Zombie Bikini Squad (2009)

Directed by Yohei Fukuda
Starring Eri Otoguru, Chise Nakamura, Manami Hashimoto
Unrated
Japan

"Well...this seems promising."

From the man who brought you Tokyo Gore School - to say nothing of Schoolboy Crush, AKA Gay Love 2 - comes the impossible-to-ignore Zombie Bikini Squad, AKA Oneechanbara. A sort of live-action splatter-toon shot and edited with teenage speed freaks in mind, Oneechanbara is based on a video game (which, in turn, is based on a Manga) that I have never played, and know nothing about. Luckily, 95% of the movie is just a hot chick in a bikini killing zombies, so a working knowledge of the back story is not really necessary.

There is a plot, of sorts: Aya (adorable Eri Otoguro), her plump sidekick Katsuji (Tomohiro Waki) and a sad-sack, leather-clad female assassin, Reiko (Manami Hashimoto) team up to find Aya's long-lost sister, Saki (Chise Nakamura).

Unbeknownst to our heroes, schoolgirl Saki has joined forces with mad scientist Dr. Sugita (Taro Suwa), the man responsible for the devastating zombie invasion that has decimated the planet. At least that's what I think was going on. This movie is very distracting. Did I mention it stars a Japanese cowgirl in a skimpy bikini?

Anyway, that's basically it. A wisp of a plot, non-stop violence, and hot Asian chicks in fetish-y outfits. The perfect prescription for an adolescent-baiting video game, but does it work as a movie? To be honest, I wasn't always sure it was a movie. Many of the jump-cutting, dimestore CGI-laden action scenes - and they pour one on every 45 seconds - look as though they were lifted directly from the X-Box console. In that respect, Oneechanbara: Zombie Bikini Squad often seems like the world's laziest video game, like some new innovation wherein you don't even have to play the thing anymore, where it just plays itself until you fall asleep on the couch, having exhausted yourself from an 80 minute-bout of two-fisted, hot Japanese chick-inspired masturbation. I can see something like that working.

Unfortunately, 'looking just like a video game' is not one of my favorite film attributes. The problem with Oneechanbara is that it never elevates itself beyond its game adaptation roots. That's a shame, because with just a bit more attention to character and dialogue - and with a few gratuitous nude scenes - we'd really have something special on our hands. It does look pretty awesome, but there's nothing but a bunch of sputtering wires and circuits under that fur-lined bikini. It ain't got no heart.

Umm, game over, man. Game over!

- Ken McIntyre

I Am Virgin (2010)

Directed by Sean Skelding
Starring Adam Elliot Davis and all the naked girls in Portland, Oregon.
Unrated
USA

"...just a buncha junk..."

If, like myself, you sat there in the theater watching Will Smith in I Am Legend and thought to yourself, "What this movie needs is more ass", than you are in luck. First-time director Skelding's low-budget one-man show is actually pretty faithful to Smith's $50 million dollar time-waster, only instead of CGI man-beasties, Skeldings post-apoc Portland, Oregon is overrun with naked, vampiric Suicide Girls. Oh, and instead of a German Shepard, this dude has a Bassett Hound. Otherwise, same deal.

The story takes place three years after some Romero-esque plague has decimated the world's population. Anyone still walking is either a sex-vampire or Ron Jeremy. Adam Elliot Davis stars as Robby, the neatly-dressed, Topher Grace-esque spawn of religious fanatics. Robby's parents managed to brainwash their offspring into waiting-until-marriage before dipping his wick into any of the local talent. Unfortunately, the world ended before he found the right girl, and now he's not only the last man - well, the last non-infected man on Earth- he's also the world's last virgin.

Robby spends his days like most last-men-on-Earth do - grocery store raids, a visit to the cinema (All Convoy, all the time), then back home before dark to play Chess with a blow-up alien fuck doll, Vlog to no one, and then quietly masturbate himself to sleep.

