Interview: Dyna-Flix!

Uh, oh. Looks like ElectroBabe and DynaChick are in the soup again - literally. Our two masked She-roes are bound in twine together in a heart-shaped bathtub boiling over with...well, pink soap bubbles. Their shiny silver capes and cherry-red go-go boots are getting soaking wet. Curse that evil-yet-shapely villainess Sweetpuss!
"Maybe we can lubricate our bodies with this lather, Dynachick," says the ever wily Electro-Babe, "and slither out of this death trap!"
And that's just what happens.

No, this is not that very sweet Nyquil dream you had when you were 12. It's the latest installment of Electro-Babe and DynaChick, a long running series of superhero spoofs by by Don "Dynahunk" Cortier, king of the superbabe videos. Budgeted at about a thousand dollars a pop and shot entirely in a pole barn just outside of South Bend, Indiana, latex n' Lycra epics like the ElectroBabe series, Dare Dolls, and the mind-melting Sucked In are all impish, surreal, deceptively innocent odes to prepubescent, girl-powered thrill-shows of yore, like Sid and Marty Krofft's mid 70's sensation ElectaWoman and DynaGirl, Lynda Carter's effortlessly bouncy Wonder Woman, and whatever episodes of the 1966 Batman series that featured Batgirl squirming uncomfortably in some elaborate-but-flimsy trap. Much like their Saturday morning counterparts, Cortier's videos feature no nudity or sexual situations. The plots are loony and cartoony, and generally center around his costumed heroines stumbling into some cockamamie booby trap involving, say, grabby household plants. On the surface, they could easily pass for odd but harmless kiddie entertainment. Or you could look at them another way entirely.

"There's some guys, they'll ask me to send them a DVD to a hotel where they're planning to stay two weeks from now under a phony name," Cortier says, "and I'm thinking, this stuff is pretty G-rated, what do they think they're getting? It's curious what people see in it, and what they read into it."
Indeed. While Cortier's films only hint at the lurid, there's an ever-present layer of cheeky innuendo bubbling just below the surface. So it's no wonder that the genesis of his Dyna-flix empire sprang from the greasy pages of a fetish magazine.

"When I started, there was nobody doing this," he says.
"When I was in grad school in 1994, I bought a magazine in Chicago. It was a bondage magazine. I don't know why I was in a porn shop, because porn grosses me out. I'd rather see somebody blow their nose into their hands. Anyway, I liked the picture on the cover of this magazine. The slant was pantyhose. The pictures inside were nothing like the cover, they were disgusting, but the magazine had a questionnaire, so I filled it out and asked them, 'Why not do superheroes?'"
Evidently, the editors listened to him, because less than a year later, his oddball suggestion was on the shelves. And Cortier hated it.
"It was called Harmony's Heroes," he explains.
"I have the second issue, from around 1995. The models looked uncomfortable and they weren't shot attractively. And they had nudity. We never have nudity in our stuff."

Cortier finished school and took up work as an English teacher. And in his spare time, he decided to right all the wrongs caused by Harmony's Heroes.
"I was a child. when ElectraWoman was on TV," Cortier explains.
"I was about ten. I thought that would be the greatest job, to make your own superhero movies. So that's what I decided to do."
In 1995, he built the Dynahunk website. He recruited fledgling actresses through local modeling classifieds, and found his costumes online. At first, he only took photo-sets, but when the site took off, he quickly graduated to video. In 1998, he produced the first ElectroBabe and DynaChick video. Just this year, he's finally making enough money from DVD sales to quit his day job.

"It a bit like an assembly line now", he says. My partner Liza does all the costume fittings. I shoot three fifteen minute chapters of the latest serial a month. One of those 15 minute segments takes about four hours to shoot, and we do it all in my pole barn. I pay my actresses on a Woody Allen sort of scale. Like, $150 for four hours."
Cortier chuckles.
"I would certainly do it for that price."
So would a lot of people, apparently.

