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.
