Tag Archives: Traci Lords

Brad reviews SHARKANSAS WOMEN’S PRISON MASSACRE (2015)! 

Posted on by Bradley Crain

The exploitively titled SHARKANSAS WOMEN’S PRISON MASSACRE opens up with employees of an “Arkansas Fracking” company causing such a disturbance underground that spiky, ancient sharks wake up and start swimming in our swamps and eating whoever they happen to come across. As a lifelong Arkansan, I’m guessing this would have to be set near the Louisiana line, but I don’t think it’s ever made clear. It doesn’t really matter because the movie is actually shot in the state of Florida. This shark awakening just happens to coincide with a group of hot, womens’ prison inmates, including Christine Nguyen and Cindy Lucas, getting into a van to go clear some stumps in that same shark swamp that’s just outside of the walls of the penitentiary that they’re currently residing in. We also meet Detective Kendra Patterson (Traci Lords) and her partner, who are looking for a group of criminals, led by Honey (Dominique Swain), who may have escaped into that same swamp that now contains our ancient, spiky sharks and our sexy Arkansas inmates! Before you know it, the trials and tribulations of every person involved will be put on the back burner as they try not to become the next victim of the Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre. 

SHARKANSAS WOMEN’S PRISON MASSACRE is pretty much the exact film that you’d expect it to be. It’s cheap, with terribly cheesy special effects, bad acting and some super-sexy women. It was made for the SyFy channel so it doesn’t really have graphic gore or nudity, which I’m sure is disappointing for those hoping for more bosoms and blood. I did enjoy a scene early in the film when the ladies are extremely warm from a tough day of clearing stumps so they start spilling water on their white T-shirts, while their faces contort in unbridled pleasures. The film is directed by Jim Wynorski who’s known for his low budget exploitation movies such as CHOPPING MALL (1986), BIG BAD MAMA II (1987), NOT OF THIS EARTH (1988), BODY CHEMISTRY 4: FULL EXPOSURE (1995), ALABAMA JONES AND THE BUSTY CRUSADE (2005), and COBRAGATOR (2015). For the director’s fans, this movie has much more in common with his classic PIRANHACONDA (2012) than it does his BUSTY WIVES (2007) series. 

The cast of SHARKANSAS WOMEN’S PRISON MASSACRE is pretty much top notch for a film like this. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen Traci Lords in one of her porn films, but I’ve always thought she was pretty good looking, and she is here. I did have Cinemax for a number of years as a young man so I’ve definitely seen some of Christine Nguyen’s work. I would come across titles like TARZEENA: JIGGLE OF THE JUNGLE (2008) starring Christine, and the man in me couldn’t help but stop and check out the story. Finally, as a huge fan of director John Woo’s FACE/OFF (1997), I remember liking Dominique Swain as Sean Archer’s rebellious young daughter in the film. In this film, she’s the queen of overacting as a lesbian outlaw who’s out to bust her lover out of jail when she finds herself in a life or death battle with deadly, ancient land sharks. It’s not exactly the performance of a lifetime, but it’s still kind of fun if you’re in the right frame of mind. 

At the end of the day, you’re either the kind of person who likes a movie like SHARKANSAS WOMEN’S PRISON MASSACRE or you’re not. There’s not a lot of in between. It’s personally not my favorite kind of film, but I’ll pretty much watch anything with an Arkansas connection, even though this one is “in title only.” For fans of the director, the film DINOCROC VS. SUPERGATOR, or some of the beautiful cast members, this film may be just what your looking for this October!

4 Shots of 4 Celebrities – Brad’s Vacation Edition!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

4 Shots of 4 Celebrities is just what it says it is, 4 shots of 4 of my favorite celebrities connected to the state I’m vacationing in. Where am I?!!

This week I’ll be getting some much needed R & R as I spend time away from work and exclusively with family and friends. My last post for the next nine days just happens to be coming from the state with strong connections to each of these unique performers. Y’all have a wonderful week and I’ll be back soon!

