Carlito's Angels (2003)

Directed by Augustin
Starring Evly G Pacheco, Alessandra Ramos, Jeni Garcia
Rated R
USA

"And my fat ass landlord? Yo, he knows exactly where I live."

Sometimes you just stumble upon an idea that's so right, so absolutely perfect, that you wonder why no one's done it before. The singularly named Augustin had that very epiphany one day, and this is the glorious result. A Charlie's Angels spoof featuring three gum snappin', smack talkin', hot pants wearing Latina hussies? Brother, you couldn't sign me up for this one fast enough. I woulda funded the thing myself, if they asked. I mean, dig this premise, if you will: Roxy (Elvy Pacheco), the slutty one; Tina (Alessandra Ramos), the baby machine; and Marisol (Jeni Garcia), the stoner, are three drop-dead sexy hood rats holding court in the projects of the Bronx. When they're not getting' high, wrecking marriages, avoiding angry landord Big Lou (Raymond Raynosa), or just hanging out on the corner and jiggling their bits around, they are doing 'jobs' for one Carlito, a mysterious, never seen Latino uberboss, dispatching his top secret missions from his jail cell.

Of course, the perilous endeavors he entrusts them to carry out aren't all that complicated- his one request in the entire film is that the Angels find out which white girl a local married Spanish gangster is banging on the side- but the girls manage to turn them into screwball misadventures anyway.

The plot revolves around The Angel's fateful trip to a local strip club (to find the white girl, natch), where they unwittingly uncover a scheme to fix "The numbers". Dunno what 'numbers' they mean, but the whole neighborhood appears to have a
stake in 'em, so they must be important. I'm getting ahead of myself, tho. First, they have to actually get IN the strip club.

Roxy: But it costs 20 dollars to get in there!
Marisol: 20 dollars? Uh-uh. That's two dime bags!

In a cunning move (on director Augustin's part, if not the Angels), the girls sneak up on the 'featured dancer', drag her in the alley, beat her to a pulp, and steal her stripper clothes. Which they then put on, naturally. Then they saunter into the club and gamely, but disastrously, pretend to be dancers, in a scene that's like an R-rated episode of I Love Lucy, or something. Between stealing make-up, cheating the other strippers in dice, and starting brawls with the paying customers, they forget their mission completely, but stumble into a labyrinthine plot to swindle the neighborhood out of their hard-earned gambling money. And so, the Angels spring into action.

Well, sort of. Mostly they get into screaming matches with the angry girlfriends of the guys they've been doing, dart around corners with their fingers in the air like they're pointing imaginary guns, have pillow fights, and change into a never ending array of jaw dropping outfits.

Oh, and they smoke pot and say "Whatevah!" and "Oh, no, you didn't!" a lot. When they do actually come up with some kind of a plan, it backfires completely- they hunt down Big Lou, but the only muscle they can find to put the hurt on him is Little Lou (Glen Foster) a dwarf, who Lou merely chortles at. "Ha ha, you're mini me!" Lou-the-fat-landord laughs, as Lou-the-dwarf swings wildly at his face. Luckily, they try plan B- plying Lou with pizza- and it works a charm. Why do ya think they call him "Big" Lou, anyway?

The Angels do eventually save the day, of course, in one of those screwball, Benny Hill kinda endings, and everybody ends up at Paco's (Casper Martinez) annual block party and barbeque, where they all (dwarf included) mud wrestle happily aver after.

Ok, so my Latina fetish helps, but this is still very close to the most fun I've had watching a movie in my goddamn life. The characters are great, the actresses are hilarious and completely believable (and muy caliente), the action fast and frenetic, and the whole film just exudes a sense of goofy, good-natured fun that's infectious. Sure, not all of the gags work- a gang fight turns into a film-within-a-film scene that's more confusing than funny, and there's the sudden appearance of a half-assed Boy Blunder that'll have you scratching your head and wondering how the fuck that stayed in the script- but for the most part, Carlito's Angels is a witty, sexy, engaging spoof that's sure to sleaze and please.

