When good girls turn bad! Dave remembers those few weeks in ’95, when a trio of wholesome starlets became the reason rewind buttons were broken the world over.

A strange thing happened during an eight week period in 1995.

A trio of wholesome starlets decided – individually I might add – to shed their carefully curated clean-cut images and get raunchy.

In September, Elizabeth Berkley – a virtuous member of the Saved by the Bell cast – wrapped her legs around a pole (and Kyle MacLachlan) in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (1995). A couple of weeks later, Molly Ringwald – arguably the most respectable Brat Packer – bared all in Ian Corson’s noirish thriller, Malicious (1995), admitting at the time that she only did it in the hope of breaking into more mature roles.

Kicking off this clothes-free course, though, was Stacey Dash, who dropped her draws in August.

Star of the short-lived teen drama TV 101, Dash hit pay dirt as the unsullied teenager Dionne in Clueless (1995), which went on to become a relentlessly quotable staple of every switched-on ’90s and ’00s adolescent. Of course, it’s impossible to predict a film’s cultural impact; so as Clueless went into post, Dash accepted her next part and moved on.

In hindsight, taking the lead in ILLEGAL IN BLUE might seem like a step too far into the realm of the erotic thriller.

Helmer Stu Segall had started out in exploitation in the ’70s, making a handful of excellent movies with Schlock Pit icon John Alderman (of which Teen-Age Jail Bait (1973) and The Dirty Dolls (1973) are the cream) before spending a decade producing hardcore pornography. By the early ‘90s, Segall – a canny businessman – had set up a studio facility in San Diego that became the base for a host of small screen shows, most notably Silk Stalkings. Illegal In Blue marked his return to the director’s chair after a decade long absence; and given this freshly opened principle source of income, it’s perhaps no surprise to discover an ensemble full of Silk Stalkings irregulars.

Chief among them is Dan Gauthier as Chris Morgan, a cop serving a crudely executed suspension for whistleblowing on a couple of bent colleagues. Moonlighting as a taxi driver, he picks up the stunning Kari Truitt (Dash), a nightclub singer under suspicion for murdering her sugar daddy husband. Predictably, Morgan becomes obsessed with this siren – but in doing so he unleashes a torrent of duplicity, drama, and danger.

In an era of softcore saturation, Segall’s film sits quite comfortably around the midpoint. San Diego sparkles in the moonlight, and Noel Hynd’s script has enough firecrackers (“I’m cold. You got an arm?”) to pique the interest of any neo-noir aficionado. Incidentally, it was certainly a departure for the New York born novelist turned screenwriter. An established author of espionage books, Hynd’s screenplay is fine if a little convoluted at times.

Dash, meanwhile, fits her role well. Seductive and undeniably sexy, she’s a femme fatale in possession of a stare that would clench the buttocks of even the most red-blooded male. The fact that the last ten years have seen her cloaked in a Trump-loving haze (replete with Fox News punditry and the dismissal of transgender rights) is a bitter pill to swallow given the potential that her acting career had.

Released on VHS six weeks after Clueless hit multiplexes, the box art for Illegal In Blue carried the not-so-subtle banner of “Clueless star reveals all” – positioned above two lookalike actors – and boasted that fans of Amy Heckerling’s picture were in for “an eye-popping shock”.

However, the only “eye-popping shock” was that Stacey Dash wasn’t actually a teenage girl, but a twenty-eight year old woman who could act.

USA ● 1995 ● Erotic Thriller ● 94mins

Stacey Dash, Dan Gauthier, Louis Giambalvo, Trevor Goddard, Michael Durrell ● Dir. Stu Segall ● Wri. Noel Hynd

U.K. VHS art courtesy of Video Collector