Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and another entry in January’s Pia Zadora Month!

Alright, so check this shit out… Last week’s movie, Butterfly, was directed by Matt Cimber. I had mentioned that we had already seen one of his movies (The Candy Tangerine Man) and that it was highly unlikely we would never see him again on this blog. Well, I wasn’t just whistlin’ Dixie. He’s already back! Yeah, Matt Cimber made two films in 1982 and both starred Pia Zadora!

That brings us to Fake-Out. At times, this movie was also released under the title Nevada Heat. I actually know it was called that because that was the name on the box we had at the video store I worked at in the 90s. Anyway, whereas Butterfly was a James M. Cain-adapted crime drama, Fake-Out sticks with the crime part of the genre, but it’s also a comedy. But it also gives Zadora a chance to be on film and sing too.

So, Pia Zadora was known to be a Vegas performer. Remember that was part of the controversy around Butterfly? Yeah, her husband, Meshulam Riklis, was accused of buying a Golden Globe nomination and win for New Star of the Year for Zadora. He did so by taking several members of the Hollywood Foreign Press to Vegas to watch one of Zadora’s shows. Well, that’s also what she’s advertised on the poster of being here too!

Er… I mean she’s advertised as a Vegas performer. Not… not an actress who might have gotten a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year. Could you imagine?

Anyway, this time Zadora is joined by other recognizable names and faces. These include Larry Storch of F Troop and Filmation’s Ghostbusters (not… not the way more famous one), Desi Arnaz Jr., and Telly Savalas. We also et a small part for George Buck Flower. It’s always nice to see him pop up in something. Speaking of that Golden Globe for New Star of the Year? Yeah, Desi Arnaz Jr. was also a winner of the guys’ category. That goes back to 1972 after appearing in 1971’s Red Sky at Morning. One of his last roles just so happens to be in The Mambo Kings as who else? His own father, Desi Arnaz. Considering Arnaz Jr. is also the son of Lucille Ball, let’s see how he handles lighthearted/comedic moments in Fake-Out!

I ain’t gonna lie… I do have a concern with Pia Zadora Month. This is a five-week theme month. Two of the five movies I chose for this month has never been remastered to anything above TV or VHS resolution. At least Butterfly, and the last two movies covered this month have gotten at least a 1080p resolution release over the years. This week and next week? Eh, no dice. They are still in standard definition. Anyway… I shall digress. I should try to be positive.

Oh. That’s the tone we’re gonna go for, huh?

Look. I want to give this movie a fair shake. I maybe didn’t care much for Butterfly because of the messy structure, clumsy character-building, and general misfiring of the plot’s own cylinders, but I want to give Fake-Out some benefit of the doubt. After all, this is meant to be a comedy of sorts. I’m sure, at times, it might get zany or goofy. Not only that, it also has Pia Zadora in her natural element as a Vegas performer. Okay, maybe, just maybe, this movie could work with what it’s got and work out. However, I don’t care much for this being the first thing I see. It’s a little bit fairy tale. It has a little jaunty theme playing over it. It references a good guy and a bad guy. It nudges us in the ribs by saying there’s a bald guy (Savalas). It’s something I didn’t expect to see, and now that I’ve seen it, I didn’t want to see it.

But… again… Let’s try to be open-minded, yes?

Oh god, it’s still going…

Please stop…

Thankfully we go into the movie after hearing about these people getting into a terrible jam. We see Mr. Spiveck finishing up work for the night at the casino he runs. Spiveck is played by none other than Meshulam Riklis, Mr. Pia Zadora himself. As he leaves, he complains about what we think is an old couple with a Winnebago blocking his way out. As he helps guide the old folks, the old couple run him over. Then the old lady gets out of the Winnebago and shoots him dead with a shotgun to make sure he stays dead.

And then we go inside the casino where Meshulam Riklis treats us to a Pia Zadora concert to gain our votes for her at the 10th Annual Academy of Enema Awards.

Okay, so Pia Zadora performs a rousing rendition of a song called “Those Eyes”. As soon as she gets off stage, she’s arrested by Telly Savalas, the promised “bald guy” shown in the opening text scroll. Zadora is playing Bobbie Warren. She’s been fast-tracked on the road to stardom in Vegas. Her boyfriend is Danny Parelli. He’s a notorious gangster and very likely involved in the murder of Spiveck.