Somewhere in that busy day he also creeps around town in his SUV, looking for survivors. All he finds, however, are undead, sex-mad, tattooed she-wolves who paw away at each other like extras in a Misty Mundae movie until they notice Robby ogling them in the shadows. Then they make chase, offering/demanding to suck and fuck him into manhood. Luckily for Robby, he's wily enough to escape their clutches and remain human...at least for now. For the first 1,000 or so days that this bullshit has gone on, the vampire-sluts have remained in the dark; lately they've been sneaking ever closer to his hideout and using "tools" (AKA dildos-on-a-stick). What will happen to our hapless virgin when Satan's sluts figure out how to use sunblock? And really, what's the harm in fucking a vampire anyway?

These questions - and a few others, including 'What the fuck is Ron Jeremy doing here?', are all summarily explained as I Am Virgin unspools to its dramatic stripclub-bound umm...climax.

Here's the important thing to know about this film: I Am Virgin is not what you think it is. It is not a splattery scuzzball horror-com, although that may have been Skelding's intention. Instead, it's something more along the lines of a latter period Jim Wynorski or Fred Olen Ray faux-fuck flick, or even a heavily cut Joanna Angel tattooed alt-babe bang-a-thon. There are half a dozen softcore sex scenes liberally sprinkled throughout the film, and while they are shot with a decent amount of gonzo punk-porn vigor, they don't actually serve the plot at all. In fact, Robbie is just a tangential observer for most of them, and doesn't really interact with the girls until the final reel. Certainly, there's lesbian-centric softcore has its legions (ahem) of fans, and if you're among 'em, I Am Virgin will scratch your particular itch. But if you're looking for something along the lines of Zombie Strippers - which is the way this film has been marketed - you'll most likely be disappointed.

That being said, I Am Virgin is technically impressive. Skelding's production design - the empty streets, burned-out cars, abandoned buildings and mummified corpses - is a fully realized vision, and a great example of just how much you can do with just the barest of essentials. Half of Skelding's doomsday is achieved with balled-up newspapers, and it's as effective as many similar productions with a hundred times the budget. There's also an assload of naked girls to soak in - albeit all of 'em of inked n' pierced neo-punkettes - and Davis's acting is much stronger than you might expect.

All in all, above par for a softcore spoof. It's just a shame it's not much more than that.

- Ken McIntyre

She Mob (1968)

Directed by Unknown
Starring Marni Castle, Monique Duval, Twig, Eve Laurie
Unrated
USA

"Do snakes come out at night?"
"You better believe it."

A Texan production loaded with whacked-out local talent and a ten-gallon hat's worth of crazy, She Mob is one of exploitation cinema's greatest mysteries. There is no director listed anywhere in the credits, which means it could be anyone's doing: Russ Meyer? Doris Wishman? Harry Novak? Orson Welles? Any one of them seems like a reasonable guess. What we do know is that She Mob is a stellar slice of late 60's roughie cinema, a riot of bad hair, revealing lingerie, clumsy ultra-violence, even clumsier sex, shameless overacting, and buckets of ass. It's a gritty melodrama, a goofy spy spoof, grungy sexploitation and a hard-hitting crime flick all rolled into one glorious 82 minute ball of jaw-dropping wonder.

Big Shim (Marnie Castle) is a sweaty, belligerent, bull-dyke prone to wearing leather cone-bras and thigh-high boots. She and her small-but-enthusiastic girl-gang - including a pneumatic, pug-faced pixie named Twig (essayed, naturally, by an actress named Twig) and a beehived blonde with swollen, scarred Frankenboobs named Baby (Eve Laurie, in an awesomely druggy performance) - have just broken out of jail and are laying low in a safe house somewhere on the outskirts of town.

Shim is content with balling Baby on a nightly basis, but the other girls are craving man-meat - they have, after all, been locked up for the past five years - so they whine and complain until Shim breaks down and calls her connection for a rent-a-stud.

