Bitch Slap
Dir: Rick Jacobson
Rating: 3.0/5.0
IM Global
105 Minutes
Bitch Slap is a difficult kind of movie to categorize or critique in a standard way. It’s less a film than a cartoon brought to life- slow motion, gratuitous violence, very well-endowed life. A deliberately self-aware homage to the trashy, exploitation films of the ’60s and ’70s, Bitch Slap revels in its own ridiculousness and tawdry thrills, from every campy bit of dialogue to every straining tank top. If nothing else, it succeeds by its own standards.
In a movie like this, plot is meaningless, but here goes: in a godforsaken scrub desert, three busty women (and if it seems tasteless to bring up mammaries, watching this movie is not for you) bicker, fight, kill people, have sex with each other, splash water over themselves, compare sexual highs and search for an ill-defined MacGuffin, though not necessarily in that order. There’s also a villainous Englishman, a mysterious crime boss named Pinky and both Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless in cameos. Frequent flash backs, varying from hours to months, slowly fill a back story that slowly turns laughable and then actually funny. And make no mistake, for all the action and tits, this is a comedy. Director Rick Jacobson clearly knows what he’s aiming for and he gets it- there’s more drawn out fights and incredibly stilted dialogue in his film than in practically all the vintage films run in a montage over the opening credits.
As I mentioned, it’d be nearly as ridiculous as the film itself to judge it by anything but itself (even the sub-Russ Meyer films it apes had less self-consciousness), but details can be salvaged. While most of the cast seems to be enjoying acting to the rafters, Julia Voth, as a bewildered stripper named Trixie (yes, Trixie), plays her part with a kind of winking sexuality and lack of guile that actually manages to sell a line like “I can’t! I’m too weak and vulnerable!” The other two leads, Erin Cummings and America Olivo, present themselves nearly well, with the latter’s feral performance as the ass-kicking Camero first seeming incredibly staged, but finally ending ferociously insane. Of course, they all look fantastic, especially when bending over in slow motion. Which they do frequently- at least three times by the 45 minute mark, by my count.
And in many ways, that’s the kind of movie Bitch Slap is- the kind of movie where you could count how many different stripper outfits are shown. The kind of movie where you begin predicting the dialogue before the characters actually speak (and are usually correct). The kind of movie where people say things like “Open wide, you psycho slut!” The kind of movie where there’s a yowling cat noise when a woman punches another woman in the groin. But hey, that’s what the people came for.
by Nathan Kamal
