OK, now we’re really getting to the fringe stuff. In fact, of all the film’s I’ve reviewed, this is the one that I really must suggest you procure and see for yourselves. For those so interested, it’s marketed by Something Weird Video. A link to their webpage is (or will be) provided on my link list. This film is the work of a woman whose oeuvre makes Ed Wood look like Orson Welles. Really. You will never see a film as inept in all departments as her work. It is literally beyond the power of mere words to describe. So, before we begin, let’s meet this paragon, the inimitable Doris Wishman.

Ms. Wishman actually has an historic distinction as a filmmaker. She was the only woman prominent in the cinematic field of what is now known as the "Nudie Cutie". These were films that featured plenty of female nudity (although usually confined to breasts and butts), but tended to be rather light on actual sexual content. As the legal climate loosened up, the Nudie Cutie was replaced by the soft-core skin flicks. These tended to feature lots of sex, but usually of a simulated nature. These, in turn, were replaced by the hard-core porn of today, available in the backrooms of local video stores across our great nation. Wishman directed quite a number of such flicks, the most famous of which is Nudes on the Moon, wherein astronauts discover (surprise!) nudists on the moon. But for me, Wishman’s most noteworthy work is her two collaborations with another extraordinary woman entertainer: the one and only Chesty Morgan.

Chesty was a well-known stripper on the grindhouse circuit, famous for her outlandishly giant breasts. Be warned, however. These are not the firm silicon domes available for constant viewing by today’s cable TV audiences. No, these were rather saggy, mooshy, hefty-bag sized glands hanging down (way down) the stout torso of a woman who was hardly a beauty queen in any other department either. Another of Chesty’s distinctions is that she is, without doubt, the absolute worst actress ever to be filmed in any way at any time. For instance, in Chesty’s first collaboration with Doris Wishman, Deadly Weapons, Chesty goes undercover as a stripper. Watching her, you just can’t believe that anyone could be so inadequate in pretending to be a stripper. Then you remember: in real life, Chesty was a stripper! She’s the kind of actress that makes you disbelieve her when she, say, answers a phone. Chesty’s other claim to fame is that she owns what has to be the most grotesque wardrobe in the history of mankind. Ugly, loud patterns, belling sleeves and pant legs, giant frilly collars and the ever present plunging necklines, which either leave her cleavage or her entire breasts open to inspection.

The plot of the seminal Deadly Weapons follows Chesty as she seeks revenge against the gangsters who killed her boyfriend. She tracks them down, seduces them, and then suffocates them with her, eh, chestal units. Even though Chesty and Doris purportedly did not get along, well, money talks, you know? Deadly Weapons made dough (hard as that might seem to believe), so they reunited for this second classic. Two points are in Double Agents 73’s favor over their earlier piece together. One, Doris was smart enough to have all of Chesty’s dialog dubbed in by another actress. The second advantage is that the "plot" is about ten times goofier, and so that much more fun.

Some shaky camera movement eventually establishes that our locale is a two-story suburban house. Inside are two guys playing cards. One, Igor, has a giant birthmark on his cheek (you can’t miss it, the camera zooms in on it at length). Outside in the bushes, in broad daylight yet, we see a third man. Sporting a bad Seventies haircut and mustache, we watch him skulk around the house. After "breaking in", Mustache Guy begins to conduct what has to be the lamest attempt at a "search" ever committed to film. During this scene, we see the first of many examples of one of Wishman’s directorial trademarks: constant shots of people’s shoes. Amazingly, he manages to discover the microfilm he’s apparently after. However, while trying to leave through a door totally different than the one he snuck in, he’s clobbered from behind. Birthmark Guy calls his unseen boss "Toplar", which is hazily repeated by the half-unconscious victim. The two henchmen carry him outside (hey, how come on the outside it’s the same door he came in, but inside it’s an obviously different room? Just that "Wishman Magic", I guess) to dump him in the trunk of a car sitting out in the street. Again, this is in broad daylight, on a street surrounded by other housing. However, and because of sloppy editing I’m really just kind of guessing here, Mustache Guy fights his way free. His foes jump in their car, following him for about a block going all of around ten miles an hour before running him down. Dragging the body onto some guy’s lawn, our villains leave. Just before Mustache Guy expires, he’s found by an associate. Mustache Guy indicates that Toplar has a scar on the right side of his face, then passes away.

