Get Christie Love!
(1974)
****
TNT Jackson
(1975)
***
A made-for-TV attempt
at a blaxploitation flick and pilot film for the subsequent series,
Get
Christie Love!
stars Teresa Graves as a black female
undercover cop investigating a drug ring. Her charms are ample and
evident; her skills as a detective less so, but what she lacks there she
makes up for in being so sassy!
When we first meet
Christie, she’s posing as a hooker. When her asking price is too high
for a prospective middle-aged-white-guy john, he yells, “Nigger!”
Twirling and smiling, she coos back, “Nigger lover!,” so nonchalantly
that you’d think she was Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat up in the
air.
By the end, she’s
still as flippant, arresting a dangerous drug lord by saying, “Yo’ under
arrest, sugah!” In between, she fires off such bon mots as, “I thought
you’d want to save your skin, cuz we gonna bust yo ass!” and, on a hotel
balcony, “C’mon, we’re only 15 floors up and you don’t have to worry
about the first 14!”
Because
Get Christie
Love!
has all the ‘70s TV-movie elements – jazzy theme song, corny dialogue,
ineffective karate sequences, the obligatory car chase and lots of brown
clothing – it’s a must-see, sugah!
TNT Jackson,
meanwhile, is Roger Corman’s down-and-dirty response to the
blaxploitation craze, starring
Playboy Playmate
Jeannie Bell as the only black woman in Hong Kong, where she goes after
her brother is mysteriously murdered there. She ends up toppling a drug
ring, even though her attempts at kung fu are quite laughable. In fact,
anytime the script calls for her to do anything other than wave her arms
around, she’s obviously doubled by a guy wearing her bell bottoms and an
Afro wig.
Bell is largely
unappealing as a heroine, and I don’t recall her doing anything other
than frown. The highlight of this one is the scene in which TNT (Ms.
Jackson if you’re nasty) takes on a roomful of bad guys while topless.
The director even tastefully calls for a slo-mo shot of her jumping. The
only person in the movie with hair larger than TNT is her no-good love
interest, and that – as well as the flick – comes to a rather abrupt end
when she stabs her hand straight through his gut.
The Firing Line
(1991)
*
The Firing Line
is one of those low-budget action movies where, five minutes and 47
seconds into it, a solider in the jungle trips over an electrical cord.
The
Firing Line is
one of those movies where the musical score … well, let’s just say
someone got a Casio for Christmas, and that someone knows how to push
the “demo” button!
The Firing Line is
one of those movies that casts Shannon Tweed, but never shows her naked.
In other words,
The
Firing Line is
one of those movies that flat-out sucks. Reb Brown, formerly known (if
ever) as
Yor, the Hunter from the Future,
plays Capt. Mark, a military adviser with a porn-star moustache and
Beefaroni build who switches sides and pledges allegiance to Central
American rebel forces, for reasons I didn’t quite catch because the
sound mix is so bad. (Yep,
The Firing Line is
one of those movies, too.)
Brown meets sports
equipment saleswoman Shannon Tweed in a bar and they become instant
friends. But as soon as he gets into trouble, she’s right there,
neck-deep in it, too. Don’t miss the scene where Brown is tortured with
sound waves; it’s not acting, but it’s something else, alright!
What follows are
many, many repetitious scenes filled with gunfire. And a cobra without
fangs that nearly gums Shannon to death. And Shannon loudly asking, “How
safe?”
without moving her mouth at all.
Oh, and the binocular cam, which is clearly a black board with two holes
cut out, only the holes aren’t perfectly round or the same size.
Awash in utter
amateurism,
The Firing Line is
one of those movies where some hick friends got together and decided to
make a movie over the weekend, but only because backyard wrestling
wasn’t yet invented.
Sister Street
Fighter
(1974)
*****
Sister Street Fighter is
often referred to as the fourth in the
Street Figther
series, but
it’s not really a sequel. Although Chiba plays a different character, it
may as well be Terry Sugury. He’s hardly in it, though, but the series’
over-the-top violence and comic-book villains remain.
