Remember when Audrey Landers was giving it a go as the next Goldie Hawn? Nope? Guess you haven’t seen Ghost Writer. (It’s no Deadly Trigger.)

She plays Angela, a writer for that hot entertainment magazine Hollywood Beat, yet she just can’t land a story to please her editor. He’s played by David Doyle (Vigilante Force), who reacts to her typewritten copy with “I wanted an interview, not a barbecue!” and other lines delivered with the kind of popped-eye faces you never want to see again.

Angela’s luck flip-flops soon after she moves into the Malibu beachfront property formerly called home by sexpot startlet Billie Blaine. Given that she died in 1962 after she supposedly “ate a bottle of barbies” (per Joey Travolta, the kind of Travolta you never want to see again), Billie is obviously supposed to be Marilyn Monroe — a point hammered home by the casting of Audrey Landers’ bustier sister, Judy, in full boop-oop-a-doop mode.

Billie didn’t commit suicide as everyone believes. She was murdered! Her ghost appears to Angela — and only to Angela, except when Billie chooses to strip nude at a club — and enlists her help in finding the man who killed her; in exchange, Billie gives Angela the scoop of a lifetime, because if there’s one thing magazine editors clamor for, it’s an unsubstantiated, unverifiable story.

Judy may not be asked to do anything beyond provide eye candy, but Audrey throws herself (sometimes literally) into the role as if she were in a classic-era screwball comedy. Kenneth J. Hall (Evil Spawn) fails her, because he wrote and directed the thing like the most predictable, most vanilla TV sitcom, making Ghost Writer another film beneath her talents. If you do watch it, look for support from Tony Franciosa, Jeff Conaway and a box of Mister Salty Pretzels. —Rod Lott

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Okay, okay — yes, I admit it: The only reason I watched Virgin Paradise is because its no-name leading lady, Zuzana Marlow (née Struss, I presume), and her yellow bikini joined forces to become an arresting visual highlight of 1985’s The Tower, a Canadian SOV SF thriller, and this comedic caper appears to be her only other prominent role in a filmography as slim as her Venus Swimwear figure.

Despite its come-hither title smack-dab in the golden age of teen sex comedies, Virgin Paradise contains no sex. This made-for-TV cheapie is called that only because of its eventual locale of the Virgin Islands. That’s where three newly minted college graduates — the only grads that year, judging from the otherwise barren Toronto campus as they exit the ceremony — head to celebrate all that pomp and circumstance. Marlow is Samantha, the rich girl obsessed with money. Her Tower co-star Charlene Richards, is Candice, the black girl obsessed with men. And Gloria Gifford (This Is Spinal Tap) is Julie, the divorced girl obsessed with alimony checks.

The Schick Hydro Silk razor strip of a story upturns the girls’ vacation plans, as they charter a boat christened Bad Timing — I’ll say! — on which smugglers have stashed emeralds worth $3 million or $6 million, depending on the scene. The jewels look like beads borrowed from a game of Pente, and Candice hides them in her container of hair gel. Sitcom setup firmly in place, the girls run afoul of pirates, one of whom resembles a squatty James Brolin. Our heroic trio also gets lost in the Caribbean, because that’s what comedy rules dictate right after you wonder aloud, “Look at all these little islands. How could we possibly get lost?”

Did writer/director Ron Standen possibly think the material was funny? One punchline in the action-packed (relatively speaking, of course) finale has Samantha utter in exasperation, “I said ‘distraction,’ not ‘total destruction!'” For the Canuxploitation faithful who eat up these video-lensed Emmeritus Productions, its threadbare funding, two-left-feet plotting and — if we’re grading on a curve — amateurish performances will not disappoint. The pleasure they’ll derive is not the kind Standen intended … except for the endless scenes of Samantha, Candice and Julie in more bathing suits than can be counted — mission accomplished there, my good man.

