Despite expressing a willingness to be finished with the adult film business and moving his family from California to Hawaii after wrapping production on 1984’s All the Way In!, director Bob Chinn showed that he still had a lot of gas left in the tank before he closed the door on the adult film world for the first time in 1987. For between 1985 and then, Chinn would fly back to the mainland from time to time and made thirteen more features in a two-year span that would contain a mix of 16mm films that were made for European theaters and the domestic, direct-to-video market, and movies that were entirely shot on video that were mass-produced on cassette. The first one out of the gate was 1985’s Blondie, an impassioned tale of a group of fed-up women who have a party full of debauched fun to spite their philandering husbands who, as medical doctors, are constantly away or on call.
In an attempt to surprise her husband, Martin (Lance A. Lott), while he’s at a medical conference in the Bahamas, Catherine (Sheri St. Claire) catches him in sexual congress with another woman on the grounds. She immediately hightails it back to Miami where her friends Blondie (Gina Carrera), Alexis (Rikki Blake), and Millie (Colleen Brennan) are all having cocktails while poolside and talking about their husbands’ penchants for infidelity.
Alexis is married to Michael (Bobby Bullock) who is at a medical convention. Blondie figures he’s sleeping with someone there and confesses it to Alexis, who rejects the idea that her husband would ever do such a thing (before quickly finding out that her friend is correct). Blondie is married to Harold (Ron Jeremy) but she’s less concerned about the affairs he may be having because she’s got his number and knows he’ll be coming back to her each and every time. Millie isn’t as blasé about her husband’s (Nick Random) indiscretions as Blondie, but has hurtfully learned to accept and resign herself to the reality. By the end of the film, all three women will have had enough and helped themselves to a grand old time with the help of Blondie.
What’s distinctive about Blondie is, like All the Way In! before it, it is a much more mature work than what Chinn had mostly been making with in his films for Caribbean in the early 80’s. Chinn’s foray into showcasing Hyapatia Lee made for some fun and good-looking pictures, but things felt breezy and light even when they attempted for serious subject matter (as was the case in Sweet Young Foxes or Let’s Get Physical). Blondie feels more like the age-appropriate extension to Chinn’s best female-centered work in the late 70’s as it is a story about women who indulge themselves in wanton pleasures because they’ve had it up to here playing up to their socially acceptable roles and have earned the right to let their collective hair down the hard way.
With the film’s characters, we get the polar opposites on the acceptance spectrum of infidelity with Blondie smack dab in the middle. Alexis’s naïveté that collapses into hurt realization and rebounding as a defense mechanism is definitely on one side of the scale. But the most wary and exhausted of all of the characters is Millie who has adopted a dour, shrugged surrender to the indiscretions that occur within her own marriage. She seems to hold her own with the young bucks, puts on a bright face, gives sound advice, and is even engaged in a physical relationship with Blondie; but she still registers a look of disappointment when she thinks about her husband and reckons with the cold hard truth of the matter regarding her situation. In all cases, the husbands’ indiscretions are shown but they’re treated as brief window dressing as we see each one of them in a dalliance with a blonde nymphette of some kind who are given boilerplate names such as The Hooker (Chante Lynn), The Countess (Rene Tiffany), and The Nurse (Cara Lott), generic players in the most standard of male fantasies.
We’re only given a partial glance into the husbands’ worlds because the majority of the sex scenes in Blondie focus almost solely on the women and their specific pleasures. Working from a screenplay by then-wife Debbie (credited as Paul Alison), Chinn creates a torrid atmosphere in which each sexual encounter feels like a refreshing dip in a deep blue swimming pool. For once the party starts, each one of the women in the group gets everything they want and exactly how they want it. One such example occurs during Sheri St. Claire’s scene with Scott Irish’s bartender/masseur. As is usually the case with impromptu stress massages during pool parties, a therapeutic rubdown slides devolves into anal sex where St. Claire verbally directs Irish’s every move (and her faux-resigned “okay” when asked to remove her clothes is hilarious). When she shows up to the party and begins filling in as bartender, Alexis almost immediately meets Victor Boyd (Greg Derek), a handsome stick of SoCal butter who is a fiend for sidecars and for taking things very literally. For when Alexis confesses that she’s a married woman who wants nothing more than to be swept off her feet and ravaged by a man who looks just like him, he actually picks her up, takes her to the other side of the yard, and almost immediately goes down on her, both fulfilling her fantasy and creating yet another void behind Blondie’s bar.
Even though Blondie was a very fast production that didn’t take a whole lot of time to shoot, Chinn finds ways to make the picture come alive, mostly by the use of color in the film’s wardrobe choices which are all vibrant and offset the character of Blondie who whips through each frame like a tropical bird with flamboyant plumage. Richard Warrington’s cinematography lends to a certain amount of realism as it captures the long shadows during the exterior party sequences that gives the film a detectable sense of time. The film’s calypso flavored Italia-disco score, credited to the New York City Jazz Quadrille, is 100% terrific and is likely one of the best to grace a Chinn flick since Candy Stripers.
For Blondie, Chinn assembled a righteously winning cast not the least of which was Colleen Brennan. A terrific actress and an even better sport, she’d bring her A-game no matter the material it was Chinn’s good fortune to have her weaving in and out of his cast orbit as the sun was setting on his pre-hiatus career. In Blondie, her first film with Chinn, she gets a great role as the randy older friend who can still project some true vulnerability. Her cavalier and compartmentalized attitude as the party commences registers as authentic and let it be known that as a sex performer, Colleen Brennan could take it to the fucking house (her scenes with both Gina Carrera and Shone Taylor will definitely make you mutter “Lordy Moses” at least once). Ron Jeremy is cleverly used as the ONE philandering husband who doesn’t get a sex scene which helps subtly reinforce why Blondie is the leader of this gang.
And despite her fun-loving attitude that manifests in her wardrobe that consists of nothing but hot pinks like she’s Barbie with a predilection for day-drinking, smoking, and bisexuality, Gina Carrera’s titular character is more fully realized than meets the eye. Fully aware that she’s the soft cushion for friends going through horrific times and is also the correct person to steward them through their troubles, Blondie is immediately and reflexively there for her friends. There is a palpable hurt that is felt by the women amid their spouses’ numerous affairs and the character of Blondie is the center ringleader in a circus of self-fulfillment and inner-peace. As the one who works out at the gym and has the number of all the guys to lift her friends’ spirits, Carrera saunters through the film with a true confidence and a believable, infectious charm while also allowing a bit of empathy crack through her chirpy facade when the moment calls for it.
In the end, Blondie plays out like John Cassavetes’s Husbands but, instead of a bunch of lost souls in men’s bodies whipping up an impromptu trip to London, all of the action occurs in a Miami dream house (though the entire movie, Bahamas cold-opener and all, was shot at a house in the Hollywood Hills). In both films, the main characters are having a whole lot of fun in order to mask an equal amount of pain and disappointment, but where the message of Cassavetes’s film was decidedly how dysfunctional the men were without their spouses, Chinn shows that the wives are doing just fine on their own, thanks.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
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