Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold

I used to love Scream Queen movies. Back in the day, of course. My favorite was Monique Gabrielle, but I also liked Elizabeth Kaitan and Brinke Stevens and Jewel Shepard and a few others. Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray made some very fun movies in their early careers. However, when Ray’s Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold came out in 1995, the Scream Queen craze was getting a bit long in the tooth.

I know that there are scads of so-called Scream Queens today and I’ve seen a few of the Seduction Cinema productions. I’m not overly impressed by them. To me they seem to be trying to recreate a time and place that no longer is in existence.

Fred Olen Ray has good intentions, I think, and Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold isn’t the worst thing I’ve seen. Yet I can’t find it in my heart to recommend that you buy it on DVD. Maybe on a bored night with a twelve pack you could watch it on Skinemax, but that’s about it. The jokes are thin and the effects are sharp cheddar. The girls don’t seem to have the zest or charm as the casts of some of the earlier movies. J.J. North, though certainly attractive, has a hard edge to her features. Maybe I’m becoming a nostalgic old fool, but the earlier Scream Queens seemed to have more personality and the later ones merely resemble generic strippers.

The plot is pretty threadbare. A serum to enhance beauty is misused and it makes two centerfold girls into giantesses. Lots of sight gags, rock bottom jokes and plenty of exposed skin.

Ray made a movie with a similar shtick just three years earlier with Evil Toons, yet I found that movie to be infinitely more entertaining and titillating. Heck, even movies as pathetic as Scalps or The Tomb (to name a couple of early Fred Olen Ray films) seem more earnest and defendable than Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold.

I see these guys like Ray and Wynorski, still making bargain basement cheesefests or kiddie dreck after all these years and it seems sad. I’m a machinist in my day job and I’ve been one for nearly twenty years. I’d feel pretty lousy if I was still a novice and never really developed any skill or style at it after all that time.

There are a few good points to Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold. It’s nice to see George Stover in it, as well as John Lazar, Michele Bauer, Forrest J Ackerman, Russ Tamblyn and even that old ham Jay Richardson.

And I don’t hate all of the modern Scream Queens. I like Debbie Rochon and Ariauna Albright. The girls that make these pictures are just chasing their dreams, like any budding musician, actor or writer. I give them their due. I’d just like to see pretty women in better pictures than Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold.