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Mama's Dirty Girls
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| Year: |
1974
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Director: |
John Hayes
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| Stars: |
Gloria Grahame, Paul Lambert, Sondra Currie, Candice Rialson, Christopher Lofton, Dennis Smith, Mary Stoddard, Joseph Anthony, John Dennis, Anneka Di Lorenzo
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| Genre: |
Sex, Thriller |
| Rating: |
  5 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Gorgeous Becky (Candice Rialson) flaunts herself in a skimpy string-bikini, driving her hapless, horny stepfather into attempted rape. Catching him the act, Mama Love (Gloria Grahame) forces her husband to pen a confessional suicide note before she and her girls, Becky and Addie (Sondra Currie) slash him to death in the shower. It was all part of a plan to seduce, slay and strip him of his money, only it transpires he had a lot less than they thought. Moving onto the next town, youngest daughter Cindy (Mary Stoddard) falls for nice guy handyman Paul Carruthers (Dennis Smith), while Addie latches Sheriff Roy (Christopher Lofton) who is anxious to leave his wife, Charity (Penthouse Playmate Anneka Di Lorenzo) but still enjoys sleeping with her (classy guy, huh?) and Becky flirts with hulking simpleton Willy (Joseph Anthony), for reasons none too clear. Meanwhile, Mama sets her sights on widowed hotel owner Harold (Paul Lambert), without realising he murdered his last wife to get her money.
Scriptwriter Gil Lasky wrote Blood and Lace (1971), another grindhouse vehicle for Gloria Grahame, and seems to have had a flair for placing ageing screen goddesses in sleazy scenarios given he also penned The Night God Screamed (1974) for Jeanne Crain. Film noir great Gloria Grahame had her heyday in the Forties and Fifties, giving great performances in tough thrillers and hardboiled melodramas from The Big Heat (1953) to The Bad and the Beautiful (1951), for which she won the best actress Oscar. She proved equally adept in wholesome family fare like Oklahoma! (1955) and The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) where she was especially winning as a glamorous, good-hearted elephant trainer. Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, Grahame shifted into character parts and exploitation films, though she enjoyed continuing acclaim for her many stage performances and had one last moment in the sun with Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980).
While a case could be made that lurid thrillers like Mama’s Dirty Girls were the logical, post-Hays Code evolution of those noir masterpieces to which Grahame’s presence seemingly alludes, the older films were more tightly scripted. As far as marry-and-murder-’em schemes go, Mama Love’s does not hold up to close scrutiny and seems more trouble than it’s worth. Besides, our trio of malicious minxes - excluding nice girl Cindy, who remains unaware of their activities - do not have the best luck at picking victims. Mama’s Dirty Girls is a slow burn but it’s never dull, what with random killings, sex and nudity from exploitation goddesses Sondra Currie (half-sister of Cherie Currie, lead singer of rock band The Runaways) and Candice Rialson. Of the cast, only Rialson oozes charisma to match the veteran Grahame. Arguably the most radiant and personable grindhouse star of the Seventies, Rialson (who passed away in 2006) really should have had a bigger career but blazed brightly in sexploitation favourites Pets (1974) and Candy Stripe Nurses (1974) plus her finest hour, playing a thinly-disguised version of herself in Hollywood Boulevard (1976).
Staid direction from John Hayes proves a handicap, with this among four films he made that year including cult classic Grave of the Vampire. His slack staging lets a few suspense scenes fall flat and robs some subplots of clarity. Whereas someone like Jack Hill or Jonathan Kaplan would have relished subverting the sleazy scenario into a gleefully amoral feminist treatise, Hayes seems out to moralize and punish. One character’s shock death is greeted with: “That’ll teach you to fool around with men” while Mama Love’s impassioned speech how some girls play dirty because men play dirty with them spurs Cindy to retort: “Perhaps we ask for it.” Granted, these women are murderers but the menfolk are scarcely painted any more admirably plus the film makes the mistake of drawing the only two “good” characters as deathly dull. Things eventually lapse into a sloppy shock climax but whenever Candice Rialson is steaming up the screen there is trashy fun to be had.
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| Reviewer: |
Andrew Pragasam
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