Wednesday, October 21, 2009

TIFF Part Six: Bitch Slap Review

Hey look! Another review! Already! I hope you all feel special, because you are. To me.

Bitch Slap

Bitch Slap is, perhaps, the cleavagiest action film of all time. There are so many big-breasted women in bikinis and low cut tops on display that it deserves a new word to be invented to describe it. Our three lead characters are introduced with their boobs before their faces are even shown. In slow motion. Decide for yourself if that's a recommendation or not.

In a film that is a proud and shameless homage to Roger Corman, we meet our three leads, in the middle of the dessert. Hel (Erin Cummings) is a high powered and bitchy professional business-like woman, with big tits. Camero (America Olivo) is a psychotic lesbian who flies of the handle at every turn, with a huge rack. Trixie (Julia Voth) is a naïve and kind stripper, with enormous bosoms. The reason for mentioning the assets (boobsets?) of these women is because this is the purpose of the film. These three women have a scheme, a hostage, secrets, and a penchant for sex and violence.

The film has a convoluted structure, constantly flashing back to reveal occasionally relevant parcels of information, and yet halfway through the film it becomes apparent that no one – on screen, or in the audience – knows what’s going on. The audience isn’t supposed to; we’re just to watch the cleavage and noise. This is deliberate. The performances, also, are bad across the board, but they’re supposed to be. There just isn’t any way that the cast could be that bad; Olivo, in particular, snarls or yells all of her lines in place of acting and picking an appropriate tone for any given scene. If director Rick Jacobson had wanted a more subtle performance from her, he would have asked, and she would have given it. He didn’t. While the desert portion of the film was shot on location, the flashbacks where green-screened. This was due to limitations of budget, the filmmakers decided to highlight this artificiality rather than hide it. This is distracting, and that is the point. And while the stunt choreography, by Death Proof’s Zoe Bell, is quite good, the editing is too choppy to appreciate it. But when the purpose of the film is its loudness, this must be a choice of the filmmakers too.

In short, everything that is wrong with Bitch Slap is supposed to be wrong with Bitch Slap. It’s best to look at the film like a home movie some fifteen year olds got together to make, except they’re not fifteen year olds, they’re established television producers and filmmakers, and most backyard movies don’t have Lucy Lawless cameos. The film was written Jacobson and Eric Gruendemann; the two worked together on both the Xena and Hercules series of the nineties, so Kevin Sorbo gets an appearance too. The two made this film together wanting to have a riotous time and they definitely succeeded in doing that, at least during production. Bitch Slap, if nothing else, looks like it was a lot of fun to make.

The most interesting part of the film is that, despite the endless low cut tops on display, despite the result of a character being blown up is that her clothes get skimpier while she is uninjured, despite every female character making out with every other female character, there is no actual nudity. This film is perfect for anyone who loves Maxim magazine but is terrified of proper sex. Then again, thinking about this film is not the point of it, at all.

Bitch Slap is a deliberately bad in a way, say, Snakes on a Plane wasn’t. Whereas that film was made as a bad movie as soon as producers picked up on everyone wanting it to be a bad movie, Bitch Slap was made as a bad movie from the get go. It can’t be rated on its quality, because it isn’t supposed to have any. And so how much you enjoy the film depends on how willing you are to go along for the ride, how good a mood you are in, and how much of a teenage boy you are at heart. Therefore, feel free to ignore this number.

3/10

The filmmakers, and the cast, and Zoe Bell (second from the right), were all on stage for this one. All I remember of it is that Bell is adorable and all of them made a bunch of sex jokes.

Meanwhile, check this trailer out:

You see how it almost looks like it has a plot? All those lines in this trailer that look like they’d move a story forward, or at least offer exposition? There isn't much, but look hard. That stuff is not in the film. Jacobson must have had a much more coherent movie on his hands, which he decided to get rid of to make a messy, cleavagey pile of noise. More power to him, I suppose.

More to come!

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