I would have bet the proverbial farm that director Augustin would have gone on to bigger, slicker, car-crashier urban-action flicks after this one. He clearly had the panache, and from the awesome cling-clang king of the Rim-Ram Room bullshit he spouted on the DVD's making of featurette ("I don't make movies to make money. If I wanted to make money, I'd work on Wall Street, or at Sears."), he had the right attitude, as well. But alas, he zagged, and went into Spanish language TV production. As to the Angels themselves, Ramos has done some TV drama (Law and Order), but for the most part, this was their big moment. A sequel seems unlikely, but hope springs eternal.

Availability: Carlito's Angels is available on DVD.

- Ken McIntyre

Cheerleader Autopsy (2003)

Directed by Stuart Dodge
Starring Calu Morton, Misty Kapp, Brian D Smith, Brian C Smith
Unrated
USA

"Gimme my hammer, so I can beat you to death with it."

Normally, we would not write about a movie with Autopsy in the title. But it also has Cheerleader in the title, so we are contractually obligated to include it here. I should mention up front that for the first ten or so minutes of Cheerleader Autopsy, I was laughing out loud, and not even at the movie, but with the movie. That's pretty remarkable for a no-budget, southern-fried, semi-retarded gross-out flick. In fact, if director Stu Dodge (current whereabouts: unknown) didn't zag so far in another direction 20 minutes in, if he had concentrated on the cheerleaders and not the autopsy, he would have had a minor classic on his hands, instead of the Troma-on-welfare puke party we're left with.

Cheerleader Autopsy opens with a redneck bus driver (Maurice Walston) who speaks in gibberish and farts into a hat. I think Mr. Walston is trying to channel either Mojo Nixon or Hillbilly Bear. Perhaps both. There's also a coach in too-tight shorts, Coach Pride (John Suggs). He's waiting impatiently for his cheerleading squad outside the bus.
"These little cunts are gonna fuck this up, " he growls. "I can just feel it."

Cut to: the inside of a girl's bathroom, where we meet The Beavers, the most unlikely cheerleading squad ever. They look like low-level porn chicks. Like rejected Suicide Girls. One of 'em, Sissy Wildington (Atlanta burlesque performer Calu Morton) has an English accent and a full sleeve of tattoos. It's fucking awesome.

There's a scene where one of the girls, Chrissy, (Misty Kapp) shows off her new ass tattoo, but she's topless when she's doing it. For no reason.

So, they goof around for a few minutes, and when they realize they're late, they start squealing, because they're afraid the coach is going to paddle them. And then they run to the bus. When they get there, well, the coach paddles them.

The Beavers are representing Stinkwater, their tiny Florida town, in a cheerleading competition. They have a send-off rally consisting of about six people sitting on folding chairs. One of them is a middle aged woman holding a dachshund. When he pees on her leg, she tosses him in a garbage can.

Cut to: "Harverd Medical School", where some big jock guy is in bed with a mannequin. She's supposed to be a corpse. Him and his buddy get kicked out of school for misconduct. The other guy, Blaine, (Brian D Smith, who wrote a screenplay called Bird Flu Horror!) plans to go to Georgia and work at his uncle's mortuary.
"He's like 80, and he's always drunk," explains Blaine. "It's gonna be sweet."

Cut to: a scene where the girls jabber away inside the bus, but the engine's so loud you can't hear them. And then the bus breaks down, and the coach makes the girls practice in a field while some old fucker shoots at bottles of porno beer. I was actually astonished that the girls had actually worked out something resembling a routine.

So the old guy accidentally shoots the bus driver, which causes him and the coach to instantly burn up into cinders, and the bus to roll backwards down the hill. The old guy also accidentally shoots himself in the face, and they use an awesome rubber mask for the effect.

And then Blaine shows up in Georgia. His uncle Clyde (Brian C Smith, presumably D's dad) - who is supposed to be 80 but is actually about 40 - picks him up at the airport. Except he's not at the airport, he's at a playground, and he's pretending to watch planes take off. He takes him back to his mortuary and they immediately start talking about fucking corpses. Uncle says, "The first rule of the mortuary business is, if they don't say no - and the usually don't - then consider that a yes."
Then they have a couple beers, and Clyde tells his nephew he's been selling the corpses to a dog food factory, and there's nothing anybody can do about it, because he's also the sheriff.

