Cannibal Hookers (1987)

AKA I Will Dance on Your Grave, Volume 3
Directed by Donald Farmer
Starring Annette Munro, Amy Waddell, Sheila Best
Unrated
USA

"This sorority has a reputation on campus, and I just hope you're able to live up to it."
"I think so. After all, how hard is it to act like a drunken bitch?"

First off, this is not a movie about cannibals. Nor is it about hookers. It's about big hair, and big dreams. To be fair, it's not even a movie at all, really, it's an hour long home-video, part of that first awful wave of horror-themed, shot-on-video junk that cluttered video store shelves in the 80's, a shoddy, eyeball-bruising wave that included sheer lunacy like Boardinghouse (1982), Killing Spree (1987), and 555 (1988). It was in these cut-and-run days that Tennessee-born filmmaker Donald Farmer first forged his empire, crafting no-budget tits n' blood epics like this, Demon Queen (1986), and Scream Dream (1989), and selling the VHS tapes via ads placed in horror-zines like Draculina. Despite a near constant stream of bad press, both for dubious business practices and dubious product, Farmer never stopped believin', and never stopped doling out sleazy SOV garbage. He's still doing it. Cannibal Hookers, however, is still, not surprisingly, his most well known work.

Lobo (Gary Levinson), a mute cannibal maniac, chomps on a chunk of bloody (or perhaps barbequed) meat in a cellar full of chains and weapons. Camilla (Diana Cruz), a blonde woman with severe eyeliner and S&M garb, tells him to prepare for the evening's entertainment.

Cut to: A skinny, tiny-titted chick with teased hair (Sky Nicholas) strolling down Hollywood Boulevard. She walks into a dark, threadbare bar, where she's quickly picked up by a john (Drew Goderis). He brings her to some rathole with a stained mattress, and they commence to get frisky. She excuses herself and comes back topless and armed with a hatchet. And then she bites off his finger and eats it.

Cut to: Hillary (Amy Waddell) and DeeDee (Annette Munro), two big-haired college girls head off to pledge a sorority, Gamma-Zeta-Beta, the "Sleaziest sorority in the state," according to DeeDee. Stephanie (Priscilla Barnes doppelganger Sheila Best), the president of the sorority, tells them that they have to dress up like hookers on Sunset Boulevard and pick up two johns for their initiation. They agree, but once they get outside, DeeDee has second thoughts.

"Maybe a sorority's not such a good idea," she offers. "Couldn't we just find a frat house that needs two little sisters?"
"Little Sisters?" Snorts Hillary. "For your information, being little sisters holds about as much social status as being gang-raped by nazis."
What?!

Cut to: Another hooker (Kristie Etzold) picking up a couple idiots with child molester mustaches. She brings them back to some crumbling mansion, and after stripping naked and sloppily humping one of the guys on an ugly checkered couch, she bails so that Lobo can choke the fucker to death.

Then he brings a cup of blood down to the basement, where his vampire queen - or whatever she is - sleeps topless, holding a plastic skull.
She wakes up and gulps the blood down.
"How nice," she hisses. "Breakfast in bed."

Cut to: Hollywood Book and Poster, where Hillary and DeeDee are shopping for hooker outfits. A poster store seems like a dumb place to look for such items, but whatever. It's a good excuse to ogle the awesome merchandise.

Cut to: Saturday night. The girls have their slutty outfits on, and after a pretty bitchin' tour of the strip and all it's X-rated theaters, Stephanie drops them off in the sleazy side of town. She gives them a few pointers ("Avoid vice, and charge extra for blowjobs,") and hands them an address to bring their customers to.

The girls are, naturally, nervous about the prank, but luckily Hillary's boyfriend Bruce (Tommy Carrano) and his goony friends show up. Since Stephanie doesn't know who his friends are, Hillary figures they can just bring Dwight (Matt Borlenghi) and Darrell (Don Trimborn) back.

They all head to the address Stephanie gave them: the crumbling castle/mansion. They are greeted by Lobo and the goth-y cannibal hookers. Hillary and DeeDee have had about as much of this bullshit as they're gonna take, so they bail, taking Darrell with them. Dwight, however, thinks he's hit some sexual jackpot, so he sticks around. Not surprisingly, he ends up with his heart torn out and eaten.

