Hot Lips | Robert Michaels | 1984
I’ve owned a VHS copy of this one for ages but it never interested me until I took a closer look at the cast and noticed it featured Tish Ambrose and Michael Gaunt, who both appeared in a few Roger Watkins films. The director credited to Hot Lips is Robert Michaels, who produced the Watkins films Her Name Was Lisa, The Pink Ladies, A Day in the Life of the Cosmopolitan Girls, and Midnight Heat.
A suburban nosey-neighbours scenario featuring a mute peeping Tom, his bumbling english-teacher father (Gaunt), the sexually voracious mom (Sandy King) across the street, and her daughter (Ambrose), who is the Stratocaster-wielding guitarist in a band called Hot Lips, who are rocking out too hard and rankling the neighbours. It’s fun to see them playing along to the Peter Lewis Connection soundtrack in a creepy unfinished basement.
I feel like this is the kind of film Michaels was trying to get out of Watkins. He succeeded with The Pink Ladies and Cosmopolitan Girls, two of the lesser entries in the Watkins oeuvre (that still manage to stay weird), but trying to contain the genius of one of the greatest film-makers of the 20th century is no small feat.
Shot on film and edited on video, Hot Lips is silly and goofy — you even hear some “waanh waaanh waaaaaanh” sound effects over Gaunt’s father-knows-best attitude. The title track by the Peter Lewis Connection is great, and you hear it a few times, but much of the score is straight out of a late-40s Abbott and Costello movie.