Brad Dourif in Mississippi Burning
Don Knotts in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken
Traci Lords in Not of This Earth
Jesco White in The Wild and Wonderful Whites of ____ ________!

Music Video of the Day: Last Drag by Traci Lords (2011, dir by Zalman King)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s music video of the day was directed by Zalman King, who would have turned 82 years old today.  King started his career as an actor and appeared in some fairly strange films in the 70s but, in the 80s, he reinvented himself as cinema’s number one purveyor of extremely pretentious yet oddly sincere erotica.  

This video came out a year before King’s death in 2012 and everything about it — from the visual style to the star of the show — is easily identifiable as having been done in King’s signature style.

Enjoy!

A Time To Die (1991, directed by Charles T. Kanganis)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Jackie (Traci Lords) is a single mom and a photographer who loses custody of her son when she’s framed for cocaine possession by a corrupt cop named Eddie Martin (Robert Miano).  Jackie is released from jail early, on the condition that she do 400 hours of community service.  Specifically, she is ordered to take pictures of the LAPD doing a good job and not killing people.  Captain Ralph Phibbs (Richard Roundtree) makes it very clear that she is to take only positive pictures of the LAPD or she could go back to jail and end up never seeing her son again.

However, even while doing community service, Jackie’s a rebel.  She decides to follow around Eddie and get pictures of him engaged in the same type of corruption that got her sent to prison.  Jackie manages to get Eddie on film murdering a pimp but, instead of going to the authorities, she wants to use the picture to blackmail Eddie into clearing her name.  Eddie, who has a cocaine problem, doesn’t respond well to being blackmailed and he decides to get the negatives and kill Jackie, not necessarily in that order.

While Eddie’s trying to kill Jackie, Frank (Jeff Conaway), another cop, is trying to maneuver his way into Jackie’s bed.  At first, Jackie doesn’t trust Frank because he’s a cop but then Frank takes her on a date to a domestic disturbance call and soon, she’s falling for him.  Frank, though, might not be as trustworthy as he seems.

This is one of the many direct-to-video thrillers in which Traci Lords appeared in the years immediately following her forced retirement from the adult film industry.  As was often the case with her 90s films, Lords is the best thing about A Time To Die.  In this film, Traci Lords again shows that she was a good actress.  Unfortunately, because of her past, she never got the type of roles that she really deserved.  In A Time To Die, she is believably tough and she makes the clunkiest dialogue credible.  Unfortunately, the other members of the cast don’t try anywhere near as hard as Lords does to bring some sort of reality to their stereotypical roles.  Conaway and Miano both sleepwalk through their roles while Richard Roundtree is reduced to getting mad and doing a lot of shouting.  Though the plot is sometimes predictable and it doesn’t take a psychic to know that Eddie is eventually going to go after Jackie’s son, the story is still interesting enough to hold your attention while your watching the movie.

A Time To Die is an occasionally interesting B-thriller that is elevated by the efforts of Traci Lords.

Cinemax Friday: Not Of This Earth (1988, directed by Jim Wynorski)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Since today is director Jim Wynorski’s birthday, I want to review one of his early films.

A remake of the Roger Corman classic, Wynorksi’s Not Of This Earth stars Traci Lords as Nadine Story, a nurse who works in the office of Dr. Rochelle (Ace Mask) and who has a boyfriend named Harry (Roger Lodge) who is also a cop.  (The leads to jokes like, “Harry called.  He said he left his nightstick with you last night.”)  Dr. Rochelle’s main patient is the mysterious Mr. Johnson (Arthur Roberts), who dresses in all black, always wears sunglasses, and who needs frequent blood transfusions.  When Dr. Rochelle takes a look at Mr. Johnson’s blood, he sees that Mr. Johnson has a strange blood disease that has apparently never been discovered before.  Dr. Rochelle sends Nadine over to work at Mr. Johnson’s home as his private nurse.  Of course, Mr. Johnson is not of this Earth.  His planet is dying and, as Nadine discovers, he is on Earth to search for a new supply of blood.

