-starring and heavily featured presence of the enigmatic team of Enjil & Vernon von Bergdorfe, who made several Alex de Renzy films but are given front-line status for once in their careers. Vernon is a highly stylized actor who plays a lead villain, so smartly dressed as to be memorable. His long almost albino hair and general strangeness reminds me of rocker Jorma Kaukonen, a fellow Frisco resident of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna fame. Enjil is a tall, thin blonde, not a beauty like Nico of the Warhol troupe but also in that sophisticated vein. Given the ease of becoming a cult figure nowadays (even I would qualify by the lowered to limbo-level standards -yuck!!), why this pair has not been discovered is beyond me.
Story has lots of exposition, tying it in with "Around the World" to such an extent that watching the two in tandem is advisable. Chief villain working with Vernon is Mike Weldon, ironic since my old friend from Cleveland Michael Weldon is the author/historian who popularized the word "pyschotronic" for a couple generation of latter-day film buffs.
Monique Starr is quite good as Wadd's contact in Frisco, her acting and her cock-sucking both up to snuff. I would have liked to see the finale of her besting all the bad guys, but Chinn didn't bother to shoot it.
Instead the film climaxes indelibly with an inept jiu jitsu/karate fight out in a parking lot between Chinn and Holmes, the stuff that P.T. Anderson dreams are made of (see: "Boogie Nights"). That was enough for me, and final shot of Chinn smug after having gotten away to cause trouble another day is about as expressive an auteur's statement to the viewer as any of windbag Jean-Luc Godard's heavy pronouncements in the series of "meta-films" he's been shooting in recent decades.
