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61 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Different Kind of Chick Flick, January 16, 2010
This review is from: Bitch Slap (Unrated) (DVD)
Oh yes, "Bitch Slap" is everything you think it is. Girls. Guns. Catfights. Explosions. Lesbian romances. A story of bad guys, booty, alliances, betrayals, and secrets. It's being billed as, "a post-modern, thinking man's throwback to the B movie/exploitation films of the 1950s - 70s," but the truth is it gives us little to think about, and I'm hard pressed to say that it reexamines modern assumptions of culture, identity, and language. It does, however, open with a Joseph Conrad quote: "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." We see the word "men" and automatically think it's a blatant anti-male message. But by the end of the film, it's made abundantly clear that women are just capable of being wicked. Equality through evil. Funny.
This movie is irredeemably enjoyable, preposterous in both its story and its characters yet magnetic as a satire disguised as a schlocky male fantasy. It tells the story of three bad girls, all smoking hot, who find themselves in a plot to extort diamonds and weapons from an underworld kingpin, whose identity is a secret. The redhead is Hel, presumably short for Helen (Erin Cummings); she seems to be the leader of the group, tough but levelheaded, able to see the big picture and plan accordingly. The blonde is Camero (America Olivo), an oversexed hothead who's on medication. She's one of those people that hates everyone and is mad about everything, and has the dialogue to prove it. The brunette is a stripper named Trixie (Julia Voth), always upset, always overwhelmed, always wanting to play by the rules.
Every opportunity is taken to flaunt their feminine assets, and boy, do they have them - a basic shot is a slow-motion close-up of heaving breasts and deep cleavage, although some time is set aside for bare legs. There's never a moment when they aren't wearing high heels or don't have makeup painted on their faces. And then there are times when they pause to do a little manual labor, such as digging in the middle of the desert. My, but it's burning hot, and ... is that a bucket of water sitting there? Maybe they should splash each other playfully in order to stay cool. Things will heat back up later on, when Trixie and Hel discover that their feelings for one another are deeper than they first imagined. That's about when the situation goes completely out of control. Loyalties change. Identities are revealed. People get shot. Things blow up. And did I mention the catfights?
Intertwined with this is a ridiculous but somehow appropriate subplot about a notorious criminal known only as Pinky, never dealt with directly and never seen but fabled to be the most dangerous criminal mastermind who ever lived. When Trixie innocently brings up the subject, Hel and Camero speak in the same tones as someone telling a ghost story around a campfire. "Many believe Pinky's a phantom," says Camero. "Others think he sold his soul to the devil. I think he IS the devil." Maybe so; a flashback sequence shows a silhouetted figure going nuts with what appear to be samurai swords, used to decapitate people left and right. Do we ever discover what Pinky looks like? With such gorgeous women displayed on the big screen, can you honestly say that you care?
When this movie is not going out of its way to be sexy, then it's being incredibly goofy. Take Olivo, for example; the angrier she gets, the funnier she becomes, not only because she spews unbelievably inane profanity, but also because her character is the most aggressive. And just wait until you hear of her tryst with a sideshow contortionist. Let's also consider the director, Rick Jacobson; he's currently at work on the new "Spartacus: Blood and Sand" television series and has been involved with "She Spies," "Cleopatra 2525," "Batwatch," "La Femme Nikita," "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys," and "Xena: Warrior Princess." The last two are noteworthy because Kevin Sorbo, Lucy Lawless, and Renée O'Connor all have cameos in "Bitch Slap." Or maybe they aren't noteworthy at all. Whatever.
This movie is, essentially, a cross between an erotic photo shoot and a silly crime caper, one that has been fed into a low-tech special effects mill. And I suppose that's why I had fun watching it. While I ultimately have no good reason for recommending it, you have to admit, there is something infectious about a movie that actively tries to be bad. I'm reminded of an often repeated Pauline Kael quote: "Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them." "Bitch Slap" is, indeed, great trash, projected up on the screen in all its violent, foulmouthed, double-D glory. Fellas, this is your lucky day.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Die Hard with ovaries!", March 2, 2010
This review is from: Bitch Slap (Unrated) (DVD)
Leaping back and forth between the present and anywhere from a few hours to multiple weeks in the past, Bitch Slap introduces us to our triumvirate of heroines first via their low-cut costumes for short hand: bad-ass biker bitch Camaro, `40s femme fatale Hel and bimbo stripper Trixie. As the opening credits attest, this is first and foremost an unapologetic exploitation movie, so each woman is filmed first at chest level, followed by a tilt up to the perfectly made-up faces. The shorthand established, the movie then has fun playing with the viewer's expectations from there on out.
