Bad Girls Go to Hell

Watching Doris Wishman movies is like driving past a car wreck; you know you're gonna see something awful if you look, but you just can't help yourself! The Something Weird DVD edition of "Bad Girls Go To Hell" that I just watched is paired with another Wishman epic, "Another Day, Another Man," and it makes for one perfect(ly awful) double feature. In "Bad Girls...," a young woman kills her janitor, comes to NYC and is attacked/seduced by practically every person she bumps into. A nice twist ending DOES mitigate some of the weirdness that precedes it. In "Another Day...," a woman with the hugest bouffant hairdo you've ever seen becomes a call girl to pay for her hubby's doctor bills. But these capsule descriptions can't possibly describe the level of sleazy teasing that these films are all about. While neither features ANY frontal nudity at all--odd, given the fact that Wishman's "Nude on the Moon," made five years EARLIER, was replete with nudity--the level of leering is not to be believed. Now I know what a raincoat-wearing old man in a 42 St. theatre in the mid-60s must have felt like. Trust me, you will need a HOT shower after watching these sleazy flicks. Lingering shots of a tossed-off brassiere lying on the floor are Wishman's idea of titillation. And her direction really does make Ed Wood look like Orson Welles. She seems incapable of shooting anything without including meaningless shots of inanimate objects. And there is no synchronized dialogue to speak of. As the "Psychotronic Video Guide" so rightly puts it, "it's a rare occurrence when a few words happen to match the lips." So why have I given these flicks two stars? Because you stare at your TV screen in utter disbelief, occasionally cracking up, and by the end realize that you HAVE, somehow, been entertained. And since neither film is much longer than an hour, the experience flies by pretty quickly. Thank God.