Cut to: the accident. Turns out all the cheerleaders died as well, although they could have easily out-run the bus, since it was going about two miles an hour. Some dude in a Mountain Dew t-shirt finds them and calls 911. The operator tells him to give the victims CPR, which he does, only there's only one cheerleader left intact -Sissy, the tattooed chick - and she's actually a mannequin. So the Mountain Dew guy is humping away at the doll when Clyde and Blaine show up. Clyde brains him with a tire iron, and they throw all the bodies in his trunk.

Back at the mortuary, they prep all the bodies for the dog food factory, and when they get to the cheerleader corpse, they both get boners and laugh, for a really long time. And then they do an actual cheerleader autopsy, wherein they yank out two dead babies. I guess one of the cheerleaders was a little fat. Then they go home and fry up the babies.

There's a nebbishy guy called Norbert (Josh Latta) who cleans the mortuary at night. He apparently has a tiny acorn penis, so everybody in town hates him. He notices that the coach's now-dead member was quite large, so after Clyde splits, he cuts off his own penis with a meat cleaver and grafts Coach Pride's onto the bloody stump. I realize that none of this has anything to do with girls, but this is the sort of thing you really have to see through to the bitter, bloody end.

A bunch of stuff happens with Clyde and Blaine. By the way, Brian C Smith appears to be channeling horror host Zacherle for his role as Clyde. It's actually pretty effective. That's the really nutty thing about this movie. As slapdash and stupid as it is, the acting is still quite reasonable, given the material. It doesn't look like Dodge just used his friends and neighbors, it looks like he rounded up actual actors. This could be a happy accident, but it does elevate this otherwise completely unwatchable exercise in Troma-styled buffoonery from total waste of time to a mild and sometimes quite funny curiosity. And that's half the battle right there.

Anyway, one of the cheerleaders, Chrissy, is still alive, despite being mangled to bits. Clyde attempts to kill her with a hammer, but Blaine suddenly sprouts a conscience and tries to stop him. Clyde accidentally bashes his own skull in, and Blaine goes to work sewing the cheerleader back together. Eventually, she wakes up, and asks him what the fuck is going on.
"Well, you lost both your legs, one of your arms, and half your face, but you're still alive. And that's what's important, right?"
"What about my tits?" She asks. "And my sweet little ass?"
"They're both perfectly fine," Blaine tells her.
"Good. At least I'm still sexy," she says.
And then she projectile vomits on his face.
And then he has sex with her, but she doesn't think he performed well, so she throws a bunch of surgical equipment at him.
So he stoves her head in with a bedpan.

There's a climactic battle between Blaine and the grafted penis dude, plus a surprise cameo from the dead cheerleader. It's sort of like the end of House of 1,000 Corpses mixed with the beginning of Reanimator, shot with the budget and technical expertise of HG Lewis. Bloodfeast for dummies, in other words. There's also two twist endings, although neither one makes any sense.

I really have no idea how to gauge this movie. I suppose if you dig rural backyard gorefests, you're in luck. If you're looking for cheerleader-themed softcore however - and you are , otherwise you'd be somewhere else right now - then this is not going to work out for you. But you probably knew that it already, since it's got fuckin' 'Autopsy' in the title.

Still, though, look at this squad. They'd make the craziest porn movie ever.

Availability: Cheerleader Autopsy is available on DVD.

- Ken McIntyre

Vinyl Dolls (2002)

Directed By Buddy Beale
Starring Tiffany Shepis, Beverly Lynne, Ander Page
Rated R
USA

"We're definitely better than the Lollipop Guild."

I'm sure I've groused about this already, but I've never really understood this whole 'softcore' sex trip- I mean, have you ever had softcore sex? I think I might have once, in the parking lot of the Ground Round, but I'm still not sure about that one. Still, there's gotta be a big, meaty market for the stuff, since Playboy (who produced this dizzy little epic) has a whole network dedicated to non-insertion sex. Still. In 2009. It's pretty crazy. At any rate, the idea of a hard 'R' rated flick about an all girl rock and roll band clawing their way to the top brought to my fevered mind classic cinematrosities like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Desperate Teenage Love Dolls and Down and Out with the Dolls- hell, 'Dolls' is even in the title- so I was pretty excited to see this one.

