Prostitutes Protective Society

There are a few things about this that might seem promising. First, you got a group of prostitutes standing up to the mob. And the mob boss is named Carny Ball. And the movie is attentive to how the prostitutes work together as a unit. One of them negotiates on behalf of the group, but has to get buy-in from the others. And there's one who pressures new members for sexual favours, but gets pushback from the more senior members. Meaning that this group of prostitutes has a better functioning HR department than many large organizations. And there's the fact that a number of them appear to be women of colour or immigrants, meaning that the cast is more diverse than one might expect from a sexploitation movie of this era.

Unfortunately, the movie plays out less entertainingly than you might hope. The prostitutes do stand up to the mob, but this takes almost two-thirds of the one hour runtime, which is largely padded with shots of nighttime street footage. There's a documentary quality to this footage that holds some novelty for the first few minutes, but as the movie keeps returning to it, and keeps looping that same bit of sexy, swingin' scoring to mask the lack of incident, and well before the hour's over, I guess I'm swung out. I just watched a few Doris Wishman movies recently, and for all their blatant padding, they usually have a sense of movement, at least in the camerawork, that gives the movies a certain momentum. Here, the camera setups are largely static, so the padding and the story and dialogue scenes both feel much longer than the runtime would suggest. I should note that the film is not unpleasant to look at (the fact that it's shot on film means that it's automatically better looking than the majority of modern digitally-shot releases) and there are a handful of stylish moments (a stabbing in silhouette is a highlight), but the relatively simplistic camera setups mean that the movie rarely pops visually.

And honestly, this is nowhere near as salacious as the premise requires. The street scenes are in busy, nice enough areas that they don't lend an atmosphere of tawdriness. The nudity is presented in a fairly perfunctory manner (characters discuss negotiating with the mob will sitting on the sofa topless; I did chuckle at the "beach" scene which is very obviously shot indoors), and the violence is nowhere near as sleazy as you'd hope. Even the climactic castration scene is awkwardly framed, so that you don't see nor feel anything (the heroines might as well be mending the villain's zipper, given the excitement level). A good comparison of how to do this movie right might be Joseph Mawra's Olga movies, which find ways to sleaze things up, and have a strong central presence in Audrey Campbell to hold the story together. This movie does care about the prostitutes' group dynamics, but to a fault, as none of them emerge as interesting characters in their own right.

As I've started paying more attention to my Letterboxd stats, I've noticed an embarrassing lack of women in my most watched actors. To rectify that, I've decided to piggyback off my Doris Wishman exploration and watched a bunch of movies with Darlene Bennett. This was one I watched for that reason, and I'm sorry to report that she's in exactly one scene (the aforementioned topless couch scene), although if we're all amigos here, I must say that she was not an unwelcome sight. This is also the first film I've seen from Barry Mahon, and while it seems this is considered one of his better movies by my Letterboxd circle, I don't think this convinced me that further exploration is merited. That being said, I see he directed The Beast That Killed Women, a nudie cutie horror movie which stars Darlene Bennett, Gigi Darlene AND future überMILF Juliet Anderson, which probably makes it the Three The Hard Way of sexploitation. So I suppose I will make time for that one at some point.