The next morning, Camilla calls Darrell and tells him that Dwight had too much to drink last night, and wants him to come pick him up. Darrell happens to be on his way to have lunch with DeeDee, so he picks her up first, and they zip over to the cannibal house. In a bizarre turn of events, Darrell gets turned into a zombie, and DeeDee ends up chained to wall, her bright yellow Buckwheat shirt torn wide open, the now-ghoulish Darrell inching towards her.

Cut to: actually, I'm leaving a bunch of stuff out, but it's not all that important. The important bit is that Stephanie throws a party for the new sorority sisters, and zombie DeeDee shows up, looking exactly like Courtney Love. So that's pretty funny. She chomps Hillary on the neck, and she turns into a zombie-cannibal girl, too.

How's it all end? Badly. How else?

Considered laughably cheap and amateurish when it was initially released, this hopelessly dated romp now has considerable kitsch appeal. It might even be a low-level classic, at this point. If you weren't there and wonder what 1987 really looked like, this is the perfect time capsule for that ridiculous era. Younger sleaze-beasts will be both pleased and amused to find out that hookers, metal chicks, and sorority girls pretty much dressed the same back then.

Surely, as the days of Aquanet and Casio slip further into time's incinerator, the legend of Cannibal Hookers will only grow in stature. 100 years from now, it'll probably be a holy relic. The inevitable digitally remastered version will surely look amazing.

As to its bizarre alternate title, a fly-by-night distro called Eden snatched up a bunch of these SOV flicks during the early days of DVD and released splotchy, washed-out, budget dupes in a 'series' called I Dance On Your Grave. Other titles included Killing Spree, Farmer's own Savage Vengeance (1993), and Lethal Victims (AKA W.A.R., Women Against Rape, 1987).

Farmer is still at it, of course. 2006's Dorm of the Dead amped-up the star power with appearances from Tiffany Shepis and Miss Howard Stern, Andrea Ownbey. In classic Farmer form, it featured blood splashing walls, murky camerawork, and hysterical non-acting. You may scoff at the man's shaky technical expertise, but you do have to marvel at his rock-solid consistency. I have no doubt the 50 year old Farmer will be churning out witless splatter-porn 20 years from now, and it will still look exactly like this. His latest film, Chainsaw Cheerleaders, is currently making the festival rounds. Call me a glutton for punishment, but it looks fuckin' awesome.

As to the hookers themselves, well, they've all moved on. But I'll bet half of them still have the hair.

Availability: Cannibal Hookers is available on DVD.

- Ken McIntyre

Hookers Inc. (2006)

Directed by Tim Pingel
Starring Joy Somers, Camille Solari, Shay Astar
Rated PG-13
USA

"Are you discriminating against a perfectly good epileptic hooker?"

Wholly improvised comedies are being churned out a rapid pace these days. Dunno why. Maybe screenwriters are dicks. It's alright though, because when you've got the right crew of quick-witted, with-it actors, they can create something funnier than the most tightly-scripted, well-rehearsed Hollywood production. You do, however, need a certain amount of polish and continuity to keep things together, or it all turns into Youtube-y mush. The 95% improvised Hookers Inc, shot on a shoestring over a six-month period in 2006, rides that fine line between genius and amateur. It's episodic and ill-planned and would probably have made more sense as a serious of loosely connected webisodes. Luckily, it's also got the greatest half-naked duo since the Crazy Babysitter Twins in Starship and Starshyp, so cohesion is a minor quibble.

Director Tim Pingel apparently spent his first couple years of film-school working a side-job as an escort driver, and he's used his experiences in the sex-trade as a taking-off point for Hookers Inc.

The story is about two fledgling filmmakers, Slim (Pingel) and Stew (Matthew Dowling, a sort-of supersized Seth Rogan/Dana Snyder mash-up) with a strip club habit, who snag a job driving escorts around for a crazy-fro'd, low-level pimp named Hollowpoint (Kareem Elseify, RIP). It's never really explained how their arrangement works, but apparently if they bring Hollowpoint enough money, he'll introduce them to a foreign-backed movie producer who can green-light their project, an interracial porn/action epic called Black Cock Down. They figure if they meet the right girls, they can form their own escort company, and make even more dough. They already have one hooker on the payroll, Apple Martini (Shay Astar), but are looking to expand their business.

