Starring Jessica Morris, Ariana Madix, Jean Louise O’Sullivan, Circus-Szalewski, Eric Roberts, J. Scott, Robert Zachar, Jeannie Marie Sullivan
Directed by Charles Band
Expectations: None. Hopefully it’s better than Killer Eye: Halloween Haunt, and something more than a simple softcore film.
On the general scale:
On the B-Movie scale:
“Boys, that’s the thorniest rose I ever met.”
So speaks one of the many party guests during the opening scene of The Dead Want Women, and while it’d be easy to say that the line was a great analogy for the film, it just ain’t. See that would mean that despite the thorns and the discomfort and the blood, you’d have delicate beauty and sweet fragrances. Well… shit, the movie does kind of have all of that (except I’m imagining the sweet fragrances)… so what’s the matter? Through all the smoke and mirrors (and nudity), there isn’t much of a story here—but that’s OK, because it’s remarkably more of a movie than the last couple of Charles Band’s films were! Hurray!
Where his last film, Killer Eye: Halloween Haunt, was nothing more than an exercise in seeing just how boring he could make a movie about girls getting naked, The Dead Want Women is something slightly more. While it does feature a character that is completely nude in every scene she’s in, there’s actually a lot more substance here than you’d expect from Band’s recent track record. The film opens in the late 1920s when *GASP* a silent film star is being put out to pasture as the talkies take over. Fuck me running, if I have to watch another movie with this plot, I’ll kill someone, then make a silent movie about my experience but set it in the late 20s so that my character could be replaced by a plucky newcomer with a great voice, then watch that film and then kill myself. That should be enough to put that tired, old cliché to bed. Are all the film industry’s touchstones to the 1920s gleaned from Singin’ in the Rain? Anyway, our raspy-voiced silent film star isn’t too happy and one thing leads to another and she’s in an underground cave watching her actor friends fuck a couple of nubile females. Oh, these Hollywood types! They so crazy!