The Wild World of Batwoman (1966)

Directed by Jerry Warren
Starring Katherine Victor, Lucki Winn, Suzanne Lodge
Unrated
USA

"She a real wildcat. I'd like to belt her one."

Jerry Warren (RIP) was a 1940's actor who became a 1950's exploitation flick huckster. He directed a handful of monstery snoozers like The Incredible Petrified World (1957) and Teenage Zombies (1959), and scissored together Mexi-horror imports like Attack of the Mayan Mummy (1964). He made his most audacious move, however, with this goofy hunk of junk, a crass and witless attempt to cash on Adam West-y Batmania. The film starred Katherine Victor (RIP), a minor 50's scream queen who was already well into her forties when she donned the ill-fitting Batwoman leotard. Her "Bat Girls" were plucked right off the street when a fleabag strip club suddenly shut down, leaving a dozen exotic dancers with nowhere to shake their moneymakers. And so began the epic superhero spoof/crime caper/serial homage/incomprehensible mess known as The Wild World of Batwoman.

It should be noted that Miss Victor concocted her own outfit, a hideous jumble of lycra, fake fur, and feathers. As Batwoman, she is the head of a very screwy crime fighting operation, one manned entirely by zonked hippy chicks who may or may not also be vampires. One thing's for sure, they like to dance. There's easily half a dozen dance breaks in this film. Some of them also look like White Panther styled revolutionaries, but I have no proof of their political affiliations.

Anyway, nefarious supercreep Rat Fink (Richard Banks) has one of Batwoman's girls kidnapped by two of his well-dressed goons. They take her back to his secret lair where a mad scientist, Doctor Neon (George Mitchell, shooting for a German accent, but landing somewhere near Apu from the Simpsons) and his Igor-esque assistant Heathcliff (Lloyd Nelson, RIP) keep her locked in a cage and occasionally feed her "Happy pills" to keep her docile.

Mr Fink nabs the girl's two-way... um, bracelet... and uses it to tell Batwoman herself what's up. Seems he needs her expertise for some bullshit, and he plans on holding her girl until she helps him out. What can she do? She flaps on over to the hideout and drinks chocolate milk and eats cookies with the bad guys until Rat Fink gets on his videophone and gives her the full skinny. He wants her to steal an atomic hearing-aid prototype from the 'Ayjax' corporation so that he can listen in on every phone conversation in the world. Just then, the doc plops a goofball into BW's milk, but she's on to him and switches the glasses. He ends up dancing drunkenly around the room, which affords our heroine the chance to drop a few smoke bombs, grab her girl, and vamoose. She gives the Ajax corp a call to let 'em know about Fink's nefarious plot.

They send Flanagan (Steve Brodie, RIP), their legal guy, over to BW's hideout to sort shit out. I know, that sounds underwhelming, but that's what happens. When he gets there, Batwoman is randomly mashing the keys on an organ while her tranced-out batgirls sit in thrall. It's a real wigged-out scene, man. Dude tells her the implications of the Atomic Hearing Aid - something about Cobalt liquid and the end of privacy as we know it - so she agrees to guard the precious item for him. As it's in the vault at the Ajax Corp, she heads over there with her girls, all of them brandishing pistols and shotguns. It's a very Patty Hearst sort of scene.

Doctor Neon and Fink's henchmen show up wearing goofy press-on mustaches and hand the girls chicken salad sandwiches. Vault-guarding is hungry business, so they greedily accept the food and chomp away. Problem is, said sangwiches are laced with happy pills, so they promptly drop their guns and start frugging furiously to the go-go beat in their heads. The crooks make off with the hearing aid.

For some insane reason, Batwoman decides that they best way to find out where the hearing aid went is to hold a séance. Unfortunately, the spirit she contacts doesn't speak English, so that's not much help. BW's Plan B is to send the girls out to find the mussing earpiece, but they get distracted by a beach party.

Meanwhile goofy henchmanTiger (Mel Oshins) captures the same Batgirl from the beginning again and locks her back up. She convinces him to take her to her apartment so she can pick up some records and teach him how to dance properly. I know, but that's what happens. To get there, they have to go out through the backdoor - a cave filled with skeletons. It's also got monsters!*

Somehow or another (I'm pretty sure somebody's dog ate the script by this point), Rat Fink ends up capturing all the Batgirls and chaining them up in Neon's lab. He wants to breed them with Neon's monsters. Seems valid.

