Bad Girls Go to Hell

source: Bad Girls Go to Hell

Prolific grindhouse auteur Doris Wishman ( Indecent Desires, Keyholes are for Peeping) probably covered the budget of this crass film at the opening day matinee on 42nd St. With a looped soundtrack from end to end she banks the film's draw on her leads (Gigi Darlene) butt as leitmotif, insuring a racy trailer and hot lobby cards to draw the porno connisor. Darlene plays a horny housewife whose carnal demands make hubby late for work. A nightmare then takes her on a picaresque journey of erotic fantasy before she comes to and faces a violent deja vue in reality. Laughable from the outset Bad Girls is clumsy (aren't they all) soft * circa 65 with Gigi making ludicrous choices in order to keep the titillation flowing. Relaxed censorship eventually brought an end to this type of sloppy * but not Ms. Wishman's career who at age 90 churned out the immemorable Dildo Heaven. You had to hand to Dorie, she went down swinging.

Doris Wishman at her best. Post-modern continuity. Shots of shoes and feet galore. Beautiful women doing housework in negligees and high-heels. Beautiful, scantily clad women smiting evil-doing men with ceramic ashtrays. Doors that can be entered and left simultaneously. A police detective coming out of the closet (literally) to his mother. Ever-looping sound tracks and music. Acting that redefines the craft. Cool, cool jazz. And we know that our heroine will endlessly repeat this day until she figures out how to keep her husband from working on Saturdays. An American classic. Asking for ten lines on this film, Is like asking for ten lines of haiku. Are there ten lines of actual dialogue? Were there ten minutes of a score? Were there even ten hours of filming? The Devine Doris cannot be confined to more than ten lines.

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.

***SPOILERS**** Ellen Green, Gigi Darlene, after first being attacked by the janitor Amos Right, Harold Key, in her building stairway is later slipped a message by the creep to meet her in his apartment for tea where the somewhat confused woman, who seems to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, goes to see him where he attempts to rape her for a second time! Fighting Right off Ellen bashes his skull in with an ashtray killing him and checks out of town, leaving her husband Ted-Alan Feinstein- in the cold, to New York City to start a new life. We see Ellen claiming that she's from Chicago not Boston where she comes from gets involved with a number of screwballs including the woman abusive Ed Bains, Sam Stewart, as well as lesbian dancer Tracy, Darlene Bennett,and raped again by George La Roque the husband of the woman Marlene Starr who rented her a room in her apartment. Alone and with out a place to stay Ellen finally gets a job looking after elderly and in firmed Mrs. Thorne, Gertrude Cross, who unknown to Ellen the two have something or someone very in common with each other. ****SPOILERS****Somewhat confusing surprise ending that's a lot like the one in the 1945 thriller "Dead of Night" besides some of the very graphic * scenes, for a movie made in the 1960's, makes the film worth watching. What bothered me about all this is that Ellen didn't deserve what happened to her-as the title indicates-since she was the victim in the film not the villain. The ending made it look like her killing of the creepy and rapist janitor Amos Right was an act of cold blooded murder which in fact it was in self defense!

I knew going into this film that it wasn't going to be some grand masterpiece or anything like that but even for a B-movie it doesn't really seem to be all that great. There are a myriad of issues with the sound, especially, which leaves me feeling like all of the sound effects and some of the dialogue was on a sound board or something. I understand that this was a low-budget film but I feel like there could have been a little more effort in the making of this film. I guess I could say it's funny that a lot of the film is spent in a limited number of locations that reminds me of video games from the late-90s and early 00's where there's a hub world and different levels you spend a short amount of time at before you got to the next one via the same hub world. The first hub world in this film is Central Park and the 2nd one is the same NYC street. This film kind of reminds me of Forbidden Daughters in that the plot is just a backdrop to push along the next scene where you can look at attractive women be attractive- but in this film's case it's not very appealing. Maybe it was OK in the 60s but there's nothing I found very appealing about the assault scenes- of which there are many. I really don't see the appeal of this film. I went in thinking it was going to be so bad it's good but instead I got whatever this was. At least it was short.

"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.

Iconoclast indie film-maker Doris Wishman's darkly decadent B/W roughie 'Bad Girls Go To Hell' (1966) is a devilishly indecent descent into a luridly carousing cornucopia of steamy celluloid excess!!!! Slake your illicit hungers upon the sultry smorgasbord of the sinfully fornicating flesh so morbidly coveted by the joyfully hellbound, heroically humping hedonists herein! Prepare to wantonly experience an exquisite catharsis of sublime saturnalia beyond even your wildest screams!!!!!! 'Sometimes it's good to be bad, but Bad Girls are ALWAYS better than good!

