Girls That Do

GIRLS THAT DO provides enough full nudity and simulated sex to satisfy undiscriminating soft porn enthusiasts, but is crudely made. I prefer filmmaker Sidney Knight's later efforts.

Both the AFI Catalogue 1961-1970 and the Something Weird video box claim this as a 1967 film, but the full-frontal nudity makes clear it is of later (1969) vintage. Unfortunately, the SWV DVD-R has the image frequently whited-out (overexposed looking), some defect in the print or negative used for transfer.

Corny plot line has a girl (Ruth) from a small town (she reports there was only one drugstore in the place) arriving in the Big Apple at Port Authority Bus Terminal and finding a place to stay in the Village with two beautiful roommates (including Linda Boyce).

Told mainly in flashback, the melodrama concerns each of the girls being mistreated by men, with their naiveté stressed as the main theme. Roommate Gigi, an ultra-buxom actress who I'm not familiar with, narrates a flashback of her being exploited by boyfriend Mike. He claims to be under the gun to pay a debt, and pimps her out as an "escort" to help raise money, with Gigi soon finding out that she's merely whoring for him.

She doesn't get wise (or angry) until she finds him one day in her bed with another woman.

In present-time, Ruth answers a want ad for a photographer's model, and the film's most tedious sequence unfolds. The Village photographer looked (and acted) to me to be character actor Philip Baker Hall, uncredited in this softcore assignment which obviously wouldn't look nice on his résumé. His improvised, slightly French-accent hambone performance is terrible, as he pretends to be just doing his pro shutterbug job, when in fact he is manipulating the girl into split-beaver poses (not shown). He ends up stiffing her out of the $25 he promised for the photo session.

After this horrible vignette blows over, Sylvia (Linda Boyce) relates her tale of woe. Her husband (a creep with terminal acne) later in their marriage insisted that she whip him, to get him aroused for (conventional) sex. Eventually he turned the tables and started to whip her -a no-no, cueing their divorce.

Gigi is working as a topless waitress at a bar, where a pesky customer keeps insisting she go out with him. Appealing to Sylvia for help against this stalker type, Sylvia suggests that Gigi bring him home and the gals will enact revenge.

They tie him up and then absurdly play strip poker to decide which woman will service him first. Threat is that if he can't perform and satisfy all three of them in a row, he's in for a whipping (Sylvia having nostalgically kept hubby's whip all this time). Twist ending is predictable, stupid and unsatisfying.

Much of the film is cheaply shot MOS, with one or the other of the actresses narrating. Direct-sound is used for dialog scenes, but the improvising is poor. A guitar solo, running at least an hour in total, dominates the visuals, and is occasionally effective in setting or amplifying a scene's mood, but this baby couldn't be saved in post-production.