FILM: Bitch Slap

(Review by Zing Tsjeng)

If you like your cars fast, your women curvaceous, and your dialogue hammier than a Christmas dinner, then you’re in luck. Bitch Slap is the movie for you. This dykesploitation film is heavy on the references and rapidly disappearing clothing but light on actual content, and reads more like a YouTube homage to B-movie films of yesteryear than an actual film.

The film opens in the desert with our three leads, the red-headed secret agent Hel (Erin Cummings), the naïve stripper Trixie (Julia Voth) and the psychotic killer Camero (America Olivo), emerging from their car breasts first, in loving slow motion. There’s a plot afoot to uncover some priceless diamonds, but that’s not really the point of the film. In fact, there isn’t really a plot, just a series of narrative leaps in logic that serve to string together as many improbable if titillating scenarios as possible: cunnilingus on nuns, for example, or punk assassins with Tourette’s.

All of which, let’s be fair, sounds fairly amazing. It’s unfortunate that something that sounds so good on paper could wear out its onscreen welcome so quickly (the relentless flashbacks probably don’t help). It would probably have worked better as a short, but its endearing campiness stampedes very quickly into overkill territory once it hits the half-hour mark. By the time you hear the forty-second euphemism for ‘vagina’ you begin to wish they’d just shut up already. Director Rick Jacobson is almost too aware of his source material, which means he goes straight into all-out parody where a lightness of touch and a sense of deft irony were sorely needed. It’s less a “nudge nudge, wink wink” film than an “elbow you in the ribs repeatedly just to check if you’re getting it” picture. At the end of the day, Bitch Slap is a little too clumsy and referential to stand up on its own legs as a film. But if you’re looking for 109 minutes of breasts, ultraviolence and not much else, Bitch Slap will probably provide you with some brief entertainment.

Bitch Slap is out on DVD later this month

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