Scrappy Sue Shihomi
is the star, hired by the police force to locate her brother, an
undercover agent kidnapped by drug lords. The story and characters
aren’t well delineated, but it doesn’t matter because your attention is
kept plenty busy by seeing a Mohawked guy with a blowgun, a gang of
Hammerheads (named so for the black baskets covering their noggins), a
“preacher” who wields a spear gun and seven – count ‘em, seven – female
kickboxing Amazons with capes, Tarzan outfits and hairy armpits!
The lead villain has
spikes on his hand (like the
Enter the Dragon dude)
and his lair is equipped with all kinds of hidden passageways and booby
traps. He and our heroine even briefly do battle in an underground lair
populated with bats. With all this going on – not to mention Sue’s
talent at impaling flies with toothpicks – who needs Chiba?
Sister
is doin’ it
for herself.
Leaving Scars
(1996)
**
Perhaps the title
refers to star Lisa Boyle’s boob job? The Plasticine, pneumatic pinup
headlines this would-be thriller as a bitchy, cocaine-snorting actress
who runs for her life after goons discover she’s in possession of a
computer disk, given to her by a friend at a party minutes before she
was killed for it.
At least Boyle
doesn’t have to play fugitive alone; she’s accompanied by some average
Joe to whom I didn’t pay enough attention to catch his name. They meet
cute at the party when they both have to vomit. They mix like vinegar
and water at first, but before the 90 minutes is it, they get their own
blue-tinted, soft-music sex scene – a given with Boyle in the cast – and
we learn that Boyle’s fake breasts are so far apart, you could fit two
more breasts in between them! The logic of the film is skewed, leaving
lots of plot holes, but even the largest of them isn’t as wide as her
chest canyon.
I’m not sure exactly
who’s who and what’s what, partly because it’s barely written and partly
because it didn’t help to cast three eerily similar-looking guys in the
supporting roles. Boyle is so unappealing on several levels that you
wish the killers would succeed.
If you watch the
Leaving
Scars DVD,
go about nine-and-a-half minutes into Chapter 6, when the director and
producer's commentary – yes, this sorry rush job has a commentary – is
interrupted by the arrival of the pizza they ordered! They spend about a
minute trying to find $10.60 to pay for it, then proceed to eat it (or,
rather, smack it annoyingly) for several minutes. During one of the
lengthy and graphic sex scenes, one of the guys even lets out a deep
belch while the other is talking. It's surreal, and better than any of
the film itself.
Emmanuelle, Queen of
the Desert
(1982)
***
Indonesian beauty
Laura Gemser stars as the oft-naked
Queen of the Desert,
and the opening credits unspool in cheap video fashion (you know,
all-caps Helvetica in white with drop shadow) over a montage of her nude
scenes.
As the “story”
begins, she’s washing off her breasts at a river when she’s approached
by a scruffy guerilla solider named Victor, who asks, “Have you ever
screwed a guy you just met?” She says, “Yes,” so he promptly jumps on
top of her. But she says if he wants “free pussy,” he has to work for
it, so she runs off into the mountains and he chases her angrily,
eventually pulling out his knife and threatening to kill her if she
doesn’t put out. Being crafty, she removes her clothes and distracts
Victor so that he loses his footing, stabs himself in the gut as he
rolls down the mountain and dies.
Soon, his buddies
discover his body and go looking for his murderer even though they’re
already lost, not realizing that the woman who’s just offered to be
their guide is responsible for his death. Gemser really doesn’t play
Emmanuelle here, but rather a hussy going by the exotic name of
Sheila.
But I can understand the title switcheroo, as
Sheila, Queen of the
Desert sounds
about as marketable as, say,
Marcy, Ace Librarian.
All the solider boys
want – and try – to get into Sheila’s shorts, all while branding her a
“bitch” and a “slut.” She uses her feminine wiles to have the guys turn
on each other and then turns on them with a rifle. The men respond by
kidnapping an Italian village boy that looks like Screech. Sheila’s
motives soon become apparent during an extended flashback that takes the
wind right out of Queen’s sails.
What begins as sleazy
fun then becomes a sleazy depressant, with rape, murder and gratuitous
fruit eating. The only thing more ludicrous than the fact this was based
on a novel is that it was brought to life by a guy named Bruno Fontana.
