Examining the movie’s cast list for the answers to these and many other questions, I see that the characters played by Stallone and Banderas are named Rath and Bain. Rath becomes Wrath. Bain is French for “bath.” Wrath and Bath. Has a nice ring. I was looking up Electra when the telephone rang, bringing me back to my senses.
Assault of the Killer Bimbos
(Directed by Anita Rosenberg; starring Christina Whitaker, Elizabeth Kaitan; 1988)
Assault of the Killer Bimbos is one of those movies where the lights are on but nobody’s at home. It is the most simpleminded movie in many a moon, a vacant and brainless exercise in dreck, and I almost enjoyed myself sometimes, sort of. The movie is so cheerfully dim-witted and the characters are so enthusiastically sleazoid that the film takes on a kind of awful charm.
The title is, of course, the best thing about it. I saw this film advertised at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it was a finalist, along with Space Sluts in the Slammer and Surf Nazis Must Die! in my annual search for the most unforgettable bad-movie title since Blood-Sucking Monkeys of Forest Lawn. The amazing thing about the title is that it does, indeed, accurately describe the movie.
Assault of the Killer Bimbos begins at a go-go club located somewhere in the twilight zone. On a tiny stage in front of leering creeps, go-go dancers in weirdly decorated bikinis bounce around to bad music. They never take off any clothes, and when a waitress gets her “big break” and is allowed to dance, she’s fired after the bananas on her brassiere fly off and strike several customers in their drinks. “You can’t strip!” bellows the club owner. “This is a go-go joint, not a strip club!”
After plot complications too simple to describe, veteran dancer Peaches (Christina Whitaker) and newcomer Lulu (Elizabeth Kaitan) are unfairly framed for the murder of the club owner. They escape to Mexico in an old Dodge convertible, pausing along the way to kidnap a truck-stop waitress (Tammara Souza), who decides to join them. In the middle of their escape, they meet three pothead surfers who accompany them, and they are chased by various sheriff’s deputies.
Students of grade-Z exploitation films may want to take notes about the employment of nudity in this film. Although the bimbos do not remove their clothes in the go-go joint, there is a later scene where they change clothes on the roadside, and we see their bare breasts. However, we never see the faces and breasts of the same women at the same time; the film is carefully edited to show nudity only from the neck down. That leads to the suspicion that body doubles were used to supply the nudity, and that the actresses actually starring in the film never took off anything.
Was this because (a) they refused to, or (b) they were assured there would be no nudity in the film, and then matching nude shots were spliced in later? Good questions, both of them, and I expect we can look forward to the answers in the sequel to this film, which is advertised during the closing titles and will be called Bimbo Barbeque.
At the Earth’s Core
(Directed by Kevin Connor; starring Peter Cushing, Doug McClure; 1976)
Peter Cushing has never said the name “David!” so often before in his life. You remember Peter Cushing. He’s the one in all those British horror films, standing between Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. His dialogue usually runs along the lines of, “But good heavens, man! The person you saw has been dead for more than two centuries!” This time all he says is “David!”
David is played by Doug McClure. You remember Doug McClure. Good. I don’t. McClure plays a rich young American inventor who has financed the Iron Mole, which is a gigantic steam-powered screw, designed to penetrate to Earth’s core. The Mole has been designed by Cushing, an eccentric British inventor, as who would not be after such an invention?
McClure and Cushing settle into their seats and push the appropriate levers and the Mole goes berserk. It forgets all about the hill and screws itself right into the very mantle of the planet itself, emerging in Pellucidar, that mysterious land within Earth. Pellucidar is inhabited by the kinds of characters whose names make me chuckle aloud even as I type them down. There’s Dia, the beautiful slave girl with the heaving bodice, and Ra, her boyfriend, and the evil Ghak, not to mention the impenetrable Hooja. All of these people speak English, you understand, except when it comes to the matter of proper names.
Well, anyway, Doug and the professor step out into this sinister underworld, which is filled with telepathic giant parrots, and the next thing you know they’re on the chain gang. The chain gang spends all day breaking up rocks. You wouldn’t think there would be a rock shortage at Earth’s core, but there you are.
About here, we begin to notice the Captain Video effect. You remember Captain Video. He was a science-fiction hero on the old DuPont TV network. He and his trusty sidekick (Bucky? Rocky?) were forever landing on strange planets and sneaking around rocks. After three weeks, you realized that the rocks were always the same.
Same here. Doug and the Professor sneak around one strange man-eating vegetable, and there’s another one—which is the original vegetable, photographed from a new angle. Meanwhile, the telepathic parrots wander by, opening and closing their beaks by spring action. It’s along about here we begin to really zero in on Dia’s bodice. Let somebody else break up the rocks and clean up after the parrots.
The Awakening
(Directed by Robert Solo; starring Charlton Heston, Susannah York; 1980)
The Awakening is bad in so many ways that I’ll just have space to name a few. It is, for example, completely implausible in its approach to the science of archaeology—so hilariously inaccurate, indeed, that I can recommend this movie to archaeologists without any reservations whatsoever. They’ll bust a gut.
Example. Charlton Heston, a British archaeologist, is searching for the long-lost tomb of the Egyptian queen Kara. He finds it. Well, no wonder: It’s “hidden” behind a gigantic stone door in a mountainside, with big, bold hieroglyphic written all over it. It’s about as hard to find as Men’s Clothing at Marshall Field’s. Anyway, having found this priceless and undisturbed tomb, Heston immediately begins pounding away at the door with a sledgehammer.
Now, even if your knowledge of archaeology is limited to leafing through back issues of National Geographic at the dentist’s, you know that when they make a major find, they’re supposed to spend years dusting off everything with little brushes and making a fetish of not disturbing anything. Not Heston. He even has a team of laborers with pickaxes standing by as backup.
Well, wouldn’t you know, every time Heston hammers at the tomb, his pregnant wife back at the camp doubles up in pain. That’s because, as the movie makes abundantly clear, the spirit of Kara is being reborn in Heston’s baby daughter. There’s also some nonsense about how Heston ignores his wife-to-be with his comely young assistant (Susannah York), and then the movie flashes forward eighteen years, and we veteran Omen watchers prepare for the scenes in which the child becomes aware that she is possessed by a spirit, and that Her Time Has Come.
Great! And none too soon, we’re all thinking. But the movie’s climax is so filled with impossibilities that we’re too busy with the mental rewrite to get scared. For example: Do you believe a priceless tomb would be left open, eighteen years later, so that people could walk right into it? That the operation of a secret door could elude generations of grave robbers, but be solved twice in a matter of minutes? That Heston could walk into a modern museum, move a sarcophagus around on a freight elevator, light candles, lift a two-ton lid with his bare hands, and conduct arcane rituals without attracting the inquiry of a security guard?