Stripteaser

Plot synopsis:
The story starts one late one weekday evening at Zipper's Clown Palace topless strip club. The beautiful Christina (Maria Ford) is on stage and devoted fan Carey (Lance August), a socially backwards, stuttering, but good natured young man sits at her feet.Outside a bus drops off Neil (Rick Dean), a man with sunglasses and a white cane. He taps his way across the street and into Zipper's bar where he orders a drink. The burley bar tender (R.A. Mihailoff) tells him he's already served last call, but patron, Frankie (George Russo) talks the barman into letting him buy the blind man a drink. They both regret this as Neil turns out to be an obnoxious loudmouth.Outside two corrupt plainclothes cops, Roland (George Tovar) and Joey (Patric Zimmerman) are cruising the streets. Roland is interested in two things: First, getting information on a recent robbery and second, finding a stash of cocaine he can seize to feed his habit. They plan to visit Zipper's later as they know the barman is a dealer, but first they drop by informant Acid Arnie's (M.C. McCurdy) apartment. After grabbing Arnie's meager supply of cocaine and pot they threaten him until he snitches on the robbers.Back at Zipper's, the barman is so annoyed at Neil he declares the bar closed and tells everybody to leave. At this point Neil pulls off the glasses and reveals he is not blind. He also produces a pistol and orders the barman to lock the front door so nobody can go in or out. He then forces the patrons and staff to sit at the bar while he takes the stage. The group consists of the barman, Frankie, Frankie's friend Buzz (J.R. Kuykendall), Christina, Carey and strippers Sandra (Nikki Fritz) and Kitten (Ann-Marie Holman). The butch Sandra and the pretty, passive Kitten are lesbian lovers.Neil is no normal robber and he pistol whips Buzz into unconsciousness for asking why he doesn't just take the money and leave. He then turns his attention to a terrified Carey, telling him that he will shoot him if he cannot answer a trivia question by the count of five. Kristen is able to answer before the deadline and this gives Neil another idea. Seeing Carey's devotion to Christina, he orders them to go behind the stage curtain. Christina will have six minutes to arouse Carey and be engaged in intercourse with him, or he will shoot her.At this outrage the barman confronts Neil and Neil shoots him in the gut.Behind the curtain, at first Carey is too scared to get aroused, but Christina is able to calm him down and promises him she will take him to Vegas if they both live through this. As a bit of comic relief Carey murmurs that he doesn't know if he is ready for such a commitment.Neil allows Sandra to check on the dying barman and give him some water. As she leans close the barman whispers that there is a shotgun behind the bar. From that point on Sandra tries to find an excuse to go behind the bar and get the gun, but Neil seems too suspicious of her to let her go.After six minutes Neil checks behind the curtain and is surprised to find Christina and Carey making love. Leaving them to continue, he now turns his attention on Kitten, ordering her to give him a lap dance up on stage. Kitten tells him she is too scared, but he threatens to kill her if she does not comply. Her eyes are wide with terror she gives him a dance with her fear somehow increasing its eroticism. Not satisfied with letting her strip off just her top, he makes her continue until she is only wearing stocking and high heels and only then allows her to return to Sandra's sheltering arms.Meanwhile the cops, done with Arnie, pull up in front of Zipper's. They can see that something is wrong as it is well past closing time and the lights are on and there are cars in the parking lot. The cops know something bad is going down and decide to pull behind the bar into an alley so they can smoke some pot and decide if they want to get involved.Neil orders Carey and Christina out from behind the curtain so he can tell the group a story. Before going out front Christina whispers to Carey that she has a gun in her purse and if she can get to it, Carey should be ready to distract Neil so she can shoot him.Neil tells the story of a man with bad chemicals in his brain that makes him do bad things. It is soon clear that he is talking about himself. The man, he says, is considering suicide when he sees a beautiful woman. We soon realize he is talking about Christina. The man decides instead of suicide he will stalk the girl getting pleasure out of watching her without her realizing it. He asks Christina if she wonders why the guy she went out on a date with never called her back. The answer is given to us in a flashback when we see Neil torture and murder him.In the alley the cops have finally decided to intervene by slipping in the back door. Joey picks the lock while Roland stands behind him with a shotgun.Christina, clearly nervous at the thought of Neil stalking her, begs him to let her get her cigarettes from her purse. He does and as she fumbles for a lighter, Carey starts demanding to go to the restroom. This distracts Neil and Christina pulls out a pistol and fires at him. Her shot is low, though, and hits the chair Neil is sitting on and he is uninjured. He returns fire and Christina, hit, drops the gun and stumbles back into a corner. Kitten tries to crawl over the bar to safety, but is shot by Neil. Frankie runs toward the back door and is also shot. One of the bullets goes stray, through the back door, and hits cop Joey in the head.Sandra jumps behind the bar and grabs the shotgun. She stands up and takes a shot at Neil, but misses. Outside an enraged Roland blows the door open with his shotgun. Seeing Sandra behind the bar with a weapon, he blasts her. Neil fires at Roland, but Buzz, who has been faking being unconscious on the floor, chooses the wrong moment to make a run for it and gets hit in the crossfire.Roland chases Neil down the stage and behind the curtains blasting away with the shotgun. Thinking Neil is dead he approaches the center of the curtain and is killed when Neil comes out from the far end. Carey retrieves the gun from the floor and confronts Neil. Neil, knowing that Carey has never fired a gun in his life laughs at him, but Carey, enraged by what Neil has done to Christina, empties the gun into Neil's chest. As Neil lies dying, Carey rushes to embrace Christina, who is propped up in the corner bleeding. She opens her eyes and asks if he has a cigarette and we realize she is still alive.In the final scene we see Christina being wheeled out to an ambulance while Carey follows. They are apparently the only survivors of the evening's slaughter. As they get in the ambulance Carey tells Christina he is rethinking his stand on commitment.