High Kicks
(1993)
***
High Kicks
is
the
ultimate
shot-on-video karate-aerobics rape-revenge movie, but that's not high
praise, considering the genre isn't a crowded one. Sandy Thomas (played
by Tara Lee-Anne Roth, who looks and acts like Elisabeth Shue's
less-talented sister) owns a tiny aerobics studio in L.A. named,
stupidly,
High Kicks.
Just minutes after she hires a new handyman named Sam (Dennis Swarthout,
channeling a mix of Parker Stevenson and Kato Kaelin), she is raped by a
gang of five neighborhood thugs, who introduce themselves with straight
faces as T.C., Rico, Mackie, Bo Man and Choots. (I find it highly
amusing that they cast a lisping, flabby, tubby guy as the gang leader,
as he looks like a threat to no one but the poor schmoe who refills the
mashed potatoes bin at Hometown Buffet.)
Thankfully, they
don't show the rape, but they do give us two minutes of Sandy
dramatically washing her face afterwards. The next day, she seems to
have bounced back from this disturbing sexual trauma pretty quickly,
giggling and biking in the park with Sam, who introduces her to his best
friends, two karate experts named Jonas and Crazy Maurice. They all
agree to teach Sandy to defend herself. She concurs, not even batting an
eyelash at meeting someone who has the gall to call himself Crazy
Maurice. Sam mentions that he himself was raped, which is no surprise;
given his total girlie hair, even I mistook him for a chick several
times. They also agree to help her get back at the hoodlums one by one.
(But how do they know how to find the bad guys individually? Is
directory assistance readily familiar with this "Choots" character?)
"Who are you? Where
did you come from? And why are you doing this?" asks Sandy, to which Sam
replies, "Those are
a lot of
questions." Apparently, she doesn't have the heart to tell him it's only
three, but that doesn't seem like a concept any guy who wears pink,
acid-washed tank tops could grasp. Their revenge plan involves lots of
kicking and, in one case, sticking a bunch of cigarettes in one guy's
nose and ears.
Ha ha! Won't
he be in for a surprise when he wakes up! Cigarettes in the nose! Does
it get
any
better?
Well, no. But the
gang members don't cotton to getting their asses kicked by a couple of
girls - I mean, one girl and Sam - so they send her a note that reads,
"YOU'RE TAGGED BITCH." I'm actually impressed that guys so quick to
utter the phrase "Yeah, man, slap that shit!" knew to use the
contraction "YOU'RE" instead of the possessive "YOUR." I mean, even my
wife makes that mistake on occasion and she went to college.
You know how it ends,
but do you know how it
ends
ends? If you said, "On a freeze-frame of
Sandy doing a high kick after dissing a ho-bag," you win a prize. If I
were up for it - and I'm not - I'd watch
High Kicks
again to count
the cameos by the boom mike, because that bastard is everywhere.
Everything about the movie screams 1985, even though it was filmed - er,
I mean taped - nearly a decade later, as Rico's stylin'
T2
shirt would attest.
Flight to Danger
(1995)
*
From “My What a Happy
Day Productions” comes my what a sucky movie. Or
video,
rather, as that’s what it’s shot on. Adding a further coat of cheapness,
parts of it are redubbed, while others remain completely unlistenable.
At least the filmmakers – er, shooters – got to try out all the built-in
effects on their editing software, including skipped frames, horizontal
wipes and picture-in-picture transitions.
The flight-less
Flight
to Danger involves
a team of female karate experts who go to Paris for a martial arts
competition. (Due to budget constraints, the entire trip is not shown.)
They unwittingly bring back a box of disks containing financial records
that gets them in all sorts of trouble with some local ruffians. Good
thing these gals can kick. Or at least the script says they can. Wait,
can we call that a script at all?
Being written,
directed and produced by two chicks, Flight does
not afford us the gratuitous nudity that we should rightly expect from
such a flick. But it doesn’t stop Marcy from hooking up with Nick in a
disgustingly drawn-out music-video montage, followed by a shirtless Nick
belting out a self-penned ode to his latest skanky conquest on his
guitar:
“She’s so pretty as can be / And I got my
sex for free.”
All the men have
Chippendales dancer hair; all the women have horse-faces. One girl even
pronounces “syndrome” as “sin-drum.”
Twice.