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You find gems in the weirdest places. Take oysters, for instance. They look like ugly sea rocks inhabited by a
living lugy. It’s mystery enough why we
ever decided to eat these things, but who the hell would have ever expected a
pearl to be lodged inside one. False
advertising all the way round. The
feeling of discovering a gem of a movie in equally unlikely places can be even
more exhilarating that finding pearls.
Well, no, not really, but it can be pretty gosh darn exciting. Allow me to share one of my favorite
discovers. With its generic title and
wildly misleading cover, it would be easy to write it off MALIBU HIGH as a
typical bubbled head ‘70s sexploitation hogwash, but trust me here, this movie
is a diamond in the rough.
The Capsule:
Kim (Jill Lansing) his having a shitty year. She constantly fights with her mom (Wallace
Earl Laven), she is flunking out of school, she’s broke, and her boyfriend
Kevin (Stuart Taylor) dumped her for a stuck up rich honeypot. Fed up, she decides to turn her life
around. Not by putting forth the
slightest bit of effort and hard work, that’s strictly for losers. Kim plans to get ahead the old fashion way,
through sexual blackmail and prostitution.
Naturally, it works out excessively well for her. Soon Kim is tooling around in her own sports
car, getting straight As, and has scored a rich new boyfriend/pimp. Once Kim makes the jump from hooker to
hitwoman, though, the rewards really start rolling in. The only thing holding our amoral heroine
back is that she is still hung up on her ex.
Kevin’s about to find out that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,
especially when she is a self-centered, murderous sociopath. It’s all part of the kooky fun happening at
Malibu High!
Warning: I cannot overstate how amazing this movie really is. It starts off as a cynical, sleazy teen sex romp and ends as a trash noir. It's more than the sum of its grimy little pieces, though. Even knowing exactly what happens in this movie will not
prepare you for exactly what happens in this movie. 
This poster certainly didn't prepare anyone for what they were in store for. It might not be as bad as marketing John Carpenter’s THE
THING as a family Christmas movie featuring The Muppets, but it's pretty
close. The poster gives the impression
of a light hearted, rolicking sex comedy, with pretty people getting it on in
the California sun. The cute little
surf bunny seems raring to have some naughty fun. Maybe she is, who knows? That woman isn’t in the movie. Neither is sun, fun, nor comedy, at least not
the intentional kind. Unless director
Irvin Berwick was secretly a satirical genius.
I’m betting it was unintentional. 
There is plenty of sex, though, and if you like your sex
depressing and gross, you are in for a treat. Kim goes through a whole stable of oily men,
most of whom have more back hair than real horses. There
is no serious action, thank god. It
mostly amounts to people rolling around in their underwear, feigning enjoyment, and
boobs. So many boobs. 
Well, mostly just Jill Lansing's boobs, but they are around so often they might as well be given their own credit. She's an attractive woman, but as far from a frisky sex kitten as you can get. Her first scene sets the tone. After her long-suffering mom wakes her for school, Kim drags herself out of bed, topless, and immediately lights up a cigarette, looking like the hungover cop in a '80s action film.
To the uninitiated, the first act of the movie would seem
like the origin of every after-school special ever made. You have teen drinking, teen drug use,
failing grades, suicide, and, of course, teen prostitution. I’m amazed they didn’t manage to get some
teen pregnancy in there somewhere. I
swear, they even use an actual after-school special music sting from time to
time. The brilliance of this movie,
though, is that while after-school specials were morality plays showing the
terrible consequences of torrid behavior, Kim is continuously and exponentially
rewarded for her bad decisions. It’s the
anti-after-school special. 
I don’t think I have ever seen a movie as tone-deaf to the
subject matter as this one. If you
thought PRETTY WOMAN misrepresented the glitz and glamor of prostitution, it’s
handled like a Ken Burns documentary compared to this beauty. I’m not sure that writer John Buckley even
understood what prostitution really was.
“Getting paid to have sex? That’s
sounds fabulous! I wish somebody would
pay me to have sex! Now where’d I leave
my bourbon?” 
The sentiment is echoed by Kim when she announces to her
best friend/doormat, Lucy (Katie Johnson), that she is going to going to get
both good grades and extra cash “in the nicest way I know.” This crazy disconnect from reality is present
even though the situation is objectively horrible.
She starts at the very bottom working out of the van of her lowlife pimp
Tony (Alex Mann, resembling a sleazier version of Schneider from One Day at a
Time). In one scene, there is literally
A LINE of construction workers waiting for their turn in the van. Not only does Kim remain fresh, limber, and in good spirits, she eagerly offers extra
sex with each guy to skim more cash for herself. 
The movie keeps throwing in moments where it looks like the end of
Kim’s gravy train, but it never happens.
She just does worse and worse things. When Kim’s
elderly school principal turns out to be the only male at Malibu High who can
resist her bewitching boobs, she just pushes him into a heart attack. Graduation with honors! Suave, Rolls-Royce driving Lance (Garth
Pillsbury) lures her away from Tony’s sex van with the promise of making her a
high-class call girl, only to completely fulfill his promise! When one
of her kinky new clients gets too rough and ends up with an ice pick in his
back, Lance takes one look at the mess and—wait for it— apologizes to her! It’s such
a pimp cliché, I know. 
Then, sensing her latent natural talents, Lance offers her a career upgrade to professional assassin.
Her first target is, of course, Tony the Douchebag. It’s only after she awkwardly shoots Tony in a parking garage she realizes that violently snuffing out a man’s
life is just as satisfying as she hoped it would be. Prostitution was great and all, but killing
people for money is really where it’s at. 
Karma eventually catches up with Kim at the very end
[spoiler]. Ducking out after a contract hit,
Kim runs into Kevin’s new girlfriend, Annette (Tammy Taylor). This is not such a coincidence, because the
guy she was hired to rub out was Annette’s dad.
Kim plugs Annette, but can’t
bring herself to put down Kevin. The movie
turns into an episode of Starsky & Hutch at this point, with Kevin chasing
Kim down a beach to a canned funk soundtrack. Kim turns the gun on
Kevin, and after a wonderful speech that is both apathetic and nihilistic, she
is suddenly shot by a couple of cops on top of a distant cliff. Her body hits the sand and cue credits! The moral seems to be less “crime doesn’t pay”
and more “crime is awesome, just don’t wuss out when it’s time to shoot your
ex-boyfriend.”
It’s a shame that this was Jill Lansing’s one and only
movie, because Kim is one of the most thoroughly despicable human beings in
cinema history. Not a villain, mind you,
just a horrible person. She sneers her
way through the movie, barely containing her contempt for her mother, best
friend, authority figures, or society at large. The entire movie rests on her resentful, reprehensible
performance, and Lansing pulls it off beautifully. At least, I hope it was a performance. 
This was also the last directorial effort for Irvin Berwick,
though he went out on an incredibly high note.
It takes a special kind of
director to make a movie so thoroughly and hilariously misguided. Just
imagine the possibilities if he were still around today. His tale of an unpleasant, undeserving brat
who continues to succeed despite an ever-growing string of flagrantly awful behavior
would have made him the perfect director for the inevitable Trump biopic.
Anyway, stay in school, kids! And don’t have sex with your teachers!
C Chaka
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