Directed by Ernest Sauer Starring Marilyn Chambers, Amy Lynn Baxter, Joan Geradi Rated R USA
"It all comes down to the lack of moral fiber." "I think there's some in the whole wheat bread."
You've got to give it to a movie that shows its first set of boobs before the credits are even over. For that alone, we've got to hand it to Bikini Bistro. Unfortunately, there's 79 more moments of alarmingly threadbare sets, horrible fake jazz, cringe-inducing 'humor', and a well-past-her-prime Marilyn Chambers to slog through before the evening is over. So I'm not sure that credits nudity is even worth the effort.
Chambers - sporting an odd, flippy blonde hairdo and dressed in some sort of matronly ex-high school art teacher outfit, is directing a Skinemax style softcore flick. "Remember," she tells the dead-eyed beefcake actor, "It's not 'Let's freeze this moment like a TV dinner, it's 'Let's freeze this moment forever'." So, it's not going too well. "If I know directing would be this tough," she grumbles, "I would have stuck with acting."
Meanwhile, across town, business is not going so well for Amy Lynn Baxter, either. Baxter is Judy, ex porn star and current owner of Gentle Nibbles, a failing vegetarian restaurant. "The formula I've come up with for this place just doesn't work," she sighs. "Sure it does," says Floyd (Salvatore Thomas, Broadcast Bombshells), her wiseguy bartender. "Small portions, bland food, high prices. What could be wrong?"
Of course, there's an evil landlord who pops in and tells Judy that if she doesn't buy the store outright from him within four months, he's shutting the place down. Deciding that all the restaurant needs is a little sex appeal, she calls up her old co-star, Marilyn Chambers, and asks for her help.
I dunno, actors often claim that playing yourself can be more difficult than playing a character, and that may be the case with Miss Chambers, because she's fucking horrible at playing herself here. Anticipating the current "breastaurant" craze a good decade ahead of her time, Chambers suggests 'Gentle Nibbles' become 'Bikini Bistro'. Cue one of the lamest 'fixin' up the place' montages ever.
On opening night, Chambers wears mom jeans and a flannel shirt, while she hands out her old, used bikinis (!) from landmark films like 'Wet N' Wild Fantasies' to the new waitstaff. That's the hook, see. Being waited on by girls wearing Marilyn Chambers' old bikinis. It could work, I suppose. I once had an idea to market spring water that Pam Anderson spit in. I know, sounds gross, but those bottles would've flown off the shelves.
So, you get to see the waitresses change their clothes in slow-motion. Not the worst way to waste four minutes. Chambers get in on it, too, donning some sort of Fabulous Moolah outfit that showcases her meaty biceps.
So, as you might expect, things start going Judy's way, although the restaurant's first-night success is hobbled a bit by her staff's hijinks. Floyd shoves half the evening's take down his pants. Donna (Playboy playmate Isabella Fortea) claims to be the perfect waitress, so the muscle-bound chef, Ron (John Altamura), makes a bet with her where she'll have to take off one piece of clothing for every mistake she makes, and then spends all his time pulling retarded pranks on her. He shakes up the Perrier so that it spurts all over one diner, gives her porkchops to serve to two over-the-top vegetarians, and in another Wile Coyote-esque move, he ties an invisible string to a bowl of gruel and yanks it so it lands one guy's head.
Whenever one of these gags occur, a Three Stooges-ish 'Wah-wah-waaaahhh!' plays on the soundtrack. Incredibly, it makes these eye-rolling moments even less funny. Meanwhile, the other new waitress, Luanne (Joan Geradi, Rock N' Roll Frankenstein), ends up waiting on her old boyfriend David (Joseph Ballister, Vampire Vixens from Venus), which prompts an endless series of flashbacks showing them soft-fucking in various public places. Then there's the stuffy food critic, and the two cartoony weirdoes from the 'Decency Committee', including Bettina (Pamela Safaraba), an overweight woman. Every time she shows up, a tuba plays. Seriously, a fuckin' tuba.
Eventually, Judy soft-fucks the decency guy, Marilyn soft-fucks the critic, Donna soft-fucks the chef, Luanne soft-fucks David some more, they humiliate the fat lady and then give her a makeover (and then she falls in love with the landlord, accidentally saving the restaurant), and they nap the thieving bartender, splattering him with (yes, you guessed it) banana cream pies. And so everybody wins. Except, perhaps, for your brain cells. They most certainly lost this fight.
