FORMAT: DVD
Donald (Lyman Williams) is an asshole workaholic who can’t quite find the time to marry his best gal Joan (Diane Sinclair). During a night on the town, he has a one-night stand with a hot-to-trot blonde. After a wild evening of sin and fornication, Donald does what any guy with a guilty conscience would do: Impulsively marry his girlfriend! What he doesn’t know is that he contracted VD from his FWB and has now put his wife (and unborn child) at risk.
Damaged Lives is an early film by Edgar G. (Detour) Ullmer. It’s a mostly dull “social disease” movie that often takes itself way too seriously to be very much fun. Usually, these scare pictures have to be over the top in order to… you know… scare the audience and/or get its message across. (Take a look at Reefer Madness for a textbook example of how the pros do it.) With Damaged Lives, it was almost as if Ullmer thought he was making a “real” movie. Heck, even some misguided melodramatics would’ve been welcome.
The acting runs the gamut from stilted to overdramatic. When I say “overdramatic” I’m not talking the wild-eyed antics of the cast of Reefer Madness either. I mean they are community dinner theater reject bad.
One memorable sequence comes late in the picture when a doctor takes our infected hero on a tour of a VD ward and shows him a variety of patients suffering from the ravages of syphilis and details how they contracted the ailment. (So much for patient confidentiality!) If the rest of the flick had this same sort of exploitative vibe, it might’ve been worthwhile. Then again, it did come rather early in the social disease movie cycle, so maybe they just hadn’t worked the bugs out of the formula yet.
AKA: The Kiss That Kills. AKA: The Shocking Truth.
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