Gorgeous talented actresses with ridiculously short resumes
Every now and then you’ll be watching some grungy genre movie and suddenly be captivated by an angel. “Who is that ?” you’ll wonder as a beautiful woman who can actually act weaves a spell of utter fascination. What talent! What charisma! Surely this divine being is The Next Big Thing and you can expect her to be in every movie of note for the next decade or two. But no — she does maybe one more film that nobody sees and vanishes forever from the public eye. What the hell happened?! Did some spurned sleazeball producer put a halt to her career just as it was picking up or was showbiz simply not rewarding enough to waste her considerable talents on? I prefer to imagine that these women simply crossed “Become a Movie Star” off of their lists of awesome things to do and then went on to work on ending world hunger or paragliding off of Mount Everest or something.
Sometimes a captivating actress will only seem to have a short film resumé because she does most of her work in other countries. (This is known as the Maria de Medeiros syndrome.) Others genuinely seem to fall off of the face of the Earth after a single unforgettable performance. Rona De Ricci the doe-eyed ingenue from Stuart Gordon’s splendid adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1991) is an example of the latter.
Gordon has a knack for casting gorgeous unknown actresses in his films many of them likely recruited from the ranks of live theatre. Any time you watch a Gordon film you run the risk of falling in love with the leading lady. In The Pit and the Pendulum De Ricci plays Maria an innocent baker’s wife who runs afoul of Torquemada (Lance Henriksen) a central figure of the Spanish Inquisition. Torquemada believes that his lust for the lovely Maria is the result of sorcery and has her imprisoned as a witch. De Ricci gives a marvelously sincere performance as an unambiguously good character at the mercy of a twisted and hypocritical authority figure. The political thrust of the film is strongly anti-torture and De Ricci’s brave virtuous and fair-minded character allows us to see the inquisitors for the hateful figures that they are.
Inexplicably De Ricci only has one other film credit to her name according to the Internet Movie Database: the 1988 drama The Penitent .
Another fascinating “Wow ’em-and-then-retire-immediately” actress is Patty Mullen Penthouse magazine’s “Pet of the Year” for 1987 and the star of the utterly bonkers splatter comedy Frankenhooker (1990). The lovely Mullen plays the title monstrosity and she surprises everybody with her amazing flair for comedy. She essentially gives three performances; she begins the film as Elizabeth girlfriend to mad scientist Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz); gets re-animated as the stitched-together monster; and lastly regains her intellect and personality in time for the film’s twisted grand finale. It is the middle portion of the film in which she gets the biggest laughs acting like a combination of a dozen streetwalkers a brain surgery patient and Elsa Lanchester from Bride of Frankenstein (1935). It’s hard to remain sexy while wearing a purple wig walking rigidly and sporting a stapled-on head but Mullen manages it. Best of all are her facial tics which resemble something a tasered Billy Idol might attempt. There’s no way this was a requirement for the role — director Frank Henenlotter did not advertise for a beautiful actress who could pull her mouth into some kind of biologically impossible parallelogram. He must have just asked Patty to do a facial tic of some kind and when she did that everybody just fell off their chairs laughing.
What else has Mullen been in? Doom Asylum (1987) and a single guest-judging stint on a wrestling show. That’s it. Still fans will always remember her comically shrill voice asking “Wanna date?” — particularly since the original Frankenhooker VHS box repeated the line every time you pressed its button.
