The Crush (1993)

Directed by Alan Shapiro
Starring Alicia Silverstone, Amber Benson, Jennifer Rubin
Rated R
USA

"Nick, ever do a virgin?"

An exceptionally silly dollop of stalker-lite starring a radiant, apple-cheeked, pre-Clueless Alicia Silverstone as Adrienne Forrester, a fourteen year old (Silverstone was 17 at the time) child prodigy adept at entomology, horseback riding and piano, but horrible at making friends. When magazine writer Nick Eliot (Cary Elwes, Saw) moves into the family's spare guest house, she quickly develops a crush on him, and their innocent flirting takes an ugly turn into obsession.

Kurtwood Smith (That 70's Show, RoboCop) plays Adrienne's sad-sack dad, who has spent the last decade assembling and restoring an entire carnival carousel in his attic just to amuse his couldn't-care-less daughter. Jennifer Rubin (Bad Dreams) is Amy, Nick's co-worker/love interest, and Amber Benson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is Cheyenne, Adrienne's sorta-friend. Eventually, everyone ends up entangled in smarty-pants Adrienne's web of warped affection.

As in any self-respecting stalker flick, there's a few scenes where the pangs of unrequited love spill over into mayhem and violence - Adrienne scratches "Cock sucker" into the hood of Nick's newly restored vintage convertible and erases the hard drive on his computer, causing him to lose the big story he'd been working on; she sics a nest of wasps after Amy and hobbles Cheyenne during a horserace. Finally, when Nick spurns her advances for the last time, she just has herself beat up, calls the cops, and blames Nick for the assault.

Out on bail, Nick and Cheyenne band together to defeat this beatific-looking monstress. And that's pretty much what happens, although most of the climax is just people yelling each other's names: "Adrienne!" "Cheyenne!" "Dad!" "Nick!"

Filmed with an absurdly light touch by Alan Shapiro - who would go on to helm the '96 Flipper remake - The Crush has all the earmarks of a soapy Lifetime movie (or, going back aways, an ABC Afterschool Special). Sure, our Adrienne is a rampaging, mad-genius psychopath, but she's portrayed by the frothiest actress since Sandra Dee. Alicia Silverstone could pluck out the eyeballs of a bunny rabbit and eat them, and she'd still look adorable doing it. She just cannot radiate menace, which makes The Crush more of an eye-rolling teenage drama about a poor little rich girl than the sexy, nail-biting thriller it was clearly supposed to be. Elwes gingerly walks the fine line between put-upon nice guy and lecherous sleaze, and Smith is great as always in his signature angry-dad role, but ultimately, The Crush is just too cute for it's own good.

- Ken McIntyre

Skyscraper (1996)

Directed by Raymond Martino
Starring Anna Nicole Smith and her ridiculous breasts
Rated R
USA

"Well, excuse me for still believing in Sunday walks in the park and little babies!"

An out-of-shape and constantly befuddled Anna Nicole Smith "stars" as helicopter pilot Carrie Wisk. Carrie's got a pretty plum gig - shuttling millionaires from one rooftop to another in Los Angeles or wherever they are - as well as a swank penthouse apartment, a sex-crazy cop husband, Gordy (TV dude Richard Steinmetz), and a propensity for child-like whining. All of these elements will collide in one fateful afternoon, when Carrie finds herself caught in the middle of a terrorist plot to...assemble several pieces of a briefcase together. Said assembled briefcase will then blow up the planet. I think that's what's supposed to happen. It was difficult to pay much attention.

First, though, Carrie has to go home, mid-morning, to take a shower. And that's what she does. Now, I think everyone - including the director - was expecting the Guess Jeans girl to show up on set.

But the Guess jeans girl was long-gone by 1996, replaced with a dazed, overweight simpleton halfway to oblivion. When she was thin and functional, Anna Nicole's boobs were already oversized, but by '96, her silicone-swollen teats were just humongous. They do not look like movie star tits. They don't even look like Playboy tits. They look like bottom-shelf gonzo porn tits. It is alarming to see porn boobs in a non-porn movie. It makes you feel like you should be watching it in the basement.

So anyway, she takes a long, lingering shower, so that you have ample time to ogle her ample breasts. And then Gordo slips in there with her, and then they continue their gross love-making in the bedroom. As soon as they're finished, Carrie starts whining about wanting a baby, and Gordon makes a hasty exit. You would, too.

