Several hours after watching "Lovely but Deadly" I'm still somewhat flabbergasted, and I cannot quite figure out what exactly I have been watching... This movie doesn't make any sense, but not in typical terms of idiotic plot or illogical narrative structure. It doesn't make sense in a way that my brains cannot process how misfit the lead characters and the high school setting are in relation to the plot.
"Lovely but Deadly" (although the VHS-copy I watched overwrites the original title with "Deadly Avenger" in a totally different style and font than the rest of the opening credits) deals with a tough girl who joins a high school to expose the drug-dealing network that caused her younger brother to die from an overdose. The synopsis sounds like normal exploitation material, but the execution is not. You'd expect for a rebellious ghetto-girl go undercover in a gritty ghetto-school and battle against vicious ghetto-thugs and corrupt coppers, but no sir! The girl is question is a cute and slender cheerleader - albeit with some serious Kung-Fu fighting skills -, the school is a traditional all-American and upright high school in a sunny Californian coastal community, and the thugs are average looking jocks, school paper journalists, musicians, and well-dressed prominent locals.
One could state the unusual cast of characters and settings are original surprise-aspects, but no. It feels unnatural and impossible. The film balances back and forth between being a mixture of "High School Musical", "Porky's", "Class of 1984", and a cheap James Bond rip-off. On the bright side, this flick is never boring (apart from the too many full-length songs) and features a few totally absurd highlights, including a catfight during a fancy house party, a speed boat chase that results in an (exaggeratedly massive) explosion, a quarterback who shameless says to a girl that she has to wait 15 minutes because he just had sex with another girl, spontaneous nudity from random and nameless cheerleaders, and a poor kid who gets steamed (!) to death. Familiar faces in the cast include Richard Herd and Irwin Keyes (in his usual role of brainless goon). "Lovely but Deadly" is not a good film, not nearly, but worth discovering for fans of unusual exploitation.
