FFWD Weekly
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| VIDEO VULTURE Occasionally a filmmaker is faced with the stunning epiphany that his latest project is irredeemably stupid. Once this is apparent, a choice must be made. Should I give up? Should I go through the motions, finish this damn picture and get on with my life? Or (Hee, hee, hee...) should I throw up my hands, throw out the script and have fun with it? This week's double feature includes a pair of movies that took the third option, instantly turning what might have been a torturous shoot into a raucously silly party. After all, if your movie is going to be stupid anyway, why not go for the World's Record? · The Wild World of Batwoman (aka She Was A Hippy Vampire) (1966): As the title suggests, the hero of this berserk oddity is Batwoman, a crusading crimefighter dressed in a cheap Halloween costume and sporting a nifty rubber bat glued to her cleavage. Her allies are the Bat Girls, a team of ditzy bathing beauties equipped with Dick Tracy-style wrist radios. Batwoman disciplines her crack team of do-gooders by interrupting their go-go dancing and poolside partying to make them recite an endless litany of goody-goody Boyscoutesque pledges. Now that the audience knows who the good guys are, it's time for masked lunatic Ratfink to step in with a fiendish plot for the girls to foil. Not content with merely kidnapping the occasional Bat Girl, Ratfink steals an atomic-powered hearing aid that can eavesdrop on private telephone conversations. (Oh yeah... it's also a doomsday device, of course.) Finally cornered in his subterranean laboratory, Ratfink uses his high-tech "Body Divider" to split himself into a half-dozen caped villains who run amok in a scene that looks like a cross between a revved-up Benny Hill chase and a dance number from Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. · Speaking of Laugh-In, there's a scene in Deathstalker II (1986) in which the protagonists peer through some leafy reeds and mutter "verrrry interesting." Clearly, this is a movie that has completely divorced itself from the humorless brutality of the first Deathstalker film, but we knew that right from the first scene. (Deathstalker battles a team of fat ninjas in a cardboard dungeon until a dominatrix in a fur bikini chases him out of a window; then she snarls "I'll have my revenge... and Deathstalker, too!" The opening titles start, and the audience groans.) Monique Gabrielle (star of Emmanuelle 5) plays two roles: a pure-of-heart princess with unreliable psychic powers, and an evil sorceress who has ousted the princess and taken her throne. Assisting Monique's evil half is John La Zar, an actor who hasn't been seen on film since his mind-boggling performance as the Shakespearean homicidal hermaphrodite Z-Man in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)!! During the closing credits we're treated to some hysterically funny bloopers. (An entire row of archers all drop their arrows at the same time; an extra who can't find anybody to fight during a big battle scene wanders straight in front of the camera and just stands there; and the camera crew starts giggling uncontrollably during Monique's big sex scene, causing her to crack up.) |