Malibu High

Malibu High is a movie that doesn’t know what it is. The poster promises a beach-blanket romp. What you get is a high schooler’s journey from call girl to contract killer, played with grim sincerity. It could work. It doesn’t, but it could.

Jill Lansing plays Kim, an 18-year-old senior who’s lost her boyfriend and is flunking every class. Her solution is entrepreneurial. She takes a job as a call girl for Tony, the local pimp-slash-drug-dealer, and simultaneously seduces her teachers so she can blackmail them into giving her A’s.

What’s surprising is the tone. A sex comedy would wink at us. A cautionary drama would wag its finger. Malibu High does neither. Kim approaches prostitution and blackmail with the flat efficiency of someone filing taxes. She likes sex fine and money better, and the A’s are pure spite. A smarter film would have found the dark comedy in that detachment. This one plays it straight, which creates a different kind of comedy entirely.

Lansing’s early scenes are pitched at a level of intensity the material hasn’t earned. She argues with her mother about breakfast as though reporting a hostage situation. She also looks old enough to be teaching at the school she’s attending. But a strange thing happens as the movie escalates. By the third act, when Kim is plugging folks who’ve fallen behind on their payments to the loan sharks, Lansing’s overheated delivery suddenly fits. The movie caught up to her.

And escalate it does. When a trick turns rough, Kim kills him with an ice pick and confesses to her new pimp, Lance, that the murder excited her. Lance buys her a gun. Soon she’s assassinating people on assignment while still blackmailing her teachers. Her principal suspects grade tampering, so she murders him by hiding his heart medication and watching him die. The climax sends her to kill the father of her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. I am not making any of this up.

The climactic chase scene is scored to a royalty-free tune that would later become the theme for The People’s Court. You can’t plan that kind of comedy, and the movie certainly didn’t.

This is its central problem and its cult appeal. The bones of a genuine deadpan satire are here, an ABC Afterschool Special that took a hard left into Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. But making that kind of film would have required a director who understood the joke. This one seems painfully unaware of its own nature.

The trouble starts with the pacing. Malibu High commits the one sin no exploitation picture can survive: it bores you. The editing plods. Scenes either drag on too long or include needless interstitial shots, as though the film is checking its watch and realizing it still has forty minutes to fill. Great low-budget filmmakers either mask their poverty or weaponize it. This one films a classroom set where curtains hang on blank walls to suggest windows, then parks the camera in a wide shot that makes absolutely sure you notice.

There is exactly one memorable image: the principal dying, framed through Kim’s legs as she stands over him. It should have been a sharp punctuation mark. Instead the shot holds and holds until the punctuation becomes the entire paragraph.

Still, the film had potential. Alex Mann plays Tony, Kim’s first pimp, as a garden-variety sleazeball. Garth Howard plays Lance, the upgrade, as something more unsettling—a kind of Charlie dispatching his lone Angel on killing assignments, all business and quiet authority. The contrast between the two men is the most interesting thing the film does on purpose.

And it lands a laugh-out-loud joke. When Kim’s mother demands to know the source of her daughter’s sudden wealth, Kim says she’s gotten a new job. What kind of job? “I told you,” Kim says. “I’m doing relief work.”

But it’s not enough. Lansing goes topless through much of the picture with a fearlessness that suggests she trusted the filmmakers to match her commitment. They let her down. Malibu High has earned a cult reputation over the years, and I understand why. It’s easy, at a distance, to remember the ice-cold performance and the lunatic plot and forget all the dead air in between. Memory is kind to movies like this. Sitting through them is another matter.