Curses. Foiled again.

Vinyl Dolls starts the same way every movie about a rock band does- with the guitar player quitting in a huff, right before a major gig. They never play her songs, man.
"Fuck this band," snorts Alex-the-guitar player (C Ashleigh), "And fuck you, Samantha."
Samantha (Beverly Lynne) is the bass player. The one who says what everybody's thinking. You know the type.

So Alex splits, which is a serious snag, since she does it right before the girls have to play "12 sold out shows in a week!" I don't know if any band in the history of rock and roll has had a schedule like this. Certainly not a local LA club band. Certainly not a local LA club band that sounds like some half-assed cross between Janis Joplin and Kelly Clarkson. Anyway, this short-haired chick, Nola (Tiffany Shepis) rolls into town from Las Vegas- she's on the run from her drug dealer boyfriend, of course- and shows up last for replacement guitarist auditions. Naturally, she's the best guitar player they ever heard.

She gets the job, and they proceed to play said 12 sold-out shows. How she manages to learn the band's songs in one day is yet another curious mystery of Vinyl Dolls. Things are going swell for the band until the drug dealer boyfriend shows up, and then all hell breaks loose.

Luckily, Nola happens to be banging the local sheriff, who solves the only dramatic dilemma in the entire film with a couple punches to Mr. Coke Dealer's nose. Everybody lives happily ever after. Except for me, maybe.

Every scene in Vinyl Dolls is punctuated with a ten-minute phony sex scene. So, if you're just looking for story, you can get through it all in 20 minutes, which is merciful. If you really do wanna watch faux-sex (erotica, some might call it), then I'd say you oughta pay close attention to the band's drummer, Ander Page. I think she's got three grope-a-dope scenes in this one, and there's a good reason why she's so convincing in them- she's actually a porn star. Or at least she was -her trail ran cold around 2006, but not before she left behind a legacy of seriously raunchy sex flicks. It's a real gas watching her in the 'behind the scenes' featurette, talking about trying to get over her nervousness at getting naked in front of a room full of people for this production. I'm guessing her first ATM scene over at the Redlight Disctrict warehouse cured that up, but quick. Still, I mean, look at this face - is this a porn star face?

Clearly, Miss Page took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

The other main actresses, Tiffany Shepis and Beverly Lynne, have taken less slippery slopes to the Playboy studios, bein' a rock video girl and a low rent scream queen respectively, but neither of them can act nearly as well as the lovely Ms. Page. They all look good naked, tho, and something tells me that mattered a tad bit more during the casting call for this one.

I think the most remarkable aspect of Vinyl Dolls, however, is the music. For a movie about a rock and roll band, the songs they play are about as far away from rock as you can get. Not surprisingly, a guy named Herman Beeftink" (!) wrote 'em all. They sound exactly like the work of one of those sweaty guys running around LA all day shoving their demos into the hands of any A&R hack they can find- "You gotta hear my new song, it's perfect for Britney!" You know the type, or at least you've seen them on TV. The music on Vinyl Dolls is the work of all those clowns rolled into one. Director Beale must either be 60 years old or deaf to buy into Beeftink's cracked musical vision.

Of course, despite all this, I still watched the whole thing. Why? Tits. That's why. Same as you. If you really want to see a phony all girl band frolicking around, tho, I'd suggest the similarly themed Heartstrings, from VCA. At least that one's got anal scenes.

PS: The movie's called Vinyl Dolls, yet the DVD cover prominently features a CD. That's not right.

PPS: Tiffany Shepis went on to become the coolest girl in the world.

Availability: Vinyl Dolls is available on DVD.

- Ken McIntyre

What's Up Nurse! (1977)

Directed by Derek Ford
Starring Nicholas Field, Felicity Devonshire, Julia Bond
Rated R
UK

"You stupid girl! I told you to prick his boil!"