Said connection is a superfly man-mountain who refers her to Tony, a high-rent gigolo currently servicing local rich bitch Brenda McClain (also, oddly enough, played by Marnie Castle!). Tony knows Shim from way-back. He agrees to take care of her man-hungry stable for his usual fee.

No sooner has the blouse-wearing Tony entered the She Mob's lair when Shim lays the bad news on him: not only will he be fucking her friends for free, but she's also holding him for ransom. If Brenda does not pay her $100,000 by midnight, Shim promises to turn her man-slut into a "choirboy", which I am assuming is some sort of castration threat.

So that's what's happening there.

Brenda comes home to her swank pad - two TVs! - and looks around for Tony.
"Tony, tony!" She cries. "Did you get your vitamins? I'm ready!"
Alas, Tony is nowhere to be found. Brenda checks her mail and finds Shim's ransom note. Initially she dials up 911, but thinks better of it and hangs up on the cops. And then she calls girl detective Sweety East (the amazing Monique Duval, spoofing then-popular female TV sleuth Honey West) to ask for help.

Sweety East - who may just be my favorite movie character of all time - shows up in a too-small, ass-crack flaunting silver space-girl suit. She also happens to be cradling some sort of jungle cat. A lynx? Ocelot? Something like that. Sweetie seems sort of irritated by Brenda and her dumb problem, but she agrees to take on the case. And then she picks up her bobcat or whatever it is and splits.

Back at Shim's place, the girls all take turns tussling with Tony. But when a suddenly bi-curious Baby joins in for an impromptu three-way, the Boss-Dyke goes bananas, slapping Tony in the face so hard he squirts blood. And then she grinds her cigarette in his crotch. Ouch!

Sweety returns to Brenda's, sans exotic pet. She makes a phonecall to her gadget guy - she needs a shoebox with a homing device in it, which seems like something she could cobble together herself - and then suits up in one of Brenda's ugly rich broad dresses to make the drop-off. For whatever reason, it takes her 7 minutes to put on the dress, and the camera gazes lazily at her naked ass the entire time.

Meanwhile, under the cover of darkness, Baby and Tony try to escape from Shim's clutches. They manage to sneak out of the house, but Tony's car gets stuck in a ditch, so they take off running. Shim and the She Mob chase after them, guns blazing. Disgusted by her lack of loyalty, heartless Shim shoots Baby in the face with her shotgun. Goodnight, Baby.

Tony manages to get back into his car and hauls ass down the highway, but the dope flips his wheels and it blows up, nearly burning down the surrounding woods. Shim drags the battered stud out of the burning vehicle and takes him home.

Then she heads out to the bridge for the pick-up. She smacks the in-disguise Sweetie in the head with her gun and takes the dough. When she gets home, she says, "Well, we're rich. Let's have a party."
And then, for whatever reason, the girls dress the unconscious, half-dead Tony up in women's lingerie.

By the way, once again, a plot device makes for a great excuse to show several minutes' worth of up-close booty. This may very well be the greatest ass-crack movie of all time.

After dressing him up in the undies, the girls string Tony up and whip him. And then Shim stabs him in the guts with her tits. And then she decides to hack his penis off.

And that's just what she does.

Not really. Then Sweety East shows up, and an epic battle between the asscrack detective and the greasy lesbo-beast ensues. And it's as good or as awful as you imagine it is.

Alright, so it's clearly not arthouse material. But for trash-film fans, She Mob is pure bliss. Mr. or Mrs. director, whoever you are, thank you for this loony, wonderful mess. This would be a much darker world without Sweety East.

She Mob is available from Something Weird.

- Ken McIntyre

Girl Boss Guerilla (1972)

Directed by Norifumi Suzuki
Starring Miki Sugimoto, Reiko Ike
Unrated
Japan

"I'm better than Jesus, right?"

