Flareup

TCM had a Raquel Welch double feature some time back. Of the films, I already did a post on Kansas City Bomber. Now it's time to do a post on the other film, Flareup.

We don't actually see Welch at first, unless that's her in the opening credits which seem obviously inspired by Maurice Binder's work on the James Bond title sequences. Instead, we see a woman named Nikki Morris, who is exiting one of the Las Vegas resorts and getting in a taxi. She's tailed by a man who follows Nikki to a meeting with her friends Michele (Raquel Welch) and Irish for an outdoor lunch by the pool. The man stalking Nikki is her ex-husband Alan (Luke Askew), who wants to patch things up with Nkki, although she obviously doesn't for good reasons: the guy is a creep. What she didn't expect, however, is that Alan was going to pull a gun out and shoot her, and then try to shoot at Michele and third friend Iris.

The police for fairly obvious reasons want to talk to Michele and Iris, warning the two women that they're both in danger and need police protection until Alan can be caught, although Michele doesn't really want the protection. That night, as Michele goes to the hospital to find out how Nikki is doing, she learns that Nikki just died. Alan learned that too, and he shows up outside the hospital where he shoots Iris and her police protector, although Michele is able to escape, which makes sense considering Raquel welch is clearly the female lead hear.

Michele goes to the go-go club where she dances for a living (sorry, she's not topless like some of the other women). She's got a sympathetic boss in Lloyd. He has a past working in burlesque, so he knows a Jerry Benton who runs the Losers Club in Los Angeles, which is a similar sort of club. Just mentiod Lloyd to Jerry and Jerry will be happy to give you a job. It's also a good way to get out of Vegas unseen.

Jerry turns out to be a female Jerri (Jean Byron), who does indeed offer Michele a job without even an audition. Joe (James Stacy), the valet parker, recognizes that something is wrong with Michele, and starts being nice to her to the point that she shows up at his apartment when she has nightmares about what happened in Vegas.

And that's not the only way in which what happened in Vegas does not, in fact, stay in Vegas. Alan kills a fourth person, this time one who offers him a ride. It's an excuse for Alan to get a car to get to Los Angeles since he was able to threaten someone at the go-go club to tell him where Michele went. Alan blames Michele for the breakup of his marriage, and he plans to get revenge by killing her.

Flareup doesn't have much of a reputation, and it's not too hard to see way. Having said that, the movie isn't quite as bad as some people would have you believe. It's more pedestrian than anything else, but it's entertaining enough. And that's really all one looks for in a movie like this. Well, OK, it's also got great vintage location shooting in Las Vegas and Los Angeles that will probably be of interest to anybody who's from either of those areas