Now, why is she under arrest? Well, it’s basically explained that she was something of a bad girl who was spared prison if she testified against Parelli. She resisted to the point that the police no longer wanted to give her any more access to freedom. Her arrest is because she never gave up anything on her boyfriend. The state of Nevada is frustrated because she not only won’t give up the goods but also gets gifts from Parelli every day for the next three months making it clear to the guards and warden that if he keeps giving her gifts to make her time in prison easier, the less likely she will testify.

When she’s first brought into prison, all the inmates try to give her a hard time. One of the guards is immediately friendly to her knowing that it would be difficult for her to turn state’s evidence against her lover. When it transitions to three months later, Bobbie’s made all sorts of friends as she leads the daily aerobics session for the inmates. So how does this movie’s first fifteen minutes play out? Old lady kills a guy in an apparent mob hit, then a Pia Zadora musical performance, then she’s arrested and sent to ladies’ prison, where she’s teaching girls how to thrust their hips in an aerobics class that gets them all charged up so that they can finally have a shower scene and tease each other by running around, giggling at each other, share soap with tits everywhere.

God I love the 80s.

Okay, so while Bobbie has seemingly made friends with a lot of the girls, that’s not the case for all of the girls at the prison. Some of the tougher broads in the clink wait for Bobbie to be done with the shower to beat her up. You know… I thought this was a comedy? I didn’t expect a scene straight out of a 70s women-in-prison flick where three naked girls first try to kiss a naked Pia Zadora and then slap her around before literally going down on her while the toughest, meanest of the guards watches. It’s… It’s crazy. Don’t get me wrong… I like me some women-in-prison stuff, but I wasn’t quite ready to see what’s essentially the fifth Ilsa flick.

Okay, after being attacked and raped by the girls in the shower, Bobbie decides that she will indeed testify against her boyfriend. Now, Telly Savalas? He doesn’t buy her decision to talk after three months of receiving gifts in prison and living relatively well despite being locked up. He figures she is using this to get out of jail so she can fly the coop. He thinks she’s pretty damn lucky that the District Attorney is so desperate to get Parelli that he will take a chance on her being a flight risk to get the testimony he needs. He and his partner, Desi Arnaz, Jr., are going to be assigned to her until she can get on the stand. They are going to watch her for Saturday and Sunday in a private suite. Then, on Monday morning, she testifies. So yeah, it’s two days… that’s all the time the next hour of this movie will apparently take place in.

Suprise, surprise, Bobbie is a bit of a handful. Not only is she already contentious to Savalas (who I will not bother to learn the name of this character because he’s always just playing Telly Savalas) and Detective Morgan right from the jump, but as soon as they get to the Riviera to check her into her suite, she immediately heads off to play Keno. She is more of a butterfly in this than she could have ever possibly been in the movie called Butterfly as she floats around saying hi to everyone she passes and immediately falls right into the Vegas lifestyle.

The moment they get into the suite, she says she doesn’t like it, but Savalas tells her that she’s a guest of the state and Nevada is picking up the tab for her weekend so tough titties. She then says she wants to order room service to get a magician brought to the room to make them disappear. Now, I get that she’s the girlfriend of a gangster. I get that she was arrested by these guys at the start of the movie. I get that she had to spend time in prison for the D.A. to get what he wanted from her (I’m not entirely sure all of that was on the up and up but whatever). However, I don’t fully understand Pia’s character here. She’s been mostly presented as a sweet girl. She had that bubbly attitude in prison to help with the aerobics class and what have you. Sure, she is a little spoiled, and I guess she’s young and already an attraction in Vegas, but she’s just an outright turd to these cops.

Okay, yes… ACAB and whatever else you want to say about the cops, but come on. As is the case with the first movie of this month, I am struggling to connect with the person who is, ostensibly, the lead character of the movie. Why is she the way she is? Is it just because she’s a brat? Well if that’s the case, that should have been shown in the scenes in prison. Instead, we get her being fairly well-treated. Well, I guess until ran into the rapey toughs in the shower.

