Last Call Reviews

If LAST CALL proves anything, it's that the sight of Playboy Playmate Shannon Tweed writhing onstage in a transparent body stocking is the definitive stress test for pacemakers implanted in heterosexual males. Apart from that this production does little service to humanity. Cindy (Tweed) is an exotic dancer by night, but during the day she's a secretary in the office of Jason Laurence (Matt Roe), a shady entrepreneur who goes into partnership with naive businessmen Paul Avery (William Katt). When Jason's assets, including a movie production company, prove to be nonexistent, the corporation goes bust and crooked Laurence gets all the liquidated capital. That's when Paul, looking for evidence against Jason, meets Cindy. It turns out her mother, a 1960s B-movie queen, was murdered by Jason years ago, and Cindy has waited all this time for revenge. In between steamy love scenes, Paul and Cindy pull a "sting" that empties Jason's entire bank account. The scheme would be foolproof--except that Paul's other ruined partner doesn't know about it and goes crazy over his losses and clumsily tries to kill Jason. The frantic con man believes Paul has marked him for death, and confronts him for a lethal showdown. LAST CALL was produced by Ashok Amritraj, one of a veritable dynasty of world-class tennis pros from Madras, India. His brother Vijay Amritraj not only made the semifinals at Wimbledon, but also acted in a few motion pictures, notably the James Bond adventure OCTOPUSSY. Ashok has remained behind the cameras, however, creating in tandem with director Jag Mundhra a series of lurid, sex-drenched thrillers for the home-video market. The previous entry, NIGHT EYES, starring Tanya Roberts, actually held up rather well, mixing eros and thanatos with a good premise and interesting characters. LAST CALL, however, delivers only on the sleaze. The protagonists are flat, and their varied scams lack imagination or suspense. The plot only marks time between prurient interludes, the highlights being Tweed's aforementioned "performance art," and an adulterous triangle between Jason, his young wife Carol (Karen Elise Baldwin) and Betty Dubois (Stella Stevens), her middle-aged sexpot mother. The latter may be encouraging for the fiftysomething crowd, but on the whole LAST CALL is slick nastiness for video voyeurs, and it arrived at stores in unrated and tamer R-rated versions. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations, adult situations, nudity.)