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Thursday, Jan 11, 1979
9:30 PM
Hollywood Boulevard
“‘Shamelessly Loaded With Sex And Violence' is the tag-line on the lobby posters for Hollywood Boulevard - and it's no lie! Hollywood Boulevard is a hilarious action-comedy, set in the world of low-budget movies, starlets on the make, and hot-tempered exploitation queens. But it's also a marvelous, precisely-observed, in-joke self-satire on Corman's New World Pictures, featuring guest appearances by exploitation directors Jonathan (White Line Fever) Kaplan as an inept assistant director, Paul (Death Race 2000) Bartel as egomaniac director Erich Von Leppe, and Barbara (Summer School Teachers) Peeters as a Drive In Mother. Sharp-eyed viewers will also spot film critics Todd McCarthy and Joe McBride, Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen, and any number of old Corman hands in small parts.
“Directed for a song (and dance) by two talented New World editors, Joe Dante and Allan Arkush (Dante went on to do Piranha, this year's ‘class' Corman picture; Arkush is shooting Disco High), Hollywood Boulevard pirates all its action scenes from New World outtakes and stock shots - simultaneously saving money and providing a virtual catalogue of recent New World product.
“Woronov plays reigning exploitation star Mary McQueen, and she pitches her performance flat-out camp - half Norma Desmond (from Sunset Boulevard) and half Edie Williams. Whether she's screaming, ‘Blow it out your ass!' at a silly director, swatting the Human Fly with a swatter, or taunting a starlet she's about to kill (by crushing her under the Y of the HOLLYWOOD sign) with, ‘You'll never be a star now, you little cunt!' she is star-quality all the way. And very, very funny. Her purest moment is wordless: standing proud in the middle of a Philippine massacre, wearing nothing but a thigh-high safari jacket, shooting twin pistols right into the camera and smiling like a little girl at a picnic. That's my Mary.”
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