"Once you find a girl who is easy to work with, invariably, she has a sister, or a friend, or a sister-in-law", Cortier says. So we get a lot of referrals. Sometimes we meet girls when we're out at restaurants or wherever, as well. We've even had a surprise audition once. There was this guy who thought his girlfriend would be good. He was a tree surgeon, and he was over here talking about that, and we mentioned what we do. So the next day we're sitting here watching a movie on TV, and boom, in walks this chick in full costume and started auditioning!"
Cortier releases sells his videos both as downloads and on DVD through his website.
Thanks to his low-overhead and tiny crew, he is able function at a small but healthy profit.
Since I own the studio I can sell just a few DVDs and make money," he says
"I just split stuff with Liza, and we do pretty well."

Don may very well be the pioneer of the superbabe genre, but at this point, he is by no means its only auteur. Former Mosquitos drummer Pat Bishow has helmed a series of New York based productions, including The Adventures of El Frenetico & Go-Girl and It's a Haunted Happening that mix superheroines, masked wrestlers, gorillas, ghosts, and all-girl garage rock bands. Jim Weathers, an in-demand Californian fetish photographer by day, is the creator of the wildly popular Adventures of O-Girl, an ever-evolving series of vignettes starring plucky masked super-chick O-Girl, who often finds herself the victim of the ol' rope trick by a revolving door of latex-clad femme villains. Phoenix filmmaker Andy Rodriguez is the creator of Retro-Girl, a masked, gold-suited heroine who takes on thugs and brutes in a series of brooding, almost Noir-ish videos. Even a cursory glance on the internet will reveal dozens more: Captain Schoolgirl, Hot Rod Girl, Dark Fury, Nightingale, The Arc Angels. A gushing wellspring of sexy crime fighting has shot up around Don and his ElectroBabe over the past ten years, which makes him wonder just how much longer he can tease and torment his beloved creations.

"I see us going on for another three years and then either giving it up or handing it off to somebody else," he says.
"I think I can do another three years, and then I'll start screaming. It's like having spaghetti every night. Eventually it starts coming out of your ears."
Looking forward, Cortier envisions himself leaving the damsels to their distresses, and creating, of all things, a teen-based comedy troupe.
"I used to be on this TV show here in South Bend called Beyond Our Control," he explains.
"It was basically Saturday Night Live before there was one. It started in the late 60's and it went off the air in the late 80's. It was all high school kids who wrote, directed, and edited the show. I'd like to do something like that, to provide the means for a group of kids to do a show like that, and I'd act as an advisor. I don't have any concrete plans, though. We're still up to our eyebrows in spandex."

Link: Dyna-Flix website

Clip: Drats! Those fiendish plants!

-Ken McIntyre

Sex is Zero (2002)

Starring Chang Jung Lim, Ha Jin Won, Choi Seong-Guk, Jin Jae-Yeong
Directed by Yun Je Gyun
Unrated
Korea

This is a pretty loopy South Korean comedy that apes American Pie-style US teen sex romps, but thrashes around in several different directions as it rolls on. The basic story involves nerdy over-aged college student Eun Sik (Chang Jung Lim) and his pursuit of driven aerobics champ Eun Hyo, who barely notices he's alive. She's pretty icy to everybody, really, which makes it sorta hard to like her, but then, I am not a 26 year old Korean college student, so who am I to judge? Anyway, Eun does whatever he can to impress her, like bashing sticks over his head and nearly drowning himself in a bucket in front of her, typical adolescent hijinks like that.

Meanwhile, he belongs to some weird club of like-minded freaks who practice endurance tests all day for no specific reason. Some of the endurance club geeks are also his roommates, and he's basically tormented by them throughout the film. And that's the set-up. Will our hapless hero get the girl? Sure. Will he endure pain, humiliation, and self-doubt along the way? Oh, in spades. This whole movie is about tormenting the poor bastard.

