B-Movie Bimbos

Now That you've opened to these pages for the 84th time and you're finally gonna read the article, let me tell you what I know about the gals who work in B movies. I've seen about 39,000 of their pictures, give or take a few Oklahoma triple features, and that comes out to about 784,000 nek-kid breasts. Those are not very impressive figures to the editors of Playboy—I realize that—but it has led me to a few conclusions about what makes a great Queen B.

There are only two kinds of B-movie starlets: the kind about to get cut up by the maniac psycho demonhead creepola sex-deviate corpse-grinders or the kind that are maniac psycho demonhead creepola sex-deviate corpse-grinders. The first kind get all the publicity, like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween, or Heather Lagenkamp in the original Nightmare on Elm Street, or, going back to the Fifties, all the slinky Mexican bimbos who had their necks drained in the El Vampiro movies. In fact, the woman I consider the very first queen of the B's—Bettie Page, star of lots of domination-and-bondage flicks in the Forties and early Fifties—was so enthusiastic about being a victim that she would hand the restraining ropes to her master. Marilyn Burns, probably the best pure-dee screamer ever to work in the business, was so effective in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that you never were quite sure which would be more fun—watching Marilyn escape from the clutches of the cannibal butcher family ot watching marilyn not escape.

But if you really know your B-movie sleaze, it's not the bimbo in peril who holds your (continued on page 158)Bimbos(continued from page 130) attention. It's the Second kind of B-movie queen. Dangerous women. Scary women. Black widows. The kind that invite you into some dark place where your head says "No, no, no" but your body says "I believe I will." This is the drive-in-movie queen of the Eighties, a demon in high heels.

Of course, it's not a new character. Mamie Van Doren, the first B-movie superstar in the Fifties, was the ultimate fantasy older woman next door, always coming over to borrow a cup of sugar wearing spiked high heels, a cashmere sweater three sizes too small, and looking like she'd been shot through the back with a couple of Cruise missiles. But touching Mamie, at least in the Fifties, would have been too much like touching your mom, so she always had an evil heart (orat least a slutty one), and the star, like Russ Tamblyn in High School Confidential!, was never allowed to follow where his raging hormones led. Mamie was bad news, bad business, badluck. And every guy who saw her wanted her.

Mamie's two enormous talents set the look of the B-movie queen for two decades: soft, fleshy, top-heavy—and deadly. The hungry man-killers of the Russ Meyer movies (Kitten Natividad in Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, Tura Satana in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Lorna Maitland in Lorna and Mud Honey) were some of the finest devouring sex-machine she-wolves ever seen. None of these women was the girl next door. They were the girls next planet. We would never meet these women in our lifetimes. But this kind of fantasy reached its limit in the early Seventies, when Chesty Morgan starred in Deadly Weapons, the story of a woman who doesn't just beckon men with her 73-inch hooters—she beats them to death with'em. (The sequel, Double Agent 73, has Chesty getting a camera implanted in her left breast so she can infiltrate a dope ring.)

But these holdover Fifties-era Amazons were already being replaced by the new queens of the B's, beginning with Barbara Steele in the early Sixties. Her body was sleek, her hair jet-black, her eyes tinged with madness, and in Edgar Allan Poe movies like The Pit and the Pendulum, her live, trembling body, sometimes seen in dark outline underneath a white negligee, was fascinating even when you suspected that it was the body of a zombie. This became the formula for successful B-movie vixens, and it holds true today. Every B-movie queen's performance has toanswer these questions:

Would you like to possess this woman? (The answer should always be yes. Otherwise, the movie is over.)

Now that this woman is acting a little crazy, would you still like to possess her? (The answer should still be yes.)

Now that this woman is scheming, conniving, attempting to control the man who loves her, would you still like to have her? (If the movie is working, we say "Yes!")

Now that you know that this woman has been sent by the Devil, do you want her? (Here, the answer can be "Probably. Make that yes.")

Does it matter that this woman is not alive but a beautiful zombie raised by the Devil? Do you still want her? (The kinky say "Yes." Some of us say "Whoa!" Most of us say "I don't know, maybe.")

How about when it's revealed that she's not really a woman but a horrible 12-headed lizard with a three-foot tongue and a tail? (The correct response is "Uh-oh.")

Now, I don't think we have to be psychiatrists to see what's going on here. There's a bunch of guys out there in Exploitation Movie Land who have been around the block seven or eight times, and if the dark-eyed beauty in an aerobics leotard dances into view and says, "Why don't we spend some time aardvarking in a hot tub?" there has to be something wrong, but you're not gonna find out what it is until it's way past too late. This is life. This is reality. This is what we expect.