Long story short, some terrorists take over a building to put the briefcase together. It's a motley assortment of vaguely foreign dudes - a black guy with a British accent who spouts Shakespeare, a long-haired Frenchman, a long-haired Fabio type guy with tits nearly as big as Anna's, some South Africans, and a German chick who, for whatever reason, happens to be cross-eyed.

Together they seal off all the exits, grab a bunch of hostages, and randomly shoot at things for the next hour or so. It's up to Anna Nicole and a Don Knotts-like security guard to thwart them.

And that's pretty much it. Oh, and mid-film, there's a flashback barnyard sex scene which allows the viewer more Anna Nicole tit-time and also looks suspiciously like an out-take from one her Penthouse videos.

Also, Anna gets raped by one of the dudes, at one point, but then she throws him out the window. In fact, several people get thrown out of the window. There are also a few massive explosions, and a scene where Anna Nicole repels down the side of the building on a cable. The stuntwoman who actually does the rope-work is about 75 pounds lighter than the woman she's doubling for.

Stuff like that goes on throughout the film - you get the feeling that everyone in the cast and crew is working doubly-hard to make up for the fact that the star of the film can't act and is too sluggish to perform anything remotely physical. It's the cinematic equivalent of pitching underhand for the slow kid in Little League.

Promoted as "Die Hard meets Barb Wire", Skyscaper might be one of the most ill-starred films of all time. Without Anna Nicole's bull-in-a-China-shop performance, it would have been merely lousy: a muddy, weirdly cast, flimsily plotted bit of basic-cable weekend fodder. But throw in the palpable ick factor of the doomed, dumbstruck, spaced-out starlet up front, and you've got one seriously queasy cinematic experience. It's not often that you can actually smell the flop sweat radiating off a film, but this one reeks of it.

Brainless and charmless - even for a 90's C-level action flick - Skyscaper probably would have slithered quietly into oblivion were it not for Nicole Smith's reality show notoriety just a few years later. Morbid curiosity will keep it afloat in perpetuity, but trash-flick fans beware: this is bad-bad, not awesome-bad.

- Ken McIntyre

Summer School (1987)

Directed by Carl Reiner
Starring Mark Harmon, Kirstie Alley, Shawnee Smith
Rated PG-13
USA

"Please take your seats."
"Where should we take 'em?"

Laid-back, surf-loving gym teacher named Shoop (Mark Harmon) is all set for a summer vacation in Hawaii with his young blonde girlfriend when he gets asked to teach English to a class of slow-learners who failed to make the grade that year because the teacher who was supposed to take the class (played by Director Carl Reiner) wins the lottery in an opening scene, thereby leaving the position vacant. Shoop is coming up for tenure and is more or less press-ganged into the job.

The class consists of a diverse mixture of underachievers and after a tough first class a deal is struck whereby the students will attend and work in exchange for help with each of their personal problems outside of class. For example, a pregnant single girl named Rhonda played by Shawnee Smith (star of the 'Saw' movies) needs a partner for her birth classes as the possible fathers (including David Lee Roth!) are not around. Meanwhile, laid-back and sexy surfer-chick Pam House, played by Courtney Thorne-Smith (Ally MacBeal, Melrose Place) has a crush on Shoop and wants to move into his home.

Also in the class is pretty Italian exchange student Anna-Maria Mazarelli (Fabiana Udenio, who also starred as Alotta Fagina in Austin Powers). Other noteable characters include a big guy who leaves class to use the lavatory but never returns, and a zany double act consisting of slasher-flick obsessed Francis "Chain Saw" Gremp (played byDean Cameron from Ski School/Ski School 2) and his slacker side-kick Dave Frazier (Gary Riley, who you may recognize from Stand By me).

During the tough first class, a female History Professor, Robin Bishop (played by Kirstie Alley from Cheers, etc) visits the classroom and Shoop falls for her although she does not welcome his advances and it transpires that she is already dating Shoop's nemisis, Assistant Vice-Principal Phil Gills, intensifying the rivalry between Shoop and Gills.

The movie includes sub-plots about each of the student bribes, including a hopeless driving lesson in which Shoop's car gets trashed, a party at Shoop's house which results in fire, and surfer chick Pam arriving on Shoop's doorstep hoping for a place to stay - cue a mis-timed visit by love interest Robin who gets the wrong idea and wrongly assumes that Shoop is having an affair with the student.

To cap it all off, Shoop even ends up in the jailhouse in his roller skates, wrongly accused of purchasing alcohol for minors attempting to help Chainsaw and Dave escape arrest for drinking in public. This provides a stand-out scene is when Chainsaw and Dave show their fake ID to the judge.