Tags: cult, murder

Review:
A typical Maria Ford Bare-it-all flick.
This movie has an interesting premise.
A supposedly blind man (Rick Dean) enters a strip club.
You wonder for what purpose.
Clearly he can't see anything behind his shades.
Perhaps, he's there for the drinks.
Or maybe, he has an acute sense of smell.
This is after all a fully nude strip club.
Well, to make a long story short, the answer is OBSESSION.
You can't blame Rick.
Maria Ford, the lead dancer, is a 9/10.
She's all-natural, but her best assets are her lovely face and legs.
A beautiful woman is a wonder of nature.
In a sea of a thousand faces, hers is the one that stands out.
Your libido is aroused by her every move, you can't wait to put $100 in her garter.
In one of Maria's dance numbers, she wears high-heel sneakers.
You know, the kind Little Richard or Mitch Ryder rhapsodize about.
Every beautiful stripper has more than one admirer, though.
Lance August plays a stuttering customer, who apparently comes to this bar just to see Maria.
Naturally the plot develops to the point where Lance and Maria become strange bar-fellows, who must cope with madman Rick, when he draws a gun on the bartender, patrons, and other dancers.
This movie has something for all fans of exploitation films to savor.
In addition to a gun crazed loonie, a sexy blond, and a shy geek, you also have two lesbian or bi-sexual strippers (one being tiny, and the other buff), the usual horny drunks, two cops who half-work, and a cozy venue for all to interact.
Without going XXX, this is about as realistic a depiction of strip clubs as you'll find in any film.
Forget about Showgirls (Elizabeth Berkley) and StripTease (Demi Moore).
I wouldn't give those ladies a $1 tip..
Pretty good, actually.
I was surprised by this movie.
It's not bad at all.
It's basically your standard "psycho-in-a-strip-joint" movie, but this time the psycho is pretty memorable.
Oh, and the main stripper is Maria Ford, who is incredibly gorgeous.As movies set in strip joints go, this is nowhere near Exotica (obviously) but much better than Showgirls or Striptease..
Memorable - But Could Have Been SO Much Better...
The late, great Rick Dean carried nearly the full weight of this film, imho.
Other than he and Lance('C-C-C-C-Carey') August, the entire cast needed changing.
Kinda-pretty Maria Ford's acting was as stilted and amateurish as ever - and She clearly needed cast against a stripper's pole about as much as Mr. T does.
Now, I cherish all Women and especially pretty Ones in high heels and lingerie - perhaps even more than most guys - and I was let down to see Her as the lead.
I mean, Ms Charlize Theron would have been WAY more fun to watch in a strip club than Ms Maria ever could be - AND they surely could have afforded Ms Charlize easier, back then - of course, in '95, She was only 20.
But, nearly any Pinup from back then would have done this movie much better than our Ms Maria was able to.HOWEVER - I DID enjoy it, I'll NEVER forget it.
If you can yawn past Ms Maria's halfhearted performances on both the pole and Her dialogue - as well as tolerate the hokey directing - it's actually a damn cool film.It's also got several chuckle-moments in it, too - i.e. Rick's clumsy entry into the club - that was worth a few rewinds, right there, hahaha!-Just focus on Rick's character (he's topping his game, here) and the strippers (other than Ms Maria, hehe) and you'll be fine.In a nutshell: This is a flawed-but-memorable film; a fun, dark, attention-holding watch..
Okay.
This film has a few good things going for it and a few bad things as well.
First, Maria Ford (as "Christina Loren") was fantastic.
Her acting was solid, her dance routines were top-notch and she was very sexy.
The other dancers, Nikki Fritz (as "Sandra") and Ann-Marie Holman ("Kitten") weren't quite in the same league but at least they provided some entertainment value.
Additionally, Rick Dean (as the psychopath "Neil") performed exceptionally well.
But eventually his constant diatribes got very annoying and towards the end I hoped he would turn the gun on himself.
Anything to get him to shut up.