Will we all learn some life lessons along the way? Yeah, and that's the problem with this one. The third act veers violently into serious teen drama all of a sudden, and has a difficult time backing out of it. Still, before the after-school special kicks in, there's a good hour or so of seriously gross gross-out humor, including (real) puke scenes, anal sex, and the unforgettable sight of a guy frying his own sperm like eggs and feeding it - with rat poison - to Eun Sik. That shit was just fuckin' alarming.

But, you know, the girls all look like this, so who can complain?

Clip: Sex is Zero trailer. In Korean!

- Ken McIntyre

Slaughter Disc (2005)

Directed by David Quitmeyer
Starring Robert Williams, Caroline Pierce
Unrated
USA

"Well, I better get this nightmare underway."

Mike (Williams) is a skinny, pale-faced freak-boy with long, stringy hair, who jerks off to a clown porn DVD (that'd be "Clown Porn", in case you wanna look for it), in the tasteful opening scene. Fortunately for us, he is quite rudely interrupted by his angry sourpuss girlfriend, who busts in on him. She kicks him in the balls and splits. That's the set-up. The guy's got problems. He can't keep his hand off his dick.

Cutting to the chase, his pal at the porno superstore leads him to a splatterporn website. He orders one of their Satanic DVD's, which features the rather voluptuous neo-goth porn starlet Caroline Pierce. She's Andromeda Strange, the mistress of mayhem, and she is gonna fuck this kid up for life. Just watch her.

On the DVD, she masturbates herself into a bloody mess, which looks like some kind of weirdo menstruation porn, until she pulls out a straight razor and starts carving herself up with it. Then it's something else entirely. I thought she might slice her own tits off for a second there, but instead she slits her throat and dies. Seemingly. "That's enough, you sick bitch", Mike says, in the understatement of the year. Then he adds, for dramatic effect, "That can't be real."

But you just know it is, right?

Like any self-respecting porn fan, he's grossed out by the whole sordid affair, until the next day, when he's watching it again, dick in hand. In the next scene, Andromeda is back, and she's got a bound-and-gagged dude with her. She blows him - graphically - and then kills him. Also graphically. And then she talks directly to Mike. Which is a strange turn of events, indeed.

What follows is an enthusiastic, if not predictable, Twilight Zone-ish tale of porn-gone-wrong, mixing the multi-media creep-out of The Ring (and The Grudge, and One Missed Call, and...well, you name it) with the kind of sex, guts, and pussy approach of modern-day splatterpunks like Jorg Buttgereit and Michael Schneider. Only without the soul-sucking pathos of those maniacs. And with a lot more shots of Caroline's meaty porn star ass.

Although the direction and camera-work on this one is pretty backyard, I will give Slaughter Disc the credit for going the furthest in mixing graphic, sleazy sex with cheap, dimestore gore since Joe D'Amato's 's over the top death-porn freakshow Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980). Actually, there might have been something in between, but I don't necessarily go out of my way to find porn flicks with mid-coitus throat slashings in them.

If you remember Draculina editor Hugh Gallagher's no-budget, shot on video, sex n' blood "Gore Trilogy" from the late 1980's ("Gore Whore", "Goregasm", and, um, the other one), then you'll know what to expect here. And if you don't...well, expect a no-budget, shot on video, sex n' blood flick.

Clip: Slaughter Disc trailer

- Ken McIntyre

Supervixens (1975)

Directed by Russ Meyer
Starring Shari Eubank, Uschi Digard, Colleen Brennan, Charles Napier
Rated X
US

"Is the fucking we get worth the fucking we get?"

Borrowing liberally from Roadrunner cartoons, X-rated comic books, old movie serials and fractured fairy tales, Supervixens is one of Russ Meyer's most inspired desert epics, a bruising thrill ride full of fist-throwing macho men and oversexed glamazons all going crazy from the heat.

The episodic story involves one Clint Ramsey (Charles Pitts), an unmotivated gas station attendant at Martin Borman's Super Service who just wants to get through the day without an incident. Since he is inexplicably irresistible to women, this almost never happens.

