Bettie Page - Dark Angel
Bettie Page - Dark Angel
Product Description
Bettie Page was America's favorite pin-up model of the 1950s, and achieved her greatest success as Playboy's January 1955 centerfold. It was her association with fetish photographer and filmmaker Irving Klaw however, that changed her life forever and established the cult icon status she enjoys to this day. Bettie Page Dark Angel recalls in episodes, her last three years as a pin up queen and faithfully recreates - in Klaw's original style - many of her now classic bondage film performances that were destroyed long ago. After a senate investigation and indictment of Klaw, threats against her life and frustration over never achieving her dream of success as a mainstream actress, Bettie Page suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from public view... forever.
Amazon.com
Cult Epics founder, Nico B., claims in his liner notes that he never thought hed make a biographical film about Bettie Pages last three years as famed pin-up star, but finding look-alike Paige Richards to play the part in Bettie Page: Dark Angel changed his mind. This film recreates Pages trials and tribulations as an aspiring actress, by placing dramatized scenes from her life between faux bondage flicks that have the grainy, black and white quality of the long-lost real ones. Nico B. studied the remaining stills to imagine live action for these entertaining bondage films that, combined, take up over half of the movie. Scenes of Bettie (played by Paige Richards) crying to her boyfriend about her frustrations are benign as are most narrative scenes in porn. Rather, the best parts in Dark Angel are the vintage-looking fetish sequences that show Bettie as dominatrix, Bettie as a captive jungle girl dressed in shredded furs, Bettie's legs tied to a coffee tables, and the most classic, Bettie as Pony-Slave. Of course, seeing the real Bettie would be preferable, but Richards looks uncannily similar, sharing the same sweet smile and inner radiance that made Bettie Page so famous. Plot-wise, Bettie Page: Dark Angel explains Pages sudden disappearance from the media during a scary sequence in which horny fans and an obscenities court case slapped against her agent, Irving Klaw, leave Bettie unsure about her own safety. The kitschy premise of the film makes Bettie Page: Dark Angel a fun homage to the Queen. --Trinie Dalton
Review
Sculptural beauty Paige Richards plays the pin-up icon and the movie starts with a Bunny Yeager photo shoot on a beach before unfolding with the highlights of Page's bondage years, which ended on a sour note, when the senate launched a puritan crusade against Page's notorious producer, Irving Klaw.
This is a piece which is mostly destined for Page's fans and knowing her influence on some certain sub-cultural circles, it might also become some kind of classic as a visual prop. This would certainly have fit well in the Bettie Page Collection, in place of the useless 100 Girls By Bunny Yeager. --Fred Thom
With the underground market for Page-related merchandise, it seems understandable that a film like this is clearly geared toward the faithful, and that is where this becomes not necessarily a movie, but a sought-after collectible. It's an add-on to all the websites, books, figures, photos, and posters, and as a piece neo-Page hipness, Nico B. has succeeded in great waves. --digitallyobsessed.com