Sure, there are always a few gals who are naive blonde bimbos, offering free sex and a life of ease. But listen to me: They don't last as B-movie stars. They're boring. They don't have the ability to pick up a machine gun and blast their way out of prison like the gals in the women-in-cages movies of the early Seventies (The Big Doll House, Caged Heat) . They can't claw their way to the top of the roller-derby world like Claudia Jennings, 1970's Playmate of the Year and the undisputed B queen of the Seventies, in Unholy Rollers. In fact, at one time, Nancy Sinatra made a bid to become a B-movie queen, in the great biker movie The Wild Angels, as Peter Fonda's old lady. Nancy had the miniskirt, the body, the long, lanky hair, but she didn't have the toughne?s of Claudia Jennings or the menace of Barbara Steele. She didn't make you squirm.

Now to the Eighties. The Eighties are different. In the Fifties, outer-space monsters tried to eat our women, and men had to save 'em. In the Sixties, women picked up ray guns and fought off evil bikers right alongside their men. In the Seventies, women dropped the men and started fighting for themselves. (This is true even in the cheerleader and stewardess movies.) But in the Eighties, the era of genetic DNA mutant monsters, the enemy is inside the woman and it's attacking everyone around her, as well as her. The outer-space monsters are now inner-space monsters. The Eighties are the decade of special effects, so not only does any self-respecting queen of the B's look good in a Jacuzzi, and in a bikini with a machine gun strapped across her chest, she even looks great in full-body special-effects zombie make-up. That is what now determines the great ones, the true superstars.

Clare Higgins, a raven-haired British actress with a cruel mouth and laser eyes, is one of those women who can transform themselves from beauty to ugliness simply with their alttitude. In Hellraiser, she's so hungry to have kinky sex with her dead lover that she picks up men at singles bars, takes them home to the attic and clubs them to death with a hammer so that her zombified womanizer can drink their blood and once again make her a love slave. Not only does she make love with a bloody, pus-faced zombie seem sexy but, in the sequel, she loses her skin, walks around a house dripping blood on the white carpet, is little more than a pulsating picture out of a medical journal and still has sex appeal.

And there are other superstars as well. Linnea Quigley, in The Return of the Living Dead, is a punkster who does an eerie moonlit dance on a tombstone while she and her friends are being turned into ravening zombies. That one scene is so memorable that, even though she has girl-next-door looks and once played Linda Blair's deaf-mute little sister in Savage Streets, she has been a queen ever since. She's at her best when she's on the offensive—as a blonde punkster in Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-rama or a demon-possessed zombie stripper in Nightmare Sisters, rock-and-rolling her way into a guy's heart so that she can show her fangs at the last moment and bite off his... excuse me, there are some things too grisly for even me to mention.

And if Linnea's big "discovery" moment was the tombstone boogie, Monique Gabrielle's was thescene in Bachelor Party where, as the ultimate dream date, she offers herself to Tom Hanks. (Tom turns down the offer and marries Tawny Kitaen, instead.) Monique has a pouty, come-to-Momma meltdown look in her eyes that she can evidently turn on and off at will, but she can also play innocent heroines. In Deathstalker II, she plays both—a princess in distress and the princess' greedy, man-eating evil clone. I have to admit, though, the clone is much more interesting.

Every Queen B pictured here has her "moment," and usually, it's something extremely nasty. Michelle Bauer is always perfect as the privileged rich bitch who takes her pleasure with men and tosses them aside. After a memorable debut as the cave bunny in Phantom Empire, she pushed a whole banana down her throat in Nightmare Sisters and assaulted a guy sexually until he was dead in Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-rama. Shame on you, Michelle, and thanks.

The stunning Roxanne Kernohan's big scene is in Critters 2 when she is transformed on camera from a male space alien into a totally nude Playboy Playmate. (Barbi Benton—Hef's old pal—invented the gimmick in the original Deathstalker when a male warrior is transformed into her look-alike. It's so painful the guy grabs his breasts and screams until the process is over.) Bobbie Bresee launched herself into B-movi? history in Mausoleum when her breasts start eating her lovers. (You had to see it.)

Ginger Lynn Allen may be one of the first porn stars to successfully cross over into R-rated movies, which she did in Dr. Alien. Marilyn Chambers tried it in the great David Cronenberg film Rabid, but for some reason, she never clicked with drive-in audiences. Traci Lords tried it last year in Not of This Earth but didn't have the acting skills to be convincing. One thing the ex-porn stars seem to have in common is that, once they're in the "legitimate" arena, they don't want to take off their clothes anymore. This tends to have a depressing effect on B-movie box office.

Becky LeBeau's smiling, open baby-doll face makes her one of the few natural blonde-bimbo types, a role she's very comfortable with. (Watch her as the clumsy stripping telegram messenger in Not of This Earth.) Christina Jensen is the latest bright-eyed beauty queen to seek her fortune in B movies. And Suzanne Slater is such a drop-dead beauty that she's the only memorable thing about Chopping Mall, where her principal purpose is to get her head exploded.

These are the Queen B's. And from what I've learned of 'em in the movies, we shouldn't go near their hives.

Right.