Movie star Lisa Brandon has everything a modern woman could want: a growing reputation as a prima donna, a perfect doctor boyfriend she shuns, a father who only wanted a son, a daughter she gets to see one whole day a week and a burgeoning side hustle as a prostitute. (That’s everything, right?)

To borrow the infamous tagline of 1983’s Angel, she’s a Hollywood actress by day, Hollywood hooker by night. Through a series of unconvincing wigs, including the Tina Turner, Lisa (Rebecca Holden, The Sisterhood) prowls the L.A. streets for johns with fist-crumpled cash. One such negotiation goes like this:

Potential Client: “I use [this truck] when I wanna pick up a cheap whore.”
Lisa: “You found her, mister. Now how ya fixed for dollar bills?”

Lisa’s efforts at keeping her #girlboss gig a secret are threatened with implosion when the slobbish manager (Eddie Barth, 1979’s The Amityville Horror) of her preferred roach motel for trick-turning discovers her true identity. He blackmails her for a condo and a job — and not the blow kind.

Unbeknownst to her, the redheaded bombshell Holden earned herself a lifelong crush with 11-year-old me when she slinkily sauntered into an episode of Police Squad! (and seemingly every other network show at the time) with sexiness and confidence. Turns out, neither are reason enough to search for Paul Leder’s relentlessly downbeat Twenty Dollar Star, not easily located.

One can see Holden’s motivations for working with the A*P*E writer and director:
1. It’s the lead role.
1a. In a feature, even!
2. Despite the subject matter, he allowed her to stay clothed.
3. He let her sing a couple of songs. (It’s not unlike her fellow ginger Cynthia Brimhall in the Andy Sidaris pics. Someone dropped the ball by not pairing these two in a pilot about crime-solving singer sisters.)

Other than showcasing her voice, the melodramatic film does her no favors. Leder choreographs exchanges of dialogue with unnaturally lengthy pauses in between characters and sentences. Said dialogue is involuntarily campy, from Lisa dissing a journalist as “that overdressed barracuda” to telling her director he “made my nose look like Godzilla!” Under a more skilled director, Holden could pour her all into each scene without coming off as histrionic and shrill.

Speaking of, Twenty Dollar Star boasts a two-bit score in which the supposedly sexy saxophone nears the vibrating tones of a kazoo. —Rod Lott

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Attention, salesmen the world over: One particular bank in Scotland has an incentive program that bests any “president’s club” event. In exchange for your hard work, it buses you to a weeklong retreat at Mega Boob Manor — so named because it’s staffed by women with royally large chests.

The butter-faced ladies pamper and pleasure the guys. They play squash and they squash. They ride exercise bikes and they ride. They soak in Jacuzzis and they soak. They squirt water guns and they squirt. You get the picture. Because individual literal fantasies are catered to, we witness a burglary during a shower, a licking of “fruit and cream from the body of Sally” and an old man’s face getting bitch-slapped by 10 heavy bags of hanging flesh.

Meanwhile, the men’s suspicious wives rightly assume the worst and take revenge by bedding their husbands’ boss. He mercifully puts this wicked monstrosity of mammaries to bed by breaking the fourth wall: “Oh, no, that’s the end.”

All of the above occurs as hamster-wheel instrumentals by The Pync Brothers (whoever they are) blare; just imagine if The Art of Noise were commissioned to score a children’s educational video on farm animals.

Also known by the titillating title of Miss-Adventures at Mega Boob Manor, Mega Manor is the movie equivalent of second base. Despite being directed by UK hardcore pornographer Peter Kay (Carrie Potter and the Philosopher’s Bone), sex is absent from this slab of erotic comedy. There’s so much breast-squeezing, the guys likely got carpal tunnel syndrome. Only three actors — Pat Wynn, Lynda White and Janie Hamilton — allowed their names in the credits. I can’t imagine why. —Ed Donovan

When I met Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, it was in the mature section of the video store. Surrounded by beaded curtains, the titillation of promised soft porn — “cable version,” the box exclaimed — just around the fuzzy corner to syrupy heaven and carnal self-pleasure.

Instead, it was a Brazilian art film about the dual nature a woman goes though channeling love and lust. I was thoroughly pissed. But now, some 25 years after I first saw it, I have viewed Dona Flor with new eyes.

After a night of hard partying, Vadinho (José Wilker) dies. His widow, the titular Flor (Sônia Braga), brings new meaning to long-suffering; during their marriage, he went from cockfighting and gambling to countless affairs and wife-beating, as one does.

