chris919

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.

I saw this insane thing at my high school, of all places, stoned out of my face as a little hippie about 1971. I remember laughing myself sick over "The Cube" -- and then I never heard of it again. I almost wondered whether I'd dreamed it up, but my fellow spaceshots remembered it with the same mixture of wonder and disbelief I did. ("What WAS that crazy thing we watched -- and why were they showing it in the auditorium?" I've gone on Google and Amazon and EBay looking for this over the years, and never seen any mention of it. Now I've finally ascertained that it does exist (Jim bloody Henson???) and maybe I'll find it someday. I've cleaned up my act a lot in the last 34 years, so I doubt it will have the same effect. But I'm sure curious...

Strawberry jam!

This is a pretty silly film, including what may well be the least erotic come-on ever to make it to the big screen (the heroine pours V-8 all over herself and invites the hero to lick it off -- yuck!). And yet it also features the resplendent Lucinda Dickey in what is far and away her most erotic performance. In those long ago days, women -- even action heroines -- with real muscles were a rarity, and I can still remember the way my jaw dropped when Dickey took off her shirt, revealing the most powerfully built female back and biceps I'd ever seen. Dickey's beauty and vitality carry the film: she could have been a female Schwarzenegger if anybody had had the vision to promote her.