In summation: Sure, Amy Lynn and the Playboy tramps look good in their bikinis, but seriously, a trip to Hooters would be just as boner-popping, far less painful and, with a well-placed banana peel or two, probably a lot funnier, as well. Director Sauer started banging out Chambers softcore flicks in 1990 and is, amazingly, still at it. They do not get any better or any funnier as they go along. Yet, I have a pile of them here. Why? Dunno. I start thinking about Marilyn in Insatiable, and I get all confused.
Directed by Kirk Bowman Starring Sarah ChristinePletcher, Kira Turnage, Danielle Krienik Unrated USA
Kirk Bowman understands boners. More specifically, he implicitly understands their primary causes and concerns, and has developed a simple but quite effective way to deliver budget wood to the masses. Bowman's managed to carve out a sizable niche for himself directing kinky, bare-bones, weekend-wonder comedies that manage to entertain and titillate without actually showing you much at all. In this age of wall-to-wall gonzo porn, that's pretty fuckin' impressive. Starting with 1995's Cybersex Kittens, Bowman has written, produced, shot, directed, edited, and in some cases, acted in nearly a dozen features, most of which feature extensive scenes involving aspiring actresses cavorting around in their underthings. He is, in no uncertain terms, a dimestore genius.
If I lived in LA, I would hang out with him everyday.
Bowman is clearly firing on all cylinders with this landmark film. Curse of the Pink Panties is the first of his films (along with Bloodsucking Babes from Burbank, also from 2007) to nab decent distribution and get widely (and positively) reviewed, and it's easy to see why. I mean, the title says it all, really. Imagine, a loony crime caper film with a plot that hinges entirely on the cotton-clad crotches of lithesome young ladies, a film with no actual nudity to speak of, but with a literal ass-load of scenes featuring wiggling panty girls, scenes that could put your average adolescent boy into a self-induced coma. That, my friends, is what we are dealing with here.
Plot? Sure, we've got that. Of a sort. Madeleine Dubois (Darlene K. Oliver) is some GILF-y gypsy type with a purring accent. As the film opens, we see an internet ad where she holds a contest to promote her brand of "Lunchbox" (!) panties. Wearers of said garments are encouraged to make homemade videos of themselves wearing the bright pink undies and showing, naturally, how "confident and strong they are." Sounds like an awesome scam. The winners will receive $5,000 and a lifetime supply of panties. No word on who will do the judging, but I'm sure she had a lot of volunteers.
Meanwhile, a notorious Saudi terrorist-slash-jewel thief is skulking around LA in the company of an equally notorious Californian jewel smuggling ring. Which, as you might guess, can only lead to trouble. But more on that later.
Sophie, an exuberant blonde (the sparkly, Kristin Bell-sy Kira Turnage) receives her pink panties in the mail (one is powder blue), and squeals with delight. She calls her drama club pals and they brainstorm the underwear video situation. Cut to:
Akbar (who, by the way, possesses not a hint of an Arab accent), who meets his rag-tag gang of paisley (!) wearing jewel smugglers in a garage festooned with swirly dayglo graffiti and liberally sprinkled with gum-snapping gangster molls. One dude is dressed like a cartoon pimp, and another guy casually brandishes a pick-axe. It's like Scooby Doo villain convention.
Cut to: Panty girls group number two. Becca (the hopelessly adorable Sarah Christine Pletcher) mugs in a barely-there pink bra and thong ensemble and says, "I am never wearing clothes again, now that I've got these cute panties with the little grapes on them!", as her doe-eyed, corkscrew-haired partner Kelly (Danielle Kreinik) films her.
Then she dances. Kelly frowns, wondering how she's going to get in on the action. Becca perks up. "We're gonna do a gangster video together!" And then Kelly, strips down, and they shoot each other with water guns. This is, perhaps, the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life. And I've been around, Jack.
