Drew Carey Show: Season 9, Ep 22. Special guest, Maria Ford! (2004)

Directed by Thomas J Thompson
Starring Drew Carey, Ryan Styles, Deidrich Bader, Maria Ford
Genre: Sitcom

"Eggs and strippers. It's why people hide in the wheel-wells of 747's just to get to this country."

While it certainly has its own singular charms, the Drew Carey Show is, classically, not much of a resource for boner TV fans. It is, after all, a show about a pudgy, bespectacled everyman in an ill-fitting suit trying to get though the day without any major incidents. Guys who brew their own beer in their basements don't usually cavort with scads of beautiful women. That being said, the show was often quite funny. Craig Ferguson as Drew's whacked-out boss was a major highlight. Also, Christa Miller, Drew's best-bud Kate, was easy on the eyes, in a low-key sorta way. That is, until she butchered her mug with plastic surgery. By the way, did you know she was Susan Saint James' niece? True story. Also, she was on the cover of the first issue of fratboy boner rag Maxim. So there's that.

Anyway, the point is, you rarely had the opportunity to ogle on the Drew Carey show. And then, out of nowhere, at the tail end of the show's 9th season, the gang hits a strip club. And who's dancing at said establishment? Why, none other than everybody's favorite go-to B-movie stripper-actress, the glamorous Maria Ford!

Ford made a series of low-budget "erotic thrillers" and horror flicks for Roger Corman back in the 1990's. Sometimes she was a cop (Angel of Destruction, 1994), and sometimes she was part of an ancient fertility cult (Burial of the Rats, 1995), but most of the time (Stripped to Kill II, 1985; Dance of the Damned, 1989; Dance With Death, 1992; Stripteaser, 1995, Hot Ticket, 1996; Showgirl Murders, 1996), she played a stripper. While these racy roles made her a cult star, she reportedly hated doing so much nudity, and by the end of the 90's, her reign as a skin-bearing b-queen abruptly ended. She claims it was by design, although many think it was because of face-altering plastic surgery she underwent in 1998. For whatever reason, Maria drifted off the sleaze-beast radar and when she did pop up in the next few years, it was generally in minor walk-on roles in kidflicks. So who knows how she ended up back on the pole in this episode of Drew Carey, but there she is!

In the episode, Drew and his pals Oswald (Deidrich Bader) and Lewis (Ryan Stiles) decide to check out the new strip club that just opened in town. In the pre-credit scene, you can see our girl Maria kicking and grinding with abandon in a too-short pink micro-miniskirt as Drew and Lewis chomp on eggs and toast. They also cut away to Oswald, who is entertaining another stripper, Raven, with his hopeless attempts at card tricks. Raven is portrayed by Sirena Irwin, a voice actress known primarily as the voice of a fish on Spongebob Squarepants.

After the commercial break, we get back to the action at the club. Crystal (Ford) is still dancing for the fellas, but Drew's feeling guilty, because he didn't tell his girlfriend Kellie (Cynthia Watros) he was going. He decides to get some advice from Crystal.
"Excuse me, I need a woman's opinion. I have a question about relationships."
"Well, if it's about your relationship with your father, I'm probably not the best person to ask."
Ouch.
Later on, Crystal gives Lewis a lapdance, and Drew keeps badgering her about his girlfriend. She suggests he lies and tells her he went bowling. Problem solved. Then she bronskies Lewis, but her hard-as-rock boobs injure his neck, and he has to go the emergency room.

The next day, Lewis visits Drew wearing a collar. He tells him he wants to sue the strip club, and to do that, he'll need Drew's testimony. To do that, Drew has to admit that he lied about bowling to Kellie. She's pretty pissed about it.

So, they all go the arbitration, and Lewis attempts to extort $4 million dollars from the club. He does not get it, but everybody gets free passes to the strip club. So everybody wins.

Well, except for Crystal.

Even when the material failed her - and it often did - Maria Ford was a compelling, captivating presence during her 90's direct-to-video run. Most obviously, she was a stunner, with a flawless face and well-toned figure. She also imbued even the most basic roles with some sense of raw authenticity. Maria Ford acted as hard as she possibly could, all the time, even with the most basic, un-challenging roles. But perhaps her most endearing trait was the almost palpable anguish she so clearly felt when she found herself portraying another woozy stripper, another hapless victim, another shameless seductress. Maria wanted to be an A-list, dramatic actress so badly that it bled all over the screen. It made you want to root for her, to be on her team, somehow. Because we're all Maria Fords in someway or another, and just like her, we often end up settling for a life a lot less glitzy and glamorous than we'd hoped for. It is this last defining characteristic, as ethereal as it is, that resonates the loudest in this episode. Ten years later, and Maria finally gets a big break - and it's as a fuckin' stripper. Life is a killer, man.