I digress. Savalas reminds Morgan that if Parelli picks up any scent that Bobbie’s gonna talk, he’ll be big trouble for them. Savalas then tells Bobbie that he figured she might have seen to her early release from prison in order to see Parelli, so he looked into the gangster’s activities and it “appears” that he is in New York. While Savalas scopes the surrounding area (likely because he’s going to be a classic case of being top-billed but will only appear sparingly because the movie couldn’t quite afford him to truly be the star of this movie), Bobbie uses her charms on Morgan to say she wants to take a bath and wants to be left alone to do so for the next 30 minutes. She uses this time to call one of Parelli’s guys, Nick, but Savalas intercepts the call.

She gets super frustrated and yells at Morgan to order her a bottle of champagne and demands that she be left alone so she can bathe and wash off the stink of the distrustful people she’s been spending the day with. Then she struggles to slam the door because of all the awkward doors and stuff in a hotel room getting in the way of each other. That’s followed by Bobbie coming out of the bedroom in only a towel while the room service guy is pouring champagne. She claims that she is auditioning for a singing gig so she’s not entirely sure why Morgan asked her to only wear a towel. This flusters the room service stooge and he storms out calling them degenerates… You know… Like he’s not seen any degeneracy in fucking Las Vegas.

Comedy!

This movie is most definitely light-hearted as compared to last week’s movie. That said, I struggle to really call this a “comedy”. There aren’t any real laughs. There is silly music playing on the soundtrack. There are a lot of double takes and stuttering and cheesy looks. But it’s not really funny. It’s barely charming in any way, shape, or form. It’s R-rated simply because of all the tits in the prison shower.

This is a frustrating movie. Again Pia Zadora is not bad. There’s something to like about her even if that’s solely the fact that she is incredibly attractive. But neither Butterfly nor Fake-Out is giving her much to do other than be incredibly attractive and a brat in a cyclical fashion. Oh, in this scene, she’s really sexy. Okay, now that she’s done that it’s time for her to be a brat and for you to kinda dislike her. Okay, she’s sorry so now she’s going to be really sexy again. Uh oh, Spaghettios… now she’s a mouthy brat again.

But wait! There’s more! How about a five-minute scene of her being a complete goober at a Black Jack table? Yeah, she wants to buy a new dress so Morgan gives her a few bucks to play. She sits down at a table where a guy is sitting alone and grumpily playing. Now, if you’ve ever been to a casino, you know you don’t sit down at a lightly occupied table without asking permission. The idea is that you mess up the mojo of the cards that are flowing from the dealer’s shoe. If you sit in front of the lone player, you’re getting his cards so any win you have may be considered that guy’s win. If you sit behind that lone player, you are taking the dealer’s cards changing the odds of his cards meaning the same thing as they did before you sit down.

Anyway, Bobbie has no strategy when it comes to Black Jack. She says she “wills” the cards to give her what she wants. She might rub the cards on the table chanting “Black Jack” to manifest a jackpot. She’ll also hit on a 17 to get a 4 to win against the dealer’s hand which that 4 would have given the other guy the win too. She’s being a pest. Worse, she’s being a pest and winning big while the other guy consistently loses.

Alright, all the while since Bobbie has returned to Las Vegas, a couple of goons have been following her and keeping an eye on her. That’s been sprinkled into some of the scenes here and there. They are either in the hotel directly following them around or in a room across the way and spying on them through a sniper’s scope. Another strange moment that follows the long Black Jack scene comes when Bobbie goes to buy some new clothes with her winnings. Out of the blue, we meet a man played by Larry Storch who is a “talent manager” who has just married a bubbly blonde who he plans to make into a star. He talks to Morgan, who is introduced as Bobbie’s fashion consultant, about scoring him some super weed and coke. He’s rather forceful about wanting to get Morgan drugs. It’s bizarre. It is just a scene that… exists… for some reason? I guess it’s maybe a play on the wild things that you might run into in Las Vegas but it’s so weird and out of place.

Just like Telly Savalas honking Harley Quinn’s ass while he calls to check in on Morgan who was just about to make out with Bobbie while she bathes in the tub.

