An effervescent rush of otherworldly decency runs through the center of Bob Chinn’s Nice N’ Tight, the second feature in his two picture deal for Tara Video in 1985. Like Blondie, the other film Chinn made for Tara and likewise released the same year, Nice N’ Tight was shot on 16mm for the still-functioning European theatrical market but only given a direct-to-video domestic release. Structurally, it’s more or less a loop carrier but it’s an absolute dandy that’s both exuberant and jocular with utility player Elmo Lavino as a heart of gold personified who works the control center of an eight-armed monster of wanton pleasure.
The setting for Nice N’ Tight is the Paradise Motel, located somewhere off the strip on the edge of Las Vegas. Run by Bill Barrymore (Lavino), it’s the type of place that was still advertising the princely luxury of “Color TV” in 1985. And the establishment’s name, also the title of the Debbie Chinn-penned screenplay (credited, like Blondie, to Paul Alison) and the working title of the film, is no coincidence as there is a little bit of magic in the Paradise. There is an impish quality to Lavino’s character as everything is delivered with a wink and a smile; the Paradise Motel is functionally a dead end at the end of Heartbreak Boulevard but is actually a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow atop which Lavino sits reading his Soap Opera Digests and allowing everyone a gratifying escape from their respective miseries.
Because in each room of the Paradise is a hard luck story that doesn’t materialize, romances that blossom instead of bust, taboo behavior that is all in fun, and always a second chance at a better tomorrow. Almost everyone who crosses the threshold of the motel gets inhabited with a spirit that makes them bend over backwards to be as nice and as gentle with each other as humanly possible. When two friends (Dan T. Mann and Nick Niter) flip a silver dollar to see who will go first with a prostitute they’ve procured (Janey Robbins), Mann lies to Niter about winning the outcome so Niter, having become drunkenly despondent over losing his shirt at the casino, can go first. When Robbins tells Mann he’s a good person for doing such a thing, he replies “actually, I’m a real shit. But my buddy, he’s a real nice guy.” What follows is made all the more hot because it was front-loaded with care and displays a really sweet moment of male camaraderie that harkens back to the best of spirit found in Chinn’s Tropic of Desire from 1979.
And from every which way, Nice N’ Tight delivers nothing but goodwill with a light touch. With its Herschel Savage/Bunny Bleu opener, the hoariest of porn canards gets a funny work-up as a broken down lounge act makes a maid believe he’s a high powered Hollywood producer. Marc Wallice and Nicole West check in as a young couple trying to have a clandestine encounter to escape the prying eyes of their small town. Much like the Kristara Barrington and Bobby Bullock honeymoon setup which weaves itself throughout the entire picture, the scene is played for its romantic angle even if sticking the couple in a janitor closet rids it of any kind of Sears catalog softness. It’s still sweet even amidst the most un-romantic of conditions (which is kind of its point, too), and, as a bonus, it’s inhabited by characters who are believably young enough not to give one fig about having sex on a gross cot in a closet.
Other encounters find their soul in the dialogue that brackets their respective sex scenes. Colleen Brennan and Greg Derek truly put their best foot forward with a hooker/john scenario that no doubt had to be excised of the mothballs when it was unpacked. Never the strongest male thespian in the deck, Derek was always a likable presence and he lets Colleen Brennan do all the heavy lifting which, for a pro like her, was no sweat. She doesn’t quite come off like the hooker with the heart of gold and, for that, her character is a little more nuanced than what was called for. The same can be said for the little bits of fun found in the scene with Kay Parker and the impressively-endowed Mark Jennings, and in the capper with Steve Drake and Paul Thomas who play a couple of conventioneers trying to bag Marilyn Chambers and Seka but end up with Jessica Wylde and Rikki Blake. In each piece of the film there is a slight twist on a character or situation that ends up giving it extra value and elevating it into being something a little more special than the status quo.
But a great deal of the film’s appeal (and its thesis, really) can be found in the scene with Pat Manning who shows up as Mrs. Emerson, an old customer and friend of Bill Barrymore. A gambling junkie who doesn’t have enough to pay her $150 bill, she offers to give Barrymore a piece of jewelry to settle her bill but he refuses. “Why don’t you wait till next time?” he asks. “Maybe next time, she’ll be a winner.” Remarkably, this moment occurs just as Paul Thomas is being (momentarily) rejected by Jessica Wylde so anyone who has ever seen Pat Manning in a Bob Chinn movie knows this would be the place she would find a way to slide into the action. Maybe a place where she could raise some much needed funds? Nope. Manning stays in the lobby and shares a drink with Lavino and Nice N’ Tight stays refreshingly all-heart.
Second to his love of lush, tropical locations, Bob Chinn also had a real feel for the sun-baked and dry, desert landscapes of the southwest likely due a chunk of his formative years being spent in Artesia, New Mexico. While Nice N’ Tight doesn’t much go outside of the motel as it leans mostly on stock footage for its exteriors, it’s not too much of a stretch to see it happening in and around the same motel and barren exteriors that were featured in the first twenty minutes of Las Vegas Lady, Chinn’s dark night of the soul that saw a release in 1981. Even though this is a bright and lively comedy, Chinn gives the motel rooms an appropriately sleazy, no-tell motel atmosphere simply by making them look like they could just as easily be home to noir-based malfeasance. Who says that a din of shattered dreams can’t also house a great time and who needs the Bellagio when the Paradise Motel exists? In this environment, Chinn lets his Richard Warrington-lensed camera float around the set which has been dressed and lit to both give the illusion of time passing but to also give each scene the kind of visual texture that only celluloid could give.
Long on the sex but delivered with a winking, self-reflexive attitude that adds up to 81 minutes of harmless fun, Nice N’ Tight might not be the first movie I’d grab off my shelf to introduce someone to the works of Bob Chinn but it would definitely be one of maybe three of his mid-80’s films I’d loudly and drunkenly defend at a party while stumbling over furniture and breaking the tchotchke.
If you think I’m lying, just try me.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
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