Next we cut to an establishing shot of what looks to be Gilligan’s Island. Here we meet our heroine, wearing the first in her parade of awful, horrifying outfits. In this case it’s a short red skirt, a big black bikini-top kind of harness for her giant orbs, and her trademark mile-high platform shoes. We instantly notice that whatever Chesty does, she does awkwardly. Lounging on a stone shelf, standing up, sitting down, whatever, she looks either like she never did it before or as if she were a hundred years old and afraid of breaking a hip. Especially when walking. Wobbling up on top of her omnipresent platforms, Chesty looks at any given moment like she’s about half an inch away from pitching over. Chesty is informed over the PA System that she has a call. We cut to a shot of a phone sitting on a table. Then, to make sure we "get" it, we cut to a closer shot of the phone. Chesty (somehow now wearing a different top) answers the phone. It’s her boss, telling to get back pronto for an important assignment. Chesty demurs, but finally ends with a wistful look that says, "Calgon, take me away!".

Next we see a plane landing in what appear to be Stockfootage Town, USA, as the plane landing is followed by generic shots of a city, cars driving, and, finally, a building. There, Chesty is greeted by Bill, her boss. It turns out that Chesty is a government spy or assassin or something. Bill tells her about Toplar, who’s flooding the country with "low-grade" heroin. No one knows what Toplar looks like, only that he has that scar Mustache Guy talked about. There are other agents working on the case, but, he warns her, Toplar is known to have infiltrated their spy organization (never named). For anyone who has never seen a movie before in their entire life, this means that we can count on Chesty being betrayed by someone close to her before the movie’s over.

Bill gives Chesty a kid’s blue report binder with the names of Toplar’s underlings. She’s to investigate them (or kill them, or something). She’s also to take a photo of each one, and of anyone she ends up killing, to see if they can be identified as being Toplar. Look, I know this doesn’t make much sense, but this is like trying to put together a puzzle when you didn’t get all the pieces. Finally, Bill informs Chesty that it’s "imperative" that she return to his office by 10:00 p.m. on March 22^nd. This is repeated twice, so obviously it’s supposed to be "important".

Next we see Chesty dozing with a bandage on her chest. This introduces the movie’s hilarious plot device: Chesty has had an "XL17 camera" surgically installed in her left breast (!). All she has to do is pull up on it, and a flash and camera "click" go off, indicating that she’s taken a picture. How this would work is left to our imaginations. Sure enough, though, Chesty spends much of the movie (too much, in fact) climbing out of her shirt and bra and taking photos of her victims.

We get right into it. The attending nurse gives Chesty a painkiller. However, an Obi Wan-esque voice reminds her not to trust anybody. Besides, the nurse was acting suspicious. When she sees that Chesty has shellacked her eyelids with thick slabs of silver makeup, she tells her "you look pretty." Let’s just say that this represents an, uh, unusual esthetic perspective. Anyway, Chesty pretends to take the pill, and sure enough, the nurse goes down the hall to phone in her success in bumping her off. Chesty waddles down the hall and strangles her with the phone cord. Unsurprisingly, one shot is of the nurse’s legs as her shoes flail around. After she’s dead, we get our first practical demonstration of Chesty’s ridiculous breast-camera at work.

The first name in Chesty’s notebook is Mark Chiaro, Toplar’s "top man". He can be found at the "Bigelow Rock Bar". However, rather than shoot at an actual club, we instead see shots of Chesty and Chiaro in front of a wall of shiny gold tinfoil sheets, "cleverly" intercut with stock footage of a rock club. These include, of course, shots of the dancers’ shoes. Chesty ditches Chiaro and breaks into his office, identified with a big number "6" cut out of a coloring book and taped to the door. Chesty uses a lame "explosive" device to open the lock, something that would embarrass even Dean Martin’s Matt Helm. After conducting an intensive search of the unlocked desk for about ten seconds, Chesty finds some incriminating papers. Off goes the blouse. However, Chiaro shows up and attacks her (I think this scene is in slow motion, but who can tell?). Chesty momentarily escapes by blinding him with the flash from her breast camera (!). Then she somehow escapes out of the office by running towards the camera, toward what an earlier shot had established as a blank wall. Ah, that Wishman magic.

Chesty and Chiaro engage in a "car chase" that probably wouldn’t have made the cut in, say, Bullitt, or Smokey and the Bandit. Chiaro catches Chesty when she pulls over (?) and hustles her into his car. He drives her somewhere and lets her attempt to run away before he shoots her. Since we’re talking the awkward Chesty here, on her trademark platform shoes, well, you can see why he didn’t think she’d be able to escape. However, the camera zooms in on a lipstick Chesty left in the car, and then the car explodes, so I guess it was a bomb. Or something. Chiaro’s name is now scratched from the notebook.

