The Dirty Dolls

Lost until quite recently, this middling softcore crime/hostage drama from Stu Segal is fairly interchangeable with any number of '70s X-rated hostage flicks (think THE BIG SNATCH, TANYA, and any of the myriad hardcore variations on the same formula). It's nice to have it back, but we probably could have pieced it together out of those other films just as easily.

The bare-bones plot concerns a guy and group of women who hide out in a woodland cabin after a jewelry heist, bringing a couple people from the company they robbed in tow. Very little happens after that point - the guy calls whoever he's working for, a kind of Manson-lite figure who declines to show up since they have too much heat on them and disappears for the rest of the film, while the guy (who's boffing his sister, in a weird subplot) slowly goes insane with sexual jealousy. Naturally, the film wraps up with the male hostage and one of the women (the sister, for the record) trying to make a break for it.

Fans will surely be most interested in this as a lost Sharon Kelly vehicle, and she's luminous here, as usual - spunky and energetic, it's easy to see the instant star quality that had her ready-made for films like this, even if she wasn't a true thespian (though she acquits herself fine here - much better than most of the cast, in fact). There are a few bizarre touches, like the group's diamond heist, which involves one of the girls dressing up as an old woman in a wheelchair, complete with the worst makeup job you've ever seen (she looks like a refugee from a cheap zombie movie, with dried oatmeal smeared all over her face!). To top it off, her dressing up lends the group precisely zero advantage in the grand scheme of their robbery, which only makes it weirder. Nevertheless, the body of the flick - save a few standout moments like this - is fairly dull, and unless you're a particular fan of Kelly's, it will hardly come as a grindhouse revelation. Just one more run-of-the-mill soft-Xer, rescued from the dustbin of history.

This woeful movie would be totally gone and forgotten if not for the wonderful Blu Ray label Vinegar Syndrome. Normally they invest their time restoring valuable, lost cinematic gems.. But not this time.. Released as a double feature on the same disc as the infinitely superior "Things To Come," this dreadfully boring flick attempts to tell the story of a group of bad girls, who follow their male leader's instructions to rob banks and hold up jewelry stores, like the girls in the Manson family. Sounds exciting? Well it's not.. The movie mostly consists of people sitting around and talking. This wannabe porn is sandwiched between two loooooong sex scenes, each lasting for more than 10 minutes, and yet never crossing the line into hardcore territory... Yes, 20 minutes of poorly filmed softcore coupling, in a movie that's only 73 minutes long. This film is wretched. However the bluray is very expensive, due to the fact that the other movie, "Things To Come," a low budget sci-fi cross between "1984" and "Westworld" is a truly fantastic example of what could be done with a limited budget and a love for the art of filmmaking. Seek out that grindhouse classic and skip this dud..