Traditionally, Florida has presented a wonderfully lurid venue for the detective potboiler as witnessed in the hard guy fiction of Charles Willeford, John Lutz, John D. MacDonald, Edna Buchanan, James Hall, Carl Hiassen, Lawrence Sanders, Laurence Shames et al

With all that literary history going for the locale, it's probably too much to expect that No More Dirty Deals, a resultantly average crime flick generated in the upper-crust environs of Fort Lauderdale, would even remotely approximate this level of writing. Suffice to say, the film satisfies the necessary conventions of the contemporary erotic thriller genre, even though it trips over a cliché or two in putting away the bad guys. To hinder its noble intentions, the picture consistently dishes out such inane palaver: "I'm not blind. You live in this big house with all these other people, but nobody works. What do you do?"

The logical answer I think would be, "I live in L.A.!" In fact, most of the love banter sounds like it were written in the front seat of a '57 Chevy.

Also, a reasonable conclusion to draw from having the name of Michael J. Peter, the strip club impresario, attached to the above-line credits as executive producer, would suggest a project bearing the ultra-sexy, ultra-nude imprimatur of Peter's Dollhouse dance tapes. No More Dirty Deals certainly has the babe angle. It's about a Mercedes Benz-level Manson Family whose modus operandi is bikini bait and burglary as the pay off. But not much more than basic string bikini tease/fluff.

Curiously, where the Peter Principle could be used to wonderful advantage, the film squanders ripe opportunities to make this a memorable T&Aer. (Of course there's a topless scene that takes place in one of Peter's strip joints, for what it's worth.) What we have, then, essentially, is a film that seeks erotic, passionate edges, but sharpens its teeth with the benign floss of a drugstore Florida picture postcard.

Von von Lindenberg (that's not a typographical stutter) plays a blond hunk grease monkey named Travis McCloud, whom one might argue is a hybrid of John D. MacDonald's Travis McCee and Andy Sidaris' Cody Abilene (Malibu Express). Fact is, the film tries like hell to be an Andy Sidaris action picture, with next to no guns, little or no bang and even fewer unveiled bazookas.

Jennifer Langdon plays Lindenberg's love interest — a dame up to her equally blonde tushie with this crime family's activities. Taimak plays the ringleader with a smirking, dusky GQ quality, as though he were expecting a Hollywood talent scout to barge in the door at any moment offering him to stunt double for Mario Van Peebles.

The film has its moments and will probably have commercial success in the straight-to-video and cable markets, but Peter should make no more deals for future projects of this ilk. He's wasting his immense, natural resources.