BIKINI BLOODBATH CARWASH

(A.k.a. BIKINI BLOODBATH 2)

A few years back I reviewed THE LAND OF COLLEGE PROPHETS, a very promising (and ever so slightly mental) early film by someone called Thomas Edward Seymour. What the film lacked in technical finesse it made up for with sheer imagination and energy.

So it was great, as it always is, to hear that a director of considerable promise had continued to make films. However, up until now, I'd not seen any of Seymour's subsequent output (he co-directs CARWASH with Jon Gorman) …

The opening of the film sets the tone perfectly. Gorgeous Jenny (Rachael Robbins) wakes up to a rock song on her bedroom radio, leaping out of her pit to dance semi-naked. Bare-breasted friend Sharon (Natalie Laspina) also wakes and joins in with the extremely energetic jiving. The opening titles play out while the girls continue to groove, concluding with "written and directed by WHO THE FUCK CARES"!

Okay, so you get the picture: lively, played for dorky laughs and determined to treat our eyes at every available opportunity with the sight of seriously hot women gyrating.

The film pile drives through rites-of-passage college flick traits in its early stages, as we follow Jenny and Sharon to school and meet their lecherous teachers (including Carmine Capobianco, of COLLEGE PROPHETS and PSYCHOS IN LOVE infamy), jock admirers and sexy girl friends.

The hot topic of the day is Miss Johnson's impending house party, scheduled for Friday evening. Jenny flirts with muscle man Todd (Jack Flaherty), arranging to hook up with him at the shindig, while his oversized buddy Gary (Matt Ford) - and everyone else in the film, for that matter - absurdly berate the svelte Sharon for being overweight. It's just one of the curious running gags that eventually wear you down and get you smiling at the prevalent silliness.

After school, Jenny and Sharon meet up with their five hot friends and go to work at Miss Johnson's (genre fave Debbie Rochon) carwash. As the title suggests, this involves the girls stripping to their bikinis before engaging in manual labour. In a montage scene that puts WILD THINGS to shame, the girls get wet and lathered in slow-motion as more solid rock sounds fill the soundtrack.

The jocks even turn up at the carwash and a bizarre dance-off ensues, culminating in a gratuitous knife fight and an enjoyably terrible joke aimed at Michael Jackson's "Beat It".

Later, back in their communal bedroom, the seven girls gather to gossip and decide to try contacting their dead mate via an Ouija board. Unfortunately they get in touch with Chef Death (Robert Cosgrove Jr) instead, a killer cook who's buried in the nearby cemetery. Their meddling causes the zombie chef to rise from his grave, cleaver in hand and maggots dripping from his face.

Which is particularly worrying for Jenny, as she recounts to her friends how she was responsible for Chef's death. I doubt he'll take into account that it was self-defence …

For a while the girls continue about their business oblivious to the impending terror - they're too busy showering, minxing about in class, flirting some more with the braindead jocks and preparing for the party. Even when two of their crew become Chef Death's first victims, the others remain unaware as they gather for another montage of trouser-stretching bikini exploits.

In fact, it's only when Friday's party arrives and after the girls have fended off the lesbian intentions of host Miss Johnson that the heat is really turned up … and Chef Death makes his presence well and truly known …

Heavy on the dumb, quickfire gags - both verbally and visually - CARWASH is a comedy of near-Troma silliness. But it's much better than the dreck Troma churns out: the women are hotter, the jokes are actually funny (with far less emphasis on juvenile toilet humour) and that unpleasant air of cynicism that spoils everything Lloyd Kaufman touches is absent.

In terms of pacing, the film rockets along from one exploitation box-marker to the next. The thin plot serves as a mere springboard to propel the screenplay into endless successions of dancing, nudity, carwashing and dumb jocks being humiliated. And that's all before the minor bloodshed begins.

Some of the gore is surprisingly decent considering the film's apparent low budget, including a decapitation and some nifty stab scenes. It's never outrightly nasty, and fans of torture porn excesses may find this a little light on the red stuff. But these scenes are balanced nicely alongside the dafter humour which dominates elsewhere.

Performances are game throughout (nice to see a few more COLLEGE PROPHETS faces pop up again - most notably Philip Guerette and Seymour himself). Robbins especially shines as a genuinely likeable, vivacious blonde. She is easy to watch. Rochon arguably doesn't get given enough to do, but delivers with predictable aplomb whenever given the chance.

Deliberately crass and not for everyone's tastes (a little too stupid for some, I'd imagine), CARWASH does however retain the enthusiasm and wit of Seymour's debut and shows subtle growths as a filmmaker in terms of lighting, editing and - most pertinently - storytelling dynamics. Kudos of course to Gorman too, who along with Seymour has co-directed all three instalments of the series.

Between them, they've fashioned a charmingly daft and occasionally rude (in the finest seaside postcard tradition) ode to frat house comedies mentality and serial killer eccentricities, right down to the knowingly absurd final line of dialogue. They know their audience - drunks! - and play to their needs.

The film is presented uncut in choices of 16x9 widescreen and 4:3 Letterboxed screenings. I opted for the former, which appeared to be correctly framed throughout. It's a nicely shot film, the colourful visuals complementing the radio-friendly hard rock soundtrack well. The transfer is sharp with strong colour representation and a healthy balance of contrast. All in all, a solid proposition.

The English 2.0 audio is similarly of a good standard, being clear and consistent throughout playback.

There's no scene-selection menu but the film can be accessed via 13 chapters.

A static main menu page leads to some modest but interesting extras:

A 1-minute trailer in non-anamorphic 1.78:1 captures the film lunatic tone well.

7 minutes of bloopers in non-anamorphic 1.78:1 follow, illustrating the lighthearted nature of the shoot. Curiously though, these are less amusing than the film.

BEHIND THE SCENES is split by a sub-menu page offering four separate Making Of featurettes. Each of these is filmed on the movie's shoot, by no-budget cable TV channel Planet Access:

"On Location with the Directors" proposes 5 minutes of fun chat with Gorman and Seymour, allowing us to take in both their appreciation for the schlock dynamics of their script and their commitment to making a good "bad" film; "Meet and Greet Chef Death" is 6 minutes with, amongst others, Cosgrove Jr; "The Girls of BIKINI BLOODBATH CARWASH" proffers some appealing behind-the-scenes moments interspersed by trite interviews with Robbins etc, over the course of 5 minutes; "The Guys of BIKINI BLOODBATH CARWASH" come across slightly better, in what is essentially 7 minutes of more-of-the-same.

All four featurettes are presented in 1.33:1 and come set to more funky metal sounds.

Finally there's a 3-minute photo gallery set to a mainstream-style hard rock tune. This offers 29 stills in total - a couple of Behind-The-Scenes shots, and then mainly promotional photographs. Some of which are exceedingly attractive, I must say!

BIKINI BLOODBATH CARWASH isn't likely to bother the boring fuckwits like Daniel Day Lewis and Tom Hanks at the Oscars. More's the pity. It's dumb, it's cheap, and its two main points of recommendation are boobies and tongue-in-cheek gore.

But sometimes, when you're drunk and happy, there can be fewer higher recommendations.

Review by Stuart Willis