Nice Girls Don't Explode
Dir: Chuck Martinez
1987
**
While it is always tempting to bet on the horse with the funniest name or buy the ale with the silliest, they almost always come last or taste horrible. The same caution should be taken with b-movies. 1987’s Nice Girls Don't Explode is a film I found in the depths of a video store that was going out of business in the early 90s and to this day I’m the only person I know who has actually seen it. It’s no real boast or honor though to be honest. Written by magician Paul Harris and directed by Chuck Martinez (who also directed one of my favorite episodes of Superboy – but that’s about it), Nice Girls Don't Explode is a great example of low-budget b-movies of the 1980s that played with the very 1950s style of warning kids about the dangers of adult life. The 30s brought us classics like Refer Madness and other dramatized propaganda films. These developed over the years and in the 50s they were sensationalized and certain subjects symbolized to resemble something else. Some great right-on classics used the same methods but generally Aliens = Communists and independent thought lead to crime, drugs and sometimes death. Exploitation films played around with the format and in the 70s and 80s many churches actually secretly funded horror films that showed young fornicators and drug takers being killed by axe-wielding bogymen. It’s the staple formula in horror – don’t take drugs or have sex outside of marriage or else Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers or Leatherface will cut parts of your body off. The 1980s was far more playful and the propaganda films were made fun of in many an awful b-movie – on the flip side though there were many ‘comedies’ that used similar methods to get important messages across (such as transgender issues and race) but did so in the worst ways possible (see Something Special - aka Willy/Milly and I Was a Teenage Boy – and Soul Man). Of course there were still serious propaganda films around such as Red Dawn and Rocky IV but that was because the cold war was still very much in full swing. Nice Girls Don't Explode’s premise was simple – Don’t have sex before marriage. The ‘why not?’ was explored in this instance through a young girl called April Flowers. Her overprotective mother wants her to stay away from boys but for good reason - flames have a tendency to spontaneously erupt whenever her hormones are aroused. April, who is clearly desperate for some intimacy, goes against her mother’s wishes behind her back but does use precaution – a fire extinguisher which she brings on all her first dates. After many incidents, April tends to date only Firemen but when she reconnects with her former neighbour Andy, he challenges April's and her mother's assumption and presses his luck to prove to her that her hormones are not, in fact, explosive. Hijinks result; as Andy tries to prove his point and get the girl, he is thwarted at every turn by April's mother. Further complications ensue when April befriends a lonely, obsessive pyromaniac named Ellen, who becomes incensed at the constant mishearing of his real name for "Helen," and begins to start fires of his own. It’s a neat idea but its badly made. The low budget really doesn’t have anything to do with the poor quality of much of the film and everything to do with the poor script. It’s sold as a soft-core sex comedy but it isn’t. The title is, as you’d expect, somewhat sensationalist but there is some quirky quality to the film. Michelle Meyrink is pretty charming as April and she plays the part straight but not over serious. Wallace Shawn’s Ellen also raises a few laughs, even though his character is badly written and shoe-horned into the story for no real reason. There are many terrible but brilliant b-movies to chose from from the 1980s and while Nice Girls Don't Explode is far from the best, it’s also far from the worst. It’s actually fascinating watching it as it’s hard to decipher what its really all about.