One night at Jumbo's Clown Room, the boys meet the worst strippers in the world, Starship (Joy Somers) and Starshyp (Camille Solari). So inept they only make ten bucks an hour, the two bubble-headed dancers attempt a two-for-one grinding session on the men, but midway through, Starshyp hits the floor and starts flopping around a like a fish out of water.
"She's having seizure," shrugs Starship.
Slim is, naturally, alarmed. "Is there something I should do?"
"Naw," she says. "Just let her ride the wave."
Naturally, Stew and Slim think they've stumbled onto a goldmine. I don't know why they think this, but they do. They hire the girls as 'massage therapists'. The strippers are, of course, too stupid to realize that 'massage' is code for sex, so they agree. They make plans for their first training session.

First, though, a quick flashback to Stew's first gig, driving Apple to a session with a fast-talking bald dude. He invites them both in, and sends Stew off to the rec room to watch TV. Apple smokes cigarettes and reads a copy of Little Women while the john bangs her from behind. Halfway through, Stew interrupts them to ask the guy if he's got the director's cut of Apocalypse Now in his DVD collection.
"Naw," the guy says, mid stroke. "But I've got Saturday Night Fever 1 and 2."

Getting back to the story, Slim attempts training his two new hires, but it's pretty tough going.
"Ok, he says, "Pretend you're on the phone and the guy asks for sex."
"Fuck you, pervert!" Starshyp yells into the phone. And then she hangs up.
Apple refuses to work with these idiots, and quits in a huff.

Eventually, the boys decide to just send them out cold to see what happens. They book a session with a John named, erm, John (Lightfield Lewis, Revenge of the Nerds TV Pilot, and Juliette's brother), but they don't even get in the elevator before Starshyp starts spazzing out.
"She's having a seizure," Stew points out. "You think guys are really gonna pay $400 for these two?"

John is slightly disturbed when he opens his door to find two disheveled hookers - one clutching a large plastic zebra - and two slacker pimps.
"I only asked for one girl," he says.
Stew barters with him to include both girls.
"So, she's $200, and we'll throw the other one in for, like, a deuce," he says.
"Plus, you get the giraffe," says Slim, pointing to the zebra.
"You get the giraffe, a rub and a tug."
He reluctantly agrees. A half-hour of fumbling around, seizures, and lotion abuse later, everybody ends up crying.

The next gig is at a 'swanky' hotel with a 'high-profile' client, also named John (Richmond Arquette, Patricia's brother), a greasy fucker in a white suit jacket.
"Are you on Miami Vice?" Asks Starshyp.
John pulls out a pile of cocaine, and then explains how he wants everything to go down.
"You blow me," he says to Starshyp, "while you strip."
"We don't give blowjobs," Starshyp explains, her nose buried in powder.
"But I really like your coke."
The girls freak out when John demands sex. Starship locks herself in the bathroom and calls the boys. Starshyp, meanwhile, has a seizure on the floor. John attempts to utilize the spasms to his sexual advantage, but then Stew and Slim burst in with plastic cap guns to save the day.

Etc.

There's a few more disastrous dates - including a particularly weird evening with Kato Kaelin - but eventually, the girls start earning some money. When they finally get a few grand together, Stew and Slim go to visit Hollowpoint at his house, where he's having sex with two women while playing X Box. The guys explain all the solid work they've done, and remind Mr. Point that he promised them a meeting with the film producer if they succeeded.

"I'm gonna let you have it, I'm gonna let the foreign money come your way," a pleased Hollowpoint tells them. "It's gonna be raining ducats and dollars and fuckin' coins and cadadadots."

