| Bad Girls Go to Hell | |
|---|---|
 Promotional release poster | |
| Directed by | Doris Wishman |
| Written by | Doris Wishman (as Dawn Whitman) |
| Produced by | Doris Wishman |
| Starring | Gigi Darlene George La Rocque Sam Stewart |
| Cinematography | C. Davis Smith |
| Edited by | Ali Bendi |
| Distributed by | Juri Productions Inc. Sam Lake Enterprises |
Release date |
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Running time | 65 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Bad Girls Go to Hell is a 1965 American sexploitation film written, produced and directed by Doris Wishman. The film stars Gigi Darlene, Sam Stewart, Barnard L. Sackett, and Darlene Bennett.
The film contains soft-core sexual situations and is considered one of the director's first roughies, "a trash-cinema genre that flourished briefly in the years before court cases legalized hardcore porn, and Wishman was one of the important figures in the form."[1]
Meg is a Boston housewife, who is sexually assaulted by a janitor at her apartment building. Killing him during the attack, she flees to New York City. Upon arriving in New York, she changes her name to Ellen Green and pretends to be from Chicago. She then meets a drunk, and goes home with him, who ends up beating her with a belt. After escaping from that hell-hole, she moves in with Della, a lesbian. They lounge around in their underwear, and end up sleeping together.
She then moves into a sleazebag hotel, where the landlord attacks her, so she moves once again, taking a job as a companion to an older lady, whose son she discovers is a detective on the Boston murder case. Meg is caught, but instead, she wakes up screaming. It was all a dream.
In 1990, film critic Joe Bob Briggs listed the movie as one of the "Sleaziest Movies in the History of the World", and at the same time has called Wishman "the greatest female exploitation director in history."[2][3] The movie is generally acknowledged to be the best of the 30 films she made.[3]
Benjamin Crabtree of Collider said the film "transcends the trappings of B-level filmmaking to create a surprisingly surreal film; both ahead of its time and elusively critical of the period’s sociocultural mores, the film is a bittersweet and beguiling masterpiece that begs to be watched and rewatched."[4]
Adam Nayman wrote in The Ringer that "with its off-center framings and drifting attention span, Wishman’s spare, minimalist style seems amateurish unless you get on its dreamy wavelength, at which point the mix of misanthropy, mystery, and circular, existential melancholy becomes positively Lynchian."[5]
Film critic Bill Gibron wrote the movie "is a masterwork of miscreant behavior and a lost love letter to a social era when insecure men feared the sexual power of women and would do anything to keep it under their control."[6] Adrian Smith wrote in Cinema Retro that "it is a surprisingly good picture for such a low budget grindhouse film; it is a real slice of the greasy underbelly of 1960s American life, and it is often hailed as one of the sleaziest films ever made."[7]
In 2008, Apprehensive Films released Bad Girls Go to Hell on DVD.[7] The film was also included in the Blu-Ray collection; The Films of Doris Wishman: The Moonlight Years, that was released in 2022.[8]