Wait… WHAT?!? Yeah! Telly Savalas is just touchin’ a girl’s butt in the hotel bar. Was that part of his agreement to be in this movie? I understand why Morgan and Bobbie are about to launch into a romantic fling. We’ve seen them interact. While, yes, their relationship is a tad forced, at least we’ve seen his interest in her and her being less bratty and more cutesy around him in a progression of scenes throughout this movie’s second act. Telly Savalas is just on phones and touchin’ dat ass!

While Larry Storch’s original scene was strange and seemingly completely disconnected from the rest of the movie, he does return with his aspiring “starlet”. As Morgan and Bobbie head to the restaurant in the casino to met with Telly Savalas, the girl gives Bobbie a message that has something to do with Parelli. She takes her upstairs to see Parelli, but when she leaves the room after dropping Bobbie off at his suite, she runs into Buck Flower who is also in this movie who begins chasing her down the stairwell. I… I think he’s working with the cops?

Okay, after not much happening for half the movie, things are really picking up now. Parelli wants to doublecheck to make sure Bobbie hasn’t said anything to the cops yet. He seems ready to take care of business with the cops and possibly even Bobbie. She did say that the reason why she told everyone she was ready to testify was because there was that scary business in the prison shower, but she wasn’t really going to testify. Meanwhile, yes, Storch and that other chick are definitely part of Parelli’s people. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the people in the Winnebago previously, just in disguise because the girl is definitely driving around with a machine gun and shooting at Morgan like a real pro.

Now the shit is really about to go down at Bobbie’s suite. The goons that Parelli’s been having follow and watch Bobbie have been told to kill her. As she moves about the suite, the sharpshooter keeps trying to shoot her but he misses her because she keeps going from one place to the next but moves just as he fires and misses her. She’s turned on music so she can’t quite hear the bullets hitting the wall or door frame, etc. Finally, Buck Flower arrives to give her protection on Telly Savalas’ orders, but as she opens the door for him, she moves just out of the way for the sniper’s last bullet to hit him instead of her.

So Buck Flower has been killed by the goons. Morgan is still chasing Larry Storch and that chick he’s with as they are now driving through a casino to get away from him. Bobbie is in the suite hiding from a sniper. Where the hell is Telly Savalas? We last saw him taking the call at the courtesy phone when Buck Flower called him. It’s been many minutes since all of this started going down. Well, he finally shows back up and discovers Buck Flower’s been killed and checks out where they were shooting from. Bobbie tells him what she knows about the Spiveck hit and says she will give the D.A. anything he wants to know. Morgan finally shoots at the car that Storch and the other girl were in and kills Storch causing the car to drive into the pool. He then follows the girl who he discovered was wearing a blonde wig. As he walks through a dark hallway, he passes what appears to be a man in a suit and turns to shoot him. Turns out the woman was a guy all along. Comedy!

Yes, I mean it, that revelation that Larry Storch’s sexy companion was a man all along is played as a joke with a silly soundtrack playing under it when Morgan opens the guy’s clothes to discover it was a dude. Angela from Sleepaway Camp, eat your heart out!

The wackiness doesn’t stop there. As Morgan gets picked up by Bobbie and Savalas, the two goon assassins start chasing them in a car. This ultimately leads to the goons driving their car up onto one of those trailers that are used to transport cars as if it’s a ramp and flying through the air in Vegas while “The Blue Danube” plays and they freak out as they crash into a tourist’s trailer.

There are definitely things that play with a comedy beat. However, there is nothing really funny about this movie or the supposedly comedic things. What’s worse is that the stuff that is played as jokes are just kind of dropped into the movie with little rhyme or reason. It’s just… there. It’s not really a crime drama either because there’s nothing being taken exceptionally serious at any point either. Sure there are dramatic moments of Pia Zadora nearly being sniped by goons or the goons killing Buck Flower. Okay, there are a few moments in which Telly Savalas shouts something super serious sounding at either Desi Arnaz Jr. or Pia Zadora but there’s just nothing here that is either serious or funny.

It’s like trying to drink the head on top of your beer. It’s there. You can see it. You can feel it. You have a taste of something there, but it’s just… air. This movie exists. I know it does because I am watching it. I’m hearing the words and sound effects and the soundtrack. I get a general idea of how people feel in any moment or any line of dialog. It’s just so weightless that it feels like I’m consuming air.

