Mantis in Lace

(1968) **

I found an actual grindhouse movie! This is the real deal, complete with tawdry intrigue, bad production values and plenty of skin. And it sucks! One of my favorite parts happened right away, when it turned out the movie is confused about its own title:


Lila here is our main character, a popular stripper in a "hippie" joint, ogled by hordes of men while she dances worse than Elaine from Seinfeld. If you decide to dare this movie, take a good look at the mirrored stage above. You're going to see a lot of it, as the flick is generously padded out with several long scenes of various strippers doing their thing. Lila even has her own theme song, an inanely mellow guitar ditty with a woman singing "Liiii-luhh. Liiii-laahh." I'm ashamed to admit that this song actually got stuck in my head.

Lila takes one of the "hippie" customers (so designated by his earring (?)) to the warehouse where she lives. He turns her on to acid and they have long, boring sex. Mostly we watch the guy's back as he endlessly grinds his face into her neck and she says "oh, wow." Then suddenly the trip goes bad and she sees stuff like this:



She pushes the guy off of her and hacks him up with a nearby butcher's cleaver. I guess when all you have in your house is a mattress and a butcher's cleaver, that's how it goes. Oh wait! She also has a record player for playing the Lila song, so she can do a private dance for her next tryst, a talky psychologist.

A typical "head-shrinker"

Turns out Lila loves the acid, and keeps forgetting that it always makes her freak out and kill people. Out to catch the killer are two of the worst cops ever. They keep finding cardboard boxes full of chopped-up bodies and then stand around the office talking about how hard it's gonna be to find out who did it. "We'll have to check all the hippie joints on Sunset, all the psychedelic shops and go-go palaces." "Huh, that'll take us about a year."

This is good fun but it's also a bit of a hike to get through. It put me to sleep two nights in a row. When Lila played the Lila song for the shrink, the camera would cut to the record player now and then and the needle wouldn't have moved an inch. I know it was the same shot re-used, but I started to think I might be trapped in amber or something. Liiii-luhhhh...