Long Live The New Flesh

Samantha Fox, Kandi Barbour, Robin Byrd and Christine De Schaffer play the titular Pink Ladies, a quartet of disenfranchised housewives. The opening racquetball sequence, washed in Watkins’ usual clinically white backgrounds, drifts in and out of caustic chaos as ELP’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” batters down. Leslie (De Schaffer), who can’t play racquetball to save her life, is excluded from the sex scene with coach/voyeur creep Ron Hudd because she’s being pelted by the automated racketball launcher.

Like all of Watkins’ flicks, the soundtrack pops. “Sister Midnight” from Iggy Pop’s The Idiot plays during a BDSM scene between Leslie and her repressed husband (Alan Adrian). The Gus Kahn standard “I’m Through With Love” is the soundtrack to one of Vanessa del Rio’s rides on the proverbial carousel of married men. And “Ride of the Valkyrie” (Watkins’ nom de plume Richard Mahler was partly a nod to Wagner) plays during one of the final scenes, which can only be described as our merry band of housewives fantasizing about having sex with a pack of flesh-and-blood Skittles.