Bad Girls Go to Hell

My first Doris Wishman film, which a friend told me was supposedly one of her best (if so, then I'd hate to see her worst)! This thing concerns a young woman who first gets attacked by her janitor and so flees away into the big city where she incomprehensibly manages to become involved with all sorts of sick and abusive strangers along her path, yet naively and inexplicably keeps moving in with them! Kind of perversely funny watching her shack up with each guy only to soon be carrying her same suitcase away with her in the middle of the night again and again.

* out of ****

Watching Doris Wishman movies is like driving past a car wreck; you know you're gonna see something awful if you look, but you just can't help yourself! The Something Weird DVD edition of "Bad Girls Go To Hell" that I just watched is paired with another Wishman epic, "Another Day, Another Man," and it makes for one perfect(ly awful) double feature. In "Bad Girls...," a young woman kills her janitor, comes to NYC and is attacked/seduced by practically every person she bumps into. A nice twist ending DOES mitigate some of the weirdness that precedes it. In "Another Day...," a woman with the hugest bouffant hairdo you've ever seen becomes a call girl to pay for her hubby's doctor bills. But these capsule descriptions can't possibly describe the level of sleazy teasing that these films are all about. While neither features ANY frontal nudity at all--odd, given the fact that Wishman's "Nude on the Moon," made five years EARLIER, was replete with nudity--the level of leering is not to be believed. Now I know what a raincoat-wearing old man in a 42 St. theatre in the mid-60s must have felt like. Trust me, you will need a HOT shower after watching these sleazy flicks. Lingering shots of a tossed-off brassiere lying on the floor are Wishman's idea of titillation. And her direction really does make Ed Wood look like Orson Welles. She seems incapable of shooting anything without including meaningless shots of inanimate objects. And there is no synchronized dialogue to speak of. As the "Psychotronic Video Guide" so rightly puts it, "it's a rare occurrence when a few words happen to match the lips." So why have I given these flicks two stars? Because you stare at your TV screen in utter disbelief, occasionally cracking up, and by the end realize that you HAVE, somehow, been entertained. And since neither film is much longer than an hour, the experience flies by pretty quickly. Thank God.

Filming in glorious and gritty black and white, Ms Wishman offers us the beautiful and talented Gigi Darlene as an everywoman in 1960's urban America suffering the birth-pangs of the sexual revolution. Take a peek at this, if you ever get the opportunity, to see an example of the art that influenced pulp film-makers of the 1960's and 1970's, John Waters, and many musicians and artists active in the Punk scene.

Sometimes bawdy, sometimes gaudy, definitely mid-60's urban in feeling and then there's gorgeous GiGi Darlene! Perhaps one of the early (only?) B-movies to attempt the "Dream Sequence" thing, where the audience finds out that Meg's shlepping from one serial rapist and sexual deviant to another while on the lam is nothing more than a dream. A dirty, sexually overturned bad-girl dream. Or is it? The acting as well as the sound is laughable at times, being over-emphasized or just plain cheap- but then again that is part of the innocence and charm that now you'd find in this film. Listen closely while she's on the run.. you'll hear the ONE horn from some distant '57 Plymouth over, and over, and over again. (simulating what I guess was supposed to be NYC traffic!) Hylarious!

Meg, apparently frustrated by her hunk-a-luscious husband going to a "meeting" on a Saturday, decides to don her skimpiest sheer house dress & pom-pom slippers and clean the apartment. Little does she know, the janitor(I've decided he's a Russian Immigrant) scopes her out in the hallway , and realizes that he, too has pent up lust and .. well - you'll see.

For the time, the sets,backdrops, and locations are all really cool to see - and you'd have to be half dead not to STILL look at GiGi Darlene and swoon. Even by today's standards, she's a babe! But aside from that this movie has it all.. Alcoholism, Fetishism, lesbianism ( I'm an acrobatic dancer!) and some of the corniest scenes you'll ever witness. Gee, it's GOOD!

"Meg Kelton" (Gigi Darlene) is a housewife in Boston who wakes up a little frisky one morning but cannot seem to get her husband to stay with her rather than going to work. So after he leaves she commences to clean the apartment and upon taking the trash out gets viciously raped by the janitor. Afterwards, she gets back to her apartment and while still in a state of disbelief sees a note put under her apartment door ordering her to come to the rapist's apartment. Fearful that he might tell her husband she does as she is told but when she gets there the janitor attempts to rape her again. She then kills the janitor but in a state of panic decides she has to leave town before the police catch up to her. So she heads to New York where she thinks she can blend in and leave all of her problems behind. Unfortunately, she has no idea what awaits her there. Now rather than reveal any more of this movie I will just say that this is an exploitation film from the mid-60's which suffers from its low budget, bad script and less than adequate acting. Not only that, but what was even worse was the constant music which played from start to finish. Even so, the aforementioned Gigi Darlene was quite attractive and the ending contained a nice double-twist which certainly helped this film to a certain degree. Be that as it may, I rate it as just slightly below average.