Starting in the 60's and charging ahead full-tilt until the 80's - when fuzzy-genital hardcore started showing up in vending machines - "Pink film" was the dominant form of Japanese erotic cinema. Pink films were softcore, at least in sexual content, but balls-out in every other respect. Comedy, drama, action, horror, all of it was slathered with bonus tits and ass and covered in bright splashes of Pink. Around the dawn of the 70's, the "Pinky Violence" wave hit Japan's shores. Like their predecessors, these films relied heavily on heaving bosoms and naked girl-ass, but in-between the fumbling sexual trysts, Pinky Violence films were packed with bloodshed, explosions, and mayhem. Women were often the protagonists in this cycle, which provided double the thrills for your movie-going buck. Topless swordfights? That's sex and violence at the same time, Jack!

Perhaps the most memorable films in the Pinky Violence cycle were the "Girl Boss" flicks that flourished in the early 1970's. These similar but unrelated exploitation sagas followed various girl-gangs as they drank, fought, and fucked their way through the Tokyo underground, often matching wits and fists with the Yakuza when they weren't embroiled in internal power-struggles or turf wars. Scenes of brutal gang violence were juxtaposed with scenes of (sometimes equally brutal) sex, and slapstick humor was liberally sprinkled in-between. The films happened to be produced during a particularly groovy period in Japanese pop culture, so the fashions and music were respectively eye-popping and swinging, as well.

Norifumi Suzuki directed the first four films in the cycle; a grindhouse master, Suzuki is also responsible for jaw-dropping nunsploitation (Convent of the Sacred Beast, 1974), proto-torture porn (Star of David: Hunting for Beautiful Girls, 1979), and Sonny Chiba ninja-fu (Death of a Ninja, 1984), among many others. Many of the Girl Boss films, including this one, starred Toei Studio's biggest sex stars, Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Ike. Ike was an especially apt choice for these juvenile delinquent roles, since the young starlet was a real-life bad girl who was arrested several times on drugs and gambling charges as her fame grew.

Like any successful cinematic subgenre, the Girl Boss films got more outrageous and gimmicky as they went along. Girl Boss Guerilla was the third in the series, so it's not as bloody and weird as some of the films that came after (1974's Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs is particularly bananas), but since the entire run was churned out between 1970 and 1974, they all share stylistic similarities.

Girl Boss Guerilla tells the story of the Red Helmet Gang. Led by mirror-shaded bad-ass Sachiko (Miki Sugimoto) these leather-clad Tokyo she-demons invade Kyoto looking for rich dudes and cheap thrills. Naturally they end up tangling with the local gangs, and Sachiko has a bloody standoff with the leader of the Kyoto clan. She summarily thrashes the girl, but the Kyoto Kids decide to ignore proper protocol and just stab Sachiko to death.

They are stopped at the last moment by Nami (Reiko Ike), the former leader of the Kyoto gang, who dropped by to see the old neighborhood. Nami and Sachiko become unlikely allies as the rest of the girls head out to town to hustle rubes with various schemes, at least one of which involves spreading VD to a bunch of sweaty old hornballs.

Sachiko ends up getting hassled by some Yakuza dicks for encroaching on their territory. She is helped out by a handsome young boxer, Ichiro (Michitaro Mizushima). They dig each other, so they retreat to a motel room where they act out mutual rape fantasies.

Then they make sweet late 70's Japanese love on the rocks. Ouch!

And then...well, you can guess what happens next, right? The Yakuza puts the squeeze on Ichiro for meddling in their affairs. They also kidnap Sachiko. And then all hell breaks loose.

The red Helmet gang - including a just-visiting Nami - hop on their bikes and chase down the Yakuza kidnappers. By the way, the gender of the male stunt drivers employed for this scene is screamingly obvious. Perhaps they refused to pad their bras.

The rescue attempt goes wrong, and the girls end up getting beaten with sticks. And then they cut off Shikuri's arm with a bandsaw. And then she bleeds to death. The end.

No, just kidding. Ichi saves her at the last minute. And then stab him in the guts, and he bleeds to death. For real, this time.
Naturally, this means war. The girls get on their bikes and head out, looking for some Yakuza heads to chop. They run into some of their girl-gang rivals, beat them with sticks, and then drag them from the backs of their bikes. This effect is achieved, as you might expect, by tying a dummy to the back of the motorcycle.

