On those very rare occasions when a porn star decides to make a break for the mainstream, one would assume that they’d opt to work with a director who wasn’t simply going to exploit their past associations but give them something more interesting to do, something that would help them demonstrate what acting talents they had. Marilyn Chambers, star of adult films like Together (1971), directed by Sean S. Cunningham, later of Friday the 13th (1980) fame, and the classic Behind the Green Door (1972), decided to try to get out of the industry surprisingly quickly and landed on her feet so to speak – after just an uncredited role in the Barbra Streisand film The Owl and the Pussycat (1970) and three sex films, she landed the leading role in David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1976) and though she was no great shakes as an actor, she acquitted herself better than most might have expected.

Unfortunately, though Rabid became a cult favourite, it wasn’t a high enough profile film for Chambers to use it as a calling card to the “legitimate” film world after a couple of short films in 1979, she returned to porn in 1980 with Insatiable which is where she largely stayed for the rest of her career, working on and off until her death at the age of just 56 in 2009. The only other mainstream film she made was Angel of H.E.A.T. and in director/co-writer Myrl A. Schreibman, she found a very different kind of director from Cronenberg. Mainly a producer (he was behind the science fiction film The Clonus Horror (1979) and the television fantasy film The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything (1980), Angel of H.E.A.T. marked his feature film debut as a director, after a pair of small screen specials, one a Tony Bennett concert, the other a science fiction award show.

Schreibman cast Chambers as the lead in this witless James Bond/Charlie’s Angels parody and had her strip off as often as the feeble script (co-written with the possibly pseudonymous Helen Sanford – this was her only credit) would allow, including in the spoofy Bond-style opening titles. Chambers plays the eponymous Angel Harmony, a secret agent working for the non-aligned group known as The Protectors, “unhindered by bureaucratic lethargy and political corruption [they] were able to strike fast and efficiently at the soft underbelly of Satan’s horde!” She heads Harmony’s Elite Attack Team, a group of specialists who count among their number Mean Wong (played by another porn star, Randy West using the name Andy Abrams), a Caucasian man who talks with a thick Japanese accent accompanied by “humorous” subtitles in a faux Japanese font, and Hans Zeisel (Gerald Okamura), an Asian man with a thick German accent… H.E.A.T. are sent to help loved-up American agents Mark Wisdom (Stephen Johnson) and Samantha Vitesse (Mary Woronov) who are trying to protect Albert Shockley (Milt Kogan), an eccentric scientist who has developed a revolutionary recording technique for New Wave bands. In secret, however, he’s also developed an army of lifelike sex androids which he plans to use to take over the world.

The level of humour on show here should be apparent from even that most superficial of synopses, and there’s a lot worse than that to be found here. It was so awful that it couldn’t secure a theatrical release (it felt a good five years out of time and there really wasn’t a theatrical market for this sort of thing any more) and ended up languishing on those video shop shelves reserved for softcore sex romps. It’s failure to find an audience meant that the subtitle, threatening the start of a franchise, now looks even more tragic, the potential series cut short after just one outing. As well as Bond (it comes with its own dreadful theme song by Denise McCann), it has its sights set on the Charlie’s Angels market but found that viewers of the chaste action antics of the Angels weren’t all that keen on stupid, badly acted softcore. Who would have thought it…?

Schreibman hasn’t the faintest idea how to direct an action scene and neither he nor Sanford would recognise an actual joke if it walked up and politely introduced itself. The action scenes are laughable, the meagre budget precluding even the most basic of thrills (an explosion is rendered here as an optical effect badly overlayed over the scene of a speedboat crashing) and dialogue references to Spectre, Dr No, and “Dr Moriarty”, and a musical gag involving the five note theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) were presumably meant to be funny but just draw attention to the gulf that lay between Schreibman’s film and those it was seeking to parody. The script even relies on Chambers past in a way that Rabid largely avoided, Chambers at one point entering a room and exclaiming “so that’s what’s behind the green door!” Neither he nor Sanford had any real idea what they were doing, and the film keeps getting itself side-tracked on fripperies like a lengthy and wholly unconnected to the rest of the plot sequence of female mud wrestling…

Chambers again isn’t awful – she was never going to trouble the selection committee at the Oscars but she’s as good as, if not better, than many low-budget actresses of the time and seems to have some decent kung fu moves if the final “battle” (a few people in a field hitting each other) is anything to go by. But again, it was hardly what she needed to finally make her way out of porn for good. She’s naked for part of the time and has softcore sex with West but honestly, if that’s what you’re after, her porn films are easily available and are at least more honest and strangely less exploitative than this trash.

Angel of H.E.A.T. is just terrible in ways that are hard to adequately convey in words. It often feels little better than a well-resourced amateur film and it should come as no surprise to anyone that Schreibman’s directorial filmography numbered just one more entry, 1989’s hopeless action thriller Liberty & Bash. “The victim will lose a few I.Q. points,” someone notes late in the film following some obscure bit of business that has little to do with the rest of the film. And so, sadly, might the audience. It’s a very long 93 minutes and one is constantly being reminded of Norman Taurog’s Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) and it’s sequel, Mario Bava’s Le spie vengono dal semifreddo/Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966) which is nothing to brag about really. For all its faults, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) would handle the same basic idea a lot more entertainingly.