Chesty Morgan's Bosom Buddies Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		0.5
Video		3.0
Audio		1.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.5

Chesty Morgan's Bosom Buddies Blu-ray Movie Review

Too Big to Fail

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 9, 2012

Chesty Morgan's Bosom Buddies, the title of this latest collaboration between Image Entertainment and Something Weird Video, is something of a misnomer. Only two of the three films on the Blu-ray star Chesty Morgan, the stage name of the Polish-born exotic dancer who holds the world record for the largest unenhanced bust size ever measured. Morgan, whose real name is Lillian Stello and who now lives a quiet life of retirement in Florida, never made the move to a full-time film career. She assured her place in trash film history with Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, then was asked by Fellini to film a role for Casanova that he ultimately cut from the completed movie. A part in John Waters' planned Flamingos Forever never materialized, because the film itself was never made.

A more accurate title for Bosom Buddies would be "Selected Films by Doris Wishman", the New York City-born schlock director sometimes called "the female Ed Wood". It was Wishman who brought Chesty Morgan to the attention of a larger audience that included Fellini and Waters by starring her in two films. The third film on this Blu-ray, The Immoral Three, is nominally a sequel to Double Agent 73, but Chesty Morgan doesn't appear in it, even though her character does. Wishman just used another actress with a considerably smaller bust. Wishman never cared about such trivia as continuity within the same film; so why should she care about it in a sequel?

For anyone interested in learning more about Wishman and her career, I recommend starting with Wikipedia.

Wishman's "aesthetic", if you can call it that, relied on barely coherent stories, wooden acting, poorly synchronized dialogue, ghastly costumes and decor, bizarrely timed edits and gore effects so laughable that "cheesy" is too good a description for them. The plots are hardly worth following, let alone summarizing. For anyone wanting to quibble with my scoring of the films, my only question is: Seriously?

Deadly Weapons features Chesty Morgan as Crystal, a successful ad executive with a soft spot for a small time hoodlum named Larry (Greg Reynolds), of whom she's too ashamed to introduce him to her father (Phillip Stahl). In classic fashion, Larry says he just has to finish one more job, but it involves double-crossing his boss by stealing a notebook filled with incriminating information. When the boss discovers Larry's deception, he has him murdered. Crystal tracks down the men responsible, seduces and drugs them one by one and smothers each of them with her breasts. By the end, justice is thoroughly served, but continuity is just as thoroughly violated. (Viewers will know what I mean.) The film's most notable feature, other than Crystal's bosom, is Harry Reems, already famous as the star of Deep Throat; he plays one of Larry's killers.

In Double Agent 73, Morgan is Jane Tennay, an operative for a government agency. A mysterious crime kingpin known only as "Toplar" heads a heroin distribution ring, and Agent 99 gets too close to his identity and is murdered, but not before communicating that Toplar can be identified by a scar. Jane Tennay is assigned to take Agent 99's place and instructed to force Toplar out of hiding by assassinating his various operatives and photographing each victim with a tiny camera surgically implanted in her left breast. The first victim is the nurse overseeing Jane's post-operative care, who tries to kill Jane before she even gets started. The loud "snap" of the shutter as Jane lifts her breast to take the picture becomes a running joke; at least, I think it's meant as a joke.

It turns out that the camera also contains a bomb, which is meant as the agency's fail-safe if Jane is captured and interrogated. After numerous deaths, Jane is rushed into surgery with an overwhelming lack of suspense just before the deadline she's been given for reporting back to headquarters, and the camera is removed. In the meantime, though, she's fallen in love with Atlantis 7 a/k/a Tim (Frank Silvano), the agent assigned to shadow her during this dangerous mission. Duty and personal life struggle for primacy in the classic battle of priorities faced by every dedicated career woman. (No, that's not the real conclusion, but it sounded better.)

The Immoral Three (which features its alternate title, Hotter Than Hell, on the source used for the Blu-ray) has the most elaborate "plot" of the three films, partly because it has three leads and partly because it has to make room for soft core sex scenes. It opens with the murder of Agent 73, Jane Tennay, by an unseen assailant. Jane is played here by Cindy Boudreau, who looks nothing like Chesty Morgan and who reappears shortly as Ginny, one of Jane's three daughters. The other two are Sandy (Sandra Kay) and Nancy (Michele Marie). All three daughters are summoned to Jane's funeral by her attorney, John Erickson (Robert S. Barba). None of them knew that the others existed, or even that their mother was still alive until recently.

Sandy is the product of Jane's marriage, which ended in divorce. Ginny and Nancy are "occupational side effects" conceived on various undercover assignments. Together, they must discover their mother's murderer in order to claim an inheritance of $1 million each. In an unwisely trusting move, their mother expressly provided that the death of any of them during the investigation would increase the amount to be distributed to the survivors. Erickson gives them a list of suspects and the keys to their mother's house, then turns them loose.