After meeting their producer, a madwoman named Tess (Jennifer Cook), and their mealy-mouthed cameraman, Sac Boy (James Anderson), Slim and Stew begin auditioning the cast for Black Cock Down. There's a couple of fake porn actresses, Chita Bonjour (Noelle Lee Kane) and Dusty Rose (Sheila Lussier, Glitch) and one real one (Hayley Rivers) who all get choice roles. And, of course, Starship and Starshyp get a reading as well. It goes badly.
Starshyp stares at the blank sheet of paper Slim gives her.
"Can I, um...can I get one with the words on it?"
"Turn it over."
"Oh."
Naturally, she has a seizure midway through the audition. Frustrated, Starship demands they have a therapy session to work this seizure bullshit out. It is conducted in a room that looks suspiciously like a stage with a couch on it.
"I can see you two are a team," says the therapist. "Lots of teams have problems. Can you name any?"
"Joannie and Chachi," says Starshyp. "Also the Ringling Brothers."
The therapy session is going pretty well, until the doctor tells Starshyp to give Starship an imaginary rope that connects to her heart. Starshyp chokes her with it. And then she wakes up. It was all a dream. They got the parts!

And so, shooting begins. Well, first all the actresses fuck the crew for bigger roles, and then shooting begins.

They nail the key action sequences, but the film's star, Larry Hung (John Davidson) is having trouble getting sufficiently excited for his sex scenes. Luckily, Stew and Slim were thinking ahead, and hired a fluffer, ex porn star Misty Canyons (Jeannie Roshar) to help him out. Unluckily, she's recently become a born again Christian.
"He died for you," she chastises, while stroking away on Larry, "The least you can do is talk about him while you're getting a handjob."

Look, I don't know what a good half of this movie was about. That's bound to happen when you're just making shit up as you go along. That's immaterial, though. The important thing is, with Starship and Starshyp, Pingel and Solari and Somers have created one seriously dynamic duo. These two are like bacon, man. They just make anything better. Too bad they're not real. I would definitely pay $200 for an hour's worth of their gibberish and antics.

Once this DVD starts making the rounds, I expect reams of Starshyp and Starship fan-fiction, if not action figures and lunch boxes. A sequel seems, sadly, quite unlikely, but most of the cast reunited for the upcoming Boston Girls. If it's anything like the Boston girls I know, expect mayhem.

Hookers Inc is available on DVD.

Clip: Hookers Inc trailer!

- Ken McIntyre

Getting Lucky (1990)

Directed by Michael Paul Girard
Starring Steven Cooke, Lezley Z McCraw, Rick McDowell
Rated R
USA

"Some stupid nerd threw puke water on me and Tony. This is Tony, by the way."

One of the more amateurish bits of teensploitation flotsam out there, Getting Lucky is a very low-level Troma pick-up about a nerdy high school kid named Bill (Steven Cooke), who is in love with a terminally depressed cheerleader named Krissi (Lezley Z McCraw), and is constantly menaced by a possibly gay bully/rapist/big man on campus named Tony (Rick McDowell). Like all nerds, Bill's always thinking ahead, so he looks for a part-time job to help pay for his college tuition, and that's where the trouble/story/wonderfulness starts.

Bill snags a job as the football team's towel boy, a job no one's held for more than a week. Bill finds out why pretty quickly. In a scene that is looking more and more like a gay gang rape, Tony drops his towel and demands that Bill pick it up - with his teeth.
"I think my hand would be more effective," he stammers.
"Yeah well, I bet I've got something your hand would be pretty effective on," Tony says, grabbing his crotch.
Where the fuck are we going with this, Mr. Girard?
Tony takes a thermos full of spoiled milk he found in his locker and pours it on the floor. That's got to be some sort of semen reference. Anyway, he makes Bill clean it up while the other dudes crowd around him screaming "Towel boy!" like it's some sort of slur. I fully expected Tony to pull out his angry penis next and hit Bill in the eye with it, but instead, he manages to pull himself away from the man-on-towel-boy hijinks long enough to meet Krissi at the back of the school. She's got the hots for him, for some reason. Masochistic tendencies, maybe. Or brain damage.
"I thought you were going to stand me up," pouts Krissi.
"Hey, it would take a real dildo-brain to stand up a babe as hot looking as you," Tony says, planting a wet one on her.
"Oh Tony, you know how to say just the right things," says Krissi.

The two start rolling around on the grass. Tony manages to get Krissi's panties off. She tells him she's a virgin and isn't sure she wants to go through with it - perhaps getting fucked on the ground by the school asshole wasn't exactly how she envisioned her first time - but Tony keeps up a steady stream of bullshit ("It'll be like the greatest wave you've ever felt crashing down on you"), so she decides to just let 'em at it. But before he can penetrate this ripe young beauty, Bill comes bounding out of the locker room and accidentally douses the two lovers with his bucketful of bad milk. And so ends his career as a towel boy.