There is one surviving gangster (or was it the helpful pizza guy/amateur cameraman? Or the snoopy handyman from next door? Can't remember, was quite dizzy by this point) who figures out that all his arch-nemeses, as well as his gang-boss, are all now resting comfortably in the warm confines of fledgling actress underwear. Given this information, he must figure out how to right all wrongs, make off with the diamond dough, and free the poor girls from their itchy situation. Can he do it?
You'll have to watch to find out, but I will tell you that an integral part of his investigation involves him yelling directly at Danielle Krienik's vagina. Awesome.
I should point out that, despite a plot straight out of a Ron Jeremy fever-dream, Curse of the Pink Panties never verges into any graphic displays of bared womanhood. It has no sex scenes or even any overtly sexual situations. And that's where Bowman's genius comes into play. Curse is as innocent or as lurid as you want it to be. Me, I lean heavily towards the latter, but put some pants on the girls and you've got a breezy, playful, PG-rated comedy full of rubbery bad guys and wide-eyed innocents who just wanna, you know, have some fun. Sure, it's threadbare and implausible, and full of giddy, giggly performances and Ed Wood-esque not-so-special effects, but that merely adds to the charm. The whole production seems to have floated in from some less cynical time, some crazy colorful never-was when girls liked nothing better than a good half-naked tickle fight and gangsters wore big purple polka dotted hats and shot each other with cap guns.
If somebody knows that way to that wonderful world, send me a map, quick.
Availability: Curse of the Pink Panties is available on DVD. Link: Kirk Bowman's Cranium Candy Pictures
AKA California Cheerleaders Directed by Alex E Goiten Starring Elizabeth Lordan, Jamie Jensen, Lynn Hastings, Gloria Upson Rated R USA
"You girls are about as much fun as an autopsy."
Cheerleaders Beach Party does not open with a party. It opens with stock footage of a college football game, complete with rambling and unrelated commentary from someone who sounds like an over-caffeinated grandpa. Love him or hate him, you've got to give it to Chuck Vincent - he knows how to lower your expectations almost instantly. Just about anything would be better than generic football footage, retarded rambling, and a seriously awful junk-disco number, so when we cut to the first cheerleader shower scene two minutes later, we are eternally grateful, so happy to be done with that opening sequence that we'll forgive the shower caps and squirt guns. It is sort of odd that all four actresses are crowded into a regular bathroom shower together - doesn't seem like an actual locker room shower would be that hard to secure for an afternoon - but cheerleader boob is cheerleader boob, so whatever.
CB Party was not actually directed by Chuck Vincent, he merely wrote it. Alex E Goiten (Cherry Hill High) helmed this one, utilizing most of Cherry Hill High's cast and crew. Clearly, we have a rare meeting of sexploitation legends on our hands here: Goiten's somnambulant directorial flair mashing head-on with Vincent's witless script. Plus, it's got cheerleaders! And disco! How could this not be a major disasterpiece?
Well, our boys do not disappoint. Or they totally do, depending on your viewpoint.
Monica (Elizabeth Lordan), Toni (Jamie Jensen), Sissy (Lynn Hastings), and Sheryl (Gloria Upson) are Rambling University's loyal cheerleading squad. When, over beers at the local tavern, they fund out that three of Rambling U's star football players (all of whom look about 35 and sport Burt Reynolds mustaches) are being actively wooed by their rivals, State University, the girls vow to sabotage SU's conference and destroy their team by any means necessary. As long as 'any means' includes having sex with football players. They steal the coach's van (they leave him with their heart-festooned convertible), and away they go. Cue the on-the-road montage, complete with skinny dipping and, erm, tent pitching.
The girls get to wherever the fuck State U is and spend most of their time at the beach, spying on the football tryouts with binoculars. One of the already-recruited mustache dudes, Mitch (Rick Gitlin,Squeeze Play), takes a liking to Monica and invites her out to a bar, where they dance to a lite-psych band and the other girls pick up hillbillies in overalls.
Later on, Rambling U's football team strolls in with a trio of awesomely named hussies: Honey (Shoshana Ascher, Night of the Zombies), Sugar (Malvina Golden), and Ginger (Cheri Southie). "Sounds like a recipe for fruitcake," deadpans Toni. The girls exchange catty comments, and as they're leaving, Toni crawls under a table and gives Honey the hot-foot. The fuckin' hot-foot, man. Who even knew that existed outside of Bugs Bunny cartoons?