Next we cut to Igor’s dank little apartment. In Wishman films, the only rival for the consistently awful clothing on display is the dependably grotesque decor showcased in any home or office. Igor gets instructions from Toplar to have an unknown woman (Chesty) bumped off. Toplar’s unable to provide her name, but luckily he has her address (?!). Just then (what a coincidence!), Chesty’s welcoming a female friend who’s coming to stay for the weekend. Chesty leaves to get instructions to meet fellow agent "Atlantis-Seven" at the local zoo, leaving her pal to take a shower. Gee, what’ll happen now? Well, golly, Igor’s assassin, Dimitri, breaks in and we watch Wishman’s "tribute" to Hitchcock’s shower scene from Psycho. When Chesty returns to find her dead friend, horrified moans are dubbed in over Chesty’s blank expression, from which we gather she’s annoyed at the prospect of cleaning out the tub.

Chesty goes to the zoo to meet with Atlantis-Seven. Actually, this turns out to be a code name, his real name is Tim. They instantly hit it off, and we groan as we see the "romance" that’s sure to blossom. Meanwhile, Igor gets a call: Dimitri killed the wrong woman. When Chesty returns to the apartment, she fails to look around, in spite of earlier that afternoon finding her friend’s bloody corpse in the shower. Sure enough, Dimitri pops out with a gun. However, before he can shoot, Chesty strokes the ugliest decanter in the history of mankind, and Dimitri is incapacitated by a stream of smoke. Chesty then suffocates him by filling his mouth with ice cubes (?). This is followed by a call from Tim, asking for a date. Chesty accedes, and soon they’re making out on his sofa (thanks, now I’m scarred for life).

Chesty’s next assignment is "Hans Schmidt" (uh, what’s that, French?). She goes to his apartment and ambushes his girlfriend, Gerta, tying her up in the bathroom. Applying a lotion to her breasts, Chesty climbs into bed with the sleepy Hans. In the movie’s most improbable moment, we’re to believe that Hans doesn’t notice that Chesty, whose chest is roughly ten times larger than Gerta’s, isn’t his lover. He nuzzles her breasts, but the lotion Chesty applied was poison (!) and he soon dies. Photo time!

Chesty’s next target is Igor. However, he ends up capturing her. After a little extremely fake beating, he, of course, begins to molest the "beautiful" Chesty. He’s interrupted by the arrival of Gerta, who wasn’t an innocent bystander after all. She "beats" on Chesty a bit, then goes to get food. Igor gets a call from Toplar, and is confused when he’s ordered to let Chesty go, unharmed. However, Chesty has escaped her bonds and is waiting for the right moment to escape. When Gerta returns, Chesty slashes Igor with a bottle and disables Gerta with a really phony karate chop. Photo time!

Meanwhile, Bill is worried. It’s almost the 10:00 deadline he gave Chesty, and he has no idea where she is. It turns out that, worried that she’d be captured and tortured (or something), he had a bomb installed with the camera (!), due to go off at 10:00. Frankly, I think this particular piece of info was on Chesty’s "need to know" list. Needless to say, Chesty stumbles in at 9:57. Bill calls an ambulance, which we’re to suppose got there and drove her to the surgeon who then removed the bomb in the three minutes remaining before it exploded.

Later, the recovered Chesty sits in with Bill to go over the photos she took, hoping to find proof that one of them was Toplar. All the photos go by (they’ve been transferred, not to slides, but to a film reel (?)), until some accidental photos of Tim show up, taken when they were, uh, you know (frankly, I really don’t want to think about it). Hey, Tim has a scar on his ear that no one previously noticed. Why, he’s Toplar! Actually, we’d already guessed that. I mean, Toplar had to be someone we’d seen in the film, and that only left Tim. Tip to young screenwriters: to increase suspense in your mystery story, write in more than one suspect.

Chesty, who has fallen in love with Tim, goes to get him. However, Tim has fallen in love with Chesty, and admits (though not in so many words) to being Toplar, then states that he wants to make amends and marry Chesty. Chesty responds to his heartfelt plea by shooting him. This provides a classic Wishman "moment". Doris had a shot of a snub-nosed revolver being fired in front of a black background. She would insert this whenever she needed a "gunshot". And she uses it here, in spite of the fact that Chesty’s pistol isn’t a revolver but a semi-automatic, and that she’s in front of a yellow wall. This is a definite "auteur" moment.

The next scene has Bill calling Chesty about her next assignment (he doesn’t even ask about Tim), in Istanbul. Chesty protests her disinterest, but a superimposed shot of a plane on Chesty’s cleavage indicates that she’s soon on her way (or that a plane is taking off from Chesty’s chest. There’s certainly enough room). Ah, Chesty, where will your life of danger lead you next?

IMMORTAL DIALOG:

I think all the dialog was pretty much improvised, and it’s too unimaginative and generic to be funny. Sorry.