Next up for our 2024 Hall of Fame inductions we have Dona Speir. She was best known for her Sidaris LETHAL Ladies films, but because we'd exhausted all the ones she starred in, we needed something else, and I found this gem on YouTube. In addition to us, Stacie Ponder at Final Girl has covered this as well.
Click: The Calendar Girl Killer has the great Ross Hagen (who also wrote and co-directed) as a famous photographer that may or may not also be a guy who dresses like a female nurse and kills people. Anyway, he has this crazy grinchy idea to do a violence-themed photo shoot, so he gets a bunch of models out to a ranch he has, and starts shooting them in skimpy outfits with various weapons in their hands. One of the models (Keely Sims) is there with her boyfriend (Gregory Scott Cummins), and he's not happy with her modeling career. He may have a case, because in the last 25 minutes or so, their model friends start getting bumped off. Can PI Hoke Howell help? Probably not, so it's up to Cummins and Sims to save themselves.
This is pretty fantastic, but it's not a 1990 fantastic, it's a 1990 in 2024 fantastic. If this was made today, and didn't kill anyone until an hour in, or if I was watching this in 1990 and saw that no one was killed until an hour in, I'd be like what the hell am I watching? But a 1990 movie in 2024, I know exactly what I'm watching, and I love it. Like when Gregory Scott Cummins on his dirt bike is chasing after Keely Smith and Ross Hagen on a winding highway, only to have another car come into his lane and hit him, causing him to go flying 20 feet in the air and land in a bunch of trees. Is he dead? Nope, "nothing's broken except my pride." It's like life can't get much better than that, can it? And there are more of those beautiful "what just happened?" moments that, combined with all the Members Only jackets, guys that probably hung out with your grandfather with popped collars hanging out with twentysomethings, and names you recognize, that make this such a great time. It's like a savings bond, it's only worth half as much in 1990 as it's worth now.
Speir is only in this at the very beginning, though based on the fact that she's in the opening violence-themed photo shoot montage--holding a bow and arrow no less--my hunch is she was supposed to be in this more. Consider the number of writers, 6, and the number of directors, 2, this probably had all kinds of issues, and maybe at some point they lost Dona, whether it was due to other commitments, or she just didn't want to work with them anymore. Whatever the reason, this was a smaller role than we'd like for a Hall of Fame induction post, but she doesn't have much more work after this beyond the Sidaris films we've already covered. And those of course are the reason she's getting this HOF induction. One of the definitive DTV franchises, the LETHAL Ladies films, and Speir was in seven of them, acting as the lead for five starting with Savage Beach--and perhaps fitting that in her first scene in this film, she's accompanied by Michael J. Shane, who played Shane Abilene in the LETHAL Ladies films after it was decided to center the films on her instead of whichever Abilene who couldn't shoot straight that Sidaris cast. We've seen bigger budget franchises of 5 or more films led by a woman now with Milla Jovovich in the Resident Evil films or Kate Beckinsale with the Underworld films, but it's still rare for a woman to helm a franchise over that many films, and Speir did it more than ten years before them. She may not have the large CV of other Hall of Famers, but the legacy of the films she's had is much greater. Here's to you Ms. Speir, you're truly one of the greats.
Someone who's making a case for a future induction is one Mr. Ross Hagen, which is something I didn't see coming when I started this site, knowing him more for 60s films like Hellcats and Sidehackers--which I discovered is actually called Five the Hard Way? But he's had quite a DTV career, starting with 1986's Armed Response, and making almost 40 DTV flicks before he passed in 2011. In the late 80s/early 90s he existed well in this space as a guy born in the 30s, wearing Members Only jackets and later-season Happy Days Tom Boseley transition sunglasses, speaking with his raspy, 70s Love Boat guest star voice, giving you that sense that he could either be your grandfather's younger friend, or a coke dealer, or maybe both. There's something soothing about it, and it is kind of crazy to think that Robert Downey Jr. was two years older when he made Avengers: End Game than Hagen was when he made this, because Downey Jr. isn't really a fun mix of grandfather's younger friend and coke dealer. That explains why Downey has to slum it making another Avengers movie, while Hagen was killing it in classics like this.
Does a movie that has "killer" in the title need to have kills sooner? Does a movie that has "calendar girl" in the title need actual calendar girls? Or maybe Neil Sedaka? Speaking of which, how did we make it through the 90s without getting Neil Sedaka in one of these movies? Yes, if you look at his IMDb bio, the songs he wrote in the 60s and 70s are still making him money, so it wasn't like he needed a quick paycheck; and I can't imagine he ran in the same circles as guys like Ross Hagen and Troy Donahue that maybe could've gotten him in a film like this just for fun, but still, I needed Neil Sedaka in a Members Only jacket with a pastel Izod-Lacost polo under it, pointing a revolver at someone while holding it in both hands. Anyway, no calendar girls, and no killers until the end, should be a wrap for a film like this, but in a way it adds to the charm. Like do I care what the movie is called when Hagen packs off a group of models and crew into a van, the van drives off, and then blows up, seemingly out of nowhere? Call it "Ross Hagen may at some point eventually dress up as a female nurse and kill people" if you want, if you're going to load it up with the stuff they did here, I'll take it.
Finally, we have a Chinatown sighting. This actually isn't the first time we've seen LA's Chinatown in a movie, there was also Lethal Ninja, and Chinatown Connection. I was trying to think of how many other Chinatowns we've had. The best I could do is a search of my site, which means I would've had to mention it in the post. Of those, we also had New York Chinatown, but then I think that's it for American ones. Outside the US, we've had Melbourne's in Revenge of the Gweilo, Manila's in Bloodfist, and Tokyo's in the Seagal flick Into the Sun. This dovetails with a point I'm about to make about the Chinatown here in Philly, which is danger based on a recent development between the mayor and the NBA team, the 76ers. In my post on The Double, I talked about Washington DC and how it had a nice Chinatown. I hadn't been in 10 years at that point, but earlier this year I went there to see a Wizards game, because the arena is also in Chinatown. In 2001, that arena was new--It was called the MCI Center, remember that company?--and Chinatown was much more robust. Now, in 2024, it's a shell of what it was then, the arena and all the accompanying development that comes with it had diminished it considerably, now instead of the Mongolian restaurant, we had a Yard House and Caesar's Sportsbook. In Philly they want to do the same thing, only the arena the Sixers and the mayor want to build will not only do the same thing to our Chinatown, it will also jam up the main east-west thoroughfare on game nights, making the city a total mess. It puts me in a quandary, because, like others, other than the one ticket I'd already bought for a game, I'm done with them until they change course on this; but on the other, tickets are really cheap right now. Opening night is under $60, which I haven't seen that low since the mid-2010s when they were horrible. It's tempting, but I gotta be strong. Save Philly's Chinatown, no Sixers arena downtown!
And with that, let's wrap this up. I found this on YouTube. That version wasn't bad, so hopefully it'll stay there for a while, because this is a lot of fun and worth checking out. And then congratulations to Dona Speir on your induction into the Hall of Fame! It's well deserved, and people can celebrate by watching any of your LETHAL Ladies films on Tubi.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099278
Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/
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