That night, Sheryl has sex with the redneck kid, which convinces him to transfer to Rambling U. So the plan is apparently working.
The next day, the dean hosts a cocktail party for his potential new players. State U's recruiter, Mr Langley (John Hart) instructs the hussies to keep our cheer-girls at bay. "What I want you girls to do," he says, "Is keep an eye on those Rambling U guys. And don't let those preposterous pom pom pussycats anywhere near them!" He says this, by the way, exactly like Sylvester the Cat. An interesting acting choice.
Our heroines will not be stopped by a trio of hair-twirlers with confectionary names, so they dress up like maids and do their best to fuck up the party. They spike the punch (the inserted sound effect of the bottles emptying into the punch is hilarious - it is clearly the sound of someone dumping water into a toilet bowl) and serve pot brownies. The usual mayhem ensues, i.e. pool dunkings, inappropriate toplessness, old ladies dancing with their skirts hiked up, and food fights, including at least one banana cream pie.
Turns out everybody loved the party, though. Particularly the football players, who especially enjoyed throwing food at each other. So, that plan kinda backfired.
Then they pretend they're ghosts. You know, like in Sccoby Doo, with white sheets and flashlights. I know, man, I know. Where's the fucking beach party already? Well, they finally have it, but it's pretty underwhelming. There's a few Chinese lanterns and some disco, and the girls do some of their routines. And then they strip-cheer, which would have been fantastic, were it not in the dark, and were the girls a bit more attractive. The climax? A campfire singalong of House of the Rising Sun. Does that sound like it's worth an hour of tedium to you? The party is not the climax - the girls have more sabotaging and soul-searching to do - but it might as well be, because nothing of any interest happens afterward. Or before, really.
Given its title, Cheerleaders Beach Party held a lot of promise. I mean, cheerleaders AND a beach party - that's two great tastes that taste great together. It had a bitchin' poster, as well. Unfortunately, nothing connects here. The dialogue is beyond lame, there's no action, the nudity is brief, the cheerleaders are only passably good looking, and the disco theme is annoying. A complete misfire. Sadly, no boners will be popped today.
Availability: Cheerleaders Beach Party is available on DVD.
AKA Carnal Madness AKA Bad Girls Directed by Greg Corarito Starring Colleen Brennan, Buck Flower, Michael Pataki Rated R USA
"I've never made it with a chick in a trance before."
One of the more bizarre drive-in also-rans of the 70's - and that's saying a mouthful - Delinquent School Girls is a weird and grimy bit of rough-stuff, padded with enough absurd humor and campy performances to squeak by as a black comedy, if you're drunk or jaundiced enough to shrug off multiple rape sequences. If not, well, you're in for a queasy ride.
Director Corarito was no stranger to softcore scuzz. His previous credits include the eyeball-scorching Wanda, the Sadistic Hypnotist (1969) and the 'dirty western' Hard on the Trail (1971). Odds are, he shot more than a few hardcore loops on the side, as well. Certainly that dank, just-get-'em-out 70's porno vibe permeates School Girls through and through, from the dead-eyed performances of the little lost girls to the he-man, always-on gusto of stuntman-turned-thespian Bob Minor as the resident bone-daddy. It's all there, the violence, the lust, the drugs, the bad wigs, the kung fu girls and the mincing queen, a toxic cocktail of vice and tender flesh served up as good ol' balls-out American Bad Fun. But, much like Satan's Cheerleaders, Delinquent School Girls is actually two films at once. Its first half-hour is standard teensploitation, the tawdry tale of bad girls on a bum trip, complete with tits-out jumping jacks and behind-the-bleachers dope smoking. And then the mental patients show up, and it turns into a different sort of movie altogether.
So, the story. The film opens with a jarring electro-shock scene, clearly influenced by Cuckoo's Nest, right down to the faking-it aftermath. And then, somehow or another, three dangerous felons from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane bust out of their confines in the dead of night, heading for god-knows-what.