Wynorski’s version of Not Of This Earth follows the exact same plot of the Corman original, right down to having a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman fall victim to the alien’s bloodlust.  (In the original, the salesman was played by Dick Miller.  In the remake, he’s played by Michael Delano.  Miller does not even get a cameo in the remake of Not of this Earth, which is surprising considering it was still a Corman production and Wynorski previously cast Miller in Chopping Mall.)  They’re both enjoyable movies, especially if you’re in the mood for something that won’t require much thought.  The main difference between the the two versions of Not of this Earth is that the Wynorski version features a lot more nudity and that it makes no pretense towards being anything other than a comedy.

This was Traci Lords’s first role in a non-adult film and she knocks it out of the park.  The scandal surrounding her adult film career has always overshadowed the fact that, for all of her notoriety, Traci Lords was actually a pretty good actress who could handle comedy.  While the deliberately campy humor in Not of this Earth is no one’s definition of subtle, Lords shows good comedic timing and, most importantly, she delivers her lines with a straight face and without winking at the audience.

Wynorski later said that the movie was so popular on video that he was able to buy a house with his share of the profits.  Not of this Earth is a classic Wynorski production, featuring everything that made Jim Wynorski a late-night cable and direct-to-video favorite in the 90s.

Cinemax Friday: Extramarital (1998, directed by Yael Russcol)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Traci Lords in Extramarital

Having quit her corporate job, Elizabeth (Traci Lords) has taken a position as an intern at We@r Magazine.  (Yes, that’s how it’s spelled.)  She’s not making much money and she and her husband, Eric (Jack Kerrigan), are really struggling to pay the bills.  However, Elizabeth is getting to work for her college mentor, Griffin (Jeff Fahey), and she’s pursuing her dream.  Unlike Eric, who surrendered his fantasies of being a professional photographer, Elizabeth is determined to make it as a writer.

The only problem is that she can’t seem to get anything published.  Griffin tells her that she’s too repressed and that she doesn’t put enough of herself into her stories.  He orders her to “confront your demons and nail your endings.”  Elizabeth gets a chance to do just that when she meets Ann (Maria Diaz).  Ann says that, like Elizabeth, she spent her youth at a Catholic boarding school and she married the first man that she ever had sex with.  However, Ann is now in an open marriage and she says that it’s the greatest thing that ever happened to her.  Intrigued, Elizabeth decides to write a story about Ann.  But, when Ann disappears, Elizabeth fears that she may have been murdered and she decides to track down Ann’s latest lover, Bob (Brian Bloom), herself.

Extramarital is the type of thriller that used to air on Cinemax, late at night, in the 90s.  In fact, it’s such a 90s film that the entire plot hinges on deciphering a garbled message that was left on a broken answering machine.  Like most of the Cinemax thrillers of the era, the plot borrows a lot from Basic Instinct and no one ever does anything intelligent.  (To cite just one example, after Elizabeth discovers the someone is planning to kill her, she calls everyone but the police.)  The film deserves some credit for actually having the guts to cast Traci Lords as someone who is sexually repressed.  Griffin calls her the “Virgin Adulteress,” which probably would have been a better title than Extramarital.

Because of her background in the adult film industry and the fact that even her non-porn roles usually required her to show a lot of skin, Traci Lords never got much respect as an actress but, as she shows here and in her other 90s direct-to-video films, she had more talent than she was given credit for.  Lords seems to really invest herself in the role of Elizabeth and her performance is often the only thing that holds this film together.  Her best moment is when she discovers that she’s been betrayed and she trashes a room while screaming, “Fucking liar!”  Traci could destroy a room with the best of them.

