Living to Die Reviews

Un film de Wings Hauser, LIVING TO DIE also stars the made-for-video action axiom as Vegas detective Nick Carpenter, checking out babes and dodging bullets in a choppy, ham-handed attempt at a hard-boiled mystery thriller. The prologue actually places Carpenter in L.A. as a cop, just long enough to get his scrappy feminist partner killed while trying to take custody of a witness. Presumably this snafu forces Carpenter from the force, because the action abruptly switches to Vegas without any further explanation. There, Carpenter is now a detective taking abuse and doing dirty work for corrupt city commissioner Eddie Minton (Asher Brauner) for no discernible reason. Carpenter's latest unsavory assignment is to go after a blackmailer who saw Minton at a motel with a hooker who overdosed on cocaine. The blackmailer is murdered, leaving Carpenter to track down an address from a phone number on the back of a picture of the hooker the blackmailer oh-so-conveniently carried in his wallet. There, he finds the hooker, Maggie (Darcy DeMoss), alive and emerging naked from an outdoor hot tub. When he meets her more formally, she tells him a lollapalooza of a tearful story about how the man who was blackmailing Minton was also blackmailing her with compromising photos he was going to send to her abusive rich husband with whom she stays only because she's got this brother in a coma, see, who needs round-the-clock medical care. Whew! It's hard to tell whether Carpenter is taken in by the story or Maggie's shapely breasts (which get only slightly fewer closeups than Hauser himself). After giving Maggie a squeeze and more, Carpenter promises to squeeze Minton for the million dollars originally earmarked for the blackmailer so they can run away and take care of Maggie's brother at the same time. But another of Maggie's violent admirers beats up Carpenter and takes off with her and the money. Minton catches them and, after extracting the truth, has Carpenter killed before picking up where he left off in the motel room, with a now slightly bruised Maggie, who's so tearful she makes her "bruise" makeup run. LIVING TO DIE is so incoherently nutty at times that, if it weren't played with such deadly earnestness, it could have been an enjoyable spoof of the bullets-and-breasts video genre. The breasts, especially, dominate the action as virtually every actress who spends more than three minutes onscreen manages to be relieved of her top within two. In one case the camera ogles a topless bar dancer for several minutes even before Carpenter enters the scene. Yet Carpenter's platonic gal pal Jasmine (Minnie Madden), an evidently time-warped, displaced black-clad beatnik, manages to draw rousing applause in a biker bar with a fully clothed interpretive dance number! Is this an auteurist signature? Or is Hauser trying to tell us something, since the women whose breasts are exposed are all "bad"? It's probably more of the latter, but it's a little hard to tell. The film credits an "additional editor," who doesn't appear to have helped much. LIVING TO DIE plays mostly as just one darn thing after another, with scant motivation for either plot or characters beyond the promise of further female breast exposures. For all that, Russ Meyer, the legendary director of breast-o-ramas like VIXEN and BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS can rest easy. Hauser shows no evidence of being a pretender to his crown. LIVING TO DIE is a boob movie made strictly for boobs. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations, adult situations, nudity.)