Cut to: The Oxford Corrective School for Young Women. It's the last day of classes before a vacation break, and all the girls are due to catch a bus ride out of town. All, that is, except for a handful of incorrigibles, bad-to-the-bone girls forced to stay on campus and think about what horrible things they've done. This motley crew includes, but is not limited to:
Stoner chick Madeline (Betty Johnson)
Feisty Carla (Big Tit model Roberta Pedon, RIP)
Penny, the always-horny one (Brenda Miller)
Feminist fist-fighter Greta ( porn starlet Colleen Brennan)
Innocent, wide-eyed Betsy (Jane Steele)
Sandy, the studious one (Kay Lange)
Alice, the stoner chick with the broken leg (Valerie Anderson)
And various other girls, including one gorgeous teacher's assistant, Miss Crowley (Zoe Grant).
If this seems like an awful lot of characters to keep up with, well, it is, especially when the film randomly adds and subtracts girls as it rolls along. Anyway, after a laborious lecture from the absurdly uptight headmaster Dr. Baxter ( prolific X actor John Alderman, one of Gary Graver's main-men), the girls in question are let loose. Greta, clearly the leader of the gang, wants to teach that mean old Baxter a lesson, so she instructs all the girls not to wear bras to gym class.
"We'll show that chauvinist pig!" she says. And then there's a braless jumping jacks scene. So that was pretty good. Later on, the girls lounge around in their dorm. Penny sniffs glue in her underwear and talks about sex-with-boys, saying stuff like, "A little stretching never hurt a girl." I like the cut of her jib.
Cut to: Ramshackle farm house. Ellie (Julie Gant) is booze-chugging harlot married to hard-working farmer Earl (Buck Flower). Playing completely against type (and against his own life-gulping personality), Buck's Earl is a sober man with intimacy issues: he is terrified of fucking his insatiably horny young wife. She berates him and then heads off to the bedroom, where she pulls out a vibrator and gets to work. Defeated and demoralized, Earl falls into fitful sleep in his rocking chair.
Cut to: Classroom. Betsy has an odd infatuation with the stuffy, 50-year old science teacher Mr. Miller (Ralph Campbell). "He reminds me of my uncle," she tells the other girls. After class, Mr. Miller asks her to help him bring some books home. She happily obliges, but once he gets her there, he doses her iced tea and hypnotizes her with a stuffed eagle.
"It's terribly warm in here, Betsy," he says, once she falls into a trance. "Why don't we remove some of those clothes?" He starts stripping her down, telling her how she will not remember a thing when she wakes. "You must remember," he intones, "to forget."
Meanwhile, there's an all points bulletin out for three escaped mental patients: Carl Clooney (Michael Pataki), the ringleader of the gang, a failed "mimic and impersonator" turned felon, Richard "Big Dick" Peters (Bob Minor), a serial rapist, and Bruce Wilson (Stephen Stucker) a "known homosexual". With the cops hot on their trail, the loony trio bust into Earl's house while he snoozes. Earl attempts to brawl with the villainous trio, but is quickly subdued. Dick, naturally, has his way with Ellie ("This is positively indecent!" she squeals, half-protesting), while Carl and Bruce swill bourbon and play the piano.
They force Earl to drink too, so he eventually gets too drunk to care about rape and home invasion, and just settles in on the couch with Carl, lamenting how fucked up the world has gotten. Earl asks the fellas if they'll lock him in a closet, so he can at least look like he struggled a bit. They grant him his wish. Then they steal his truck, and take off into the night.
Meanwhile, back at Girl School, everyone has left for the vacation break except for our resident bad-girls, who sit around doing sexy stuff: a little lesbian petting here, some topless push-ups, some suggestive Popsicle sucking. Just your average hot-bad girl's night in, really. That is, until the unholy three run out of gas just outside of the school. Hungry and exhausted (although I'm not sure why; they just left Earl's house ten minutes ago), they sneak into the school's back door.
The fellas find themselves in the school's kitchen, so they gorge on watermelon and baloney sandwiches. Fearing that the joint may actually be some sort of prison, they decide to bail as soon as they're done eating, but a couple of the girls walk in on them and start beating their brains in with rolling pins. The tables quickly turn, however, and the girls get raped. The actresses actually look freaked out by the scene. It sorta sucks all the fun out of the room. Miraculously though, once the forced sexin' is over, they all sit down to sip wine and goof around together. So, they're charming rapists, I guess. Wine tasting party over, Carl shoves the girls into a freezer for safe keeping.