Alas, he is thwarted when Batwoman shows up with her raygun and frees the girls. She attempts to unmask Fink, but he has another trick up his sleeve - a "Body Divider". He clones half a dozen Rat Finks and they all run amuck in the lab.

So, how does it all end? Like a particularly retarded Scooby Doo episode, pretty much.

A very odd superhero spoof, this no-budget hodge-podge undid Jerry Warren when DC Comics decided to sue him over the unlicensed use of the "Bat Woman" name. Not surprisingly, DC won, forcing Warren to retitle the film the even more ridiculous She Was a Hippie Vampire. Warren went broke soon after, and didn't make another film until 1981's Frankenstein Island, which also starred Katherine Victor. Anyone who thinks Wild World of Batwoman is a bad movie should take a look at the truly wretched Frankenstein Island. WWOB is a sparkling gem in comparison. Mystery Science Theater dissected Batwoman in 1993, which boosted its stature significantly. They needn't have bothered, however. The movie already lampoons itself quite nicely.

One of the all-time great jawdroppers, The Wild World of Batwoman manages to be horrible and awesome at the same time. And it's way better than Catwoman (2004), too.

*Said monsters were borrowed from The Mole People (1956).

Clip: Wild World of Batwoman trailer!

- Ken McIntyre

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

Bat Pussy (1973)

Directed by?
Starring Dora Dildo, Sam, Buddy
Rated XXX
USA

"How does it feel?"
"Terrible."

There are no credits on either end of Bat Pussy. It's a complete mystery, perhaps the world's last truly 'underground film', found in a trash heap somewhere and resurrected by the kind/cruel souls at Something Weird Video. An ultra-cheap porn quickie with no production values to speak of, Bat Pussy was most likely in and out of the XXX theaters in a day upon its release. Certainly, it does not work, on any level, as masturbation fodder or even kitschy erotica. It is, however, stunningly weird, grubby, and ugly, an unintentionally hilarious bit of homespun cinematic folk-art so senseless, so maddeningly random in its execution that it very nearly approaches some sort of terrible genius. I can only imagine what the raincoat crowd thought of it in 1973, stumbling into some rathole porn theater on the Deuce, hoping for a little light jack-off material and getting nearly 60 minutes of two drunken idiots yanking on each others genitals and spitting out slurred insults/threats like "You never can get a hard on, so I have to use a rubber dick, you son of a bitch!" and "I'm gonna fuck my secretary right in the ass and then come home and make you suck my dick!" The next day, they must have thought they'd dreamt it, unless they just hung themselves in the mens room stall during intermission, convinced that they'd never again pop a boner after witnessing such a nauseating display. Not surprisingly, Bat Pussy has garnered a small-but-ferocious cult following of drunkards and sleaze-beasts over the years. The gang at the AV Maniacs forum even had a "Bat Pussy Dirty Motherfuckers" club for awhile back there, complete with membership cards and fridge magnets. There was also a petition being passed around for awhile to get Bat Pussy re-released on DVD. It worked, sorta, since Something Weird released it as a DVD-R, coupled with another feature, Baby Bubbles. I'm assuming a Blu-Ray is in the works somewhere, but for now, thank goodness for Something Weird Video. For without them, how would we know what the worst/best porn film ever made was?

Buddy, a drunken hillbilly with a Duane Eddy haircut sits, naked, at his kitchen table, guzzling whiskey (for real, from the sounds of it), and reading Screw magazine. His freckly, pug-faced, beehive-hairdo'd wife Sam - who may or may not be a prostitute - sits in their conjugal bed, begging him to fuck her. The copy of Screw would suggest New York City, but their accents suggest...well, swamp people, really.
"Wow," says Buddy, staring at the smudgy pictorials in the newspaper. "Would you look at what they're doin'? Shoot, I wouldn't submit you to something like that," he grumbles to Sam.
"Although I'd like to!"

