Linnea Quigley

The Queen of "Sex and Scare" cinema, Linnea Quigley at first looks a bit like Goldie Hawn or Barbara Harris, with her often teased blonde hair and playful, wide-eyed expression. Quigley began in more straightforward soft-core erotic fare, and also played a small roles in the rowdy comedy, "Cheech and Chong's Nice Dreams" (1981) and the low-budget actioner "Savage Streets" (1984), in which she played a deaf mute who gets beaten up and raped. Quigley reached the top of the B-movie pyramid with films like "Return of the Living Dead" (1985) and "Treasure of the Moon Goddess" (1987).

Quigley's films are often filmed in days and on budgets that are rarely more than a very few hundred thousand dollars. What one remembers are the titles: "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers" (1988), "Assault of the Party Nerds" (1989), "Sexbomb" (1989), "Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama" (1988), "Virgin High" (1990) and "Beach Babes from Beyond" (1993). Connoisseurs of these films also remember some of the dramatic highlights: Quigley getting squeezed to death by a giant thing in a warehouse in "Creepozoids" (1987), or driving a tube of lipstick through her own chest in "Night of the Demons" (1988). Quigley herself is playfully uninhibited and yet consciously campy about her antics, considering herself first and foremost a comedienne. She has also arranged her own "genre" of films so that she doesn't do complete nudity. In interviews Quigley has noted that she probably won't continue her star reign indefinitely; on her sojourn to Hollywood, she mused philosophically, "You know, I came out here more to be warm than to act."