Meg (Gigi Darlene) is a Bunny Yeager type housewife. One Saturday, when her husband Ted (Alan Feinstein) is at work, Meg is raped by the janitor in her building. After killing her attacker with an ash tray Meg is overcome with fear, shame and is utterly unable to face Ted. Meg flees to the Big Apple to disappear in the crowds only to land herself in one predicament after another.
Bad Girls Go To Hell (1965) is nudie picture auteur Doris Wishman’s best known film. Wishman’s uncanny eye infuses a rough little sex picture with the visual virtuosity of the great modernists in cinema. The influence of Bad Girls Go To Hell, like so many of Wishman’s idiosyncratic exploitation features, can be felt in the films of John Waters and Roberta Findlay as well as the films of Anna Biller.
Sexual violence in Bad Girls Go To Hell is rendered as an abstract montage details from Meg’s contorted expression to a hand clasping a rail. Similarly the scenes of Meg navigating New York’s mean streets are lyrical sequences of perpetual motion, tracking the traumatized housewife as she flutters from man to man. Wishman constantly denies traditional visual structures in favor of a more expressionistic approach. By de-centering the viewer Wishman puts the spectator in Meg’s shoes; invites us into her world. The same goes for even the most mundane scenes, such as when Meg fixes drinks for Al.
In Bad Girls Go To Hell acrobatic dancing, making dinner, fixing drinks, fighting off sexual advances and killing rapists are all part of a woman’s work. The objective of this work is to survive and make a place in a man’s world. The delirium of the camerawork reflects the unease and tumult of such an existence. It never becomes the stuff of horror simply because all that Bad Girls Go To Hell shows the viewer is commonplace.
The sense of the everyday is communicated by the genre prerequisite that all of the tragedies that befall the heroine are fetishized. The dramatic construct of Bad Girls Go To Hell is wholly plastic in its extreme melodrama. Bad Girls Go To Hell is a distorted reflection of reality where every beat is afforded dramatic bombast and every woman looks like she stepped out of a Bunny Yeager pin-up. Each everyday occurrence takes on an erotic overtone because of the heightened drama and physical appearance of the female characters.
In a rare episode where the protagonist isn’t assaulted by a man, she forms a queer relationship with another woman. Della (Darlene Bennett) takes Meg in and the two live as roommates. They spend their time hanging out in lingerie and dancing together. Their relationship is implied rather than explicit, but when Meg leaves they each profess their love for the other. This is the single safe space in Wishman’s film that is only denied its possibility because homosexuality was taboo. Yet Wishman never indulges in scenes of lesbian love making, preferring the relationship to exist as a predominantly emotional one.
A film where the women characters spend their days in nothing more than lingerie is rarely affecting. Doris Wishman’s film is subversive in that it does two things at once. On the one hand Bad Girls Go To Hell is a social commentary while on the other hand it is a low budget nudie film. Its power to move comes from the fact that it exists at all.