When we first meet our man Clint, he is servicing the top-heavy SuperLorna (Christy Hartburg, AKA Playboy model/TV actress Christina Cummings, who later married a right-wing extremist and got pretty fuckin'crazy herself along the way), but when his darling wife SuperAngel (gorgeous Shari Eubank) gets wind of it, she demands he come home immediately. As she is clearly insane, he splits work to try and smooth things out.

When he gets there, Angel is waiting for him in a knockout black lace ensemble, but their clumsy coupling soon turns sour. Their verbal sparring turns into a knock-down, drag-out fist fight in the front yard. SuperAngel bashes up Clint's truck with an axe and threaten to "Chop him up good", so he drags his half-naked wife back into the house to calm her down.

Nosy old creep Rufus (frequent Meyer stooge F. Rufus Owens) from next door calls the cops, and soon officer Harry Sledge (Charles Napier) shows up and conks Clint on the skull with his night stick. SuperAngel gets a free ride to the hospital, and Clint gets off with a warning.

Clint is on the outs with his old lady, so he heads over to the local bar, where bartender SuperHaji (Faster Pussycat co-star Haji, bizarrely bejeweled from head to toe) propositions him. Meanwhile, SuperAngel has invited Officer Harry over, to thank him for saving her from the clutches of Clint. She attempts to seduce him, but it turns out that hard-man Harry has an impotence problem. The emasculating SuperAngel mocks him and his flaccid penis, which puts the already on-edge Harry into a full blown rage. He murders her in her own bathroom, stabbing her repeatedly and then electrocuting her in the bathtub in what is easily the most graphically violent scenes of Meyer's - or anybody's really - career.

Harry's got to cover his tracks, so naturally, he blames Clint for SuperAngel's murder. Martin Borman (Henry Rowland, RIP) drops by the bar to tell Clint he's been fingered, and that he needs to vamoose but quick. And so our fallen hero hits the road, with nothing but his tight denim jeans to help him along.

Clint meets an ever screwier collection of misfits, creeps, and bountiful babes as he traipses across the southwest, looking for a safe landing. He hitches a ride with SuperCherry (future porn star Colleen Brennan) and her groovy suitcase pimp boyfriend (Z-man himself, John LaZar). The always-up-for-it swingers try to entice Clint into a scene - SuperCherry even attempts some hand manipulation on him - but he rejects her advances, which pisses Z-man off. He beats the tar out of Clint and steals his wallet.

Clint is saved by a chicken-fucking farmer with a Swedish mail-order bride, SuperSoul (70's tit-queen Uschi Digard). He invites Clint to stay with them at the farm, as long as he doesn't bang SuperSoul. Naturally, he bangs her, and is forced to flee, with the farmer hurliing pitchforks at him.

Then he runs into an oddball motel owner with a deaf-mute daughter, SuperEulah (Deborah McGuire). He invites him to stay with them at the motel, as long as he doesn't...etc. etc. SuperEulah takes him out for a topless dune buggy ride and attempts to seduce him, prompting a high-speed chase when dad finds out.

Things finally turn around for our hero when he stumbles into a roadside diner and meets a waitress, SuperVixen ( a suddenly sunshiny Eubank), who appears to be the reincarnation of his slain wife. Or perhaps her (good) twin. Or the Yin to her Yang. It's never really explained. They fall head over heels for each other, and it looks like everything's going to turn out swell. That is, until a vacationing Harry Sledge turns up.

It all ends in a gonzo mountain-side showdown, with a fully-insane Harry chucking sticks of dynamite at Clint and Supervixen. Will love conquer all, or will bad-ass Harry squash these two fuckers like bugs?

Well, the ending is just as berserk as the beginning, so yes, but no. But yes.