Anyway, Telly Savalas says that it’s pointless to try to take her to the station because he figures that Parelli will know that’s their next move and they will try to hit her there. So he pulls over and lets Morgan take the car and Bobbie to his sister and brother-in-law’s boat at the Lake Mead Marina. Morgan asks for Telly’s gun because he’s out of rounds but Telly seems peeved about this. More on this specific moment in just a sec. Telly sends them off while he tells them he plans to arrest the goons and take them in to get info from them.

So after a THIRD TIME in this movie that Pia Zadora’s character says she needs to take a bath to feel better… No shit. This movie has taken place over the course of about 12 hours. She needed a bath to wash the prison off her when they got to the Riviera. She needed to take a bath before putting her new dress on that she bought after winning at the Black Jack table. Now she needs a bath when they get to Telly’s sister’s boat. No wonder Nevada is a stinking hellhole of a desert… Pia Zadora needs to bathe 3-4 times a fuckin’ day!

Alright, so the goons arrive at the boat. You might be asking how they know they went there. Weren’t they getting arrested by Telly? Wouldn’t they have possibly died after sending their car fuckin’ airborne through the streets of Vegas? Well, you probably know why they know that Morgan took Bobbie here, but they’ve arrived to break up Morgan and Bobbie’s fuck sesh. After they shoot the place up, a car pulls up to the marina. It’s Telly Savalas.

Yeah, surprise twist… Telly is a bad guy. After he sees one of the goons dead on the floor of the boat, Morgan confronts him and reveals that they were actually on the other boat. Telly says that he was in deep at the casino. When he’s got all those markers on him it wasn’t hard for someone like Parelli to get his hooks into him. To pay off his debts, he had to set them up. However, when Morgan had Telly’s gun, Morgan uses the cover that Parelli isn’t going to be happy to see that the guy who was on his payroll for this exact purpose killed two of his men.

I guess that’s that. That’s all it takes to take down a powerful gangster in Vegas. A little gun switcheroo. Now Telly says he’s finally going to beat the house and go and arrest Parelli himself. The End.

Fucking Christ this movie is kind of shitty. Like, really shitty. There’s not much more to say about how frustrating this movie is to sit through. At least with Butterfly, the frustration was over never really fully connecting all the way with character motivations and such. Okay. That can happen. At least the performances were good and the movie looked really good. This movie is almost the opposite. I get why everyone does what they do, even if everything and everyone is as thin as paper in terms of motive. But the movie is insanely ugly. We spent most of the time inside a casino and it wasn’t all that glamorous. It was still kind of that old Vegas look. It’s grimy. You can smell the stale cigar and cigarette smell of the place. It’s not shot very well at all. Performances seem mostly phoned in. It’s just a bad movie that was neither a drama nor a comedy nor a mystery.

The reveal that Telly Savalas was working for Parelli was not really a big twist. I had figured it out pretty much during that multiple-chase sequence in which Morgan is chasing the two in the car and Buck Flower was rushing to protect Bobbie? I mentioned that it seemed as though Telly Savalas was just nowhere to be found. It was then that I started to figure that it was a likely twist that he was in on everything. So, no, I’m not surprised he turned out to be a bad guy. It’s serious weak sauce to not have him die when Morgan figured it all out. He gave the assassins the location of where they were. Okay, sure, he says he was glad they didn’t whack them. Great! You’re still a bad guy, Telly! You don’t get any style points for being likable because you were surly and irascible the entire movie.

Fuck this was a bad movie.

So, here we are. Two weeks into Pia Zadora Month and we have two misses. One miss was just off-target. The other is balls. That’s bad news because next week, we get the most risky pick of the entire month’s slate. We hold off the third feature motion picture role for Pia and, instead, we turn on the boob tube to see a performance of hers that was filmed for television. Once upon a time, it was common for cable channels to film stage performances of Broadway shows to air and that’s what we’re looking at next time as Pia Zadora is joined by Susan Ward and Robert Klein for Showtime’s 1983 production of Pajama Tops.

Until then, I need to take multiple baths in the span of 12 hours to wash the stink of Fake-Out off me.