Other highlights include a class outing to a petting zoo/theme park, a day at the beach, and an in-class screening of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But when the school administration discover what has been going on, Shoop's days look numbered and a substitute teacher takes over the class. The delinquent class respond by staging their own version of a chainsaw massacre, utilizing novelty gore and horror movie props to great effect!

Shoop and the class realize they have grown close and the kids promise to do their best to pass the exam if Shoop comes back. They study hard and on the day of the exam the student who 'went to the lavatory' returns after being absent for the entire summer, stating "My zipper got stuck." The drama intensifies when pregnant student Rhonda goes into labor during the exam.
The movie skips to the day that the exam results are announced, the students, their parents and Shoop are on campus and it transpires that not all the students have made the grade, despite all making a vast improvement. As a result Assistant Vice Principal Gills wants to fire Shoop. However, the parents of the students come to Mr. Shoop's defense on the basis of the vast improvement of their offsprings' performance. At this point Principal Kelban (Francis X. McCarthy) agrees that this is the most important thing and grants Mr. Shoop tenure. As for the romantic sub-plot between Shoop and Robin? The movie ends with them laying together on the beach together, kissing in the surf.

To sum it all up this is a great movie and one of my favorite of that whole 1980s High School genre. Sure, it isn't the most fashionable, neither is it the zaniest, crudest, or most famous. In fact it is kind of dorky and unlike many other films in the genre (or on this website) there isn't any nudity.

However, with such an impressive line-up of future starlets such as Courtney Thorne-Smith, Fabiana Udenio and Shawnee Smith this makes the grade as a 'movie about girls'. The great casting , characters and various sub-plots keep the pace fast and fun to make this a timeless movie despite the overall predictability and 80s cheesiness. All in all this is a movie which doesn't pretend to be anything it isn't and delivers enough laughs and good vibes to make it a cult classic. To paraphrase Chainsaw and Dave, "it has plucky spirit and character....two thumbs up!".

The Soundtrack is good too and includes the Moviesaboutgirls.com playlisted "Mind Over Matter" by our favorite E.G. Daily, in fact the promo video starring the Summer School cast was an MTV hit at the time.

- Alex Eruptor

Angel of Destruction (1994)

Directed by Dan Golden
Starring Maria Ford, Charlie Spradling, Jessica Mark, Chanda Fayme Rated R
USA

"The broken nose is for the girl - the vasectomy's free."

Topless action flicks are the cinematic equivalent of a late-night Taco Bell run. While they have, in fact, been greedily and happily consumed by just about everyone - and usually during a giddy alcoholic stupor - they are practically never praised in public. Worse still, "erotic thrillers" have none of the cult appeal of similar subgenres. There's dozens of books and hundreds of blogs dedicated to slasher movies, but sexy action flicks? They get no respect, man.

They do, however, have their own kings and queens, and Maria Ford is one of them. Ford's hazy star never shined quite as brightly as her contemporaries - Z-action perennials like Shannon Tweed or Julie Strain - but she may be the most remarkable actress of the bunch. The Morticia eyebrows, the sand dollar sized nipples, the stubborn refusal to register emotion of any kind, it all adds up to one deliciously ridiculous package that's impossible to resist. She is probably most well known for 1995's audacious Stripteaser - another no-budget Roger Corman-produced quickie - but Angel of Destruction is just as over-the-top, and infinitely weirder.

Set in Hawaii, but filmed in the Phillipines - and in some of the grungiest, least Hawaii-esque locations imaginable - Angel of Destruction tells the tawdry tale of Delilah (one-time actress Jessica Mark), a topless cabaret performer/glam-metal singer from Honolulu. With her career on the skids, Delilah launches a racy comeback at a local S&M club, performing her songs wearing heavy metal lingerie and cavorting with her lover/co-conspirator Reena (Chanda Fayme, Emmanuelle, Queen of the Galaxy) on an electric chair prop while smoke bombs go off and scantily-clad locals writhe in a cage behind them. This audacious display attracts the attention of berserk bleach-blonde man-mountain Robert Kell (Jimmy Broome), a sexual predator/mercenary/ex-military man in town to waste a bunch of underworld fat cats who "left his men to die in Angola", whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.

Kell sends Delilah a finger in the box, which prompts her to seek out a bodyguard, private investigator Brit Alwood (Charlie Spradling, Ski School). She doesn't want to bring her troubles to the cops because she doesn't like the police - as she tells Brit, her dad was a cop, and he raped her. Ouch!