Supervixens, much like Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill, is Russ Meyer firing on all cylinders. Easily the most accomplished film of his 70's sexploitaion era, Supervixens mashes cartoon hyperviolence with Little Annie Fanny-esque comic strip sexcapades to create a wildly clanging, balls-first, eyeball-gasm ode to the 70's Man and his giant, throbbing penis so effective in its chest-bearing machismo that you just wanna climb on the nearest dune buggy and head out on your own death-defying desert sexventure. Meyer's follow-ups to this were exponentially crazier, but none of 'em manage to achieve the complicated balance of surrealism, softcore, and teeth-gritting mayhem that Supervixens does. They also do not have the boundless charms of Shari Eubank.

Ms. Eubank is one of Meyer's most elusive starlets. She only acted in two films - this one, and the oddly muted PG-rated sexploiter Chesty Anderson, US Navy (1976), before giving up acting completely. A small town girl at heart, Eubank left showbiz in the late 70's and never looked back. She became a school teacher in Illinois and continues to teach there now, in her early sixties. She never does any press or interviews about her acting career, and from reports of people who know her, appears to regret ever making Supervixens. It's a pity, really, because she was an astonishing beauty, and her pneumatic, larger-than-life performance in Supervixens is really one for the ages.

While it is a tad overcooked - the entire SuperEulah and Supersoul sequences could be excised without missing a drop of plot - Supervixens still stands as one of the greatest sexploitation films ever made, a towering cinematic triumph of heaving bosoms, swaggering uber-men, and pop culture kitsch. You could base your life on this movie. You'd be dead in a month, but it would be the best month ever, that's for sure.

Supervixens is available from Russ Meyer Films International.

- Ken McIntyre

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Repligator (2000)

Directed by Bret McCormick
Starring Brinke Stevens, Gunnar Hansen
Unrated
USA

In some top secret warehouse/military complex, a bunch of bumbling officers with names like General Mills and Colonel Sanders team up with some crackpot scientists for a series of Nazis on acid genetic experiments. The Replicator doesn't actually replicate anything, but it does transmit matter from one place to another, you know, like in the Fly. And just like in the Fly, it doesn't work right. So, instead of sending a soldier through a wall, it turns him into a hot chick. And when said hot chick gets horny, she turns into an alligator. Only the alligator in question has a dinosaur head. And when someone gets bitten by the alligator/dinosaur girl, they turn into gay zombies.

I don't believe for a second that a script was involved in the production of this movie, as the plot twists and turns at every corner, with the sleazy scientist and barking military man coming up with increasingly absurd explanations for the mayhem as they go along. It does, however, have plenty of topless chicks, including Brinke Stevens and her age-defying puppies for 2 minutes or so, and somehow or another, tits make even the most ridiculous movies all fuckin' right.

Repligator is a fun, nonsensical throwback to the goofy trashfilm "Urban Classics" howlers like Galactic Gigolo and Assault of the Killer Bimbos - mindless, horny, kitchen sink comedies destined to fry stoned teenage minds on the USA network for years to come. As an added bonus, Leatherface himself, Gunnar Hansen, embarrasses himself but good as "Dr. Kildare", inventor of the X-Ray spex, among other, less useful things.

Umm, note: the VHS copy I had disintegrated when I tried to digitize it, so no screen grabs. However, here is a totally fuckin' hot early pic of Brinke that I've been saving for a rainy/screen grab-less day.


- Ken McIntyre

Bare-Naked Survivor (2001)

Directed by Doug Hoffman
Starring Julie K Smith, Shauna O'Brien, Aimee Sweet, Tess Broussard, Aria Giovanni, Alexis Winston
Unrated
USA

"Fuck this French shit, you know what I mean?"

There isn't a lame-assed television concept out there that you can't make fucking superb by throwing some tits at it. Case in point, pseudo-reality's yawnfest ratings juggernaut 'Survivor', which mostly proved how petty, tawdry, and obnoxious regular people are. After you realize that none of these irritating fame whores are actually going to starve to death or get eaten by lions or even eat each other, about the only thrill left is that maybe one of the rapidly thinning women might pop a top. Luckily, the helpful sleazemongers at Indican have made it easy on us all, reducing the series' tiresome docu-drama leanings to it's bare (ahem) essentials.

