Alexis Dziena topless in Without Ward (2022)

This film was released in 2022. It features Martin Landau, who had been dead for five years, but was still pretty spry.

It’s a Festivus miracle!

How can that be? The tale is simple enough. This film sat on a shelf for ten years after the photography was completed. Why? The full explanation can be found here.

It’s an offbeat film that IMDb describes as follows:

Inventor creates drug that allows people to live in their wildest dreams. Now, the drug is no more, and everyone who was on it is under house arrest. Garp learns to connect with himself, and in that, to take action.

Alexis Dziena was not dead when the film was released, but her career surely was. Per IMDb, her resume included no credits in the previous six years. Except for a brief arc on Entourage, I haven’t seen her in almost two decades. You probably remember that she finished in the #3 slot on our poll of the Top Nude Scenes of 2005, in a Broken Flowers performance that featured full-frontal nudity, but she added no second act to that glorious nude debut.

She is now nearly 40 years old, and I assume she is dealing with some mental health issues. There are some clues in her Wikipedia page:

• In September 2011, Dziena attempted to get a restraining order against her parents, claiming that she was living in fear of them resorting to “murder or violence” to access her money. Her request was declined by a judge later that month as she had insufficient evidence to support her allegations.
• In June 2014, Dziena’s ex-boyfriend Jeffrey Francis Ausley was granted a restraining order against Dziena after she showed up at his house with a bag of clothes and announced that she was moving in. Ausley also alleged that she threatened to harm both of them if he ended their relationship.

She was still in her twenties when she shot her scenes in Without Ward, which were lensed between the two incidents described above. Here are some 4K captures:

And, of course, we know her from that song:

It was down in Dziena
Just about a mile from Texarkana
In them old cotton fields back home