The Working Girls

Supposedly the only appealing thing in this movie is that Cassandra Peterson (Elvira) gets naked for the first and only time in her career. So they released this film on video calling it 'Elvira Naked'.Unfortunately, she is only in this movie for one scene and the naked appearance does not last long. Not to mention that she does not look as sexy as she does on her show and in the movies. The rest of this movie isn't even worth a shot on Mystery Science Theater 3000. And the other actors in this film should get jobs that fits their skills and intelligence.

This is one of a number of Roger Corman produced drive-in movies from the 70's that focused on the lives and loves of various "career" women and attempted to take the traditional T and A sexploitation formula of the time and inject it with half-a**ed feminist themes. Like many of these other films (i.e. "The Student Teachers", "Candy Stripe Nurses") this movie offers some incredibly mixed messages. The main heroine, Honey, for instance, is a complete bimbo with a truly annoying voice. In a normal T and A flick she'd only be there to take her clothes off, but she doesn't here. Instead she flirts with contract killing, gets paid to talk to a reclusive billionaire (I'd pay her NOT to talk to me), and eventually reveals a talent for the stock market (even though she is as dumb as a box of rocks). Her roommate is a struggling artist, and in an interesting role reversal, it is her various male models that have the nude scenes. The third roommate, Jill, becomes a waitress and stripper (it is her and another stripper, played by Cassandra "Elvira" Peterson, who provide all the female nudity). She eventually becomes manager of the club and has a torrid affair with a handsome mafioso who is shaking the place down. He beats her up (when her roommates ask he her what happened, she says she was "fighting on the Italian front"), but incredibly, they part on good terms. Talk about mixed messages.

In its defense, however, this movie really isn't that bad or all that unbelievable (aside from the annoying Honey character). It does honestly portray a lot of the confusion that was being experienced at that time in the so-called Sexual Revolution. And while it's mixed messages probably didn't endear it to either feminists or the male raincoat brigade, it is vastly preferable to Corman's later "feminist" films which usually feature Maria Ford or Julie Strain beating up muscular guys while wearing nothing but a g-string. (This film is a cinematic feminist thesis by comparison). It was also directed by Stephanie Rothman, one of the first female exploitation directors who helmed a couple of interesting WIP flicks, "Terminal Island" and "Sweet Sugar", and one honest-to-god good movie, "The Velvet Vampire". You could do worse I guess.

This movie begins with a young blonde woman named "Honey" (Sarah Kennedy) coming to Los Angeles with no money and looking for employment. Luckily, she manages to rent an apartment on credit from another young woman named "Denise" (Laurie Rose). Likewise, living in that same apartment is another young woman by the name of "Jill" (Lynne Guthrie) who goes to college and works as a waitress in a nightclub on the side. And it's at this nightclub that Jill meets a young stripper named "Katya" (Cassandra Peterson) who convinces her to become a stripper there as well. In any case, as these young ladies struggle to make ends meet they encounter various people along the way who change their lives in a very dramatic manner. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that, although this film is billed as a comedy, I didn't seem to find too much humor in it. But it did have a couple of attractive actresses in Cassandra Peterson and Laurie Rose to grace the screen so I suppose it wasn't a total waste all things considered. In short, this was a low-budget movie made for drive-in theaters. Nothing more and nothing less and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly below average.

This movie was one in a series of crappy films that used to play on cable when I was a kid and you'd watch them from beginning to end, no matter how bad, just because they had an R rating. Maybe you'd see some nudity! Maybe something shocking! More often as not you were bored to tears.

This is a pretty dull movie in general; the plot is, basically, a bunch of terrible actresses with a bad script walk around Hollywood a lot and say things to each other and someone filmed it. OK, to be fair there's a story, but it's mind-numbingly unimportant--something about women trying to get jobs and make their way through the '70's, and have sex. Fair enough. There are only a few things that made this one rise to the top of the swill for me and made it memorable.

First, the blonde "Goldie Hawn" rip-off actress who played "Honey" (Oh brother). I know most people would hate her but I love camp and she's as camp as can be. She's got a noxiously "cute" voice and look and I laugh every time she comes on screen just because she's there. I like it when people with funny voices scream and curse or make a play to be taken seriously, and this actress does her share. She works the dumb bimbo thing well and, like Goldie before her, clearly is in on the joke.

Second, everyone in this would-be "T and A" film (there are exactly four t's and more male a's than female, not that anyone would care one way or another, it's all so UN-sexy...who was this made for anyway?) has such a loony, "after school special" attitude it furthers the camp value. No one gets burned for being optimistic in this flick--a street bum is just a nice guy who wants to be your friend, your boss in a strip joint really wants to further your career because you're a great gal. Hah? It's so deliriously unrealistic that people living in L.A. would treat each other nicely like this that it goes from being badly produced to almost clever. It's like "The Care Bears Visit A Crack House."

Third and foremost--Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira. I didn't know who she was when I saw this as a kid, but I knew there was really only one reason to watch it--for the "Katya" strip routine about 20 minutes in. I keep the tape around to this day for this scene alone. Ms. Peterson is absolutely wonderful performing a fun burlesque routine. She rolls her eyes, strikes some classic va-va-voom poses and bounces around to the thumpy music without ever losing her dignity. It's not sexy at all (to me) but a wonderful bit of business all the same--there's something so fun about burlesque that isn't possible to replicate in today's world, I think, and Cassandra exemplifies it--the woman in complete control and teasing and flirting her way through a number that is more about dance, imagination and beauty in motion than raw sex like you see in rap music videos and the like.

And then to hear her talking later! Even though at the time she was clearly not an actress, she portrays the "seasoned veteran" well. She speaks to her protégé as if becoming a stripper in a lurid club is a high ambition and lots of fun--not unlike Elvira's ambition in "Mistress Of The Dark" to become a Vegas showgirl. The silly innocence of this sub-plot is fun and compelling and inspired me a lot. It has a very similar tone to the "sex-for-pay is good clean fun" movie "The Happy Hooker" which came out around the same time. Makes you wonder what they were smoking at the time.

You can easily turn it off after Elvira's protégé does her number, the movie doesn't get any better after that and soon becomes interminable.

A very obscure low-budget "oddity" that I picked because Sarah Kennedy's in it, her second and last film before she started doing only voice-over stuff.

The female director unfortunately didn't realize what a cute gem she had in Kennedy hence perhaps why there are so few close-ups of her, if we can call them that. Most scenes were shot from a distance, as if this mediocre writer-director actually thought she could ape Altman, Kubrick or whomever. This results in disappointingly few shots of Kennedy in which her face is clearly visible - which in turn reduces the entertainment factor of a film whose sole recommendation is that she (and Cassandra Peterson) are in it.

It's a lame, fairly pointless little film that probably made $30 dollars and 50 Cents for its confused "auteur".

The dialog is quite corny, outdated, occasionally verging on lower-tier B-movie fluff. Not much better than porn film dialog, either, but the semi-competent cast help "elevate" it a bit.

The "semi-competent" does not apply to Kennedy, however. Given the proper vehicle she could have been a "minor" movie star. She can definitely act, isn't "just" mega-cute.

I can't quite put my finger on what Rothman was going for, what style she was aiming for, what message or point she was trying to convey. Or was she merely happy to be making a movie - ANY movie? "They gave me some money, so I'd better hurry up and write something - anything!" That's how it appears to be.