Presumably to get the running time to the magic 90-minute mark, Virgin Paradise comes with a wraparound sequence featuring the gorgeous Marlow as a different character. Speaking in a baby-doll voice (which is most annoying) and wearing skimpy lingerie (which is most welcome), she relays the story to her diary — and the viewer — complete with interruptions throughout. One of her lines is “I kept thinking to myself, ‘Self, if only I had a camera to record it all. What a movie it would make.’” It did not. —Rod Lott

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Blame It on Rio is the Celebrity Skin-ready tale of the woefully middle-aged Matthew (Michael Caine, The Island) and his painfully farce-ready love affair with his best friend’s teenage daughter, Jennifer (Michelle Johnson, Beaks: The Movie). His excuse? Blame it on Rio!

Rio is one of the lustiest cities on this side of the planet, a brown-skinned Bacchanalia filled with an infinite amount of bare breasts bringing to life all your damnable desires, flaunted about in the streets 365 days a year. It’s seemingly the perfect setting for Stanley Donen’s directorial swan song, if it wasn’t such a bleak, horrific view into the mindset of a dying man wishing for one last view of pert teen bosoms. The easiest way to get them? Blame it on Rio!

Matthew and his wife (Valerie Harper, TV’s Rhoda) are seemingly in a loving relationship, but, in this film, love is a selfish emotion that gets more grotesque as the movie goes on. When the spirit of a crazy night in Rio gets into him, he gets even deeper into Jennifer, giving fully into the sudden sexual aplomb of the city. He expects to have one torrid night to forget with her, as most middle-aged men would, but, of course, she obsessively falls in love with him. He totally blames it on Rio.

After their initial sexual encounter, Matthew gets tries admirably to cut things off with Jennifer, not out of the dark shame of bedding a willing teenage girl, but completely out of fear of getting caught by her equally sleazy dad (Joseph Bologna, Transylvania 6-5000). When he tries to gently let her down, she goes a tad overboard and tries to off herself. We’ve all been there, but we probably weren’t able to blame it on Rio.

Donen, who directed films such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Singin’ in the Rain, sadly, seems to forgotten all he knew about being a filmmaker, his master’s touch now a pervert’s sticky glove, with his leering view coating the film in a gooey veneer of manmade despicableness. He made an ugly film of people doing rather ugly things, but it was the ’80s, and anything went, usually with the help of cocaine and an Animotion album. Especially if you going to blame it on Rio.

But no one really comes off worse than Caine; now considered a great actor because, well, he’s old and British, here he’s a combination of visibly embarrassed and audibly horny as Jennifer writhes and grinds on him every chance she gets. But, if the authorities asked him what he was doing with a 17-year-old-girl in his bed, he could always wink at the camera and blame it on Rio. —Louis Fowler

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Dean Martin plays Matt Helm (or vice versa) for the fourth and final time in The Wrecking Crew, the most lackadaisical of the series, yet mojo-charging all the same. Sixties spy spoofs are the true chicken soup for the 21st-century battered soul.

In Denmark, a billion bucks of American gold bars get poached from a train headed for London. It’s all the doing of Count Contini (Nigel Green, The Skull), whose name sounds like a brand of low-cost marinara, whose head resembles a salt-and-peppered Will Ferrell, and whose voice pronounces “schedule” as “shed-ule” a lot, so you know he’s a pompous ass. So that news of the heist doesn’t spread and send the world’s financial markets into a friggin’ death spiral, the United States’ Intelligence Counter Espionage agency (ICE for short) makes the bullion’s retrieval a one-man job. The man is Helm, natch, and he’s given only 48 hours to complete the task.

Pulled away from a sex picnic with his harem of “Slaymates,” Helm immediately is briefed and jetted to Copenhagen, but he’s not deployed without mission-aiding mechanisms. In fact, he’s given three: a camera that shoots a flume of knockout gas, handkerchiefs that explode upon impact when thrown and, deadliest of all, Sharon Tate! The Valley of the Dolls doll exhibits considerable comic flair as ICE-assigned assistant Freya, although director Phil Karlson’s gambit to shield her beauty from audiences is laughable, for reasons not involving pratfalls and one-liners. Carlson (absent from the series since, um, helming the first one, 1966’s The Silencers) even pulls the ol’ trick of equating glasses and hair buns with frumpiness, thereby asking us to believe Tate is beautiful and/or sexy only when she Rapunzels her hair, and shakes and shimmies her rear in extreme close-up.

