The movie opens with scenes of generic, surgically enhanced '90s babes having sex with what look like sleazy businessmen in suits. In one scene, a man strangles a woman to death at the moment of climax with a red scarf. He is blackmailed by his colleague who threatens to reveal his crime, that he was inexplicably able to get away with. Foolishly, he discusses it on the phone with his back to the door of his office, allowing his wife to come in and hear the tail end of his conversation.
The guy's wife is divorced or separated from some other guy, who has an unrealistic conversation with their son in the car. The kid seems too young to understand the nuance and irony he projects.
Apparently the dad lost his wife after dalliance with hookers. Was he one of the guys depicted in the movie's opening sex scenes?
We then see a woman stripping and being tied up while typical '90s softcore saxaphone music plays. She also gets killed by an unseen assailant. What's the bet that the killer is NOT the guy who killed the girl in the movie's opening?
A cop approaches the scene of the crime and we are treated to the view through HIS eyes - an unusually creative touch for a softcore b-flick.
The cop is the guy we just met, whose wife divorced him, and whose kid is unbelievably precocious. He has a partner who is a typical sidekick - short, fat, bald. His appearance contrasts with the main guy, flatteringly, as do his lack of manners.
Softcore siren Shannon Whirry, truth be told the only reason why I'm watching this movie, makes an appearance about ten minutes in. Our (anti?) hero sees her being mistreated by a typical leather-jacketed punk in a bar and steps in, fighting him off with suspicious ease.
This is where the movie gets weird. Whirry thanks the man and leaves, apparently thinking that that would be the end of their interaction, but in the next scene, they're both outside, admiring Whirry's car. Whirry signals to the man that they will have sex - what happened to her just leaving? - and the man kisses her up against the wall while typical softcore sex music plays. The scene changes almost imperceptibly to the inside of a car. How did they get there so fast?
Whirry changes her mind - again - when her right breast it out and our hero has his hand on her thigh. "Stop," she says, "I have to go."
Why did she initiate the encounter, then?
Our hero does stop, and goes and does some off-duty police work, speaking with a prostitute whose johns on the street she works could hardly pay for all the work she's had done.
Any guesses as to who will be the killer's next victim?
The hero and his sidekick visit a coroner who tells them that the murder victim just lay down and let herself be strangled. They then speak to a classy madam who tells them about the "Lady in Waiting" call girl service. This madam is played by Meg Foster (from "Lords of Salem" and "Leviathan") - she of the extraordinary pale blue eyes.
William Devane, the guy from "Rolling Thunder", whom I always thought of as Jack Nicholson without the charisma, makes an appearance as a police lieutenant.
The hero's comical sidekick calls him "goombah".
The hero has another conversation with his kid, where the kid again knows much more than he does. The cop now has dirt on the scumbag his ex-wife is married to, and he tries to warn her, but she predictably does not listen. We knew she wouldn't. Why didn't he?
"Lady in Waiting" isn't the only softcore flick I've seen in which the fisticuffs is really unconvincing. I wonder why that is. Did the budget that would normally go toward fight choreography instead go toward paying all the girls extra to get naked?
Whirry is shown naked from the waist up in a bathtub, and apparently starts masturbating, but of course the movie isn't really going to go there and cuts. Whirry's line readings are pretty on the nose. They remind me of those ads for phone sex lines that used to be shown on TV in the small hours back in the '90s.
Our hero finally has a scene with his ex's new beau, the hot shot, arrogant corporate type. You know, the one the movie is trying to hint is the killer, and by which is letting us know actually is not. He describes his step-son, the hero's biological son Nick, as "part of the package". What does the hero's ex see in this guy, anyway?
We then see a shadowy flashback of the hero with a woman clad in black lingerie, who puts a red scarf over his face.
The obnoxious corporate man assaults his new wife and is threatened by his stepson with a baseball bat.
Whirry finally gives a splendid full frontal nude scene - perhaps the movie's first instance of full frontal - at almost an hour in. Her body is a sight to behold.
Our hero observes her in the shower, you see. It is revealed that he is spying on her, though why, I'm not sure. He witnesses her being ravished by that long haired punk he beat up.
The corporate guy turns up dead with a bullet in his head. This is shown like he didn't matter to the movie at all; at first I didn't realise it was him.
Someone else turns up dead, this time run off the road into an embankment so their car explodes. It must have been filled with nitroglycerine to explode just from that.
The coroner says that it was a sports car that ran the car off the road. How could he know that?
Then there are revelations at the end of the movie that make absolutely no sense and are very anti-climactic. And I was enjoying it, too.
Um. I don't get it. I have an idea who the killer might have been - though it's impossible to believe it really might have been them. The 'revelation' comes with the force of a wet fart.
