Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965)
Directed by Doris Wishman
Wishman was one of the earliest and most prolific female independent producer/directors, so naturally you won’t find her in any but the most esoteric of history books. That could be because she was an early pioneer of sexploitation, or because her grammar was unruly. Bad Girls Go To Hell, a hypnotic nightmare of sex and violence, was her breakthrough. A woman kills her rapist and goes on the lam, finding one sordid character after another in a futile search for shelter. Wishman would frequently cut away from her characters when they spoke so their voices could be dubbed later. This has the effect of taking even more power and agency from her heroine, turning the film into a noir of sleepwalking self-annihilation—a minimalist, masochistic mix of Detour and The Lady from Shanghai. Scout Tafoya (Apr 23, 24, 7:30pm at Anthology Film Archives’s “Beyond Cassavetes: Lost Legends of the New York Film World”)