Giving Tate a run for her moneymaker are a never-more-hourglassy Elke Sommer (House of Exorcism) as Contini’s partner in crime, Tina Louise (SST: Death Flight) in a largely wordless appearance and Nancy Kwan (Wonder Women) as — hold your horses — Yu Rang.

A running gag has Helm croon parodic ditties in his head upon meeting each lovely. (A sample: “If your sweetheart puts a pistol in her bed / You’ll do better sleeping with your Uncle Fred.”) Another running gag has Helm being unable to do the deed with any of them, but certainly not for a lack of trying. Nearly every line of dialogue Martin utters to the fairer sex is not just dripping in innuendo, but also rolled in crushed Rohypnol; in today’s climate, any one of them would earn him a write-up from ICE’s HR department, which would have put the brakes on the secret agent’s career. In real life, the 007-a-go-go Helm movies were put out to pasture after The Wrecking Crew’s release. The closing credits promise Matt Helm would return in The Ravagers. He did not. —Rod Lott

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It is hard to believe there was a time in this country when Americans shelled out thousands of dollars not just to drive vans as a primary mode of transportation, but to emblazon them with airbrushed fantasies of mermaids and Mickey Mouse and more, all of which look to have been dictated to a slumming Frank Frazetta by a toddler who forgot to take his Ritalin that morning. And yet here, to serve as historical record (and little else) is proof: Supervan. It is a movie that is likable against odds stacked higher than used tires.

Otherwise known as Vandora, the Supervan is a solar-powered, souped-up four-wheeler of the future, today! Designed for the film by Batmobile builder George Barris, who cameos as himself, the Supervan is the great white-and-red hope for the idealistic, yet unemployed Clint Morgan (Mark Schneider, The Premonition) to score the $5,000 prize up for grabs at the second annual Non-National Invitational Freak Out. (Results after feeding that through our patent-pending Outdated Slang Translator: “van contest.”) Consisting of events ranging from the “show-and-shine” and “wiggle-woggle” to its climactic mudslide competition, the Freak Out is sponsored by the corrupt Mid America Motors Corporation, whose cigar-chomping CEO, T.B. Trenton (Morgan Woodward, Final Chapter: Walking Tall), seeks to rig the games with his firm’s new gas guzzler, the Trenton Trucker.

Adding a wrinkle to this hackneyed conflict is that en route to the Freak Out, Clint saves a cute woman named Karen (Katie Saylor, Invasion of the Bee Girls) from being gang-raped by bikers, and she instantly assumes the plot position as our youthful hero’s stock sidekick-cum-girlfriend … despite being Trenton’s daughter. The story grows no more complicated than that; viewers will find more depth in the carpeted interior of any given van on display.

Directed by Lamar Card, who gave us the following year’s equally novel Disco Fever, Supervan is less a movie than an opportunity to show off enough bitchin’ rides and braless babes to capitalize on the of-its-time trend of action-comedies rife with speed traps, sheriff’s deputies with high blood pressure and CB radio-speak that demands subtitles; interestingly, this Missouri-made picture beat the hicksploitation granddaddy, Smokey and the Bandit, to theaters by a matter of months. With seemingly endless scenes of driving and dicking around, it exudes the spirit and storytelling of a feature-length Mr. Microphone commercial, albeit one in which a car can blow another up via laser beam.

Card and his cast work hard for every joke, without precisely knowing the proper structure of one; each gag tends to be missing either the setup or the punchline. Similarly, secondary characters saunter in, free of context or introduction, then disappear without contributing to a payoff. Among them is a lisping trio of gay men vanpooling to the Freak Out, with the driver sporting a “MAN HANDLER USA” T-shirt and the dash littered with copies of Playgirl magazine. Somehow, Supervan finds room for a moment of sheer horror as a shapely wet T-shirt contestant is embraced by none other than Charles Bukowski. Clutching a pull-tab beer and with his belly having escaped to the outside of his shirt, the legendarily alcohol-soaked poet looks more unkempt than any wrecked vehicle of your choice among all 91 minutes. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.