Co-Ed Call Girl (1996)

The bubblegum pink of that mirror is beautiful.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to buy this film online. It's not on DVD and was probably never even released on video, which means I'll have to hope to get lucky and catch it on Lifetime Network the next time they play it.  That'll probably never happen, which is a damned shame because judging from these two clips I found (maybe the only glimpses of C-ECG I'll ever have), it has to be delicious.

It never fails to amaze me the types of roles Lifetime thinks they can give Tori Spelling.  She's always Donna Martin anyway.  Even though I assume that when "Co-Ed Call Girl" begins Tori plays an innocent, virginal character who somehow gets roped into prostitution--wait a minute, let me just pull up the IMDb plot description:

"Thanks to a roommate's practical joke, bookish college student Joanna Halbert finds herself signed up with a Malibu-based escort service. Her initial annoyance turns to curiosity when she visits the boss's beach house - and she is soon captivated by the seemingly glamorous lifestyle of working as a high-class escort. Before long, however, she realises that glitz and money go hand in hand with exploitation and sleaze . . . and it may be too late to get out."

Ok, so...she accidentally became a prostitute because her roomate played a joke on her.  That's as believable as the idea of Tori being either a "bookish college student" OR a hustling femme fatale.  Because, you know, she's a terrible actress.  No, seriously, she's usually okay as a bookish college student.  It sort of fits in with the Donna Martin role (even though Donna HAS A LEARNING DISABILITY), which she usually replicates beautifully in all her other roles.  Okay, that's unfair:  she did a pretty decent job as the meanest girl in haahschool in "Death of a Cheerleader," I GUESS.  Maybe it was just easier to play someone so diametrically opposed to Donna Martin (i.e. a really mean popular girl) than something sort of in between the two.

For instance, just the other week I saw "Deadly Pursuits" (also from 1996, a busy year for Tori) for the first time.  In this one she's a kind of double agent, seducing and falling in love with a guy whom you later find out she's tailing on behalf of a mobster (Richard Belzer with a moustache).  It's clear from the beginning, though, that she is So Wild.  You can read it aaall over her face.  Tori first pops up in this movie when the main character is for some reason in the airport.  She catches him in her crosshairs and smiles knowingly.  (She’s sporting the short, bleached do Donna Martin made famous during the Ray Pruitt years, just FYI.)  Next thing you know, the guy lowers his newspaper to find Tori’s hips jutting seductively into his face.  She then successfully seduces him, I guess.  Her success is due in part to one of my favorite movie cliches:  she is such a damned Free Spirit.  They have lunch or something, I really don’t remember, OH NO, they’re getting out of a taxi, and she runs over to a smooth jazz band saxophoning on the street and starts to dance.  (I actually found a clip of it!!  It's from a later scene but it's the same dance.  For some reason someone tacked it onto a very uncomfortable stripping scene from another movie, so ignore that and just skip to about 4:38.  CLICK HERE)

Anyhow, it's definitely a lot of fun, if a little painful and embarrassing, to see Tori play this kind of character.  Probably because it's embarrassing to see ANYone doing that, especially in a Lifetime Original, but Tori really brings the laughs.  I don't feel like an asshole saying that either, because as far as I understand she's always had a pretty good sense of humor about herself.  Or, rather, she learned to do it after a while.  Not gonna go through the trouble of finding quotes.