Look back at British movies from the late 60's, all during the 70's and on into
the early 80's and what you see are tits and ass and an occasional fanny (and
for those of us on this side of the Pond, the last term might seem redundant but
in the UK fanny is a term that cuts a little closer to the knuckle - it means
the furry bits). I read somewhere all of that is Hollywood's fault. Moviegoers
in the UK abandoned British film to watch the blockbusters made over here and so
to stay in business the British film makers stumbled upon the one thing that
would play in Liverpool and make them them some money. What they gave us were
films with Carry On and Confessions Of in their titles, and all of them starred
Robin Askwith and a host of women willing to reveal tits and ass and an
occasional fanny. Even the dramas were revealing, titillating... exploitative...
because that's what got every limey and his cousin into the theatres.
That brings us to The Deadly Females (1976). The premise here is an amalgam.
Imagine that in the course of their everyday lives some women were also
assassins, hired by disgruntled wives and husbands to do away with their boring
or abusive mates. All of this is run by a very snooty British woman - what
friends in Sydney and Auckland refer to as a pommy bitch. So there is in The
Deadly Females the element brought to its pinnacle by True Lies: a down home
person whose day job requires murder and mayhem. Now mix in bits and pieces of
teen slasher films - all of the guys dispatched by the deadly females are
philandering, obnoxious and thoroughly reprehensible. Either the assassin gals
fuck 'em and then kill 'em or the guys get killed because they are fucking
someone who they won't marry or won't divorce or some such silliness. So you see
the screwing and then you see the killing. It's True Lies meets Sleepaway Camp.
If that sounds dreadful, well then me buckoes, I told it right. The Deadly
Females is talky, annoying, poorly written and terribly made pile of stinking
elephant poo. And those are its good features.
Well, that's not true. An upside to the tack taken by British cinema in the 70's
involves all the naked women, some of whom went on to long careers in movies and
on the telly. The Deadly Females has two of those. One is Gennie Nevinson (here
credited without the second n in her last name). Gennie seems to have made a few
exploitation films in the 70's but by 1980 she was on British television, in one
series after another. Her last credited appearance is in a 2009 series. In The
Deadly Females she plays one of the assassins and has two nude scenes. The
first, with her boyfriend, has her giving up T and A and a brief look at her
bush. And the second has her topless for a while and then gives us a good long
look at her tush as she smothers a crude, ugly business man who could come
straight out of a Hollywood B movie if you gave him a Mississippi drawl. Good
riddance is what we are supposed to say about all that.
The second is Sally Faulkner. She started out in TV (as part of the Dr Who
ensemble) moved into exploitation movies (e.g. Vampyres and Confessions of a
Driving Instructor) and then migrated back to TV, where she remains to this day.
Olivia Munday is a third topless gal in this movie. She is in a batshit crazy
scene: starts out wearing a nun's habit while punishing a knight of the realm as
part of foreplay, moves into the sport-humping and then winds up topless in a
long and dreadful conversation with her rich, old fuck buddy. Olivia made only a
few movies, all of them of this genre - Carry On this and Confessions that - and
then she up and disappeared. Too bad - fine looking lass she was.
And then there is the one-hit wonder - Angela Jay. Ms. Jay was a perky little
blonde with what looks to be a killer bod although it sure is hard to tell
because her post-coital conversation is filmed by candlelight, or its
equivalent. BTW, I learned from this movie that 3 out of 4 English gentlemen
talk rather than sleep after sex. Knowledge is power, I suppose.
