MonsterHunter

I was too grossed out by these chicks to actually count them, but I’m pretty sure that at no time in this movie from Ted V. Mikels (we’re still trying to forget him from the killer cat food movie, The Corpse Grinders and that other ugly chick movie, The Doll Squad) was there ever a gang of girls that amounted to ten. This girl gang of disaffected miners seemed to hover at about six or seven, but with all the murky night shots that took place early in the film, Teddy might have snuck in a few extras without me noticing.

I’m not really going to run this movie down though for not really delivering ten violent chicks, because in all fairness it did give you that and then some. There were actually plenty of broads in this flick and they all seemed to have anger management problems to varying degrees. I just thought that there was going to be a gang of ten that hung out and wore their colors and rumbled and stuff. They did pull of a jewel heist in broad daylight, which was a pretty impressive debut for a gang, but then they went and got caught up in a drug sting with only their squirt guns, which probably wasn’t so impressive.

Even less impressive than that was the bulk of the movie which spent its first forty minutes as one of these women’s lib deals where women reclaim their independence from a male dominated society by stealing lots of diamonds. The second forty-five minutes turned into your standard women in prison movie where women have to reclaim their self-respect from the sadistic lesbian warden. The last ten minutes was spent escaping back into a male dominated society where the gals all learn a valuable lesson about law and order when the Sheik whose sacred scarab they stole gets his jewels back, drops charges and hires the two remaining violent women to be belly dancers on his yacht. Who needs an equal rights amendment when you look good in gauzy harem pants?

Diamond heists? Women in prison? Belly dancers? By now you’re wondering how a bunch of women miners ended up a gang of violent felons with a sweet gig gyrating the night away on a rich Arab’s pleasure boat. It’s simple really. So simple that it actually didn’t make a whole lot of sense. There’s a bunch of girls who are miners hanging out in front of this cave. The only guy on the crew sets off some dynamite in the cave that ends up burying some of the girls still in the cave. (And trust me, this is the sort of movie where the mine shaft looks pretty much like a cave.)

The girls get mad at this guy and attack him and one of the most violent of the approximately ten violent women on the work site shouts what would become her battle cry: “you son of a prick!” And by that, I mean she said it two times during the course of the movie. After they finish thumping this dude, they all decide to do things for themselves and live the easy life. Somehow this translates into robbing a jewelry store. If that doesn’t seem to logically follow from a work place accident, then you probably know why it wasn’t a good idea for these women miners to be wearing replica major league batting helmets on their heads instead of regular miner’s helmets. Especially that chick with the Baltimore Oriole helmet.

The robbery of the jewelry store is one of those plans that seems so simple it makes you think twice about whether you should get into the jewel heist business. Two of them go in posing as potential buyers, two more of them stand around outside the store distracting the easily distracted security guard and another one of them stands around outside distracting the Sheik who just happens to have an appointment to see his sacred scarab at the same time the girls have scheduled their robbery. They pull their squirt guns on the help, get the jewels, take one of the workers hostage and drive off.

Later on in the evening they’re all at the local duck park talking about how sweet their new life of crime is. They squabble amongst themselves and end up having some sort of impromptu duel with their squirt guns. I wasn’t sure what the point of all that was, but some of the ladies were wearing those wispy late seventies/ early eighties blouses so that the entire incident turned into a mini wet T-shirt contest. And let’s just say that these are the kind of babes that make much better miners (batting helmets and all) than wet T-shirt models.

Following a drug deal gone wrong, the “women in prison” portion of our film begins and is pretty much what you would expect. You’ve got your nasty old butch in charge and she has some flunkies that help her out. Our heroines meet some people in the joint that help them, and there’s more than enough cons getting rough with each to technically justify the title of the movie. You’ve got your fight in the shower, your battle with mop handles, the old gonging the metal bucket over your head routine, and beatings with wet towels. The only question I had was how in the devil did the inmates manage to smuggle the spray paint into the shower room with them to put all the graffiti on the walls? And how was it that the graffiti done in chalk didn’t get washed away?

I was pretty much lost once they finished their expected prison break because they end up hitching a ride with someone who happens to be either the Sheik or his employee and they all end up in Vegas and eventually uon the Sheik’s boat belly dancing after he gets his jewels back and declares that he is dropping all charges. That’s great. I’m sure the jeweler that was held at squirt gun point and robbed and kidnapped doesn’t want to press charges either. Plus, there is still all that unfortunate business with the drugs and the dead drug dealer, but I’m guessing he probably doesn’t wish to pursue charges anymore either.

Ted V. Mikels ends up giving us something that while purportedly made in 1982 resembles some sort of cruddy cop show from about seven years earlier, complete with big ugly cars, ugly clothes, ugly people, and music that made you wonder where the heck Huggie Bear was. Adding to this atmosphere of looking like one of those overlong retro music videos that attempt to ape that era like the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video is that periodically the picture will freeze frame and some text will pop up on the screen saying something like “the plot thickens” or “and they sailed away on the Sheik’s boat and lived happily ever after being second class citizens in a culture that devalues women even more than western culture does.” An overlong, confusing concoction of heist, women’s revenge, and women in prison flicks that manages to do justice none of them, and makes women miners look stupid. For son of a prick wannabes only.

© 2008 MonsterHunter