Later on, Bill's wandering around picking up trash (it's his thing, recycling) when he finds a leprechaun, Lepkey (Garry Kluger), in a beer bottle. I know, who hasn't, right? So, as they are wont to do, the tiny man in the bottle (that's actually a genie, but whatever) grants him three wishes. By the way, if you're envisioning a Warwick Davis-type Leprechaun, sadly, that's not the case here. Our magical midget is just a regular dude in a costume-shop Robin Hood outfit. Bill first asks for world peace, but Lepkey admits he's not a very good leprechaun, so that's probably thinking too big. His next wish is a date with Krissi. Lepkey thinks he can handle that one. Or can he? At that exact moment, Tony and Krissi are scheming on the phone about how to hook up away from the prying eyes of Krissi's overprotective mom. The plan is for Krissi to ask nerd-boy Bill out, and then bail on him to fuck Tony. And so, just when Lepkey claims to have granted Bill's wish, the phone rings.

Dopey Bill accepts the date, of course. He takes Krissi to the drive-in. They're showing Princess Warrior, which looks way more interesting than this. She asks Bill to get her some popcorn, and then sneaks away to Tony's car. After fumbling around with condoms forever, he settles on a handjob, but is rudely interrupted by Bill, who taps on the glass and tells his date that it's time to go home. They drive home in silence.

You may be wondering, at this point, where the laughs are. Well, me too. If Getting Lucky is actually some sort of existential horror film, then it's doing a bang-up job, because this is one of the most depressing, soul-sucking movies I think I've ever seen. If it's supposed to be a comedy, holy smokes, things are going badly.

Having failed at the date, Lepkey grants Bill a wish for a car (he asks for a Ferrari, but gets a Pinto), and when he's getting bullied by Tony, the leprechaun causes the asshole to beat himself with his own tennis racket, and then to shove it up his own ass. He gets carried away by paramedics, the racket tucked firmly but safely between his thighs.

A word, if I may, about Lezlie Z McCraw. You get used to bad, amateurish acting in these kinds of movies, but our girl Lezlie goes way beyond bad into this somnambulant non-acting fugue state. Her delivery is so distant, so eerily not-there-at-all that you start to wonder just what drugs she's on. My guess is a Nyquil/Valium cocktail. Also, in three-quarters of her scenes, she's being mauled by Tony. He almost always has his fingers jammed deep into her crotch. And yet, she never shows any signs of discomfort, even when the scene calls for it. Almost as if she's used to such brutish behavior. She's just fuckin' bizarre, man. Just what is your game, Lezlie Z? Please let me know, because you are freaking me out.

Anyway, Krissi has a change of heart and starts dating Bill. He takes her out for a round of miniature golf, and things go pretty swell. Afterward, however, he starts to wonder if she's really over Tony. Lepkey turns him into a cat, so he can spy on her. So, there he is, in cat form, getting stroked by Krissi, when Tony barges in.
"When I was in the hospital this afternoon and they were pulling the tennis racket out, all I could think of was you."
He actually says that. She rebuffs him and he tries to rape her while Bill-the-cat watches. Does any of this sound funny yet? Well, just wait until you hear what's next.

The next day, after the attempted rape hubbub dies down, Bill and Krissi are going to ride their bicycles to school together. Bill wants to adjust her brakes or something first, and his wrench is the wrong size. He asks Lepkey to change it for him, and the drunken little moron screws it up and shrinks Bill down to microscopic size. So he's stuck on Krissi's bike seat. She thinks he bailed on her, so she jumps on her bike and heads to school, while tiny Bill holds on for dear life inside her underwear. This effect is achieved by what looks like two sheets slung from the ceiling and some dyed rope to represent her vagina hair. The fake Supertramp song on the soundtrack during all of this goes "We can't get much closer, we can't get much closer..." Krissi goes to class, and in his attempts to climb his way out of her panties, Bill stimulates Krissi with such fervor that she has a screamy orgasm right at her desk.

