It's time.
Crystal is a woman with enormous boobs. Picture the biggest boobs you've ever seen on a person, and then approximately double them in size, and you're looking at the kind of boobs Crystal has. She looks to be in some degree of pain most times of the day, which is totally understandable if you've ever had big boobs or worn big boob prosthetics before. Yet she has problems even bigger than her boobs. Her boyfriend, Larry, is a mobster, and he's decided to go out on one last big score before settling down with her--he steals a notebook vital to his boss, in order to blackmail him for 100 grand. But he's not quick enough and gets gunned down. Fortunately, Crystal overhears that one of the killers is a one-eyed man named Captain Hook, who is going to stay in a hotel in Vegas. She tracks him there, and her one-woman war against the mob begins.
And she kills her victims suffocating them to death in her boobs.
I've mentioned Doris Wishman here and there on the site before, and at only one other time does she shine brighter than she does here in Deadly Weapons. We'll get to that other movie in this year's Spookyween, but for now let's talk about her. Wishman is one of the most idiosyncratic sexploitation directors of all time. It is somehow entirely her to see an actress like Chesty Morgan (nee Liliana Wilczkowska, who plays Crystal, as you may expect) and immediately think, "Hm, yes, those puppies could be used for murder. But I also have to arouse my audience to make money. Well, c'est la vie--I'll just combine the two." For good measure she brought in Harry Reems, perhaps to trick people into thinking this was a hardcore feature. And then, she set about directing it.
I'm sure there's a better verb to fit Wishman's style of film creation than "directing." Wishman's true power the ability to hollow out other human beings and make them instruments of her id. Somehow, she managed to translate her batshit ideas into modes that were comprehensible, but no less batshit. It's almost like everything is directed wrong. There's brightness, prettiness, but everything is cheap. It's par for the course, archetypically so, as far as mid-century sexploitation goes: horrible, cheesy voiceovers, abrupt interruptions from familiar stock music cues, bored-looking actors, comic-relief "boing" sounds in the presence of tits, and missed-by-a-mile fake violence. Doris takes these already-unconventional cinematic occurrences, and then does them as aliens would do them.
Consider one of the recurring oddities of the movie: when Chesty/Crystal unveils her mammoth mammaries to go in for the kill, the music will cut to instead play a stock horror lightning strike, as if Chesty's tits are the new Universal monsters. They may as well be. Isn't there a scene in Gulliver's Travels where Gulliver accidentally sneaks a peek at some Brobdingnagian junk, and it's so humbling he becomes impotent? Well, even the toughest among us will break down in horror before the monolithic (or duolithic) sight of Chesty's chesticles. I mean this all with the fondest respect. When Crystal isn't looking contentedly bored, she really does look like her bra strap is cutting into her back.
Then, there is the repetitive dialogue. Crystal's tipoff that a man named Captain Hook killed her beau wouldn't be possible unless Harry Reems was there to say, "You're a pretty good shot for a man with one eye, Captain Hook" three separate times. (This is also contingent on the fact that Captain Hook's real name turns out to be Captain Hook, but whatever.) When Crystal is hunting Captain Hook, she calls the service desk of the hotel to see if he's checked in yet. When they say he isn't, she waits five seconds, tells herself, "Maybe they just didn't check carefully," and calls again...with the same result. It's a completely pointless sequence that doesn't even waste enough time to be considered padding. I don't know what this was supposed to accomplish. It doesn't make Crystal seem like a more insistent investigator, it makes her seem ineffectual and impatient.
And I'll never get over how bad the violence looks in a lot of these movies. When the mob boss goes to "crush" Harry Reems' hand with his shoe, he's not even touching him! Add that to the fact that Reems is a porn actor, so his whimpers of pain sound weirdly sexual. That's actually a pretty common feature of these sexploitation flicks, I should point out: pain and pleasure are usually the same as far as vocals are concerned. Especially if it's got the Doris Wishman stamp of approval on it.
Deadly Weapons is not for everyone, and upon rewatching it for this review, it's slower than I remember. However, if you have patience, and the capacity to absorb lengthy shots of titanic boobs, then you will be well-rewarded in strangeness. And you know what? This movie had a fucking spiritual successor. Double Agent 73 has Chesty Morgan running around with a camera hidden in her boobs, taking pictures in the name of heroic espionage. Yepppp...
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