Pulling up in a muscle car, our heroines yank open the truck to reveal mid-level gangster Gage (played by Hercules star Michael Hurst), bloody and nearly naked in silk robe and banana hammock. They're out in the desert, near a run down trailer, and demand he reveal the location of his hidden storehouse of ill-gotten treasures. When a badly-timed bullet prevents his confession, the girls are forced to dig, shovels in hand and impractical shoes on pedicured feet. As the story moves forward, we jump back and slowly learn how they got to this point in time. All the double-dealings, back-stabbings, assaults, murders and insane associates that led them to this desert. Each flashback brings a new height of lunacy until, by the end, the movie is almost saying "Oh, you bought that one, did you? How about this?"
Bitch Slap throws everything at you. Every exploitational fetish is represented: Japanese Schoolgirls (in the form of the lethal yo-you-weilding psycho "Kinky"), cat fights (multiple and increasingly vicious), lesbian interludes (all three leads have complicated history with each other), nuns (which includes hilarious cameos by Xena stars Renee O'Connor and Lucy Lawless), strippers, cat burglars, sexy super-spies, women-in-prison set pieces--not a Russ Meyer stone left unturned. Around all this we have international intrigue, a diamond heist, illegal arms dealing, explosions, mysterious policemen and a shadowy villain cut from Keyser Soze cloth who goes by the name of "Pinky". Keeping up with the plot is less strenuous than keeping up with the twists. But the movie makes it easy for you by never, at any time, taking itself seriously.
Directed by Rick Jacobson and produced and written by Jacobson and Eric Grundenmann (billed during the opening credits as "Poets Laureate"), Bitch Slap asks you to swallow great gulps of perverse cinematic guilty pleasure. From the over-wrought opening shot of a bloody Trixie, in her destroyed gold cocktail dress, looking up from a smoking crater asking "How did it come to this?" we are told that Bitch Slap is a comic book. The multiple (but surprisingly not overused) split screen sequences serve as reminders. The flashbacks, too, shot in Sin City stylized set pieces, are reminders too. As if the incredibly over-the-top characters weren't enough! By the end of the movie's 90 minute running time, depicting explosive violence along the Las Vegas strip, all the viewer can do is throw disbelief to the wind and just hang on.
But if Bitch Slap was merely eye-candy, merely a female version of Shoot `em Up, then there wouldn't be much to recommend it beyond its obvious thrills. What's neat about this movie is the underlying message that women can be as sexy, dangerous, sensitive, sensual, vicious and violent as their male crime-action counterparts. They're not the ornaments in this film, the men are. And the men who think they're coming to the girls' rescue find out right away that they're the ones needing rescuing. It's a nice change of pace, even if that's as deep as the message goes. It's just refreshing to see women taking charge, firing the ludicrous machine guns and performing the physics-defying stunts. Even better, as opposed to the Andy Sidaris genre of girls-and-guns, we get a good idea of who these women are as people rather than tropes. Sure, they're people from a pulp fiction world, but within the limits of that world, they are human beings.
What many might find as the ultimate surprise is the (almost) complete lack of nudity. While all three of our leads get down and dirty with each other and a goodly number of their co-stars, their much-referred-to naughty bits are covered throughout, even if just barely.
In case the casting isn't enough of a give-away, incidentally, most of the cast and crew had worked together on both Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess. Furthering the fun is Zoe Bell providing the fight choreography and "doubling for everybody" (look fast for her during a two-woman street rumble during a flashback). As the three anti-heroines, Erin Cummings and America Olivo (as Hel and Camaro) steal the show with knowing odes to Barbara Stanwyck and Tura Satana, respectively, while Julia Voth as Trixie, stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold-and-a-dark-secret portrays slow-to-the-going sweetness. None of the three are afraid to get physical--in all sense of the word--and remain both tough, dangerous and appealing throughout, even while playing with the viewer's sympathies. The rest of the cast is fun, but largely incidental. William Gregory Lee playing Hot Wire, a punk with facial scars and severe Tourettes was a personal favorite, but make no mistake--Bitch Slap is about the ladies, not about Kevin Sorbo's (or any of the other) cameos. Those are the candy flowers on this already over-loaded decadent cake. Guns, swords, grenades, fetishized vehicles, microscopic skirts, spraying blood, every action trope stuffed to bursting in one single film.
One colleague of mine referred to this movie as "Steel Magnolias with balls," but I have to respectfully disagree. Bitch Slap is Die Hard with ovaries.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Kick-Ass Ride!, February 26, 2010
This review is from: Bitch Slap (Unrated) (DVD)
BITCH SLAP is a kick in the teeth, a slap on the face and a spank on the ass. Seriously. A clever homage to exploitation movies of old, dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, it always remembers to be a sexy, funny and crazy ride. And they really do deliver the "greatest chick fight in cinema history." And the greatest wet t-shirt gratuitous-fest. And dialogue so over the top, your lips are numb. And women so beautiful, it's hard to believe they weren't designed in some secret government laboratory somewhere.
What's not to love???
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