Bad Girls Go to Hell

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!

Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965)

** (out of 4)

Doris Wishman directed this sexploitation cult classic, which is one of the better known films out there. A married but bored housewife gets raped by the apartment janitor and eventually kills him. She flees from the scene hoping to start a new life in NYC but everyone she meets either physically or sexually abuses her. Like many other sexploitation flicks, this one here was shot in grainy B&W without sound, which was later dubbed in. The best thing about this film is the pretty good, if rough, editing, which cuts to various scenes very well. This film was still early in the sex genre so there isn't too much nudity but Wishman plays with the viewer with her fast cuts and quit edits. There's not much that really goes on but I was still caught up in the film.

During the mid-60s, there was a slew of these tacky drive-in movies. Most of them were barely indistinguishable from one another. They all had exceptionally pretty, but sleazy female characters, who were always running around nude, or nearly-nude. Most of these flicks also featured plenty of violence (especially of women getting beaten and raped), and excessively bawdy lesbian sex scenes, no-doubt thrown in to titillate male viewers.

This film has quite a bizarre plot premise. When a young wife is raped by the janitor in her apartment building, she flees the scene, after killing him in self defense. As the story unravels, the viewer sees the wife waking-up screaming, relieved that what happened to her seemed to be only a dream. Or was it? The viewer can never quite be sure, because of the convoluted way that the story progresses.

This movie, like others of it's ilk, is little more than soft-core porn. But it, and other films like it, were on the cutting-edge of sensationalistic sex and violence, during the swinging 60s. These films were quite shocking, back when they were made. Now, films like these seem ludicrously melodramatic. If you are nostalgic about seeing seedy 60s B movies, then you may find this film mildly entertaining.

An ex-girlfriend of mine used to drive around with a bumper sticker that said: "Good girls go to heaven… Bad girls go everywhere!" I always found that hilarious and the title of this little 60's exploitation film instantly reminded me of it. "Bad Girls Go To Hell" is another glamorous and ultimately sophisticated accomplishment of the great writer/director Doris Wishman; the woman who pretty much single-handedly popularized the so-called "roughie" exploitation movies during the sixties. The films of Mrs. Wishman may perhaps not be very good (in fact, she was quite often referred to as the female Ed Wood) but she definitely had … well … balls! This film is boring, poorly acted, ineptly directed and desperately stuffed with padding footage to reach a half-decent running time, but still I can't bring myself to harshly criticize it. The year was 1965 and here she was – Doris Wishman - showing girls' bare bottoms, attempted rape and even quick nipple flashes. The plot of this film sounds acceptable enough, but in fact it's really silly and laughable. When the Meg Kelton is taking the trash out in her see-through nightgown on a Saturday morning, her sleazy janitor attempts to sexually assault her. You can tell this man is really sinister because he has a Slavic accent, ha! When Meg goes to his apartment later on - I haven't got the slightest idea why she does that, though – he tries to rape her again and she kills him with a glass bowl. The poor girl panics, obviously, and impulsively decides to leave her house and husband and flee to New "Hell" York. Once there, Meg's life only gets worse and worse. She successively ends up with a friendly man who turns into an abusive monster when he drinks, a lesbian stripper, a married couple of whom the husband is yet another rapist pig and an elderly lady with a creepy police officer for a son. Poor, poor Meg! If she wasn't such a bad actress, I might have felt really sorry for her. And then Gigi Darlene, the girl who plays Meg, is still the most talented one in the whole cast by far. "Bad Girls to Hell" has a stupid ending, but then again, it was still okay in the sixties, I guess. If you're familiar with this type of cheap and raunchy Z-grade cinema, you know what else to expect, right? We're talking dialogs clearing added during the post-production phase, inexplicably large amounts of filming people's feet, monotonous go-go- dancing music, etc, etc

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.