When her uncle is gunned down by the mob, Katie (the utterly ravishing Cara Burgess) inherits his business, the Loving Touch “massage parlor” offering “special handling,” if you get the drift. (And if you don’t, maybe the photo of W.C. Fields on the wall helps? No?)

Kicking the working girls and their johns to the curb, Katie vows to turn the fleapit brothel into a legit rubdown provider. For help, she recruits her two pals: a sexually harassed secretary (Judith Brown, Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off) and a failed vaginal-spray commercial actress (Rosalind Miles, Shaft’s Big Score!). They reopen the place as Soft Touch — a terrible name, if you ask me, but at least their matching caveman-cheerleader outfits accentuate enough cleavage.

At any rate, the syndicate tries to muscle its grubby paws back into Katie’s honey pot of a biz, even enlisting the kingpin’s nephew (Vince Cannon, 1967’s Trackdown) to seduce her into submission. Each woman gets a romantic subplot, none more entertaining than Miles’ cherry-popping a virgin customer (Peter Fitzsimmons, 1987’s The Principal) so inexperienced, his response to her kiss is, “Sure was slippery, wasn’t it?” (Moments later, as she doffs her top, his agog line is, “Breasts!”)

Director Lee Madden, whose career would crater two films later with Ghost Fever, directs The Manhandlers with little to no verve, opting for about two angles unless it’s time for a sex scene, which suddenly sees him get all dark and arty. At least he knows the ol’ exploitation-pic axiom of when in need of production value, shoot the climax at an amusement park. Or perhaps he’d just already had his fill of paisley and wicker, and needed to get outside.

Cribbing elements from soaps and sitcoms to pad the running time, the movie rides the Ms. magazine wave of feminism by presenting its leads as take-no-guff ladies with sharp minds … except when they fail to comprehend the true intentions of the gregarious and gargantuan Texan bursting through their door as their first customer. Oh, well, you gotta start somewhere, as Burgess does here in her first film. Unfortunately for us, it’s also her last. —Rod Lott

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By name alone, Pete Walker’s Die Screaming Marianne sets you up to expect one of his signature horror films that pushed boundaries in Great Britain. Instead, it’s a crime thriller, but it does contain a Marianne — in the shapely shape of Straw Dogs’ Susan George, no less. Bikinied and barefoot, she go-go dances her way through the opening credits, demonstrating why she’s billed as “The Hips” by the nightclub employing all her parts.

On the cusp of turning 21, Marianne has been estranged from her family for more than a half-decade when father (Leo Genn, Walker’s Frightmare) hires her freshly spurned boyfriend to retrieve her. Marianne believes dear ol’ Dad and Sister (Judy Huxtable, Scream and Scream Again) are plotting to kill her for her portion of her dead mother’s inheritance. Which they absolutely are.

And yet, brought against her will to the family’s oceanside estate in sunny Portugal, Marianne accepts an invitation to join her sibling in the sauna. What could possibly happen? A line Marianne gives her lover-cum-kidnapper (Christopher Sandford, Walker’s also comma-less Cool It Carol!) could be thrown right back in her face, not to mention the uneven film itself: “You really are quite unstable, aren’t you?”

Die Screaming is not “The Ultimate in SUSPENSE” as its poster proclaims. Heck, it’s not even the ultimate in Susan George vehicles by any measure. In Walker’s first three years of making features, from The Big Switch to Marianne, what he gained in production values, he lost in storytelling tightness. For example, I’m unable to work in Barry Evans’ (Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush) role as the ostensible second lead because the mechanics of his character’s introduction are so convoluted, it would take more space to share than you’re willing to read. —Rod Lott

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