Just as in the series it parodies, in Bare Naked Survivor, six contestants are placed on an island and battle it out for a cash prize. Only on this version, the contestants are all nude models, the island in question is 'Butta Cheeka', all the 'challenges' are merely a ruse for the horny host to grope the women, and nobody gets thrown off the show, no matter how outlandish their behavior. In other words, everybody wins.

There isn't much in the way of plot, pacing, or convincing performances, but it hardly matters. What does matter is that there's 101 different ways to get a woman to take her clothes off, and all of them are here. Who knew mouth to mouth resuscitation works better topless, or that booty shaking attracts wildlife?

The contestants in this valley of dolls comprise a nice combination of bimbo stereotypes, all played up for maximum camp value. Ruby (Julie K. Smith) looks like Wendy O Williams smuggling basketballs in her halter top. She's the tough chick, the ex-marine that would be a shoo-in to win the contest, were it an actual competition. She stomps around the island flexing her muscles and plotting some kind of vague revenge on the rest of them.

Babette (Shauna O'Brien), the mean one, always snapping at her co-jigglers, has a French accent that's as phony as her bust-line.

Cheryl (Alexis Winston) is...well, a bad actress, mostly, although she does tell a very amusing story about a religious vision she had in Mexico. Only problem is, she's not sure whether she saw Jesus, or just "Some Mexican guy".

Angela (Aimee Sweet) is the hippy chick, Dallas (Tess Broussard) is the good girl, and Monica (Aria Giovanni - who you can find as the teaser girl on a bout half a million porn sites) is the prettiest one.

Not that she gets away from humiliating hijinx, when she gets caught with her pants down by a wandering gorilla.

All of this tender flesh is herded by game host Cliff Probate (Lenny Juliano) who's about the slimiest, pastiest, most craven excuse for a man you can imagine. If anybody deserves to be stranded on a deserted island, it's him. Without the girls, I mean.

It should be noted, by the way, that what little clothes the girls wear, they wear throughout the duration of the show. Which means they only brought one outfit apiece, or more likely, the entire proceedings were shot in one afternoon. No wonder the girls fumble over the script, since it was probably being written in real time. Mandatory viewing, quite obviously.

By the way, the end credits feature ads for each of the girls personal websites, but after watching them run around half naked for an hour, what more do you want from them, blood? Wait, there's the sequel - Bare Naked Vampire Survivor. The 'sucking' jokes alone could keep it going for a season.

- Ken McIntyre

Ice Scream (The Remix) 2008

Directed by John Darbonne
Starring Bobbi Billard, Akira Lane, Shastina Eloff, Gelusa Zaripova
Unrated
USA

"Vicky, what are you doing working here?"
"I'm saving. I want to get double Ds."

Way back in 1997, screenwriter Derek Zemrak and a couple of his pals bought a camcorder, liquored up Ed Wood cohort Conrad Brooks, and made an hour-long Z-flick about a guy who owns a sexy ice cream shop and the box-headed killer that ruins his day. It was called Ice Scream, and it really did exist, if the VHS repro on IMDB is any evidence. Unfortunately, it did not make a huge splash on the world of underground film. And then? Who knows what happened. Time flew. Zemrak, sensing that perhaps the world had finally caught up with his singular vision of eyeball-ridden ice cream cones, remade (or, as they like to call it, 'remixed') Ice Scream with a (very slightly) bigger budget, more tits, and no Conrad Brooks to speak of. Further confusing matters, the 2008-lensed film has been released under two different titles: depending on where you pick up your copy, it may also be called Hot Blood Sundae. Apparently, that version is slightly different. Dunno how. If you do, fill me in. This is what awaits you in the Remix, at any rate.