Shikiru is captured, chained, tortured and whipped. They even set her vagina on fire!

Can anybody save the leader of the pack?

Yep. Well, maybe. It's complicated.

Filled with iconic, pop-art imagery, way-out fashions, bludgeoning violence, copious nudity, and the most adorable all-girl biker gang imaginable, Girl Boss Guerilla succeeds on nearly every level. The sudden leaps from ass-grabbing sex comedy to slow-burning melodrama are jarring, and some of the effects - the bike drag, some very clumsily staged slap-fights - are decidedly dodgy, but those are very minor quibbles, given all the payoffs. One the penultimate examples of the 70's pinky violence films, Girl Boss Guerilla is everything you could possibly want in an exploitation flick - gratuitous everything, delivered in heaping fistfuls.

Highly recommended.

- Ken McIntyre

Amazon Warrior (1997)

Directed by Dennis Devine
Starring JJ Rodgers, Jimmy Jerman, Chris Lydon, Al Spencer
Unrated
USA

"I don't know what they're doing in there. It sounds like it hurts."
"Well...maybe the first time."

Two blondes in loincloths and fur bras are on guard duty together. "We have to make sure nobody gets through", blonde #1 says. "Oh, like someone's going to crash through the amazon camp, here at the part of the forest that's the thickest and most impassable", the other one snorts. Meanwhile, they happen to be standing in the middle of a sunny, two-lane road. Such is the hyper-logic of Amazon Warrior, an amazing end of the world saga, filmed on a shoe-string in the California desert.

The blondes fail miserably at their task, and a gang of thugs in tunics and camouflage pants invade the amazon camp, killing everyone but the title character, who is still a child, and her mom, who are busy down at the lake, bathing topless and fighting off what looks like a tire iron covered in seaweed, but is actually some kind of post-apoc monster.

Flash forward to the present. Future present, I mean. Tara (Rodgers- kind of a metal-chick version of Linda Blair), the Amazon warrior, now the last of her kind (how stupid could those thugs be, to kill off all the fuckin' women?), is all grown-up. Or, as all-grown up as 22 will get you.

Some dirty little kid finds her dozing under a makeshift canopy, and tells her that King Barelli (of the pasta kingdom?) wants to pay her ten pounds in gold to take his daughters across the river. She's a mercenary these days, you see. She takes on the task, dragging the two pouty debutantes through the desert, but not before she tears off their cotton sundresses ("These are the finest silk dresses in the kingdom!" they protest) and makes them wear animal skin bikinis.

Along the way, they fight off some marauders, part of the self-same gang of punk-asses that killed Tara's tribe. They look like rejects from a Scorpions video, and one of them carries a giant, razor bristled toothbrush. The marauders were dragging a prisoner back to their camp, a musclebound cat with slicked back hair (Jerman) who decides to tag along with Tara and the girls. When they stop to camp, he bangs the two daughters, as Tara looks on quizzically. Never been kissed, this amazon warrior.

Then, some unspeakable acts of treachery and deceit happen. To be honest, I didn't even see them coming. At any rate, they all end up back at the marauder camp, where Tara finally comes face to face with Steiner (Raymond Storti), king of the bad guys. He's the one that killed Tara's mama 20 years ago, even though he can't be more than 6 months older than her. A good 20 or so minutes of fight scenes ensue.

Everything turns out OK. Touch and go for a few moments, but it all works out. Tara even learns how to cook and clean.
Amazon Warrior may or may not have been filmed entirely at a Renaissance faire, over a weekend. Either way, it's brilliant. Fans of Deathstalker and Beastmaster will know what to expect- tongue-in-cheek violent fantasy with a kitchen sink plot that's so involved that the characters all need to keep up a constant stream of chatter, even when they're beating the shit out of each other, just to explain it. The budget allowed for scant few monsters or effects, so all you'll find of end-of-the-world beasties is the aforementioned tire iron, a giant skunk in the bushes, and a couple of 20 dollar yeti masks on sticks. You won't miss them though, as the almost constant fight scenes are remarkably well choreographed- Rodgers, in particular, looks like she really can kick ass- and they keep the pace brisk, propelling the story along to it's suitably implausible conclusion.
Amazon Warrior is everything you'd expect from a film with such a title. Of course, none of it makes an ounce of sense, but this kind of late-night bad fun rarely does.