After class, Krissi has cheerleader practice, and then she hits the showers. So there's a shower scene, at least. At some point, Bill falls out of her vagina and lands on the shower floor. Then he rolls around in bubbles for awhile. Lepkey finally figures out how to get Bill back to normal size, but he realizes he left his glasses and wrench in Krissi's vagina. This could prove fatal, but luckily, the offending objects just materialize in her underwear.

I don't know how/why this happens, but in the next scene, Bill's getting paddled by the principal. It's shot like man-on-manPOV porn. Halfway through, Lepkey gives the principal a heart attack. And then we move on.

Etc.

I'll give Getting Lucky this much: the last half-hour is so loony, there's just no way you could predict any of it. It's incredibly random. Horse fights? Shish Kebab duels? It's pretty nuts. It's also pretty tedious. Clearly, Girard tried his damnedest to bash out an entertaining film on a shoestring, but there are so many things wrong with this film that it's just a lost cause, really. Still, the film has developed a fervent cult of badfilm enthusiasts who will gush with Troll 2-esque passion about the panty debacle or Bill's playin'-the-sax-while-skateboardin' buddy, or the barbarian (spoiler alert!), but the whole mess just gave me a headache.

That being said, I'm still going to dig up some of Girard's post-Lucky films. Bikini Med School has got to be awesome. Right?

PS: If you never want to see any of these actors again, then your wish - wink, wink - is granted. Most of them never acted again.

Availability: Getting Lucky is available on DVD.

- Ken McIntyre

Fatty Girl Goes to New York (1982)

AKA Cicciabomba
Directed by Umberto Lenzi
Starring Donatella Rettore, Gena Gas, Adriana Russo, Anita Ekberg
Unrated
Italy

"Die, priest!"

There are two very difficult hurdles to get through before you can really enjoy the sorta-charming and quite sweet Fatty Girl Goes to New York. First, it was directed by Umberto Lenzi, the same crazy fucker that made Make Them Die Slowly. It is therefore quite difficult to watch this without flashing back to the scene with the live turtle getting hacked to ribbons, or any of the other bits of defenseless animal cruelty in that dumb movie. Who says he's not gonna hang a monkey or throw a kangaroo out the window in this one? Also, Fatty Girl is clearly not fat. She's a skinny girl with magic-marker freckles, cotton balls stuffed in her cheeks, and a series of clown-like fat suits. It's incredibly distracting, and almost Ed Wood-esque in its ineptitude.

But hey, besides the ridiculous looking protagonist and the constant threat of animal mutilation, things are pretty smooth sailing.

Mirsi (Donatella Rettore) is the 'Fatty Girl' of the title, a gregarious life-gulper whose self-esteem is sky-high, despite her weight and tragic wardrobe. Miri lives in a tiny Italian village called Happy, and works at Catholic Venetian Radio, where she hosts a popular call-in show, Magic Phone, the only program on the station that plays pop music and doesn't hold to a strict Catholic dogma. She's just as contrary at school, spending most of her time sticking up for her best friend Pinocchia (Adriana Russo, wearing a weird long-nose appliance) and plotting the downfall of cavalier cocksman Mirko (Dario Caporaso).

As the story begins, Mirko bribes Miri into writing a paper for his Greek class in exchange for a date, and then stands her up. Knowing this was his plan all along, Miri actually writes a paper detailing Mirko's plans to bone the principal's wife, thusly ending his career at that school.

Fuming, the freshly-expelled Mirko runs into Deborah (Gena Gas), Miri's vindictive beauty-queen sister, while she's being crowned Miss something-or-other. He quickly charms her and whisks her away in his car, sash and all. After hearing Miri on the radio and declaring his hate for her, he finds out that he just picked up his arch-enemy's sister, and together, they plot her downfall. Mirko invents an alter-ego, "Angelo". Angelo sends Miris flowers and calls in to her radio show, telling her how much he needs her. The vulnerable Miris falls in love with her phantom admirer, and so, when he leaves a note to meet him at the park one evening, she rushes to him - dressed exactly like the Hamburgler, in a striped shirt, giant floppy hat, and a cape - only to find a smirky Mirko and his douchebag friends. They spray her with hoses and call her "Fatty girl" until she cries.

