Sugar Cookies (1973) Starring Mary Woronov and Lynn Lowery

 

Like a prototype Vertigo remake (before De Palma gave it his old college try), only with a prototype Basic Instinct kind of icy (no pun intended) kick to it on a tenth of the budget of each. It's a story where a personal obsession leads this antiheroine Camila (Mary Woronov) to take a new woman who she is "casting" for an adult film, and the woman just happens to looks like the spitting image of her dead ex lover, a different adult star Alta, with Lynn Lowery as both the woman who dies in the first scene and this new woman, Julie Kent, who Camila befriends/beds/grooms for revenge. So, yeah, imagine if Scotty in Vertigo was not just shaping New Madeline into the Old Madeline, but getting her ready to enact revenge against Gavin Elster for fucking with him so bad.

Not an exact analogy, and ultimately there's a reason for that. Sugar Cookies lacks much of the moral and psychological ambiguity and the sheer weight of cinematic expression and grammar on the process of becoming infatuated and what that does to a person, which is what makes Vertigo the monumental or simply memorable film it still is - that Hitchcock could see through desire and idealized images while doing just that - and as far as the Basic Instinct comparison that comes down to really the lead being so Stone Cold Set in what she's about, though this film lacks the verve and humor that carried. Not that this doesn't try for humor, but arguably it comes from what I imagine was co writer Lloyd Kaufman finding the Gus character simply hilarious (and good God is it distracting how much that guy is like a young Jonah Hill teleported back in time, but digress).

If Sugar Cookies doesn't aim so high or achieve too much in the way of creating psychological depth between these two women, one who knows all and another who doesn't, then at least for one thing the filmmakers understand that there's this dominant-submissive angle that isn't expressed in sex so much (though they do get intimate, at least eventually) as it is in behavior and overall control, and the director cast Woronov, a force of nature who prior to this was largely one of the Factory Girls with Warhol, and Lynn Lowery, so well, in particular with a lot of trust put on the latter in a dual role as the heart of the film (in her debut) and allowed them the space to make these women emotionally complex and rich... to a degree.

One small example with Woronov comes to mind with how good she is here: there's a scene where Camila is getting Lowery into bed for a sort of role-play, naked (as she is for more or less half the film), and becomez shall we say very intimately familiar with her body via a small handgun, and the allusions of course to the former Alta, who Julie is now well aware of (at least on film and by reputation) leads to a brief struggle and fight to stop. Woronov does the whole "fine get out they were just blanks etc" thing, and then moves on the bed to make Julie guilty. One can say she is still manipulating her, but look at the pleasure and smiling Woronov is doing after all this, as if she knows this is all so silly (hey, they were just blanks). This is where we get some uncertainty in a good way about the character and it's driven by her performance; is she still playing her Instrument of Revenge, or is she getting emotionally closer to her in a genuine way? Or both? It's one of those times with an actor boosts the writing.

It is unadalterated sexploitation, and the Shannon performance is fairly one note (though he has a great look) as one of those master manipulative men of the adult film world - not that I can't believe men didn't exist like that then and still do, just that the actor plays it in a way that is icy but not on the same level as Woronov - and there's plenty of draggy time between the ladies in the middle where it feels like the script just said "They run around and go frolicking in a field" or some shit, and that one comic (barely a) subplot is nonsense. But there is something going on as far as a sordid, almost Neo-Noir tale of performative mindgames via a righteous Femme Fatale leading to the conclusion one can guess a mile away, and it shows that Lloyd Kaufman started out with something to say as a writer. If it falls short of what it reminds us of, it at least tried.