Clip: Behold! The trailer!

- Ken McIntyre

Dinosaur Valley Girls (1996)

Directed by Donald F GlutStarring Jeff Rector, Denise Ames, Karen Black

Unrated

USA

"Tukka-Tukka?"
"Tukka-Tukka!"

Don Glut was one the original "monster kids", that noble breed of American youth who grew up during the country's golden age of pop culture in the 1950's and 1960's, when rock n' roll, UFOs, drive-ins and monster-mashes held sway over the nation's collective imagination, and you could survive an atomic bomb blast by simply hiding under your desk. Glut began his film-making career in his own backyard, making super 8 monster movies with his friends and a handful of rubber masks. He also played in a garage rock band, wrote comic books and fanzines and children's television shows, helped create the Masters of the Universe toyline, wrote the novelization for Empire Strikes Back, and the list goes on. Suffice to say, Donald F Glut is a very accomplished gentleman.

It was inevitable that Glut would eventually graduate from home-movies to fully-fledged film productions, and after dipping his toes into directing with a couple documentaries - including, fittingly enough, one on dinosaur movies - he wrote and directed Dinosaur Valley Girls, a light-hearted, lightweight homage to fur bikini romps like One Million Years BC (1966) and Eegah (1962).

The awesomely named Jeff Rector (Doctor Hackenstein) stars as the Bruce Campbell-esque B-movie hero Tony Markham. Markham has it all -fame, money, women - but he is haunted nightly by visions of a rampaging dinosaur and the prehistoric beauty said dino plans on chomping.

One day, halfway through an interview with a cynical local reporter, Markham visits a paleontological museum on a hunch. A frail-lookling William "Blacula" Marshall (RIP) runs the joint.

He shows Markham some cave drawings, and after some mumbo jumbo, Markham ends up time-travelling to Dinosaur Vallley,where he meets the girl in his dreams, Hea-Thor (pretty Denise Ames) and her fur-bikini clad tribe.

Karen Black, of all people, pops up as Ro-Kell, the matriarch of the girl-tribe. Although it's a tad alarming to see this legendary actress hamming it up with plastic bones and spouting cave-people gibberish, her then 57-year old gams and heaving bosoms still looked delightfully tasty. So that was something.

Anyway, there's a warring male tribe and a (puppet) dinosaur to battle. There's also a sex scene and a music video and some decent gratuitous cave-boob. Mostly, however, there's people shouting "Ooga Booga" or whatever and thrusting plastic-tipped spears at one another on rickety backyard sets. And that's pretty much it.

There's not enough monstery bullshit for this to qualify as a creature feature. Nor is there enough skin to lump it with some of Glut's latter day eroti-horror romps. And it would be way too generous to call it a comedy. So what is Dinosaur Valley Girls, really? Well, it's a headache, mostly. But it does have a couple of ace tunes - by Glut himself - two wonderfully weird celebrity cameos, and half a dozen pairs of bouncy cavegirl boobs.

Is that enough for the 94 minute investment?

Sure. If you're planning on living forever. Otherwise, I'd stick with Glut's recent Mummy/Dracula/hot chicks mashups. Like Countess Dracula's Orgy of Blood, for example.

And a "Tukka, tukka" to y'all.

Availability: Glut's own label, Frontline, has recently released a two-disc, extras-packed edition of Dinosaur Valley Girls. If you're going to get it, that's the one to get.

Dinosaur Valley Girls (1996) (trailer)

-Ken McIntyre