COVERGIRL (1984) Blu-ray
Director: Jean-Claude Lord
Scorpion Releasing

Every woman wants to be "the face of the eighties" in the Canadian New World Pictures pickup COVERGIRL, on Blu-ray from Scorpion Releasing.

T.C. Sloane (Jeff Conaway, ALMOST PREGNANT) is an ultra-rich wiz kid inventor of sophisticated robot amusements who frustrates his business partners by not turning his interests toward mass-marketable product. It's lust at first sight when he literally runs into model Kit Paget (Irena Ferris, LOOKER), and they end up meeting cute again when she locks herself in a bathroom stall at an auction, and he is determined to market her as he would any of his products. He has his more knowledgeable business partners make a million dollar offer to Kit's controlling agent Eva Randall (Paulle Clark, WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN?) whose agency has been suffering financially since a former protégé has been stealing her models, the latest being Zara (Tiiu Leek, HERO AND THE TERROR) whose promised exposure is eclipsed as soon as Sloane starts pushing Kit for high profile jobs. Sloane and Kit become too distracted in their burgeoning romance to notice the behind the scenes attempts to push Sloane out of his business as well as the private troubles of Kit's best friends Dee (Roberta Leighton, BARRACUDA) who is moonlighting as a hooker, and Avril (Deborah Wakeham, NEEDFUL THINGS) who has fallen into a depression after lover/photographer Joel (August Schellenberg, EIGHT BELOW) casts her aside as "last year's model."

A thorough mess of a film that never settles down into one genre, COVERGIRL has comedy (Conaway's character seems locked into quippy callousness that just makes him particularly unsympathetic by the time bad things start to happen to him), drama, sex (Dee's hooker getup as a topless nun anticipates Kathleen Turner's blasphemous gig in CRIMES OF PASSION), and much fashion industry bitchery but seems thrown together from a bunch of visual sequences without regard to any dramatic cohesiveness. The central romance is particularly unbelievable with Kit going from scoffing at Sloane's attempts to impress her by insisting in the midst of a show that he will buy any of the furs she models – earning her the ire of the other models as she is sent out to model all of them – to falling into his bed after a romantic dinner and a fireworks show that literally puts her name up in lights. Toronto stands in for New York as well as it did in any other Canadian film of the period, and what successes the film does have are in the visuals of René Verzier (RABID) who shot some of a number of early Canadian exploitation and horror films and had also lensed the slicker and sexier fashion model sexploitation film JOY the previous year. Director Jean-Claude Lord had previously helmed the thriller VISITING HOURS, and producer Claude Héroux was behind David Cronenberg's THE BROOD, SCANNERS, and VIDEODROME.

Released theatrically by New World Pictures and on VHS by Thorn/EMI, COVERGIRL was another New World title that was passed over for during the DVD days when Anchor Bay and then Image Entertainment licensed the Lakeshore Entertainment library. Scorpion's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen Blu-ray is derived from a new HD master and looks as good as one would expect from a Canadian film of this vintage with the heavy use of diffusion and smoke (a conceit called out in the film during a photo shoot) and slow motion giving the film a glossy but softish look in long shots while close-ups reveal more detail but also show that even the male cast have had their features smoothed out not by digital tinkering but by Estée Lauder. Damage appears only in a couple faint scratches during the slow motion bits and a blue emulsion scratch that moves across the screen horizontally like a vertical tear in one shot. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono audio is in good condition, revealing a balanced mix in which a few patches of ADR audio are evident. There are no captions or subtitles. The disc includes the film's theatrical trailer (1:57) as well as trailers for TALKING WALLS, FRATERNITY VACATION, PRETTY SMART and TORMENT. (Eric Cotenas)

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