Ginger McAllister (Cheri Caffaro) is a wealthy heiress whose late parents have left her enough money to be comfortable, but not enough to satisfy her craving for excitement. To that end she has become involved with a private crimebusting organisation who believe she is just the right woman to embark on a mission to break up a crime syndicate of bored rich kids just like her, in spite of her complete lack of experience in the field. There's one problem, and it's big: the syndicate are prone to using violence to get their way and preserve their drug dealing, blackmail and prostitution rings...
And so began one of the most lucrative trilogies in American entertainment: High School Musical! Eh? Well, Don Schain the director of the sexploitation Ginger series, which starred his then-wife Caffaro, made so much money with this and others like them in the seventies that he was able to branch out and go to work for Disney, becoming the producer behind the wholesome song and dance franchise which was a million miles away from his so-called female James Bond of thirty years before. Needless to say, the fans of the Ginger movies were seeking very different amusement to the kids watching Zac Efron prance about.
Although Bond was invoked when these were mentioned, that was more down to aspiration than the end results, which looked more often than not seedy, tawdry and sleazy - with no sign of any of the budget that an international franchise might have at its disposal. The hallmarks of Ginger's outings were not so much the nudity and violence on offer, but poor lighting, variable sound recording, flat line readings, cast members who were obviously not going to make a success of this career, visible tan lines on all the women who disrobed, and the general air of a cheap and not so cheerful production that would be willing to deliver the thrills many a higher budgeted thriller would not.
Not if they wanted to stay in business, that was, but in the drive-ins and grindhouses of the United States, indeed of the world, watching Caffaro tough talk her way into and out of tricky situations was regarded as a perfectly adequate way of spending an evening. With an aesthetic which suggested hardcore porn of the day without actually delivering, here was a movie that any established actress would have run away from at high speed, but was a one way ticket to low level fame for Caffaro, even if that quickly soured for her and she eventually got out of the business (to keep bees, apparently). While she was cinematically active, however, she appeared in enough of what would be termed "roughies" to ensure interest in her.
Even though she was more angular than conventionally attractive, but her butch persona and regular reveal of her slender frame was guaranteed to appeal to somebody: they made two more of these, so there had to have been a market. The plot was more a series of Schain's sexual fantasies that he plonked his wife down in the middle of, and not all were especially wholesome, so for every scene where Ginger comforted a scared prostitute by gently, sexually seducing her, in the next she would have tied up one of the bad guys naked and threatened to castrate him with piano wire if she manages to turn him on - all to get the information she needs, and not for her own cheap kicks, oh no. There were some sequences which the passage of time had rendered unintentionally funny - see the bar scene where Ginger gives a proto-lapdance to one ne'erdowell, but then her not very appealing casual racism had to be taken into account (the sole black villain is obsessed with getting "white ass"), along with the way she was "punished" at the finale for all those BDSM fans of the day. Very odd.
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