The film’s ending doesn’t make much sense and you’ll figure out who the main villain is just by process of elimination.  That’s one problem with low-budget whodunits.  There usually aren’t enough people in the cast to really keep you guessing.  But Traci Lords is both sexy and sympathetic as Elizabeth and Jeff Fahey gives another memorably weird performance.  As far as late night Cinemax features from the 1990s are concerned, Extramarital delivers exactly what it promises.

Straight From The Direct-To-Video Film Vault: Laser Moon (1993, directed by Douglas K. Grimm)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Like so many straight-to-video thrillers from the 90s, Laser Moon opens with a serial killer.  This one stalks women whenever there’s a full moon.  His weapon of choice appears to be a laser pointer but it’s supposed to be a real laser.  When late night DJ Zane Wolf (Harrison le Duke, doing a barely passable Eric Bogosian impersonation) starts getting phone calls from a man claiming to be the killer, Detectives Barbara Fleck (Traci Lords) and Vincent Musso (Bruce R. Carter) get involved.

If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you mashed up Talk Radio with the type of movies that used to play regularly on late night Cinemax, the end result would probably be better than this.  Oh, don’t misunderstand.  Laser Moon tries it’s hardest to be something more than just another low budget, direct-to-video thriller.  Zane Wolf claims to be a cynic and he smokes a cigarette right in front of a “no smoking” sign.  (I have pictures of myself doing the exact same thing in high school.  Take that, evil sign!)  When the killer calls Zane Wolf’s show, the discussion involves all sorts of philosophical issues but the problem is that neither one of them has much to say.  Zane is a cardboard nihilist, the type who can’t come up with anything more profound than telling his listeners to “do what you’re afraid to do.”  “You walk alone,” he tells another caller.  Why are people listening to this guy again?

Traci Lords is miscast as a police detective but she still gives the best performance in the film, showing once again that there was more to her as an actress than just her notoriety as a former underage porn star.  Laser Moon may be one of her worst films but at least it ends with a twist involving the use of holograms.  That’s not something you see every day.

Cinemax Memories: Raw Nerve (1991, directed by David A. Prior)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Raw Nerve opens with a serial killer haunting Mobile, Alabama, using a pump action shotgun to shoot women in the face while they’re wearing red high heels.  Race car driver Jimmy Clayton (Ted Prior, brother of this film’s director) has been having visions of the murders so he goes to the police and offers to help them out.  Unfortunately for Jimmy, neither Detective Ellis (Jan-Michael Vincent!) nor Captain Gavin (Glenn Ford!!) believe in psychic phenomena so they toss Jimmy’s ass in jail.  While Ellis’s ex-wife, Gloria (Sandahl Bergman!!!), tries to prove that Jimmy’s innocent, Jimmy’s mechanic (Randall “Tex” Cobb!!!!), takes an unhealthy interest in Jimmy’s teenage sister, Gina (TRACI LORDS!!!!!).

As you can tell from reading the paragraph above, the main thing that this film has going for it is a cast full of recognizable B-actors.  Though none of them are really at their best, Raw Nerve is still your only chance to see Glenn Ford, Jan-Michael Vincent, and Sandahl Bergman all sharing scenes together.  Unfortunately, despite all of the famous names in the cast, Ted Prior got the most screen time and he really didn’t have the screen presence to pull off either the role or the film’s loony final twist.

The best thing about Raw Nerve is that it features both Randall “Tex” Cobb and Traci Lords.  Lords was a legitimately good actress, even if her past as a pornographic actress made it impossible for her to get the type of roles that she really deserved.  Lords doesn’t get to do much in Raw Nerve but she does her best to make Gina into a real character instead of just a generic victim.  Meanwhile, Randall “Tex” Cobb is a marvel as a biker who is never seen without a beer in his hand.  When Cobb eventually leaves the movie, you miss him.

Raw Nerve was one of the many low-budget thrillers that came out in the 90s.  Like many of these films, Raw Nerve was directed by David A. Prior and released by Action International Pictures, which shared both an acronym and a sensibility with American International Pictures.  Though films like Raw Nerve may not have been great art, they were entertaining if you came across one of them on Cinemax.  Where else were you going to see Tex Cobb and Jan-Michael Vincent battle it out at two in the morning?

