Cynthia Brimhall, who had a recurring role as Secret Agent Edy Stark in six Malibu Bay pictures and also lent her singing talent to several Sidaris productions, recalls the pro-active, girl-power tone as balancing out the cheesecake parade.

"Even though we were these sexy chicks with guns, at least we didn't rely on men to come save the day. We always got ourselves out of these disasters," Brimhall told Playboy.com.

Night Shift (1982)

Like Sidaris, Abel Ferrara was another exploitation director who rose through the B-movie ranks in the Eighties and rounded out his casts with Playmates. Ferrara's 1984 thriller Fear City, about a serial killer preying on topless dancers in New York's pre-Disney Times Square, featured June 1980 Playmate Ola Ray as Honey, an exotic dancer. In the lofty company of fellow dancers Rae Dawn Chong and Melanie Griffith, Ray's Honey is one of the more fortunate victims: Slashed in a back alley, Honey nevertheless survives to describe her harrowing attack from a hospital bed. Ray -- whose most famous role in the Eighties was probably as the pretty young thing in Michael Jackson's 1983 video Thriller -- made another appearance as a woman of ill repute in Ron Howard's 1982 comedy Night Shift. Ray appeared with Playmate Ashley Cox in the relatively light, violence-free buddy film as a prostitute pimped by city morgue attendants Michael Keaton and Henry Winkler. Fed up with being exploited by their pimps and life on the streets, the prostitutes band together and form their own money-making sex-for-cash enterprise based out of the city morgue. A woman who spent the entire decade being pursued by maniacal, break-dancing werewolves and razor-wielding fiends, Ray is granted a lighter moment in Night Shift when she is playfully chased around amidst cadavers and autopsy tables during a wild frat party in the morgue.

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