Brit does her best to keep Delilah safe, but then Kell snaps her neck, and that's the end of that. It's a pretty disorienting moment in the film. Isn't Britt the Angel of Destruction? What? She has a sister?

Yep. Brit's step-sister Jo (Maria Ford), an undercover cop, shows up to bury her older sister and exact bloody revenge on the beast who killed her. And also to take over bodyguarding duties for Delilah. And also to do a striptease dressed as cat.

Oh, and to have a house-destroying karate fight with half a dozen mustachioed Filipino dudes while wearing nothing but a thong.

But that's not all. Heavens, no. There's also mob hijinks, a super- slo-mo sex scene with a gay guy (also mustachioed), an extravagant and shameless misuse of spandex and half-shirts, over the top car explosions, and slasher movie psycho bullshit, just to name just a few of Angel of Destruction's singular delights.

The plot is mostly non-existent, the production values grubby and threadbare, and the film's adherence to any functional form of reality is mostly tenuous, but the rewards are so great with this one that all these deficits can easily be overlooked. A heaping, piled-high plate of pure gut-bucket 90's exploitation, this is the sort of deliriously cheeseball 3AM pay cable time-filler that teenage sleaze-beasts dream of, but rarely ever witness. A glittering pearl amongst the tedious muck of artless 90's erotic-thrillers, the undeservedly obscure Angel of Destruction is well-worth the hunt. A minor masterpiece of old-school drive-in trash.

Director Dan Golden has spent most of the past decade working as a DP, shooting softcore for T&A legends like Jim Wynorski and Donald F Glut. The odds are, if you've watched a titty-flick that was made in the past ten years - Countess Dracula's Orgy of Blood, The Witches of Breastwick, Bikini a Go Go, Cheerleader Massacre, etc. etc. - it was our man Dan behind the camera. As for Maria Ford, she's mostly abandoned her exploitation roots as of late, preferring family TV drama like 7th Heaven and kidflicks like Beethoven's Fifth (2003). But if she ever wants wallop some sleazy mustache dudes in a thong again, there will surely be legions of bleary-eyed sleaze-beasts tuning in.

- Ken McIntyre

The Graves (2010)

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Sorority House Vampires From Hell (1998)

Directed by Geoffrey de Valois
Starring Kathy Presgrave, Yvette Davis, Eugenie Bondurant
Unrated
USA

"I had more fun at my last drive-by."
"HAHAHAHA!"

The movie opens with a ten-minute credit sequence featuring a hot chick with big boobs dancing around in a front of a TV while ear-gouging industrial rock plays on the soundtrack. Of course, you could always hit the mute button to escape the garbage-y music, but it won't even do you any good, because the video image is so saturated (on purpose) and blurry (maybe not on purpose), that you can't even pop a decent boner. Originally, Sorority House Vampires from Hell was released in 3D, so I think that's what's up there. If that's the case, than this sequence - and the others like it - are completely useless, since 90% of the available copies of this fucking mess are in blotchy 2D.

Oh, and also, I think there was a shot of flame-haired porn starlet Annie Body sucking on a metal phallus of some kind in there, too. Dunno. Anyway, fast-forward through that part.

When you get to the story, you will first be alarmed/panicked by just how cheap the fuzzy camcorder image looks. It is much worse than the home movies your dad took on the family's first video camera in 1987. It's also, at least briefly, in washed-out black and white. Impossible to say if this is on purpose. A girl walks through a cardboard graveyard and runs into another girl, this one in a cape and cowl. Then a third girl springs up from her grave and tries to bite the other two girls. And then they haul ass out of there.

Turns out the first two are sorority pledges, and the sorority house is in the middle of the woods, the very same woods where an anorexic vampire hangs out. A couple end up fucking in the dirt near the vamp's grave; she manages to chomp them, and begins to gradually return to her former form - a too-skinny, wisecracking clothes horse. She quickly acquires a biker chick Renfield and the two traipse around the immediate area, snacking on coeds and trying on lingerie.
Meanwhile, inside the sorority house...well, it's actually impossible to tell what's going on. There is a shower scene, but it's shot too ineptly to do you much good. There's some lesbians and a little S&M, but not enough. There's also a subplot with a bungling Dracula who makes Wall Street jokes. Etc.
Eventually, the skinny-bitch vampirella recruits half the sorority and most of the local yokels into her zombie army, and they take over the world.