A sexploitation flick that's risen to cult status based on its lurid title alone, Bad Girls Go To Hell is a time-capsule of sixties' sleaze. Don't expect Doris Wishman to inject any feminist subtext into this misogynist genre. This was Wishman's first roughie, a sub genre focusing on titillating the audience with male violence perpetrated against women. Sadly, this trend of equating sex with violence continues to be prevalent in * today. Wishman, like fellow exploitation director Russ Meyer, shows considerable skill as an editor. However, Bad Girls Go To Hell is a technical mess. The threadbare plot focuses on a housewife who flees the police after murdering her rapist. Why she doesn't claim self-defense for the quite justified killing is never explained. The housewife, played by Gigi Darlene, is quite a beautiful woman. She carries herself with grace and poise, seemingly unaffected by Wishman's leering camera. There are numerous salacious shots focusing on Darlene's buxom form, but most of the nudity appears in the first ten minutes. After that, the film relies more on her meager acting talents. The movie ends with an "it was all just a dream" coda, explaining away some of the more bizarre and unrealistic moments. The strongest moments of this film, a lesbian subplot, appears to have been cut to ribbons by outraged censors.

It's a pity that so many non-porno movies that dare to deal solely with the issue, and repercussions of(whisper it)...sex, are often dumped in the bins marked 'Worst Movies Ever Made'. Once this happens, so many interesting movies just seem to disappear, totally under-valued. So let's hear it for Doris Wishman and this, which may well be her greatest movie. 'Bad Girls Go To Hell' is a gem, a highly individualistic fever-dream of erotic(but never pornographic) intensity. The movie benefits greatly from it's star, the astonishing looking Gigi Darlene, who appears to be in every frame of the movie's running time. She is quite simply one of the most beautiful screen-stars I have ever seen. In 'Emmanuelle', Sylvia Kristel was praised for looking sexy(or sexual) without even being aware that she was being so. Well it's the same with Gigi here, every movement she makes on screen seems somehow sexually charged, without her having the slightest inkling of her power. Men become weak and slobbering before her, unable to control their vile sexual lusts and frustrations, and as always seems to be the case, it's Gigi who suffers as a result. Driven from her domestic bliss(her husband is the only man in the movie who seems capable of controlling his desires while around her) after killing a deviant who attacks her, Gigi finds herself in New York where she is befriended by a struggling alcoholic man who invites her to stay at his place. After mistakenly giving him alcohol as a 'thank-you' for his kindness, the man goes berserk and beats her, causing her to flee again. She next finds herself living with a lesbian who involved with a sleazy pornographer(pimp?), again it all ends in tears. The ambiguous ending to the film is either a happy ending or a bad ending depending really upon the viewer. Whilst I have praised Gigi Darlene highly for this film, the main credit must go to Doris Wishman. Often ridiculed, the simple truth is that if Doris was male and/or European, she would be hailed in the same breaths as Godard, Resnais and Truffaut. Her camera work and simplistic, minimal cinematography are simply excellent. The film moves with a beat and tempo all it's own. There is no doubt that this is a purely singular vision at work, an auteur's vision. It's almost incredible that Gigi Darlene can spend so much of the movie in state of complete undress, yet we see NOTHING. The movie would hardly earn a PG certificate these days, certainly not for nudity. It's a masterclass of editing. The clear crisp photography gives the movie a look all of it's own, especially in the scenes in (a bizarrely empty) Central Park. Further credit should go to the excellent score. The jaunty flute-laden music that accompanies the scene where Gigi prepares coffee in the kitchen at the beginning of the movie, and the garage-rock style accompaniment to the scene where the two girls are dancing, are both fantastic. There are a couple of mysteries though. Both involving images that accompany the opening title sequence. Some of the images in the titles NEVER appear in the film. Given that one of the images is also one of the most frequently used as a poster for the film(Darlene Bennett in her underwear), makes me wonder if a lot of footage was never used, or has simply been lost over the years. Nevertheless, I cant rate this movie highly enough, even though it clearly wont be to everyones tastes. It is, in my opinion, Doris Wishman's best film, and given that Gigi Darlene appears to have so few movies, I would say it's her star turn. Bad Girls Go To Movie Heaven.