My review was written in July 1983 after a screening at Thunderbird Drive-In of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
In an era when the B-grade action film market is dominated by lookalike martial arts pictures and vengeance mellers, "Lovely but Deadly" is an entertaining novelty, combining elements of both genres into a teenage wish-fulfillment format. It represents a tough sell commercially, but pic will provide pleasant diversion for both action fans and students of current trends.
Filmmaker David Sheldon has adapted the current vigilante trend in films to teen pics, with pert young brunette Lucinda Dooling toplining as a California high school student, Mary Ann Lovett (nicknamed "Lovely"), mounting a one girl campaign to wipe out the drug dealers and higherups in her community, in order to avenge her kid brother's drug-induced death.
Sheldon styles Dooling as an underage female version of James Bond (with topgrade martial arts skills to boot), a gimmick which proves to be fun since she is a normal-looking young gir rather han such macho femmes as Pam Grier, Cheri Caffaro, Monica Vitti, Cornelia Sharpe and Marilyn Chambers who have previously essayed similar roles. Also to the film's advantage is the staging of Bond-like action scenes in prosaic settings such as the school locker room. If you can't compete with $30,000,000 budgets, you can at least have fun with the format.
Cast mixes old pros (Marie Windsor as heroine's aunt, Richard Herd and John Randolph as behind the scenes heavies) with young talent with generally effective results. Dooling, in particular, overcomes the occasionally preachy anti-drugs script with her forceful, physically convincing performance. Teen genre conventions such as cheerleaders' action and several rock songs belted on camera by the anti-hero slow up the narrative, but the final action payoff on the docks which karate teacher Susan Mechsner and her class of diminutive high school girls come to Dooling's rescue from assorted thugs is priceless.
Lensing is cheap, using available light for many scenes. The musical score by Robert Ragland is in the same rousing bag as his recent "10 to Midnight" offering and features a scene-setting title song which has the tone of a Shirley Bassey-Bond theme.