Or they don't. I mean, this thing is impossible to sit all the way through, so anything could have happened.
The opening and closing sequences - with the naked girls, flashing lights, and headache-making racket - are quite redolent of legendary psychedelic schlockmeister Jess Franco's work. I'll give Mr Valois that much. But all the ponderous spookshow antics and anti-comedy in-between are just too painful to endure. The only reason I ended up buying(!) a copy of Sorority House Vampires From Hell in the first place is because it's supposed to feature the lovely JJ Rodgers, star of Amazon Warrior, but she is nowhere to be found. Apparently, she's in some other cut.

So that sorta sucked.

All in all, a pretty miserable experience.

- Ken McIntyre

Chai Lai Angels: Dangerous Flowers

Directed by Poj Arnon
Starring Jintara Poonlarp, Bongkarj Khongmalai, Supakson Chaimongkol, Bunyawan Pongsuwan
Rated R
Thailand

"How dare you kick my face!"

There's this pearl, see. It's at the bottom of the ocean. It keeps all the fish in line. This one stone-faced karate dude is sworn to keep it safe. But then this other guy - one of those blandly handsome, vaguely evil types - kidnaps the karate dude's kid and uses her for leverage to find out where the pearl is. That bad guy also has a seriously annoying transvestite henchman. The best one always do, don't they?

At first, this turns out to be a bad idea. The kid is actually a karate master, just like her dad, so she kills a lot of dudes first. But they finally get the best of her.

So...I am not sure who works for whom or how anybody gets involved in all of this, but somebody calls the Chai Lai Angels - five female Asian mercenaries/secret agents, ranging in attractiveness from sorta-cute to drop-dead gorgeous. Just like in the landmark 70's television series Charlie's Angels - the clear inspiration here - they girls change into different outfits all the time, and they report to an eccentric Bosley-type boss named, conveniently enough, Boss. That's the set-up. A lot of fighting and clowning and camaraderie ensues.

A very low-budget affair that tries its best to get by on sheer exuberance, Chai Lai Angels features some of the shoddiest wirework this side of a 70's Turkish Superman rip-off. Of particular note is a spectacularly unconvincing fight scene between the Angels - wrapped only in bath towels - VS a gang of black-suited thugs on a mall escalator. In the hands of a competent director, the scene would have been jaw-dropping. Here, it's just eye-rolling. Still, pretty girls! In towels! Doing high kicks!

Despite the almost constant hand to hand combat, the girls do occasionally find time for romance. Rose (Khongmalai)- the bustiest of the Angels - gets engaged to a handsome young banker, and when she gets home, she does a very gratifying underwear dance. So that was pretty awesome.

Unfortunately, he's kidnapped and beaten by a gay black pirate minutes later.

The cross-dresser henchman hires a bunch of comic-booky assassins to kill the Angels once and for all. A rain-soaked battle royale ensues outside of what looks like a mini-golf castle. One oddball inconsistency with this film is that sometimes the girls are bunglers and sometimes - as in this scene - they are possessing of supernatural powers, including Hulk-like strength, and the power of flight.

Despite this surge of superheroine-ism, the girls still end up trapped in a flimsy white cage. Luckily, the fifth angel shows up in a tank.

Etc.

The bad guys - of which there seems to be an endless supply - finally locate the sacred pearl-of-whatever on some deserted island. And they would have gotten away with it, too (whatever it is they were planning on getting away with; I am not sure that was ever explained fully), but then the Chai Lai Angels pop up out of nowhere to engage in the oft hoped for but rarely witness Epic Bikini Battle.

And then, for whatever reason, Rose performs a disco number inside a giant plastic ball.

A bunch of stuff happens after that, too. Most of it involves chicks and guns.

While it is never great, and while it occasionally lapses into full-retard mode, Chai Lai Angels: Dangerous Flowers is consistently entertaining, and maintains a goofy, ragged charm.

Despite the frequent bouts of graphic violence, the tone, for the most part, is light and fluffy; the action dips into ice-cold Tarantino territory for part of the climax - a guns blazing, kill-everybody free-for-all - but then the cross-eyed double-agent shows up again, and who can stay mad when there's a cross eyed double agent shooting up the joint? A bit of nudity and a less insane dubbing job would have been nice, but still, a fun, frothy movie.

PS: the film ends with a five-minute fire-fight that's supposed to be footage from the planned sequel, Chai Lai Angels Go to Battle. Sadly, said sequel has yet to emerge.

- Ken McIntyre