Gratuitous nudity, gratuitous violence and gratuitous bad jokes all add up to a gratuitous good time in this ragged drive-in charmer. It’s terrible and it knows it. It’s clumsy and it laughs about it. Every time this film stumbles, which it does often, it does so with a gag that diffuses everything. It’s a dumb movie made by smart people, an eighty-three minute in-joke.
It hatched from a bet between Roger Corman and producer Jon Davison that Davison couldn’t make the absolute CHEAPEST movie ever for Corman’s New World Pictures. From there, Davison (with directors Allan Arkush and Joe Dante, first-timers both) settled on a “trouble on the movie set” story. A young actress hopeful (Candice Rialson) arrives in Hollywood with sky-high dreams only to get work from the lowest, most exploitative independent movie-makers in town. Even worse, actresses keep dying mysterious deaths in the middle of filming, which poses a problem for our heroine.
B-movie fans will get the most out of this as film references fly like bullets while the makers pad the running time with that ultimate in low-budget short cuts: footage from other movies. Anytime you see a shot here that looks like it cost more than twenty bucks to put together, it’s swiped from some past New World production or old Roger Corman film. Arkush and Dante’s idea of an original special effect is having an actress take off her top for no reason.
Trivia note: Watch for the truly funny Dick Miller playing a low-rent Hollywood agent named Walter Paisley, which is the same name as his character from the classic A Bucket of Blood.