That being said, as Drew Carey episodes go, "Assault With a Lovely Weapon" isn't bad. Lotsa cleavage, a few funny jokes, and gratuitous Maria Ford. That's pretty good for 22 minutes of mainstream situation comedy. Fans who haven't seen her since the mid 1990's might be taken aback with Ford's new look - her surgery really did fundamentally change the shape of her face - but underneath, she still exudes the heartbroken screen goddess that so enthralled us way-back-when.

Now, somebody put her in a real fuckin' movie so we can have a happy ending, ok?

- Ken McIntyre

Stripteaser (1995)

Directed by Dan Golden
Starring Maria Ford, Rick Dean, Nikki Fritz
Rated R
USA

"Well, I don't know about anybody else, but I've certainly got a hard-on."

In real life, there's Jumbo's Clown Room, a self-consciously sleazy burlesque bar in Hollywood. In Roger Corman's corner-cutting, royalty-free B-movie universe, Jumbo's transmogrifies into Zippo's Clown Palace, an alt-world version of Jumbo's, frequented mostly by rejects from Revenge of the Nerds and staffed by bikers and scream queens. Incidentally, the doorway to Zippo's Clown Palace is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen, an inspired bit of trashy amusement park style hucksterism. The inside, on the other hand, might just be a spare conference room at the New Concorde offices.

At any rate, as our story begins, it's last call, and Zippos' star dancer Christina (Maria Ford) has just finished her slutty bride dance. A dyke-y Nikki Fritz, wearing one of those Skid Row nose-chains, is dancing listlessly on stage, and everyone's taking their final slugs of hooch, when Neil (Rick Dean, RIP) a loudmouth blind dude with a Mark Goodman perm job shows up and demands a drink.

He gets it, and then proceeds to jabber away incessantly. The barkeep tries to throw him out, but then he whips off his glasses, pull out a gun, and hold everyone hostage.

Meanwhile, a couple of crooked cops are making the rounds. They bust in a on dude named Arnie while he's trying to jerk off to some sweet 90's porn (Forrest Hump!) and do all his coke. And then they press him for info and head out. And they even steal his porn.

Back at the club, the crazy fucker makes the stuttering simp obsessed with Christina have sex with her or he'll shoot 'em both. The dude cries while Christina blows him. It's pretty awesome.
Then he tells a story about how he's been stalking her for months, even busting into her house while she's at work so that he can sniff her panties. Seems valid. He also kidnapped her ex-boyfriend, tied him to a cross, and crucified him.

So anyways, then the crooked cops show and, a seriously over-the-top free-for-all gun fight ensues. It's so abrupt and ultra-violent that it almost looks like a bunch of maniacs opened fire on the actors while they were filming their scenes. Still, even with the aggressively apocalyptic ending, we are left with a glimmer of hope: if you can survive a hail of gunfire, even bespectacled toadies with social phobias can score with hot blonde strippers. I mean, they might bleed to death before the ambulance arrives, but still.

Ably directed by short-change sexploitation expert Dan Golden, Stripteaser is an economical, stripped-down (no pun intended) psycho-thriller anchored by Rick Dean's gloriously unhinged performance as excitable schizo-stalker Neil. You literally have no idea what he's going to say or do from one minute to the next. It's an alarming and awe-inspiring bit of kamikaze acting. Of course, the title - changed from the original "Zippo's Clown Palace" to Stripteaser to cash in on the hype around Demi Moore's clunker Striptease, which was released shortly after - is a bit misleading.

Sure, stripping does happen - Ford joylessly gyrates through a couple numbers, top-heavy z-queen Nikki Fritz expertly works the pole, and big-eyed pixie Ann-Marie Holman is forced to dance fully nude for Neil's sick kicks - but it's not really about strippers or stripping, it's about a violent nutball and his kidnapping and murder spree.

Still, a very original and gripping piece of late-night scuzz. Recommended!

PS: Whatever happened to Ann-Marie Holman?

