Joe Dante’s Fleapit Flashbacks – Bonnie’s Kids

Here’s another installment featuring Joe Dante’s reviews from his stint as a critic for Film Bulletin circa 1969-1974. Our thanks to Video Watchdog and Tim Lucas for his editorial embellishments!

Gunplay and sex, both in comparatively moderate degree, make this crime‑chase programmer a better than average booking for ballyhoo houses and drive‑ins, especially where younger adult trades predominate. Rating: R.

No, the Bonnie of the title isn’t Bonnie Parker, but considering the sort of things her kids are up to, she might as well be. This sex‑crime saga from General Film Corp. is strictly ordinary exploitation stuff in most respects, but it does move along at a nice clip and features enough nudity, violence and inexplicit sex to rate as amusing, lowbrow fun for the adult action fans. Its main distinction, more visual than artistic, is the lead presence of the magnificent Tiffany Bolling (uncovered, as they say, in PLAYBOY and remembered as the devastating young thing who picks up the hero in the best scene of THE MARRIAGE OF A YOUNG STOCKBROKER).

Miss Bolling displays, in addition to her body, about as much performing promise as possible under the circumstances. Miss Bolling, 22, and Robin Mattson, 15, are sexy sisters who have all the local yokels drooling. One night, horny stepfather Leo Gordon just can’t take it any more and tries to rape Mattson, only to be shotgunned by her sister. Rich uncle Scott Brady takes the fleeing pair to his estate, where lesbian wife Lenore Stevens takes an interest in Mattson. Brady, a crook, has white and black thugs Alex Rocco and Tim Brown (the former footballer) hire Steve Sandor, an amazingly dumb private eye, to pick up a shipment of stolen money and deliver it to Miss Bolling. The two immediately hit the sack together, and she convinces him they should make off with the loot.

Meanwhile, after a night of offscreen passion, Mattson walks out on Miss Stevens, who shoots herself. The irrepressible Miss Mattson wrinkles her nose disapprovingly at the corpse: “What a creep!” Rocco and Brown track the fugitives all over the Southwest until Sandor accidentally kills somebody. Things look bad, then worse when Miss Bolling shoots a cop, who wounds Sandor. The thugs follow them into the desert and shoot both, proving that crime does not pay, at least for nonprofessionals.

1972. General Film Corp. (Tomy‑J Productions). Eastman Color. 105 minutes. Tiffany Bolling, Steve Sandor, Robin Mattson. Produced by Charles Stroud. Directed by Arthur Marks..