Girl in Gold Boots (1968) Pressbook
It Came From Hollywood, where else?
The nightclub [shown in the movie] called The Haunted House was a real nightclub in Los Angeles, located at the famous corner of Hollywood Blvd. and Vine St. It was also featured in the 1967 film It’s a Bikini World and a TV special in which it was visited by Sonny & Cher. (Mst3k)
Girl in Gold Boots is a low‑budget (less than $50,000) crime‑drama musical about a small‑town waitress who follows a fast‑talking hustler to Los Angeles and gets pulled into the sleazy world of go‑go dancing, drugs, and petty crime. It’s one of Ted V. Mikels’ most infamous exploitation films and later became a fan favorite through its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Mikels was a jack of all trades when it came to cult movie-making. He often filled multiple crew roles on a single project: producer, writer, director, cinematographer, and editor. A New York Times obituary notes he typically employed small, inexperienced crews and little‑known actors working for minimal pay, likening him to figures like Ed Wood and Herschell Gordon Lewis in his relentless output of gory thrillers, sci‑fi cheapies, and action pictures. His corpus of work that included body‑part‑stealing zombies, a cat‑food company grinding corpses, an all‑female commando squad, a black magic witch queen, and stalking killers, fueled through scant resources and mixing it up with gore, camp, and cheesecake, make him a cult movie legend.
The movie’s afterlife has been interesting. Because the film fell into public domain circulation, it was widely available on VHS and later DVD compilations, which helped keep it in circulation among bad‑movie aficionados. It’s a so‑bad‑it’s‑good time capsule of the go‑go era, often noted as an example of Mikels’ peculiar charm: clumsy direction and writing, but full of bizarre yet interesting choices, oddball characters, earnest performances, and surprisingly memorable details like the “gold boots” stage leap and off‑kilter musical cues.
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