Teri Weigel: Centerfold

For such a fake portrayal of a celebrity's life (I recently watched an even dumber one made a decade earlier about Traci Lords in a similar vein) it is surprising to see the actual celeb playing herself on screen.

So we have Teri Weigel, dressed like a streetwalker (for no good reason) reading her supposedly self-penned autobiography as we watch an incoherent melodrama concerning her fate. I interpreted it as her hiring hitman Colt Steele to kill her as an elaborate suicide but the show ends cryptically, a testament to the lousy screenplay writing by Patti Rhodes and less than adequate direction by her erstwhile hubby Fred Lincoln.

What unfolds is a patently misleading and cliched story of how Teri became a Playboy centerfold and then suffered immediately from the sophomore blues, work evaporating once the initial fame of magazine exposure wore off, reducing her to working in crappy hardcore porn assignments. This completely ignores her real-life period of softcore stardom, memorably featured in Andy Sidaris's action movies.

The melodrama presented as her life is absurd and often illogical, most pointedly in when she supposedly marries cad Jay Ashley, who got her drunk on the wedding night and had her sign a pre-nup agreement that seemingly condemned her to be his slave and breadwinner forever (hence the path to suicide), taking up immediately with girlfriend Kaitlyn Ashley moving into their mansion the next day.

A crummy studio set attempting to portray an exterior scene with bench is repeated several times for Poverty Row production value. There's no humor in Rhodes's script but the show unfolds on the level of some Charles Ludlam drag comedy, with poor Teri in the drag role of playing herself. At least her breasts look great, at the optimum medium-huge level of her mid-XXX career rather than the later oversize creepy level.

Adding to the annoyance factor is her Svengali Murrill Maglio cast in a small role as the guy who tries to talk her out of hiring Colt; he in real-life is too close to the fictional character played by Jay Ashley for comfort (i.e., MM mooched off her as she was the family breadwinner).