She finally coaxes him to bed, and starts slime-sucking his flaccid penis. It looks like a sickly pink eel that just wants to die in peace. That goes on for awhile, and then they switch to the '69' position, just like Buddy saw in Screw.
"Darlin', you're gonna have to move your sweet leg," he offers, politely.
This goes on, mercilessly, for quite some time. Apparently Buddy is just now realizing the erotic potential of his partner. He usually prefers, from what Sam implies, "Girls at the office". Of course, he is still not erect after ten minutes of her slobbery suck-job, but whatever. Interestingly, the couple get increasingly hostile towards one another the more time they spend together. Sam starts to call Buddy a "Bastard" with increasing disdain in her voice, while Buddy - gamely trying to perform cunnilingus on his woman - says crazy shit like "Goddamnit, stop coming in my mouth!" and "Every time I run my tongue up your pussy it comes out your asshole. What's the goddammed deal with that?"

Meanwhile, at Bat Pussy Headquarters (scribbled on a piece of cardboard, taped to a cement wall), "Dora Dildo", an angry, undernourished looking woman in a dirty nightgown, lies on a grungy sofa, absent-mindedly grabbing at her crotch. The narrator informs us that she's waiting for her super-sensors to kick in. They tell her when a crime is about to be committed. How does this manifest itself?
"She can always tell," says the narrator, "When her twat begins to twitch".

So, I guess it starts twitching, because Dora gets up and starts pacing. "Somebody is making a fuck film in my holy Gotham city!" She growls. "I better put on my Bat Pussy uniform!"
She whips off her dingy negligee, and starts to pull on her puke-green costume, all the while muttering to herself: "Dirty motherfuckers trying to make a fuck film in my fuckin' city..."

Meanwhile, the two hillbillies continue to flop around awkwardly on the bed.
"That ain't a pussy you got," Buddy says at one point, "That's an ol' warsh tub."
Romance! This goes on for a long time, the two of them trading back nonsensical insults while they paw at each other's privates.

"You wouldn't know how to eat somebody," says Sam, "Even if you was fuckin' your own grandmother."

Meanwhile, Bat Pussy emerges from her secret lair - an outhouse - straddling one of those hippity-hop bouncy balls kids loved in the early 70's. She proceeds to bounce slowly through a park, ostensibly on her way to thwart crime. Amazingly enough, she manages to bounce her way right into the very lap of criminality. Some dude is man-handling a woman near a clump of trees. Bat Pussy sneaks up behind him and bashes his brains in with her bouncy red ball All of this is shot from a squinty long-distance angle, The cameraman had to be a hundred feet away during these scenes. Why? Why would this happen?

Anyway, we cut to more squabbling from Sam and Buddy, juxtaposed with scenes of Bat Pussy bouncing down the side of the highway, giant 70's cars carelessly zipping by her.

Buddy, for some insane reason, decides they could "Make a fortune" if he took pictures of Sam's rancid red vagina and send them to Screw, so he pulls out his camera and starts snapping away. On cue, in barges Bat Pussy, demanding Buddy put the camera down.
"See?" Says Sam, completely misinterpreting the situation. "I knew you were cheating on me. You been messing around with this chick."

Bat Pussy effectively ends the photo-session, but does nothing to stop the horrible carnal display. Within seconds, Buddy has her stripped naked and thrashing around on the bed as the third leg in their mortifying three-way sex-blunder.
"Suck Bat Woman's pussy!" Demands a clearly demented Buddy. "We're all gonna live together now. Suck her pussy!"

There's more naked wrestling to endure. Interestingly, this part of the film looks like it is literally covered in vomit. One of the girls starts coughing a lot. Sam pulls out a flesh colored dildo and starts working on herself, and later on,on Bat Pussy. Buddy never manages to penetrate anybody, although he does accidentally knock Bat Pussy off the bed at one point. And then he flashes a panicked look at the cameraman, unsure of whether he just broke the actress's neck or not.

And then it ends, rather abruptly, with an unsatisfied Bat Pussy pulling her uniform back on and storming out of the apartment.
"Fuck you," says Sam, summing up the experience. "Fuck you in the ass."

Way, way better than The Dark Knight, Bat Pussy is Mandatory viewing, clearly. A once in a lifetime experience. Twice would surely kill you.

Bat Pussy is available from Something Weird Video.

Clip: Bat Pussy to the rescue!

- Ken McIntyre