Ricky (veteran soap actor Richard Van Vleet) owns a failing ice cream shop staffed by Wes (Ryan Click, who seems to be channeling Jim Carrey's fire marshall Bill character, for some reason), a semi-retarded kid with a too-long neck, and a quartet of teenage cuties in candy striper outfits led by busty blonde Vicki (Bobbi Billard). One day he comes up with an idea to save the store - he renames it Scoopettes, and gets his employees to wear tiny t-shirts and mini-skirts. A solid plan, and before you know it, rubes are lining up to buy scoops full of "Oral orange" and Virgin vanilla" ice cream from his scantily-clad servers.

Things go pretty swimmingly until one night when Paula (Shastina Eloff), on her way to take out the trash, wanders into a dimly lit room to find body parts and blood strewn everywhere. She's attacked by an unseen assailant who drags her across the floor and then strangles her to death with a plastic bag. So that's the end of Paula.

Mindy (Akira Lane) and Desiree (Russian-born Gelusa Zaripova, whose accent is as awesome as her name) discover her in the freezer the next day. They assume she killed herself because she didn't like the skimpy outfits. This would not explain why she was wrapped in plastic, but these are not the brightest bulbs in the novelty ice cream business.

A portly fellow in what looks like a UPS outfit and a girl dressed in lingerie and wearing a cop hat show up to investigate. Sexy policewoman wheels the frozen-stiff Paula out on a hand-dolly while the UPS guy/detective grills/comforts Desiree. And then everybody splits.

Jodi (Nova Conner) is the last one to leave for the night, so she takes a shower in the back room, because that's naturally what you'd do. However, before she can even get her bra and panties off, she's axe-murdered by a dude with a festive box/upside-down ice cream bucket on his head.

Despite that two of their own have been murdered on the premises, the remaining Scoopettes return to work, undaunted. In fact, they wear even less clothes than before, preferring string bikinis. The deaths have done nothing to dampen their sense of fun and frolic either, so they spend a good five or so minutes stripping topless and slathering each other with whipped cream.

Comic antics ensue when a gay guy shows up asking for "Penis pistachio" and then a midget tries to barge in, but playtime is over when the girls discover a human eyeball in the "Cherry Forever" ice cream.

The cops show up again and they discover Jodi in the dumpster, so that pretty much ruins the evening.

The next day, our surviving Scoopettes float around topless in a pool, which is awesomely gratuitous. Wes drops by and the girls tease him until he freaks out and bails. Later on, Mindy shows up for work and gets summarily executed by Boxhead in a jarringly Saw-esque scene shot in stark gray and crimson.

The standard slasher movie finale ensues, as the cops battle the Boxhead killer while Vicki and Desiree alternately cower and go about their daily business of posing in bikinis and suggestively licking ice cream. It ends, as you would expect from an ice-cream themed movie to do, with a twist, albeit a fairly obvious one.

Oh, and there's an end-credits booty-shaking sequence that's pretty much worth the price of admission.

Clip: Playboy's The Girls of McDonalds promo

Director Darbonne has worked mostly as a cinematographer for National Lampoon garbage like Adam and Eve (2005) and low-level Playboy TV segments ("The Girls of McDonalds"!). This becomes pretty obvious whenever he launches into yet another bout of whipped cream smearing or lite-lesbo titty-rubs. He also seems intent on directing a dark and very bloody horror flick someday, as Ice Scream is a fairly grisly affair, especially for the consistently light tone the girls keep in the shop. While the kill scenes are not necessarily at odds with the rest of the film, they do seem less jokey than they ought to, and if you wanted, you could edit out an effectively nightmarish stalk n' slash reel from the more serious moments here.

Buckets of blood aside, Ice Scream is a satisfying bit of no-budget fluff anchored by the Russ Meyer-esque charms of final girl Billard. Prior to her role here, the Texan-born beauty starred as 'Summer' on the syndicated Women of Wrestling TV series in 2000, and is a well-known internet model, with over a million Myspace friends. That's a lot of buds. Imagine what her Christmas card list is like.

Anyway, you have either already seen a lot of her, or you will in the future. Like Mary Carey, she has real B-queen potential.

Clip: Ice Scream the Remix trailer.

- Ken McIntyre