Good, the Bad and the Wicked, The Review

Reviewed by Nat Hocken  on  2/16/2003

According to her audio biography, Syren, the pretty Oriental who gets squaw duty in Brad Armstrong’s “The Good the Bad and the Wicked,” carefully selects the movies she appears in, preferring those films that “really showcase her acting ability.” Maybe that’s true. But I guess sometimes a check is nice, too. I can’t imagine what else would have drawn her to appear in this picture.

Though the boxcover, with its chicks in Old Western garb and the tagline, “Missy’s in town with a few days to thrill,” gives an impression of narrative, “Wicked” is, instead, a collection of seven more or less random sex scenes strung together like beads on a thin Western theme. No, not a theme, a gimmick: the sheer number of sex scenes tells you that much. Clocking in at just under an hour and a half, this film can’t support seven sex scenes AND a story, or pay anything more than lip service to the Old West.

So, sure, Missy rides into town—packing a big bag of nothing. It’s up to the town’s “unofficial historian” to jumpstart the action. And being the only man in a town full of horny women, the only action he cares about is of a sexual nature. As he gives Missy a rundown of what goes on, the film cuts to various locations in and around the town to fill in the details. It’s the details that make this a disappointing film.

I’m not here to tell you that the sex is noticeably different from any other mainstream girl/girl film; I’m here to tell you it isn’t. That’s the problem. Armstrong and Wicked Pictures went to a lot of trouble to dress up this movie—the costume rentals alone could probably pay for an entire Ed Powers film—only to make the typical porno mistake of failing to put this effort to meaningful use. What’s the point of putting a girl in a saloon dress if she’s going to take it off before you’ve had a chance to admire her in it? Yet that’s the way this movie works: 30 seconds after a scene opens, the sex begins. You can forget about any visual foreplay.

Forget about raw sexual activity while you’re at it, this is a “mood” movie, complete with musical overlay, dissolves, and slow camera pans. What Armstrong doesn’t realize is what directors like Andrew Blake and Michael Ninn learned a long time ago: the kind of mood these effects produce gets shot all to hell when you let the girls talk. Armstrong has his music, but he lets you hear the sex as well. By the time you get to the saloon girls in Scene 3, you’re thinking we’d all be a lot better off if they were screwing on the countertop of the No Man’s Land bar. Save the gimmicks, give me the sex.

Of course, what we’re talking about here is pretty run-of-the-mill sex. The best scene takes place on washing day and Armstrong accidentally gives us a few good shots of Nici Sterling in her big dress while Roxanne Hall eats her out. Stephanie Swift’s first scene balances this one out, however: it’s a badly choreographed tryst with Charlie that ends without ever really concluding the action. The rest is standard porn issue.

Except the barbershop scene: Missy asks for a shave and gets sex instead. Sure, it’s ridiculous—Missy winds up shaving the barber!—but some may enjoy the sight of Ruby having her pussy shaved with a straight razor. I could have done without it.

Which is how I feel about “The Good the Bad and the Wicked.” The gimmicks don’t work and the sex is so basic it’s almost bland. But being a Wicked disc, it’s loaded with special features: audio bios, trailers, several photo galleries, and a Making Of segment. I wonder if the Making Of piece explains what went wrong with this picture? Maybe you can tell me; I wasn’t interested enough to find out.