Across campus, Betsy is visiting Mr. Miller again. She's dropped by to see his new collection of snakes. Non-poisonous snakes that look deceptively like rattlers. Betsy still doesn't suspect that she's become an unwilling sex slave. Before you know it, she's staring at that fuckin' eagle again, and crazy ol' Miller has her stripped down. Worse still, he's letting the snakes loose in her panties. What the fuck?
The marauders break in. Initially they plan on the usual rape and robbery, but the snakes freak them out, so they bail, while Miller has a heart attack on the floor. Betsy, however, is still oblivious to it all. Next, the boys bust into the gymnasium, where Alice and Madeline are getting stoned by the pool. The girls offer to smoke the strangers up, and the next thing you know, they're giggling and making out. But then Carl sticks the edge of a knife under Alice's chin. Naturally she freaks out, and kicks his ass into the pool. Dick jumps into save him and the girls attempt to escape, but get nabbed by Bruce. Then they disappear. Continuity is not this film's strong suit.
At some point later, two of the girls (Who knows which ones? At this point, it all becomes a blur of big tits and karate chops) run into Dick, who they attempt to kill by kicking him to death. Carl and Bruce intervene and make them wrestle in the dirt. It starts to become clear that Delinquent School Girls is less a narrative exploitation film than it is a series of sequences geared towards specific fetishes. Like girls in schoolgirl outfits? We got 'em. Big tits? Check. Rape fantasies, lesbians, girl-on-girl wrestling, even bestiality? Step right in, we have room for every fucking weirdo in here.
The guys find a car with the keys still in it, but before they can get the hell out of there, Dick manages to peep into yet another window to find all the girls not locked in freezers or left half-naked in the mud in the gym, practicing Karate. For whatever reason (because they are all crazy, I suppose), Carl decides they ought to bust in on them and, I swear, make them dance in a chorus line. Bottomless, no less. "I'm not taking my panties off for you or any man," growls Greta, which is sort of ironic, seeing that Brennan was a porn star.
Meanwhile Carla, bloodied and muddied, finally makes it to the highway, where she flags down a car. Two hippies pick her up, but instead of offering help, they try to ply her with booze and squeeze her enormous tits. "Oh, we'll help you," says the driver, "but first, let's clean off some of that mud and see what we've got to work with."
Mr. Baxter is still sitting in his office, reading bondage comics (!), oblivious to the horrors going on in the gym. A knock-down, drag-out fight between the feminist Kung Fu girls and the already beaten-to-shit bad guys ensue. You can probably figure out the rest.
Given its lurid title, Delinquent School Girls would've scored in mid 70's drive-ins and grindhouses regardless of its actual contents. I couldn't help myself either. The actual film is largely indefensible, though. It really is just a series of R-rated fetish loops lashed together with a bunch of standard exploitation tropes to flesh it out. Pataki, Minor, and Stucker literally attack their roles, to various levels of effectiveness. Minor's Big Dick is a half-retarded sex beast, a bizarre, muscle-bound cross between a blaxploitation superdude and a horny werewolf. Stucker does a full-on Paul Lynde, and Pataki laces his jokey exposition with lame-duck impressions (Nixon, Clark Gable, Cagney). Too cartoon-y to be authentically menacing, they instead come off as just really, really annoying. The girls are much more interesting to watch, with performances that range from convincingly bad ass (Brennan) to immaculately stoned (Anderson). Had Corarito made an entire film about the girls, this could have been a teen-trash classic, ala Trip with the Teacher or The Cheerleaders, but the shoe-horned fetish elements and these braying jackass mental patients often turn the otherwise dead-on 70's T&A-fest into a tedious and embarrassing mess.
Your call, really.
Graduation day? School Girls was Corarito's last official directing gig, but he stuck around the z-movie world for many years, eventually working for none other than Canucksploitation god Rafal Zielinksi. Pataki had a sweet gig for awhile as the voice of George Liquor on Ren & Stimpy. Bob Minor, now in his mid-sixties, is still acting and doing stunt work. Stucker died of AIDs in 1986. Colleen Brennan became one of the biggest porn stars of the 80's, and also acted (as Sharon Kelly) in Chuck Vincent's 1988 women-in-prison howler Slammer Girls. Buck Flower lived until he died, in 2004. Most of the other girls were one-time actors, including, unfortunately, the striking Zoe Grant. Her, I'd watch in anything. Well, not this again, but anything else.
