POSED FOR MURDER
Directed by Brian Thomas Jones. 1989. United States.
Any movie that opens with a still frame of its lead actress’s bikini-clad crotch is bound to be a winner, right? Over credits, we get even more cheesecake photos of our lovely lead, Laura, including some topless shots. You don’t hire a Playboy Playmate like Charlotte Helmkamp to play the lead in your movie and not have her take her clothes off. This is common sense. But baring it all in the opening credits? Certainly, there’s a point to that. Either this movie is going to be a snoozefest people wouldn’t watch without the promise of more nudity, or the movie is going to eventually say something about the crass sexualization of women in horror.
Turns out, it’s both of those things.
Laura is a budding actress gunning for a role in Meat Cleavers From Mars, the latest masterpiece from snobby horror director Serge LaRue. Despite the need for nudity (and having to work for deferred pay), Laura is thrilled by the prospect of a callback. She’s trying to go legit, so to speak, and leave her days of nudie modeling behind her. And just in time, too, as her overprotective ex-boyfriend, Danny, has just gotten out of jail. He would disapprove of other men cranking it to his girl, I’m sure.
After a ludicrous late-80s gym montage full of glistening muscles, rock-hard abs, spandex-clad asses, and jiggling boobs, we meet meathead Rick, a large slab of man who has eyes for our lead. The two hit it off almost immediately, probably because Rick is the only man in her life who doesn’t turn into a drooling sex pest in her presence. The two fall in love just in time for someone to start stalking our leading lady, mouth breathing heavily as they watch her from the shadows. Laura is hard-talked into posing nude one last time, and this is the straw that breaks our mysterious camel’s back. Before you can say PERFECT BLUE, the stalker is carving up all the men out to take advantage of our precious Laura.
This leads Laura to meet Detective Steve Barnes, yet another mulleted man’s man in a movie filled with mulleted man’s men. Turns out, Detective Barnes and dreamboat Rick have a past. Rick used to be a cop, a dirty one at that. Not that Laura seems to mind, but our Detective sure does. In fact, he appears to be strangely into our lovely lead. Maybe the killer is closer to Laura than we think.
I don’t think POSED FOR MURDER is as empty-headed as it appears to be. It clearly wants to say something about how sexualization, exploitation, and the way men (and the media empires they run) treat women’s bodies like commodities to be traded. Laura is a sympathetic character, one who wouldn’t feel out of place in a post-Me Too movement modern slasher. She’s a woman who constantly has her background in, let’s be honest, fairly mundane sex work held against her like original sin. She’s guilted into posing for another round of nude photos and told that she should leverage the magazine sales to get a role in a movie. They might as well have said that the only thing talented about her is her tits. When Laura finally does get the role, she’s crushed to find out that they want her to take her clothes off for the camera. There is clearly a point to all of this.
It’s just a shame it gets lost in the utter boredom. Charlotte Helmkamp is beautiful and even likable, but she’s not an actor, and neither are our two male leads. The real stars of the show are all the creepy weirdos in the supporting cast, especially William Beckwith. They are cartoon characters, every single one of them, and it’s a joy to watch them die. I will give the movie that. When it stops being semi-serious and starts being schlock, it works. At one point, the killer drops the world’s largest knife into a whirling garbage disposal. Not only does the garbage disposal somehow swallow this stupidly large knife, but the killer rams their hand down into it to stop the blade from disappearing. Why? Because they wanted to make a gnarly-looking mutilated hand, and it’s great. And while all of this ridiculous climactic shit is going on, the film is cross-cutting between Laura’s struggle for survival and a shot-on-video slasher movie playing on the TV in the next room. After 80 minutes of slow-moving slog, the ending is a welcome blast of fresh air.
But it says a lot about POSED FOR MURDER that my favorite scene isn’t the gory deaths, mutilated hands, or unconvincing struggle between two people with a 100-pound weight difference between them. No, it’s when Laura, convinced that a killer is about to break into her home, picks up a small statue and hides in the shadows, waiting to brain the killer as he walks through her front door. It’s tense. It’s suspenseful. And then Charlotte Helmkamp sneezes, and no one yelled “cut”. They just kept filming because fuck it.
That's all you need to know really.