WELCOME TO THE GRINDHOUSE: LAS VEGAS LADY - Luck be a lady tonight!

While I thought that Tarantino and Rodriguez's experiment in resurrecting seventies cheese with Grindhouse more or less a failure, I am grateful for one thing. They did manage to raise the audience awareness of the genre, and of course in true Grindhouse fashion, dozens of DVD companies have jumped on the bandwagon, releasing dozens of low budget crap on disc.

Some are more successful than others, but the best one of the lot is probably BCI/Navarre 's Welcome to the Grindhouse series. BCI has managed to get their mitts on a ton of flicks from Crown International - one of the bigger distributors of schlock and trash from the glory days of the drive-in - and are releasing them as double features at a very reasonable price.

The second movie on this disc is a heist movie from 1975 called Las Vegas Lady. We open with a girl named Lucky visiting the mysterious - well, he doesn&#146t get a name, so we'll just call him Mister Big, in a old west recreation town on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Lurking in the shadows of a saloon, he tells Lucky that the job goes down Thursday, and we get some exposition about how Eversull will have the cash in his office and he has to get the cash to Costa Rica by Friday to pay for The Goods.

Lucky gets back to the Circus Circus and meets up with a magician's assistant Carol, who has built a catering cart with a false bottom. Apparently the plan is Eversull is having The Big Game on Wednesday night. Carol has arranged to swap with a friend (although how she managed to swap ahead of time when the plan had been unexpectedly announced for Thursday is a mystery) to bring the catering cart up to The Big Game. Meanwhile Lucky lowers down a rope from the ladies room just off from The Big Game so that Lisa, a trapezes artist in on the heist can climb up, grab the cash and make like a blintz, hiding in the catering cart. Then Carol rolls the cart down to the kitchen and they make off with Eversull's money and the Costa Ricans are left holding the bag.

Or something like that.

You know, that strikes me as an excessively complicated plan. Why couldn&#146t Lisa just hide away inside the catering cart, get wheeled into Eversull's office and pinch the money that way? Well, aside from padding out the movie by twenty minutes with "Exciting and gripping climbing sequence"? And I wonder how much Circus Circus got paid to allow a film crew to hang off their roof anyway?

Alo0ng the way, we meet various subplots - Carol, it seems is up to her eyeballs with a bookie who wants his dough. Lucky has a boyfriend security guard at the casino that wants to run away with her and buy a farm in Montana (and not necessarily Buy the Farm like I was thinking he would do by movies end). Lisa - well, she gets to . . . um, look pretty.

Anyway, the heist goes down more or less as planned - until Carol, serving at The Big Game gets her ass grabbed by a fresh card player (ah, those wacky seventies) and makes a fuss at him. One would think that a waitress engaged in larcenous activity might want to keep a lower profile than that, but I'm not a criminal mastermind, so what do I know?

Anyway, Carol gets hauled off to the Security Wing to get searched when Mister Misogynistic Patron claims that she pinched some of his chips. This gives Eversull time to discover his office door ajar, find out that his money has been nicked, and draw the conclusion that the mouthy waitress was the cause.

And so one showdown at the Old West Town (but not nearly as cool or showdown-y as the setting demands), one twist on the real identify of Mister Big (who I shant divulge here - why spoil the one surprise this movie has, after all. But if you think about it even halfway hard, you'll figure it out) and the ladies are a million bucks richer in an era where being a millionaire was actually being rich. Roll credits and cue really horrible theme song.

The problem with Las Vegas Lady was that it's not very exploitative for an exploitation flick. No nudity to speak of, no hard hitting action, no car chases and only one half-assed gunfight. No taboos violated, no drugs, no swearing, no sex - just a heist and some undeveloped characters we couldn&#146t give a rip about. So if you're after a movie high in sleaze and camp and cheesy goodness, you'd do well to look elsewhere.

There are also odd moments where the film feels incomplete - like when AC, Carol's impatient bookie, finds the map to Eversull's office (and presumably figures out the heist), that's obviously setting up for a third act double cross when he takes all the money for himself, right? Nope - nothing ever comes of it. AC just kind of fades into the background after making random threats to Carol that They want Their money tonight. Or the man on the billboard across from the Circus Circus with the sniper rifle who's watching the heist go down, but never actually does anything.

The acting is okay, with some B-list stars like Stuart Whitman from Night of the Lepus, Stella Stevens from The Poseidon Adventure - oh, and look, a bit part from Frank Bonner about a year or two from landing his WKRP gig.

BREASTS ON DISPLAY: 0
EXPLOSIONS: 0
ROUNDS FIRED: 23
PUNCHES THROWN: 3
HANDRAIL DEATHS: 0
CAR CHASES: 0
FRUIT CARTS DESTROYED: 0
NINJA? No
AFROS: 1
F BOMBS DROPPED: 0
SEVENTIES FASHION SENSIBILITIES: 10%
BEST LINE: "Never mind him lady, I always work alone anyway. "

THE DVD -
We get a widescreen anamorphic print of Las Vegas Lady. Considering the low cost of the DVD, the low budget of the content and the treatment that the prints have probably undergone in the last 30 years, it looks pretty good. Not stellar or anything, but the print seems reasonably free of flaws and damage. It doesn&#146t look pristine, but one could argue that a print like that only enhances the grindhouse experience.

THE EXTRAS -
We don&#146t get much in the way of extras, but we do get a really cool presentation. Like the Warner Brothers "Night at the Movies" discs, where hitting play all gets you a news real, cartoon and a trailer before the main feature. Here, we get a Grindhouse Experience option, which plays a "Coming Attractions bumper", a trailer for Chain Gang Women and Superchick and then a "Our Featured Presentation" bumper - then the movie runs.

After Policewomen wraps up, we get an Intermission bumper, a "Please keep our theater clean" spot a trailer for Chinese Hercules and Weekend with the Baby Sitter before the second movie on the disc runs. It's a very cool presentation that really makes you feel like you're in a nasty, run down old theater on 42nd Street.

THE BOTTOM LINE -
Despite the grindhouse presentation, this is a pretty poor representation of exploitation cinema in the seventies. Still the movie that it comes with is a pretty good flick, and the price is right. But if it were just Las Vegas Lady alone, I'd say give it a miss.