After professional setbacks which included two troubled projects in a row (one of which caused his irreparable split with actor John Holmes), the creative burnout that director Bob Chinn was feeling in 1981 is completely and utterly palpable in Las Vegas Lady. A blank, 57-minute stare across a desolate parking lot and into the middle distance, the film was a production that came about when Bob Chinn trepidatiously took the job offered to him by producer “Spanky” McFarlane, a man whose only similarity to the Our Gang star was his girth. Though there wasn’t much to it other than it was a vague vehicle to turn Drea, mononomous ingenue and a future ex-Mrs. Bill Margold, into a star, Chinn took the project on when he found that his director’s salary, while reduced, was adequate enough for someone in a dry spell and desperate need of a job. What Chinn quite realize until it was too late was that there wasn’t going to be much money in the budget left over for anything else.
At the center of Las Vegas Lady is Helen (Drea), a frustrated housewife who is very tired of her husband’s constant absence. After learning that her husband is going to be out of town for the weekend AGAIN, Helen hits the strip in a horny huff and picks up John, a mustachioed, cowboy-garbed hustler from Nebraska played by Mike Ranger (credited as Mark Ranger and looking like something you’d find passed out on a bench outside Circus Circus on a Tuesday afternoon). Hot to trot, Helen drives him out to the middle of the desert and performs oral sex on him while parked atop a place where a dead mobster is probably buried.
The story REALLY gets going when Helen invites John take a trip to San Francisco which prompts John to call Bobby (Gary Eberhart, credited as Gary Everhart) on the telephone and says that she’s fallen for “it” hook, line, and sinker. The audience really has no idea what “it” is, but Bobby is told to wait for them at the airport in Frisco. Once there, we’re back into Chinn’s recognizable territory as we go to Fisherman’s Wharf and all the regular haunts he steals with a quickness, lending the film a brief flash of interest and cinematic value. Helen takes John to meet Kathy (Shirley Duke), her old friend who lives in the area. After immediately leaving John with Kathy in the other room, Helen goes upstairs and hides a stack of cash in a drawer. She then grabs the yellow pages and calls an airline to book a flight for Acapulco. What is this shifty Las Vegas lady up to?!?!?!
What follows is a semi-convoluted mess I’m not sure I completely understand which includes an orgy at Kathy’s, Kathy quietly absconding with Helen’s cash, and a hitman inexplicably played by cult filmmaker and z-grade pornographer, Ray Dennis Steckler. The movie ends in a burst of violence that recalls 1974’s For Love of Money but without the great sex to go along with it nor the naïveté to excuse its narrative gaps which causes more questions to pop up than are answered. It is unclear if Helen and Kathy are somehow in on whatever scheme Helen is involved with, and it’s doubly unclear who John really is, what he has to do with anything, and why he ends up getting “the kiss from Las Vegas” from the hitman. Is Helen’s husband a mobster and has sent a hitman after her and whatever lover she might be with? Did Helen set John up? If so, why? Things just happen and the audience is asked to go along with it.
Aside from a phoned-in attitude that causes the whole of Las Vegas Lady to propel forward without a clear sense of purpose, almost every single technical element of the film is lacking in some form or another. Forget about the indifferent cinematography, credited to Robert Longly, which is unexciting and flat. And don’t give a thought to the film’s editing, which is so ragged that it still remains a mystery as to how many days are supposed to have passed within the film’s story. Sex scenes featuring the same participants buttress up against each other without the benefit of plot elements separating them and moving the story along.
Gary Eberhart, usually a very welcome and likable presence in Chinn’s films, shows absolutely no mercy as the asshole who thinks its cool to come to an orgy with a guitar and his acoustic serenade that kicks off the festivities makes one wish a toga-clad John Belushi would wander into the living room and pull a repeat of his staircase outburst in National Lampoon’s Animal House. Far from the cowpoke country charm that was evident in his musical efforts in Sadie, Eberhart’s score sounds like he turned in a package of outtakes and demos. And, not for nothing, “Guitar pickin’ and shit-eatin’ grinnin’” are some of the worst lyrics I’ve heard in either a straight or comedy song.
Though Mike Ranger was usually hired for his stud abilities and less his qualities as a thespian, his shit-kicker yokel act in Las Vegas Lady is just as dumb as a bag of hammers. His character is not only written as someone who is playing dumb, he’s playing SO dumb the film asks us to believe that he thinks it’s plausible that his ruse should include articulating that he has no concept as to how much $2,000 is. As clueless as he acts, Ranger might as well throw in a drawn-out, Gomer Pyle “golly” to overplay his hand a little more.
In the annals of women who ever graced the screens of adult cinemas, Drea had the least chance of being the one for whom an average audience member would throw their life away. She’s what you’d get if the slightly sexed-up lady from accounts receivable, or your wild, newly divorced aunt Joyce decided throw caution to the wind and do a little porn. Drea may have gone on to be something of a fan favorite in some circles, and maybe she was a performer with whom people actually enjoyed working. But a cutting screen presence with ready-made cinematic charm a la Rhonda Jo Petty she most certainly was not. When her early solo scene is cross-cut with travelogue strip footage, I’m more into the strip footage (I was especially digging on that sign for the Englebert Humperdinck show at the MGM Grand). When she saunters into a room and knocks Billy Dee for a loop by wearing transparent slacks that look like a prop she stole from the never-made sequel to So Fine, overwhelming is the urge to boo her right off the goddamn screen.
One of the faint lights found within Las Vegas Lady is the aforementioned second unit material that captures the old Vegas strip both day and night. But, though really nice, it’s nothing that couldn’t be experienced watching fifteen minutes of an episode of Vega$, then in its final season in 1981; nor is the footage anything that mid to low-tier filmmakers like Carlos Tobalina, Chris Warfield, or Ray Dennis Steckler himself couldn’t capture. The San Francisco orgy is likewise one of the film’s few highlights, but even there, one has to sift through that particular box of rocks to find the gems. Namely, Elaine Wells (credited as Barbara Harold) and the two other anonymous female participants really do a lot to help generate some heat. But even THAT comes with a caveat as the two unknown actresses are something of a mixed bag. The one paired with Eberhart who eventually gets positioned with a tardy Billy Dee and Drea looks like she’s having a whole lotta fun and one wishes the whole movie would have been about her. On the whole other hand, the poor gal paired with Ranger literally looks like someone who got into porn on a dare by her more rambunctious compatriot and almost immediately wished she hadn’t. It’s damn near like watching a life-lesson get learned in real time.
Like a Leon Russell album from the same period, Las Vegas Lady is so very brown and so very tired. It tries some old tricks but everything is so performative and mechanical, which is something Bob Chinn himself doesn’t shy away from admitting. Seeing that it’s his one true bomb in an otherwise stellar run from 1974 to 1985, Las Vegas Lady was to Bob Chinn what Deal of the Century was to William Friedkin. But just as it’s darkest before dawn, the doldrums that seemed to follow Bob Chinn would soon abate as Harry Mohney and Gail Palmer would cruise back into his orbit with Hyapatia Lee, a lady who (with Bob Chinn’s assistance) would become one of the last superstars of the Golden Age, and someone who NOBODY would dare boo if she wore transparent britches onscreen.
Now, THAT’S a star, Spanky.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
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