The next day, someone brings in a tape of Miris declaring her love for "Angelo" and plays it over the intercom at school. And then she gets fired from the radio station. They replace her with a nun. Miris can take no more abuse, and decides to commit suicide. But before she puts her head in the oven, she decides to eat her last box of chocolates. Inside the box, she finds a golden envelope. She opens it to find that she's won a prize: a free trip to New York City.
"I'll kill myself another day," she says. "I won first prize!"

Miris makes it to New York and while she's riding the escalator in the airport, she's spotted by Baroness Von Kemp (a very past-her-prime Anita Ekberg).
"There she is," the Baroness shouts at her assistant. "I've found my creature!"

Seems the Baroness has inherited some sort of diet-powder company from her dead husband, and she wants to use Miris as her test subject. Since the gunk is made from swordfish bones, she dresses Miris up in a fish costume for the "before" picture in a proposed magazine ad. Miris is not quite sure why this is happening - she tells the Baroness repeatedly that she's happy being fat - but what the hell. Crazy shit happens in New York.

So, Miris spends her days eating fishbone soup and running around Times Square in a bright orange jumpsuit. Eventually, she loses the weight and gets a makeover, which is awesome, because watching her walk around in the clown suits for 40 minutes was pretty tiresome. Unfortunately, this being 1982 - and an Italian 1982, at that - her new look involves giant shoulder pads and a blonde Duran Duran pompadour. So I'm not sure it was much of an improvement. Anyway, she goes on a television show and performs a song (Rettore was actually an Italian pop star at the time) that goes, in part, "My head exploded/with these thin legs, I'd like a sandwich."

Soon, everybody wants their own bowl of fishbone soup. To show how much of a star Miris has become, Lenzi has her do the 'My Head Exploded' song over and over, in different outfits. Occasionally he even flashes a hilariously unconvincing cut-and-pasted magazine cover with Miris' face on it.


Miris spends some time in soaking up the limelight, but eventually decides to go home and rub everybody's face in her fame and good looks. She runs into her friend Pinnocchia, who had plastic surgery to snip off her long, pointy nose. The two hotsy-totsies head over to Miris' house, where they find Deborah on the roof, threatening to jump.

Turns out Mirko, that cad, promised to marry her and then changed his mind, telling her he's marrying the mayor's daughter, Simona (adorable Paola Rinaldi), instead. Naturally, Miris concocts a plan to fuck up Mirko's life again.

I'll leave you to find out how she does it. It involves a chicken and a transvestite.

The very height of frivolous - and surprisingly coy, especially from a guy who directs cannibal movies - Fatty Girl Goes to New York is nevertheless pretty fuckin' delightful. This was Rettore's first film, and despite the ridiculous half-hour she spent in a fat suit, she did fine job playing the ever-plucky Miris. During the second half of the movie she pretends to be an FBI agent from New York City, and does a squeaky American accent (in Italian) that's quite funny. Its been mentioned that you don't actually need to know Italian to watch and enjoy this movie, and it's true. The half-assed subtitles help, of course, but if they weren't there, Rettore's animated performance and faux-American squeals tell the story perfectly. There are also some very funny regional flourishes: the grumpy priest, Miris' chief rival at the radio station, opens his morning-drive show with "It's 7 AM...more or less."
That seems hilariously Italian to me. There's lots of treacly 80's Italian pop to sample on the soundtrack, hideous fashions to scoff at, and some very striking women to ogle, including the gorgeous Gena Gas who, like Rettore, was a pop singer dabbling in acting. Hardcore sleaze beasts or celebrity skin enthusiasts will probably want to stay away from this lighter-than-air concoction, but if you're in the mood for some wispy, goofy fun, Fatty Girl Goes to New York is well worth a look. It does not let Lenzi off the hook for Make Them Die Slowly, but it at least shows he was capable of more than penis chopping and animal abuse.

Availability: Fatty Girl Goes to New York is available on DVD.

Clip: Listen to Gena Gas's 1982 hit SOS Ti Amo!

Clip: Rettore as Miris in Fatty Girl:

Clip: Rettore perfoming Kamikaze Rock N' Roll Suicide on some loony Italian TV show, 1982:

- Ken McIntyre