Sugar Cookies

This movie is not schlock, despite the lo fi production and its link to Troma productions. A dark fable for adults. Exploitation is a theme of Sugar Cookies, and one wonders if the cast has not fallen prey to said theme. A weird movie with enticing visuals: shadows and contrast are prominent. Definitely worth a look, especially from fans of Warhol and stylish decadence. Through all the cruelty and wickedness, a moral, albeit twisted, can be gleamed.

If you want to know why the director's career when nowhere after SILENT NIGHT BLOODY NIGHT, here is your answer. SUGAR COOKIES means well, but it has no story. It has the idea of a story, but it is never fleshed out, never explored deeply, and never really developed. Outstanding performance by Lynn Lowry. Great to see Monique Van Vooren, an underutilized talent. The always interesting Mary Woronov doesn't appear all that comfortable in the part her husband wrote for her. A major plus: the Vinegar Syndrome transfer is outstanding.

Unholy hybrid of psychological melodrama and soft-core nudie (with some head-scratchingly odd comedic asides added to the imbalance) has an immoral, decadent producer of 'arty' porno films playing kinky sex-and-death games with his X-rated starlet ("Get the perfume! Now load the gun!"). He goes too far and kills her, yet the coroner is apparently fooled into believing her death was a suicide (though the shooting is suspicious enough to get a middle-aged detective to start sniffing around). The filmmaker's alibi is provided by his statuesque assistant, a hedonistic bisexual vamp who lies for him but has a secret: she was in love with the dead actress, and plots her revenge. Cobbled together by writers Theodore Gershuny (who also directed, badly) and Lloyd Kaufman (who also co-produced, along with future director Oliver Stone, Ami Artzi, Garrard Glenn and Jeffrey Kapelman), this low-budget curiosity might have made for a juicy cult item if only the team had picked up the pace a bit. It's dreary instead of dangerous and tiresome instead of erotic. A subplot about the producer's young nephew trying to lose weight (and having sex with a prostitute dressed in a wig and pink see-through wrap) is just bizarre. As the assistant, Mary Woronov (Gershuny's then-wife) has amusingly diabolical eyebrows and silky chestnut hair falling passed her shoulders. She has the film's best directed and edited sequence, a quick series of auditions for a new skin-flick. Woronov is required to strip like the other actors but, unlike Lynn Lowry (continuously naked in a dual role), she isn't degraded by the camera; she's so assured an actress that towering over the C-grade material (literally) comes naturally for her. *1/2 from ****

Although not a particularly good film, it is still loads better than anything Troma released in the 80's. This is the one of the first releases by Troma, a few years after the laughable "The Battle of Love's Return". Lynn Lowry plays a dual role(and cannot act in either of them) as Alta, a woman murdered by adult film-maker Max, & Julie, an actress pursued by lesbian Camila(the leggy Mary Woronov). It might have been a better film had there been better acting and if a stupid sub-plot involving Max's ex-brother-in-law had been deleted.

In 1973, the year before Lloyd Kaufman formed Troma Studios in order to churn out his particular brand of trashy low-budget B-movies, he helped produce Sugar Cookies, an experimental sexploitation flick starring Lynn Lowry (The Crazies, Shivers) as aspiring actress Julie Kent, who is tricked by lesbian seductress Camilla (Mary Woronov) into helping avenge the murder of her lover.

Loaded with dreadfully dull dialogue, languorous scenes of supposedly emotionally intense drama, and of course, plenty of nudity, this sort of ponderous, progressive, art-house styled erotic nonsense might have gone down well with a crowd of enlightened (ie., stoned), sexually liberated hippy types several decades ago, but will seem laughably dated to a modern audience. Even connoisseurs of cult cinema keen to see unconventionally attractive amazonian cult actress Woronov and frisbee-nippled Sissy Spacek-alike Lowry strip off and get it on will probably find this film a struggle.