“Bitch Slap†is one of those films that’s smarter than it looks, one that’s very aware of all the mistakes it makes throughout. Most of them are culled from exploitation movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s, namely those girl-power capers that Roger Corman made a fortune producing. You’d think a genre like that would’ve had its fair share of camp already, but since “Bitch Slap†knows it’s an action movie first and a comedy second, it understands that it doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel – when you’re making fun of a bunch of movies that seem like parodies of themselves, livening things up with more laughs would be overkill.
Instead, it takes its own camp value and intensifies it, letting its characters be as eccentric as they want to be. It even starts them off with a befitting entrance: When their muscle car breaks down in the middle of a desert, its three female occupants step out to take a look, all while the camera admires their buxom bodies in slow motion. Trixie (Julia Voth), Hel (Erin Cummings) and Camero (America Olivo) are less desperate than they seem, though. They’ve got a guy named Gage (Michael Hurst) bound and gagged in the trunk, and they get him to give them the dirt on some diamonds worth hundred of millions of dollars, which he says are buried somewhere in the area. Camero shoots him when he tries to turn them against one another, though that might’ve been an excuse to get back at him for calling her that rudest of four-letter words.
Everything we need to know about these femme fatales is revealed through flashbacks, and we learn how their paths coincided over time. Although they’re sporadic and pretty hard to follow, we see memories of Hel and Camero sharing a prison cell, and of Trixie dancing for strangers to make money. She should charge extra for having the only glow-in-the-dark vagina in town.
Most of the other characters are no less bizarre, like a criminal with Tourette syndrome named Hot Wire (William Gregory Lee), and his partner in crime, a sexpot who calls herself Kinki (Minae Noji). The only normal person here is Deputy Fuchs (Ron Melendez), who has no idea of what he’s getting into when he encounters the girls on the road and asks if they need any help.
The whole film is a love letter to babes and their bodies, so much so that it comes off as more than a bit sexist. The filmmakers would probably plead guilty as charged, but that doesn’t mean they’re out to offend anyone. Like all those fight scenes that are way too violent to be taken seriously, the overdose of sexism is no accident – any film that stops dead in its tracks for a wet T-shirt contest is too fantastic to be anything but a joke.
Besides, it’s not as if men are the only ones who’d get a kick out of this. After being stranded in the desert together, it’s only a matter of time before the girls come out as lesbians and put the moves on each other whenever they get the chance. Maybe I should’ve mentioned that right from the get-go.
Good review, but I’d like to point out that this mix of sexism and feminism is typical of the exploitation movies that Bitch Slap is trying to bring up to date, so I consider it an asset.