- Ken McIntyre

Angel of Destruction (1994)

Directed by Dan Golden
Starring Maria Ford, Charlie Spradling, Jessica Mark, Chanda Fayme Rated R
USA

"The broken nose is for the girl - the vasectomy's free."

Topless action flicks are the cinematic equivalent of a late-night Taco Bell run. While they have, in fact, been greedily and happily consumed by just about everyone - and usually during a giddy alcoholic stupor - they are practically never praised in public. Worse still, "erotic thrillers" have none of the cult appeal of similar subgenres. There's dozens of books and hundreds of blogs dedicated to slasher movies, but sexy action flicks? They get no respect, man.

They do, however, have their own kings and queens, and Maria Ford is one of them. Ford's hazy star never shined quite as brightly as her contemporaries - Z-action perennials like Shannon Tweed or Julie Strain - but she may be the most remarkable actress of the bunch. The Morticia eyebrows, the sand dollar sized nipples, the stubborn refusal to register emotion of any kind, it all adds up to one deliciously ridiculous package that's impossible to resist. She is probably most well known for 1995's audacious Stripteaser - another no-budget Roger Corman-produced quickie - but Angel of Destruction is just as over-the-top, and infinitely weirder.

Set in Hawaii, but filmed in the Phillipines - and in some of the grungiest, least Hawaii-esque locations imaginable - Angel of Destruction tells the tawdry tale of Delilah (one-time actress Jessica Mark), a topless cabaret performer/glam-metal singer from Honolulu. With her career on the skids, Delilah launches a racy comeback at a local S&M club, performing her songs wearing heavy metal lingerie and cavorting with her lover/co-conspirator Reena (Chanda Fayme, Emmanuelle, Queen of the Galaxy) on an electric chair prop while smoke bombs go off and scantily-clad locals writhe in a cage behind them. This audacious display attracts the attention of berserk bleach-blonde man-mountain Robert Kell (Jimmy Broome), a sexual predator/mercenary/ex-military man in town to waste a bunch of underworld fat cats who "left his men to die in Angola", whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.

Kell sends Delilah a finger in the box, which prompts her to seek out a bodyguard, private investigator Brit Alwood (Charlie Spradling, Ski School). She doesn't want to bring her troubles to the cops because she doesn't like the police - as she tells Brit, her dad was a cop, and he raped her. Ouch!

Brit does her best to keep Delilah safe, but then Kell snaps her neck, and that's the end of that. It's a pretty disorienting moment in the film. Isn't Britt the Angel of Destruction? What? She has a sister?

Yep. Brit's step-sister Jo (Maria Ford), an undercover cop, shows up to bury her older sister and exact bloody revenge on the beast who killed her. And also to take over bodyguarding duties for Delilah. And also to do a striptease dressed as cat.

Oh, and to have a house-destroying karate fight with half a dozen mustachioed Filipino dudes while wearing nothing but a thong.

But that's not all. Heavens, no. There's also mob hijinks, a super- slo-mo sex scene with a gay guy (also mustachioed), an extravagant and shameless misuse of spandex and half-shirts, over the top car explosions, and slasher movie psycho bullshit, just to name just a few of Angel of Destruction's singular delights.

The plot is mostly non-existent, the production values grubby and threadbare, and the film's adherence to any functional form of reality is mostly tenuous, but the rewards are so great with this one that all these deficits can easily be overlooked. A heaping, piled-high plate of pure gut-bucket 90's exploitation, this is the sort of deliriously cheeseball 3AM pay cable time-filler that teenage sleaze-beasts dream of, but rarely ever witness. A glittering pearl amongst the tedious muck of artless 90's erotic-thrillers, the undeservedly obscure Angel of Destruction is well-worth the hunt. A minor masterpiece of old-school drive-in trash.

Director Dan Golden has spent most of the past decade working as a DP, shooting softcore for T&A legends like Jim Wynorski and Donald F Glut. The odds are, if you've watched a titty-flick that was made in the past ten years - Countess Dracula's Orgy of Blood, The Witches of Breastwick, Bikini a Go Go, Cheerleader Massacre, etc. etc. - it was our man Dan behind the camera. As for Maria Ford, she's mostly abandoned her exploitation roots as of late, preferring family TV drama like 7th Heaven and kidflicks like Beethoven's Fifth (2003). But if she ever wants wallop some sleazy mustache dudes in a thong again, there will surely be legions of bleary-eyed sleaze-beasts tuning in.

- Ken McIntyre