Availability: Delinquent School Girls is available on DVD.
You've got to give it to a movie that shows its first set of boobs before the credits are even over. For that alone, we've got to hand it to Bikini Bistro. Unfortunately, there's 79 more moments of alarmingly threadbare sets, horrible fake jazz, cringe-inducing 'humor', and a well-past-her-prime Marilyn Chambers to slog through before the evening is over. So I'm not sure that credits nudity is even worth the effort.
Chambers - sporting an odd, flippy blonde hairdo and dressed in some sort of matronly ex-high school art teacher outfit, is directing a Skinemax style softcore flick.
Meanwhile, across town, business is not going so well for Amy Lynn Baxter, either. Baxter is Judy, ex porn star and current owner of Gentle Nibbles, a failing vegetarian restaurant.
Of course, there's an evil landlord who pops in and tells Judy that if she doesn't buy the store outright from him within four months, he's shutting the place down. Deciding that all the restaurant needs is a little sex appeal, she calls up her old co-star, Marilyn Chambers, and asks for her help.
On opening night, Chambers wears mom jeans and a flannel shirt, while she hands out her old, used bikinis (!) from landmark films like 'Wet N' Wild Fantasies' to the new waitstaff. That's the hook, see. Being waited on by girls wearing Marilyn Chambers' old bikinis. It could work, I suppose. I once had an idea to market spring water that Pam Anderson spit in. I know, sounds gross, but those bottles would've flown off the shelves.
So, you get to see the waitresses change their clothes in slow-motion. Not the worst way to waste four minutes. Chambers get in on it, too, donning some sort of Fabulous Moolah outfit that showcases her meaty biceps.
So, as you might expect, things start going Judy's way, although the restaurant's first-night success is hobbled a bit by her staff's hijinks. Floyd shoves half the evening's take down his pants. Donna (Playboy playmate Isabella Fortea) claims to be the perfect waitress, so the muscle-bound chef, Ron (John Altamura), makes a bet with her where she'll have to take off one piece of clothing for every mistake she makes, and then spends all his time pulling retarded pranks on her. He shakes up the Perrier so that it spurts all over one diner, gives her porkchops to serve to two over-the-top vegetarians, and in another Wile Coyote-esque move, he ties an invisible string to a bowl of gruel and yanks it so it lands one guy's head.
Whenever one of these gags occur, a Three Stooges-ish 'Wah-wah-waaaahhh!' plays on the soundtrack. Incredibly, it makes these eye-rolling moments even less funny. Meanwhile, the other new waitress, Luanne (Joan Geradi, Rock N' Roll Frankenstein), ends up waiting on her old boyfriend David (Joseph Ballister, Vampire Vixens from Venus), which prompts an endless series of flashbacks showing them soft-fucking in various public places. Then there's the stuffy food critic, and the two cartoony weirdoes from the 'Decency Committee', including Bettina (Pamela Safaraba), an overweight woman. Every time she shows up, a tuba plays. Seriously, a fuckin' tuba.
Eventually, Judy soft-fucks the decency guy, Marilyn soft-fucks the critic, Donna soft-fucks the chef, Luanne soft-fucks David some more, they humiliate the fat lady and then give her a makeover (and then she falls in love with the landlord, accidentally saving the restaurant), and they nap the thieving bartender, splattering him with (yes, you guessed it) banana cream pies. And so everybody wins. Except, perhaps, for your brain cells. They most certainly lost this fight.
In summation: Sure, Amy Lynn and the Playboy tramps look good in their bikinis, but seriously, a trip to Hooters would be just as boner-popping, far less painful and, with a well-placed banana peel or two, probably a lot funnier, as well. Director Sauer started banging out Chambers softcore flicks in 1990 and is, amazingly, still at it. They do not get any better or any funnier as they go along. Yet, I have a pile of them here. Why? Dunno. I start thinking about Marilyn in Insatiable, and I get all confused.
Availability: Bikini Bistro is available on DVD
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