Poor Pretty Eddie (*1/2, 1975)

This exploitative piece of junk has the distinction of having both Shelley Winters and Ted Cassidy (Lurch from The Addams Family) in the cast. A popular jazz singer, traveling alone in the Deep South, finds herself stranded in a podunk town in which the local inn’s proprietor is an Elvis-like lounge lizard with psychopathic tendencies. Winters plays the madam/former showgirl who pines for her better days, and it’s likely the actress herself was pining for her better days in Hollywood, days when she didn’t have to do crap like this. Slim Pickens is a good ol’ boy sheriff with a blue-streak mouth, and Dub Taylor plays the justice of the peace. And a justice of the peace is kind of like Chekov’s Gun – if there is one, you can be sure one will be needed at some point in the movie. If I had to pick out one part of Poor Pretty Eddie that wasn’t horrid, it’d be that of the protagonist, Liz Wetherly, played by Leslie Uggams. Wetherly is put through a lot of anguish, let me tell you, as she’s essentially held hostage in the small town by the innkeeper, Eddie (Michael Christian). And guess who Uggams wound up playing later in her career? Blind Al from the Deadpool movies. Funny how careers go sometimes. Meanwhile, Winters would hang around for more than 25 years, making a slew of bad movies. She did this film just three years after doing The Poseidon Adventure, so you can see how much that movie affected her career. Hey, if you want to hear classic Hollywood actors like Winters and Pickens spout four-letter words and references to female anatomy, have at it.

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