Flor goes on with her life. She meets and marries Teodoro (Mauro Mendonça), a pharmacist she believes is a good man, but also a boring one. It’s okay, though; Vadinho’s ghostly visage is fine with performing all his late-husbandly duties — all sexual, of course. I guess Teodoro does, too.

While I originally thought this was tale about a new wife and the trials and titrations about marriage, it’s actually a sexy wish-fulfillment fantasy, with Braga’s Flor being the sultry object of South American desire. It’s concerning that she puts up with Vadinho’s abuse, but I guess she makes peace with it, because Flor gives both men a kiss goodnight, even if one’s a ghost.

Dona Flor was first remade in 1983 as Kiss Me Goodbye with Sally Field, James Caan and Jeff Bridges. The original’s sex appeal was monstrously gone, replaced with a brown swatch of neutered khaki fabric. —Louis Fowler

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After a hiatus in Vegas, glamour model Emanuelle (Nicole D’Angelo, Darling Nikki) returns to town and into the abusive arms of her controlling ex (Chris Spinelli, who also produced). She makes her intentions clear: “I just want to be beautiful again.”

He makes his clear, too: “Street trash,” he chides her, then adds, “You can stay here and we can dream better” — whatever that means. As with the case of every Gregory Hatanaka film I’ve seen, “whatever that means” remains unclear, ostensibly up to the viewer. But we do know she stabs him with scissors … or do we?

With D’Angelo co-directing alongside Hatanaka (Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance), the hourlong The Awakening of Emanuelle then settles into a thrice-repeated pattern: She meets a photographer. The photographer shoots her in hot lingerie. She beds the photographer. Next!

More metaphorical than sexual, Awakening doesn’t do enough shedding to qualify as an Emmanuelle movie, whether we’re talking the real, double-M kind or the alternate-spelling knockoffs. Nonetheless, I find D’Angelo incredibly appealing onscreen, even when that screen is awash in purple wigs, cheap Mardi Gras masks and infuriating editing. —Rod Lott

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No doubt Famous T and A proved an enormous VHS hit for Charles Band back in 1982. Hell, it probably paid for an L.A. divorce or a Romanian castle. Now, a full four decades later, the exploitation film legend finally gives it something his 2006 movie Evil Bong already has seven of: a sequel.

What in the holy name of Craig Hosoda took you so long, Chuck?

Whereas sex bomb Sybil Danning hosted the original, Famous T and A 2 comes fronted by a sex doll in human form, Diana Prince. A former (?) porn star, she’s best known as the sidekick to drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs on his current Shudder series, a gig that doesn’t ask for much. This compilation flick calls for even less: Sit still, face the camera, read innuendo-leaning lines off cue cards, raise an eyebrow now and again. (The latter accounts for more movement than Band’s camera.)

After a quickie quick run-through of early skin-on-the-screen history — or herstory, really — Prince officially kicks off Band’s “tit-illating trip” with a tribute to Russ Meyer. Strangely, it’s done so with clips from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, one of the few Meyer mamm-sterpieces with no nudity. That oddity immediately rectifies itself with segments honoring Jess Franco, Andy Sidaris, Linnea Quigley and the like. As one could guess, the bulk of T&A 2 pulls from Band’s Full Moon-owned archives, from the respectable (Tourist Trap, also skin-free) to the reprehensible (Unlucky Charms) to the Skinemax staples.

In these cases and most others, the clips aren’t clipped enough. For example, as a one-time 13-year-old, I’m pretty sure viewers want to see Sherilyn Fenn making the two-backed beast with an actual beast in Meridian, not several minutes of talk leading up to it. The erotica from Band’s Surrender Cinema titles wear out their welcome sooner, in particular the tentacles-a-poppin’ Femalien: Cosmic Crush.

Among the other Surrender snippets are Veronica 2030 and Bad Girls at Play, both notable per Prince for their featured porn personalities. The former puts Julia Ann in some kind of gold tinfoil (but not for long) as some kind of sex robot; the latter finds Trump belt notch Stormy Daniels unleashing breasts with angles so boxy, they don’t appear to be finished.

Something about it all seems … off. Perhaps it’s a lack of energy; perhaps it’s my age; or perhaps the concept’s irrelevance in an everything-on-demand world. Or perhaps it’s all these things, and Famous T and A 2 is really as boring as it struck me. Co-directed and written by Full Moon regular Brooks Davis (The Gingerweed Man), it stretches the definition of “famous” as far as Band does with dollars. —Rod Lott

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