Film Review: Nightmare Nurse (dir by Craig Moss)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

hp-images-nightmare-nurse_0

Earlier tonight, I watched Nightmare Nurse, the latest thriller to make its premiere on Lifetime.

Let’s just start with an obvious point.  Nightmare Nurse is a great title.  It’s a title that screams melodrama and danger.  It’s a title that says, “You must watch, you must watch!”  If there was a TV series called Nightmare Nurse, I would watch and review every episode.  If a character named Nightmare Nurse ever shows up in a Marvel comic book movie, I guarantee that she will become the most popular character since that talking raccoon.  Nightmare Nurse is a title that epitomizes everything that we love about Lifetime movies.

The other point I would like to make is that, according to the imdb, Nightmare Nurse was filmed in Los Angeles.  I was actually shocked to discover this because everything about it screamed, “Canada!”  As I watched the movie, I just naturally assumed that it was filmed in either Montreal or Toronto, like so many other Lifetime films.  But no, Nightmare Nurse was actually filmed in the U.S.

As for what the film is about … well, this is an odd one.  It starts out like a normal Lifetime film and, for the first 75 minutes or so, it plays out like a normal Lifetime film.  And then suddenly, things get really weird and, for the final 15 minutes, it’s like you’re watching an entirely different movie.  This is one of those Lifetime films that has a big out-of-nowhere twist that really doesn’t make much sense.  After you find out about the twist, you find yourself obsessing on how little sense it makes.  In order for the plot of Nightmare Nurse to work, you have to believe that someone would come up with the most needlessly complicated plan necessary to accomplish a relatively simply goal.

But look, I’m not going to spoil things.  If you want to talk about the ending, do so in the comments.  But for this review, I will stay try to stay true to the no spoiler rule.

Nightmare Nurse tells the story of Brooke (Sarah Butler) and her boyfriend, Lance (Steve Good).  One night, Lance is driving Brooke home from her job as a sous chef when, suddenly, a man wanders out into the middle of the street.  Lance loses control of the car.  The man is killed and Lance ends up with a broken leg.  At the hospital, both Brooke and Lance are taken care of by Nurse Barb (Traci Lords).  But, since Barb can’t go home with them, they have to hire a home nurse once they’re discharged from the hospital.

Brooke ends up hiring Chloe (Lindsay Hartley) and, as soon as Chloe showed up at the house, I was just like, “No!  Stop!  No way would I ever hire someone who looks like Chloe to take care of my boyfriend!”  Seriously, if I’m hiring a nurse to spend all day with my boyfriend while I’m at work, you better believe that I am going to hire the ugliest nurse that I possibly can.

And you know what else I would probably do?  I would probably run a background check or at least ask for references.  Brooke doesn’t do any of this so should she really be all that surprised when Chloe turns out to be totally batshit crazy?  Soon, Chloe is flirting with Lance and subtly suggesting that he and Brooke really aren’t that compatible.  Meanwhile, Brooke is stuck working for a British chef.  (Julian Stone does an okay job in the role but I would have loved to have seen a Gordon Ramsay cameo here.)  Seriously, people — do a background check.

So, Chloe’s crazy, right?  Well, yes but that’s not all!  There’s a whole other layer of conspiracy going on.  It’s all revealed during the final 15 minutes of the movie and it pretty much comes out of nowhere.  This is one of those films where the mystery is solved largely through coincidence and luck as opposed to any use of intelligence on the part of anyone in the film.

I never though I’d say this about a Lifetime film but Nightmare Nurse is almost too implausible for its own good.  On the positive side, Lindsay Hartley is properly unhinged as Chloe and Steve Good is likable as couch-bound Lance.  Nightmare Nurse may not be the best Lifetime film that I’ve ever seen but I would definitely watch Nightmare Nurse II because a good title is a good title.