#44 Girl in Gold Boots (Wes)

Girl in Gold Boots

Our next movie, Girl in Gold Boots, was once riffed on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Now whilst I may love that show, it’s an episode that I’ve never watched as Girl in Gold Boots really is an awful name for a movie. When I could watch Mike and the bots rip into movies with titles like Future War, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank and The Deadly Mantis, what hope does a movie called Girl in Gold Boots have of being watched? Well I had to watch it now, but the question is was I right to dismiss it or was it another hidden gem in the world of bad movies?

Michele (Leslie McRae) works in a diner where she seems to spend most of her day dancing. When sleazy Buz (Tom Pace) stops in for coffee and pie he persuades Michele to leave the diner (stealing all the money from the till) and her drunken father behind and head to LA where Buz’s sister Joan (Bara Byrnes) works as a gogo girl. On the way they pick up hitcher Critter (Jody Daniel) and rob a convienience store. When they reach LA Michele gets hired at the club Haunted House and becomes the dancer she’s always dreamed of being, whilst Buz becomes a drug dealer and Critter becomes the janitor. As Michele’s career grows, Buz makes the move from a smalltime hood into the criminal underworld and Critter mops the toilets. How will all this end? Will Michele be a success? Will Buz become bigger than Tony Montana? Will Critter finally get rid of those stubborn understains?

Having only recently watched Showgirls (see here) it’s impossible not to make comparisons. Girl in Gold Boots is basically the 60’s equivalent to that movie. It’s much camper, and doesn’t quite have the glamour to occasionally mask the sleaze, but it’s so similar sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking that Joe Eszterhas’s original title for Showgirls was Girl With Gold Boobs.

However unlike Showgirls, Girl With Gold Boots seems to have some sort of hidden agenda. Whilst it starts off like any other counter-culture movie from the era, with it’s anti-heroes (including the fact that Critter is a draft dodger) all heading straight down a path of hedonism and petty crime, it ends up with both a very “drugs are bad” and “crime never pays” message and Critter signing up to the US army just in time for the Vietnam War. You come out of the movie wondering whether the makers of this thought that by showing a rebellious teenage audience these, then maybe they’d see the error of their ways.

The other major difference it has with Showgirls is with its complete lack of decent choreography. The scenes set in Haunted House feature a group of girls who have all learned the same dance moves, but just haven't understood that they should attempt to all synchronise them. The head dancer Joan stands behind them on the same level as the band doing a bizarre combination of dance moves that someone has told her the name of, but that she’s never actually seen (when someone told her about the new hit dance called the swim, she decided to doggy paddle). Michele herself gyrates as though she’s attempting to watusi whilst standing on an electrified floor. You can’t help but think they would have been better off hiring Batman and Johnny Bravo as their dancers.

The music itself is a mixed bag. The main song is ok, but is over-used throughout the movie. As for the other songs, I really wasn’t that keen on them. The incidental music is great though, occasionally reminding me of a mix between the background music in a Hanna Barbera cartoon and the classic song The Detectives by Alan Tew.

The movie itself is quite well paced, and the acting, whilst hardly Oscar worthy is actually mostly ok, and no worse than your average 60s tv show. However whilst the acting may be ok, the characterisation is often flawed.

The villains of the movie are about as convincingly bad as those in the cop parody Police Squad. He may be using his club as a front for his criminal activities, but the most horrific thing that owner of the club, and crime boss Leo (Mark Herron) does is host a party where the entertainment seems to be a bongo player who plays the same fast rhythm throughout the entire party. Perhaps instead of trying to ram the drugs are bad message down our throats, it would have been more productive to society as a whole to teach the kids that ”Winners don’t use bongos” (taking this further, if anyone remembers the D.A.R.E. campaign, then I personally think that B.A.R.E. would have had a more positive impact on the world).

His henchman looks like the bastard child of Groucho Marx and Ortega from The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies (see here), and seems about as menacing as Elmer Fudd. As for Buz, I’m not sure it’s possible to be intimidated by somebody who wears his trousers pulled up near his nipples outside of tv talent shows, which may also explain why Michele goes for Critter instead.

You may get the impression that I didn’t like this film, but honestly as terrible as it may be, I actually enjoyed it. I don’t believe it would have rated so low on IMDB if it hadn’t made an appearance on MST3K, but this far into the list I’m glad it did as it made a welcome change from some of the awful movies we’ve had to endure recently. This movie may not quite have danced its way into my heart, but it managed to flail its way there in way that some people may think is dancing and sometimes that’s good enough.