In the book that inspired these Weird Wednesday posts, Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive, Lars Nilsen writes, “This was promoted as ‘the female James Bond.” There’s some truth to that. Both have two legs and carry a gun. But if I had to choose between a James Bond movie and Ginger, this would win nine throws out of 10. Unlike 007, Ginger is a hard-faced, bleached blonde biker chick from New Jersey who goes undercover to expose a marijuana and white slavery ring. This is about the most mean-spirited, merciless, joyfully cruel example of rough sexploitation you’re ever likely to luck into. It has a casually nihilistic “we’re all scum, but only some of us admit it” attitude that’s, well… refreshing. And it’s hilarious, particularly if you have an irredeemably sick sense of humor. In Ginger’s world, all men are scum who deserve to be killed and worse. And Ginger does much, much worse. With piano wire in one case.”

This stars Cheri Caffaro, who, no offense to Nilsen, was born in Pasadena. At a very young age, she won a Life magazine Brigitte Bardot look-alike contest, beating Portland Mason, James’s daughter. Her husband, Don Schain, may have eventually produced High School Musical for Disney, but he made three scuzzy Ginger movies with his soon-to-be wife: this film, The Abductors and Girls Are for Loving.

Ginger McAllister takes on a job of infiltrating a gang of criminals. This often means sleeping with men and women, which can often mean using piano wire on a dude’s tallywhacker and threatening to cut it off. This feels like porn without penetration, the kind of porn that was playing the Avon and the rougher theaters, as Ginger is tied up and assaulted several times, yet always comes out on top, even when bad guy Rex Halsey (Duane Tucker) rapes her. After all, the cut to her face assures us that she likes this.

If you’re expecting a 1971 grindhouse movie to have any morality… just wait for the scene where Ginger relates how three black guys assaulted her when she was young and how much she hates African-American men, using all the language you would hope she wouldn’t.

That said, this is Tracey Walter’s first movie, playing Ginger’s brother. One day, he would be Bob the Goon.

This is the kind of sex movie that makes no one want to have sex ever again. Bodies just fall onto one another, nudity seems like an attack on you and at no moment does anything feel arousing. Ah, the 007 of 42nd Street. I want to watch her fight Olga.