#339: Malibu High
Release Date: May 4th, 1979
Format: Streaming (Tubi)
Written by: John Buckley and Tom Singer
Directed by: Irvin Berwick
2.5 Stars
The scummy little sexploitation pic Malibu High opens with our protagonist, Kim (Jill Lansing), waking up and lighting a cigarette on the edge of her bed, fully nude. Down the hall her mother (Phyllis Benson) is yelling to come eat breakfast. They’ll sit together at a little kitchen table, and Kim’s mother gives her a hard time about her smoking and about her grades, and about how it’s such a shame that Kim’s boyfriend (Stuart Taylor) dumped her for the richer and prettier Annette (Tammy Taylor).
Later, when Kim returns home from school at Malibu High, they’ll get into it again:
Kim: Honestly mom, how many times have you already dusted today?
Mom [sigh]: Just trying to keep things clean, and you’re certainly no help.
Kim: Clean? More like antiseptic! You’re always fussing, but you don’t care about yourself! Look at you. You’re always in that rag.
Mom: Really, Kim, what do you expect me to wear around the house? An evening gown? Or maybe one of the minx your father left me? Ha!
Kim: Don’t joke about daddy. No wonder he couldn’t stand it here. You could have looked decent once in a while! Instead of worrying about dirt! And dust! And greasy build up! Maybe then you wouldn’t have driven daddy away! And maybe daddy wouldn’t have had to kill himself because he couldn’t get it up any more!
Kim then storms out of the house.
It’s scenes like this that define Malibu High, with its hilariously melodramatic dialogue and its fixation on the tragic power of female attractiveness. Malibu High tells us that if a woman doesn’t cash in on her sexuality, she’s susceptible to losing her man and pining away at school or housework as life passes her by.
That’s what it seems like to Kim at least, and the rest of the movie shows her in full rebellion. We’ll see her sleep with her male teachers and then blackmail them for better grades. We’ll see her prostitute herself out of a van for a pimp named Tony. We’ll even see her later kill Tony and multiple johns when she falls in love with a rival pimp (Garth Howard), who uses her as his personal assassin.
Director Irvin Berwick, a veteran of sexploitation flicks going back to the mid-sixties, has no budget to work with here. The interior dialogue scenes are brightly front-lit and sometimes out of focus. The photography doesn’t get any better during Malibu High’s numerous sex scenes, either. Far from titillating, it’s mostly just Berwick wielding a handheld camera as we watch nude, middle-aged men writhe on top of Kim in a fully lit room. Gross.
I’ll generously label the film’s soundtrack as campy and fun. There are some funky ‘70s music stings that punctuate the end of dramatic scenes, and the score is that type of easy listening muzak that they used to play in department stores when I was a kid. It’s an odd juxtaposition against Kim’s increasingly violent and erratic behavior.
So why do I like Malibu High? It mostly comes down to Jill Lansing’s casting as Kim. She’s a raw performer (think ‘70s porno actor), and not particularly pretty (no disrespect), so she fits nicely into the film’s bare bones mise-en-scène. As the movie plays out, and doesn’t get any better, you start to appreciate her more and more. She’s a trooper, damn it, and she believes in Kim’s antics even if we don’t.
The script from John Buckley and Tom Singer is pure exploitation. Malibu High is no probing psychological exercise in which we’re trying to understand a grieving and angry young woman. This is not Charlize Theron sympathetically portraying the serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, fueled by drug addiction and sexual trauma.
Nope, Malibu High is just cheap exploitation and it has just the right lead in Jill Lansing as Kim, a young woman determined to sleep and kill her way to the top.
Postscript: The best scene in the movie is when Kim entraps her school Principal (prolific bit actor John Harmon, from Ritzville, Washington; shoutout Ritzville!) in her living room during a home visit. He’s there to inform Kim’s mom that she’s been expelled from school for sleeping with her teachers, but Kim’s mom isn’t home. Kim invites the kindly old man in, seats him in an easy chair, rifles through his coat pockets to steal his heart medication, and then gives him a topless lap dance that kills the poor bastard. Berwick’s best shot of the whole film is when he puts the camera down on the shaggy living room carpet, looking through Kim’s parted legs at the old man dying. We feel bad for him, and then we feel stupid that we care so much about him in this silly movie. Now that’s great exploitation filmmaking!