From everything I've read about the man, writer/director Derek Ford was a perpetually horned-up pussy-hound who made sexploitation movies mostly because it afforded him easy access to tender young flesh. Starting with 1969's This, That, and the Other, he spent nearly a decade cranking out low-budget sex-coms like this one, including several with wife-swapping themes, a topic the married Ford was especially interested in. In fact, Ford's wife Valerie sometimes served as his assistant director, shooting hardcore inserts in their own home to tag onto racy "European" cuts of his films. This would certainly account for the brevity (77 minutes) and choppy editing of What's Up Nurse!. Not that it matters, really. The what-the-fuck editing job only adds to the movie's grimy, bedraggled charm. It is clearly the work of a man who likes tits and laughs, and pretty much hates everything else.

Everything about What's Up Nurse! is half-assed, including the title. Where's the question mark and the comma? Say it loud with the exclamation point. It makes no sense. Also, it's not even about nurses. There's three nurses in the film, but two of them don't even have names, and none of them have a significant role. I am sure there's some method to this film-title madness, but I am not privy to it.

The film opens with a train ride. Olivia (the incredibly named Felicity Devonshire) reads The Story of O and occasionally fondles herself. She's sharing a seat with a dashing young doctor, Robert 'Sweeney' Todd (Nicholas Field), who cannot help but notice the pretty blonde with the wandering fingers. Naturally, he introduces himself. He tells her he's a doctor, about to start an internship at a local hospital.
"Seeing as you're a doctor, perhaps you can help me. I have a little problem," Olivia says. "Can I show it to you?"
He agrees to look at it, whatever it is, and she starts walking over to the bathroom.
"Are you coming?" She asks.
"Very nearly," he cheekily answers.
They crowd into the bathroom and she yanks her shirt open as the infectious psych-pop theme song ('The Love Bug', by Tony Burrows) kicks in.

The two attempt to make sweet 70's love while the train barrels down the tracks, but the young doctor finds himself in a delicate predicament.
"I'm...I'm stuck!" He says.
"Yes, well, that's my problem!" the girl tells him.
They call for help, and the creaky old ticket-puncher shows up.
"Oh dear," he says. "I hope you haven't been like that since the train was in the station."
At the next stop they call for an ambulance, and the still-stuck couple are whisked off to a tiny hospital, Banham on Sea General. They get wheeled in, and a ditzy nurse (Julia Bond) takes a look under the sheet.
"Are they Siamese twins?" She asks.

Grumpy Doctor Ogden (John LeMesurier, RIP), called away from his golf game, prepares to separate them via an injection of some sort, and grouses about being disturbed on his day off.
"I'm on my own," he snorts. "It's awfully difficult, because this idiot intern hasn't arrived yet. There's no sign of him at all."
"Well," the young doctor stammers, "That's the thing, sir. I am your intern. I'm Dr. Todd."
Doc Ogden is suitably outraged. It gets worse, however, when he finally gets an eyeful of the blonde with the convulsive vadge.
"Hi, daddy!" She says.
"I see you've met my daughter Olivia," says the mortified Ogden.
Ha ha, what a mix-up!

After he's finally released from Olivia's iron grip, Dr. Todd heads over to his new home, a furnished room in the home of sexy widow Helen Arkwright (Angela Grant). After meeting a neighbor who spouts an amazing, innuendo laden monologue about the comings and goings of all the boat-loving folk in their seaside neighborhood ("You know that young fisherman down at number 13, well, last night was trying out his dinghy for size, to see if it was big enough..."), she points him towards the Cleopatra, the yacht Helen owns. After dumping a bucket of water on his head, she invites him on board and then seduces him.
"There's a storm brewing," she says. "Should we lower the main sail?"
I guess if you spend a lot of time on boats, you just pick all this salty language up.
"After all," she purrs, while they roll around on the floor, "I did invite you to come aboard."
So then he ends up falling overboard, and they have to rush him back to the hospital in an ambulance.

What's Up Nurse! has this odd habit of slipping between narrative-driven comedy and pure slapstick, and you never really know which you're getting from scene to scene. For example, after Todd gets wheeled into the hospital, Carthew the ambulance driver (Graham Stark) stands there in the hallway, cracking walnuts.
"You're making a mess on the floor!" Snaps Matron (Kate Williams), the head nurse.
"Well, I'm quite fond of me nuts," he explains.
And then the other nurse pirouettes through the frame.
"I thought I told you to stop pirouetting!"
Every so often, weird shit like that happens.

