Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 7:6	Budget Medium

Question: If a movie is directed by Katt Shea, stars both Maria Ford and Debra Lamb, what type of movie is it? Answer: Dead stripper movie.

I've mentioned journeyman directors before, and Katt Shea is a member of this fraternity. She has directed about a dozen films without every really breaking through to mainstream. She seems quite competent behind the camera and has written and acted in a few films. This is Katt's third film and oddly enough her third film about strippers. The film has a very amateurish feel to it, partly because of the actors but I think also because of the directing style. The characters are all played too broadly. Maria Ford's Shady is clearly troubled. She is jumpy, easily upset and afraid of something. Ed Lottimer plays a detective with a couple of quirks that never factor into the story. His character never quite makes sense and why Ford's character would fall for him is a complete mystery. Of course you also have to wonder why Lottimer's character would fall for Ford's as well. Besides the fact that she is the main suspect in an ongoing investigation, she is flaky and temperamental. Her roommate tries to touch her a couple of times and Shady reacts like she is being poked by a sharp stick. This is never explained. One of the other dancers asks Shady to go out with her and tells her to wear something sexy. Is this supposed to mean that Shady is lesbian? Again we never find out.

The plot is pretty obvious right from the start and there are no real surprises and the acting is wooden. So what is there to see? Strippers or more correctly dancers. Shea likes to use talented dancers in her movies and they usually end up topless, but there is not all that much sex in her movies. In the original Stripped to Kill she got a few TV actors who did credible jobs with some pretty lame dialog and some really dumb scenes. Here the acting and the plot are just something you endure to see the dancing. And the best dancing is by Debra Lamb. Debra was a stripper and fire eater who did a number of B movies and a few mainstream movies. She almost invariably played a stripper and she has more dialog in this movie than most of her others combined. Maria Ford, who is also known for playing strippers, looks great in this film and also provides some very acrobatic dancing.

The movie's main problem is that it wants to be taken too seriously. We are meant to take these things at face value and it is just impossible. Clearly Shea was trying to do a great dead stripper movie, but like a lot of other directors she misses the mark.

Shady dreams about the killer with pretty acurate detail despite the fact that she is at home drugged unconcious during the events. She knows who and how everyone was killed. The killer in her dreams wears a mask and uses a razor blade held in her teeth to cut her victim's throats. Now I will grant you that this looks reasonable on film, so I'm okay with it. The cop shows up for some reason at the strip club but does not go in the front door, instead he hangs out on some platform that has a pole running down to the middle of the alley. He ends up having sex with Shady. Of course it starts raining and as soon as they are done, the rain stops. The cop breaks in to Shady's apartment and finds a pill on the floor. A subtler approach to the whole movie would of helped. Some thought to the motivation of the characters might not have been a bad idea. Debra Lamb comes off the best here because her character is mostly in the background and as a result she seems pretty normal compared to the rest of these physcos.

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