I also didn't care for the character "Carey" (Lance August) or the two cops who just sat in the car taking up valuable time and film footage.
They detracted from the film more than anything else.
Especially Carey.
Even so, this film wasn't too bad.
But Maria Ford couldn't carry the entire movie by herself and Rick Dean had too much film time as it was.
Perhaps if the writer (Duane Whitaker) had devoted more time and energy to a few other cast members (other than Lance August that is) this would have been much better.
But he didn't and the film suffers accordingly.
Still, for an extremely low-budget production and all of the aforementioned flaws I suppose it was okay and merits an average rating.
But just barely..
I'm stunned at how much I liked this.
Admit it.
Stripteaser doesn't sound like the name of a good movie, does it?
When I tell you it's set almost entirely in a strip club called Zipper's Clown Palace and has a cast that includes a guy who looks like a retarded Ed Begley Jr. with a bowl haircut and a pseudo-Asian Janeane Garofalo, it doesn't exactly raise your expectations, does it?
And that it does have women getting naked, but one of them has an immobile set of fake knockers and another has nipples so orange it looks like she's breast feeding Oompa Loompas, that really clinches it, right?
This film just has to suck.Wrong.Powered along by an outstanding performance, some deceptively well written scenes and direction that regularly surprises you, Stripteaser is much better than you would ever hope or expect.
In all honesty, I picked it up at my video store expecting it to be some piece of crap I could have fun ripping apart.
And when it started with a pretty but too thin young woman taking off her clothes in front of a bunch of actors who might as well have had "Career Extra" tattooed on their foreheads, I thought my expectation was confirmed.But then a guy walks into Zipper's Clown Palace, a blind guy who looks and talks like a cross between Howard Stern and Gary Busey.
I was ready to write him and the whole movie off as another example of what happens when you give a camera a very small amount of money to filmmakers who have ambition but no talent.
But after a few minutes of watching the Stern-Busey crossbreed, I had to acknowledge something.
I was becoming more and more interested in what he was saying and how he was saying it.
There was a cleverness to his dialog and while his performance chewed a little scenery, there was something genuine and magnetic about it.
And then I noticed the direction, while ordinary for the most part, would every so often do something a little smarter and more skillful than I would have anticipated.By the time the Stern-Busey crossbreed pulled a gun and took everybody else in the strip club hostage, this film had me hooked.
When it introduced a degenerate coke fiend of a cop and his portly partner into the mix, it reeled me in.
As the crossbreed strutted across the strip club catwalk, manipulating his hostages in a game to which only he knew the rules, Stripteaser dragged me into the boat, clubbed me on the head and gutted me for supper.Now, I'll grant that there is plenty of shlock to this production and there's a very significant problem with the plot.
This story should logically come to an end about a half-hour sooner than it does and only keeps going because the script arbitrarily pushes the pause button on a subplot.
The screenplay probably needed to go through another couple of drafts and some of the roles could have been played by better actors.
But none of that interfered with my enjoyment of this movie.Rick Dean is superb as the Stern-Busey crossbreed.
He's so good here, I would now rent another film solely because he's in it.
George Tovar and Patric Zimmerman as the two cops are also excellent in their matter-of-fact portrayal as the bottom rung of the urban police ladder.
Writer Duane Whitaker and Director Dan Golden have also made me interested in any of their other work.Films like this are the reason I keep going, to find little gems like this and hopefully let other people know they're worth their time and money.
There are so many appallingly bad movies out there that no one should ever see.
Stripteaser is one of the films you should watch instead..
An effectively tense and sleazy thriller.
Cunning and lethal blind maniac vagrant Neil (a wired, intense, bravura performance by the late, great Rick Dean in one of his patented insane villain parts) terrorizes a handful of folks in a strip club at gunpoint.
Neil cruelly uses everyone's individual weaknesses against them.
The main target of Neil's twisted obsession is lovely stripper Christina Martin (well played by the stunningly gorgeous Maria Ford).
Director Dan Golden, working from a clever and compact script by Duane Whitaker, wrings plenty of gut-wrenching tension from the simple, yet gripping premise and certainly doesn't skimp on the tasty bare distaff skin.
Dean and Ford both turn in stand-out work in their juicy lead roles; they receive excellent support from Lance August as stuttering shy guy Carey, George Tovar as corrupt cop Roland, Nikki Fritz as mannish, domineering lesbian Sandra, the adorable Ann-Marie Holman as Sandra's mousy, passive lover Kitten, and R.A. Mihailoff (Leatherface in "Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III") as tough bartender Little.
Both Timothy Wynn's funky score and Andrea Rosotto's slick cinematography are up to par.
Popping up in nice cameos are John Lazar (Z-Man in "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls") as a bar patron and Linnea Quigley as a waitress.
The DVD boasts a few nifty extras: several trailers, a funny outtake reel, and a lively, informative and highly entertaining commentary by Rick Dean and Dan Golden.
Good, nasty fun.