Sandy shows little inclination to do anything other than lounge about, but Ginny and Nancy begin working through the list. All three of them manage to find time for scenarios familiar from the early days of porn (and set to the same style of cheap lounge music) involving handymen, delivery boys and strangers stuck in elevators. Still, every time Ginny or Nancy get close to anything resembling a lead, an unseen assailant intervenes and kills off anyone who knows anything. By the time the multiple conspiracies are revealed, enough dead bodies have piled up for the last act of a Shakespearean tragedy. The thought that most troubled me as the credits flashed by was that the film's plot was just coherent enough for some junior exec at today's twist-obsessed studios to try recycling it for a "legitimate" thriller.

Chesty Morgan's Bosom Buddies Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The image on this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is perplexing. Doris Wishman shot her features on film, but none of these features looks like film. Let me explain.

I'll start by leaving aside various inserts that are special cases: stock footage (e.g., airplanes taking off and landing); footage borrowed from another film (e.g., nudist camp scenes at the beginning of Double Agent 73); location shots captured "on the run" with what looks like 8mm home movie cameras (e.g., the Nevada scenes in The Immoral Three). By the time these went through whatever processing was required to get them into Wishman's negative, they probably already looked awful. On the Blu-ray, they look like grainy videotape.

The majority of these films, and the portions I've chosen for screenshots, were shot (however badly) on sets (however makeshift) and processed by a lab (however cheaply). I have no idea what kind of elements Something Weird provided to Image Entertainment, but the result is a remarkably clean and, when in focus, detailed image that is almost entirely devoid of any visible grain structure. It almost looks like video, except that video of this quality was not being recorded in the mid-Seventies, and certainly not in cheap productions like those of Doris Wishman.

Now, before anyone starts crying "DNR", please bear in mind that the vice of so-called digital noise reduction is that it strips away detail and smears the image, which is not the case here. The image isn't smeared, and there's detail aplenty. If the site rules regarding screencaps allowed, I would gladly post an image showing the full extent of Chesty Morgan's assets with all their texture and veining on display. That's precisely the kind of fine detail that disappears in the classic "DNR" scenario, but it's all here. What's missing is the film grain. (Anyone who thinks he can see it in the screencaps, wait until you've seen the disc in motion; then we'll talk.)

Colors are vibrant and well-saturated. After you've seen just how thoroughly awful Seventies style could be in the hands of someone with truly bad taste, you may find yourself wondering how humanity survived.

Chesty Morgan's Bosom Buddies Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Contrary to the specifications listed on the disc jacket (which claim DTS-HD MA mono), the audio for all three features is mono encoded as Dolby Digital 2.0 at the DVD-standard bitrate of 192 kbps. I doubt that it matters much with source material of such low quality. The sound is reedy and thin, with limited dynamic range; the voices sound detached and distant and rarely match the lips from which they're supposed to be emanating (Chesty Morgan had to be dubbed because of her thick Polish accent, but Doris Wishman generally post-dubbed everyone and did it poorly); and the music and effects sound like they were done on a consumer-grade tape recorder circa 1975. Hiss and static are plentiful, as are pops, breakup and crackles, with The Immoral Three suffering by far the worst in the latter regard. Then again, no one ever watched a Chesty Morgan film for the audio.

Chesty Morgan's Bosom Buddies Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Doris Wishman Trailer Show (SD; 1.33:1): A "play all" feature is included.
• Indecent Desires (2:52)
• My Brother's Wife (2:52)
• The Amazing Transplant (2:18)
• Another Day, Another Man (2:41)
• Bad Girls Go to Hell (2:14)
• Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1:59)
• Deadly Weapons (3:00)
• Double Agent 73 (1:24)
• Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls (2:03)
• Hot Month of August (2:36)
• The Immoral Three (2:05)
• Nude on the Moon (1:52)
• The Sex Perils of Paulette (2:21)
• A Taste of Flesh (2:17)
• Too Much Too Often (2:53)


• Gallery of Doris Wishman Exploitation Art (SD; 1.78:1; 5:11): This "slide show" of print advertising for Wishman's unique oeuvre is accompanied by voiceovers for trailers or, possibly, radio ads, assuming that any stations of that era would accept such ads.

Chesty Morgan's Bosom Buddies Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's no lost classic to be unearthed here and no witty subtext smuggled in under the radar. One either does or doesn't have a taste for this particular species of trash. I'm passionate about my own tastes in junk entertainment; so I'm in no position to pass judgment on anyone else's, but this isn't a disc to be recommended for or against. It's simply there for those who want it.