MOVIE REVIEW : Sleazy, Low-Budget ‘Lingerie’

“Dead Women in Lingerie” (at Laemmle’s Grande) is a wanna-be big-time sex thriller: a low-budget independent movie trying to copy the glitzy, higher-budget slashfests, with barely an ounce of glitz to toss around.

The premise is both predictable and unpromising. Scantily dressed illegal alien lingerie models are being slaughtered by a maniac while their piquant, lissome, rich-girl boss (Maura Tierney) has a comical romance with a health-nut slob of a private eye (co-writer John Romo).

This mixture of coyness and sadism is pure ‘80s: semi-realistic but banal sex chatter under L.A. sunshine grafted onto a bloody paranoid comic strip, drawing sloppily from Brian De Palma, John Carpenter and even, probably, Katt Shea Ruben’s “Stripped to Kill.” And it doesn’t become any more palatable when it’s done without the usual glossy overproduction.

There’s also an incongruous TV feel to this satiny-sleazy shocker, like a mid-level late-night show gone raunchy, and it’s not just due to the bright, mundane camera style. Familiar actors like Jerry Orbach (as the sweatshop’s owner), Dennis Christopher (as a vicious INS cop), June Lockhart and Lyle Waggoner (as Tierney’s parents) and Beaver’s nemesis Ken Osmond (as a rich nerd) keep popping up in “Lingerie.” Orbach mostly looks mournful, Lockhart and Waggoner look chipper, and Christopher and Osmond harass or annoy everybody.

“Dead Women in Lingerie” (Times-rated Mature, for sex, nudity, violence and language) is mostly exploitation/gore and cutesy-poo blather, but a vein of spurious social consciousness gets dragged in too: another vice the movie shares with some of its sources. Director/producer/co-writer Erica Fox dedicates the movie to her mother, another immigrant who worked in sweatshops.

Reading that, you wish she had forgotten all this froufrou thriller stuff, these maniac killers, soft-core corpses and bloody POV stalking cameras. And you wish Romo had abandoned his attempts to find the mystical middle ground between Jim Belushi and Tom Hanks, and that Fox and Romo together had simply made a movie about the plight of illegal aliens working in L.A. dress shops. That movie would have had a chance to be good--or, at least, interesting.

‘Dead Women in Lingerie’

John Romo: Nick Marnes

Maura Tierney: Molly Field

Jerry Orbach: Bartoli

June Lockhart: Ma Field

A Seagate Films production. Director-producer Erica Fox. Screenplay Fox, John Romo. Cinematographer John Newby. Editors Mark Stratton/Stacia Thompson. Costumes Catherine Beaumont. Music Ciro Hurtado. Production design Adam Leventhal. Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (language, nudity, violence, sex).