Dr Ogden is, of course, annoyed that he's been called in for more of Todd's bullshit.
"You needn't have come in," Dr Todd tells him. "It's only a mild concussion."
"More's the pity," snaps the doctor, and then storms off, leaving the slightly concussed doctor in charge. A guy shows up in the emergency room with a jam jar shoved up his ass, so Todd and Carthew use plaster of Paris and a broom handle to get it out. They milk this lame gag for a lot longer than you'd think. Eventually, the guy ends up rolling down a hill on his gurney, a broom handle sticking out of his ass. He crashes into a guy holding a sign that says "The End is Here".

And so on. There's a fairly awesome scene with a group of girls tossing a ball around in the nude, but it takes a while to get there: a patient comes in suffering under the delusion that he's swallowed a live frog. Matron tells Todd he comes in regularly with the same complaint. They usually just give him a sugar pill and send him on his way. Todd figures he can cure him once and for all by pretending to do a surgical procedure on him to remove the phantom frog. They put the man under, but now Todd needs a frog. First he goes to the local pet shop, but the owner is no help, and tries to sell him a stuffed owl. Next, he decides to go to the source, heading down to a local creek and wading around in the mud looking for frogs. That's when he runs into the naked girls. They think he's a masher, and call their boyfriends, who beat him with sticks and drag him off.

Oh, and then a monkey shows up in the emergency room. And then a constipated gay guy shows up. The gay gets an enema and passes out, and the monkey gives the doctor the slip and ends up blowing the gay guy. At this point, I no longer have any idea what the fuck is going on.

Helen is launching a new boat, so she invites everyone on board for a party. Carthew brings a dropper full of drugs to dose some blonde's drink, but Nurse Julia grabs it out of his hand and gulps it down. Naturally, she ends up performing an impromptu (and impressive) strip tease.

Through a series of ridiculous circumstances, Todd and Olivia end up picking up a yacht for Helen in France and sailing it back to England. Olivia tells Todd the boat is "self-navigating", so they spend all their time fucking in the cabin. Amazingly, they do not get stuck this time, which prompts Todd to propose to her. Olivia gets so excited she sets up some flares, which causes an explosion, blowing them both off the boat. And then it sinks. They're rescued by a bunch of Indian dudes who were stowed away in the yacht.

I am not sure why - it was Olivia's fault, after all - but when they get back, Dr. Todd ends up in jail. Olivia talks the police chief into letting Todd go because they need him at the hospital, but only if he's handcuffed to a constable, which makes for a very uncomfortable scene when a lovely young lady (gorgeous Zoe Hendry, Confessions of a Window Cleaner) comes in, complaining of - ahem - chest pains, and later, when Todd has to perform an appendix removal on the guy who's boat he sank.

Everything comes screeching to a climax in one of the weirdest happy endings I've ever seen. And around here, that's saying a lot.

Like most British sex-coms from the 70's, What's Up Nurse! is full of well-known and well-respected television actors who you will not recognize unless you are actively British, but even without a working knowledge of Graham Stark's resume, this is a relentlessly cornball but often funny bit of tits-out trash that does not skimp on the skin, even in this ridiculously truncated form. The girls are all above average in the looks department - never a given in Britsploitation flicks - and Devonshire in particular stands out for her bubbly, up-for-anything personality. A Page 3 girl before she took up acting, Devonshire appeared in a raft of T&A flicks between '71 and '78, including Intimate Games (1976), Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman (1973), and 3D epic The Four Dimensions of Greta (1972). Sadly, 1979's Sex and the Other Woman was her last film appearance. Sadly for us, I mean. She became a property investor and now has one bazillion dollars.

Director Ford followed this one up with What's Up Superdoc! in 1978. In 1984, he started the amazing Don't Open 'Til Christmas but quit in apparent disgust halfway through shooting. Not enough tits, most likely. He shot a couple direct to video softcore flicks in the 90's, but mostly concentrated on writing erotic novels. He died in 1995. He was only in his 60's, but let's face it, the guy gulped down at least a couple lifetimes while he was here.

Availability: What's Up Nurse! is available on DVD.

- Ken McIntyre