DORIS DECEMBER: BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL (1965) ****

BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL  (1965)  ** ½

(Originally posted July 17, 2008)

In the ‘60s, Doris Wishman was the Queen of the Nudie Movies.  This one is sleazier than most.  Meg (Gigi Darlene) is a housewife who gets raped by a janitor.  She kills him with a candy dish and high tails it to New York where she moves in with a handsome guy.  He turns out to be a drunk and beats her with a belt.  After he passes out, she kisses him goodbye (!!!) then shacks up with a lesbian.  Meg tells her she’s an “acrobatic dancer”, but all she really does is stand on her head.  The lesbian puts the moves on her, and she splits.  She rents a room from a couple and the hubby rapes her, so she leaves and gets a job taking care of an old woman.  When her son comes to visit (he comes in through “the front door” which is clearly a CLOSET!) he turns out to be a detective looking for Meg.  And then… it was all a dream!  Wow.  With all the Wishman trademarks:  lots of bad dubbing and lots of close-ups of feet.  Wishman also did Diary of a Nudist and Double Agent 73.  

BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL  (1965)  ****

(Critical Re-evaluation, December 7th, 2022)  

When we think of artists having different “periods” that define their work, we mostly think about painters and sculptors.  However, Doris Wishman is one of the few directors to have very distinct periods throughout her career.  That was mostly because of the market demands and shifting trends within the adult movie genre.  Doris, ever the chameleon (and workhorse) never met a subgenre she didn’t like.  The eras of her work are so pronounced that the AGFA Blu-Ray boxset is broken up into three parts.  Bad Girls Go to Hell is one of the films that defined Wishman’s time in the “roughie” genre and is one of her best.

Wishman’s nudie films ran about seventy minutes or so, but they often felt much longer.  At a lean, mean sixty-four minutes, Bad Girls Go to Hell flies by.  The first thing we notice is the music in the opening credits.  Gone are the sunny, upbeat theme songs that populated her Nudie Period.  It has been replaced with moody jazz that is a perfect fit for the starkly photographed pictures that accompany the title sequence.  It nicely sets the table for the rest of the film.

With Bad Girls Go to Hell, Doris seems to be leaning into her cinematic fetishes/limitations.  The effort to synch up the actors’ lips and dialogue is much more relaxed (READ:  Slipshod), and the random shots of feet could be put into the Louvre.  Whereas Wishman was using the weird cutaways of feet to fit to cover herself in the editing room during her nudie era, here, the foot photography has an eerie, gothic, dreamlike quality to it.  

There are also some truly bizarre touches that I just love.  Like when our heroine, Meg (Gigi Darlene) takes a shower with her husband.  Usually, a shower scene is memorable unto itself, but it’s the random bit where she kisses a portrait of two cats before she enters the shower that will stay with me.  Another touch I loved was the way Gigi wipes her attacker’s blood off her face by licking a tissue and dabbing it as if it were stray spaghetti sauce.  And of course, there’s the hilarious scene where a front door is portrayed by a closet.  

I first watched Bad Girls Go to Hell on VHS as a part of Joe Bob Briggs’ “The Sleaziest Movies in the History of the World” series.  I’m not sure how many Wishman movies I saw before then, but seeing it hot on the heels of the films in her Nudie Period, it feels like a revelation.  The black and white photography is beautiful, a sharp contrast to the sunny color cinematography in her early career.  The print is flawless too.  The film was always one of Wishman’s better looking films to begin with, but this is the best it’s ever looked.  Bravo, AGFA.

Also, much of the movie takes place indoors, another big difference from the nudist camp era.  This is also psychologically important as the claustrophobic surroundings feed into the psyche of Meg.  The drab domestic scenes where she dutifully does housework are miles away from the bright sunshine days of carefree nude shuffleboard.  When the film does open up and steps outdoors, Doris’ lens makes the seedy New York streets look foreboding and surreal.  Carnival of Souls by way of film noir. 

As inept as some of this is, the first rape scene is surprisingly shocking and effective.  The chaotic editing and camera placement perfectly puts the audience in Meg’s disoriented state.  The leering close-ups of her attacker and the shots of her frightened face pack a punch too.

Of course, the inept stuff is a lot of fun too.  Meg’s time spent with the lesbian (Darlene Bennett) in a bad blonde wig is a hoot.  The part where she claims to be an “acrobatic dancer” and randomly performs handstands, backbends, and crabwalks for her new roommate is the kind of scene that elevates Bad Girls Go to Hell from mere exploitation to bizarre art.  It’s just so out of left field that you have to admire it.  

Bad Girls Go to Hell is ultimately a film about guilt and shame.  Whenever Meg is attacked, she runs away from her problems, unwittingly setting off a chain reaction and dooming herself to repeat the cycle yet again.  I love it when a director takes one idea and does repeated variations of a theme/cinematic fetish for reel after reel until they finally have a movie.  This wouldn’t be Wishman’s first or last rodeo in that regard, but it is one of her most effective.