MonsterHunter

In spite of the cool painted movie poster that this one features with its team of female commandos in form-fitting uniforms leading an assault on enemy troops while stuff is blowing up in the background and an evil looking guy looks on indifferently, I put off watching this one due to the fact that the front of the DVD proclaimed it not simply The Doll Squad, but as Ted V. Mikels’ The Doll Squad.

Teddy was the guy that set us up with the killer cat food epic, The Corpse Grinders and it was one of those low-budget affairs where every cent of its three hundred dollar funding probably came from some duped family member. I was scared that since Ted wasn’t able to stretch his dollars very far in a movie where the main villain was a can of Nine Lives, that juggling an all-girl squad of secret agents battling against some fruit cake who was intent on spreading bubonic plague via some rats was somewhat beyond his meager talents.

It turns out that our villain’s most nefarious scheme though was walking around his swinging bachelor pad hideout with his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest while it was drenched in his own flop sweat! Uh, if you’re about to take over the world, can’t you either get an antiperspirant that works or at least a fresh shirt, you stinky bitch? Talk all you want about bringing the world to its knees, but I can’t stop gagging at your Frisbees, sweathog.

As you may have already surmised though, the villain’s hyperhidrosis isn’t really the worst part of the movie, it’s just the one that will give you that bitter beer face. Some of you may also experience bitter beer face when you get a load at the wardrobe selection of everyone involved. Since I was in the Nam for most of the sixties and seventies breaking in and out of POW camps, the only outfit I wore was my own blood and sweat, but getting a look at movies like this, one thing becomes clear: Sears was having a sale on ugly white belts.

Everyone in this movie was wearing them. You had the Doll Squad with their very functional tight green body suits (they weren’t low cut like in the poster though - when you’re invading the bad guy’s split level ranch style compound in the hills of California, you’re going to need a little more support than that) accessorizing them with gaudy white belts. Not to be outdone, the army of guys that the villain has on retainer stalking around his compound are dressed like some banana republic’s military junta, but also decked out with white belts. Somehow though the master criminal himself - a pudgy, sweaty guy that looked like he was wearing a rug that would have made Claude Raines wince - manages to outdo them all as he prances around in a half unbuttoned silky blue shirt and silver studded belt. Hey, Bad Guy, we’ll catch you at Studio 54 later on!

The government guys who sit around their offices taking calls from the president on their red phone and punching buttons on gigantic mainframe computers and feeding them punch cards fare little better with their wide barf-colored striped ties. Then there was the rainbow colored jacket that the leader of the Doll Squad wore after capturing the bra-less secretary of the Senator who was wearing a flimsy lavender one piece thing. During the actual capturing, Sabrina (I think that’s the name of the head Doll) was wearing a silly looking dark catsuit that was actually different than the silly looking dark catsuit she was wearing when she invaded the island of the supervillain.

Having established that Ted should have budgeted a substantial chunk of change for some Speed Stick as well as not allowed the stars to provide their own wardrobe, we now need to figure out what exactly is a Doll Squad, why they are invading a hideout that is alternately described as being on an island and also located somewhere in the “hills”, and why you would ever go on a commando raid wearing go-go boots.

The Starflight II program suffers a setback when it blows up shortly after launch and a voice comes over the television that the Senator is watching it to taunt him. Some guy who is from one of those fake-sounding security agencies that movies like this use shows up and he summons crack secret agent Sabrina, a gal with gigantic red hair and the hard bitten look of someone that has no doubt been in these low budget movies for most of the seventies.

The President gives them two weeks to find out who is behind this terrorist attack and when Sabrina listens to the tape of the guy taunting the Senator, she recognizes the voice but just can’t place it. Sabrina decides that she needs to get the rest of the Doll Squad together which means she goes to the local kung fu studio and hospital to let her sister agents know that their country needs them again, though as a nurse and kung fu instructor they are already serving their country admirably in civilian life. Two hoods follow Sabrina around and kill these two chicks after they meet with her, leading me to believe that having a secret agent walking around telling other secret agents to meet at the local Howard Johnson’s later that night is not as secure a situation as you would have thought.

Sabrina goes back to HQ and uses this magical super computer thing to figure out that the person behind all this was former agent (though I’m guessing he was never actually on the Doll Squad) Eamon Miller. Just then, the traitorous secretary shows up and gets caught by Sabrina. In what some may have been a bit of a tactical blunder, but a big break for the Doll Squad, the secretary kills herself only after giving up some vital information on Eamon’s whereabouts.

Sabrina goes about getting some more Doll Squad members and even though her traipsing around with “Secret Agent Recruiter” tattooed on her forehead got everyone wasted last time, Eamon doesn’t think to send more minions out to do the same thing again. Of course, why these losers just didn’t kill Sabrina right at the beginning is something you can ponder along with how an alleged supervillain could get electrocuted after being drenched with a martini and touched with the cord from a lamp. (Don’t ask.)

We’re getting ahead of ourselves though. Before Eamon’s big death scene, we go through a progressively silly series of incidents like when Eamon’s right hand man kidnaps an agent who is undercover at a carnival and then makes up his own lady to look like her so that she can get info from Sabrina when Sabrina meets her at the carnival later that evening. This must be one of those island hideouts with a branch office near the local parking lot where this carnival is set up or something. When Sabrina meets with her, this imposter asks all kinds of obvious questions and Sabrina is able to sniff her out for the faker she is, though she could have just as likely been smelling the stale urine stench of fat guy sweat that Eamon got all over her during their more intimate moments.

Using all her secret agent abilities, Sabrina deduces Eamon’s location from where his evil-doctor buddy is living and an invasion is planned! The Doll Squad rent a boat posing as dumb broads and go out to the island and take a row boat in to shore. The first mate, Raphael, who is one of Eamon’s flunkies tells the captain to go ahead and leave because the gals said that they would just hang out on the island for the rest of their lives. The captain has the wisdom of an old sea dog and questions whether they would really say that without any food or water and Raphael says “yep, they sure would” and Captain says okay and leaves, even though Raphael is so high he is almost falling overboard as he tells the Captain all this.

The Doll Squad muck around on the island for what seems like hours and shoot about a hundred guards. I don’t know how Eamon pays for all this, where he houses these guys or why no one else in the area notices the guy whose property is barb wired off and patrolled with a small army of goobers, but this is an island, right? And what’s the point of an island hideaway if the Doll Squad can just row their boat ashore without any problems? I was also thinking that maybe once Sabrina figured out where Eamon’s hideout was, she might have just telephoned her boss to let him know so that he could order a Daisy Cutter dropped on this moron or at the very least send in a force bigger than five honeys in tight uniforms.

Lots of shooting and a few pathetic fight scenes pepper the remnants of the movie before stuff gets blown up. It was an unfortunate choice that Ted made to show lots of stuff blowing up since he had absolutely no grasp on how to show a convincing explosion on screen. The Doll Squad themselves weren’t very interesting and none of them had any independent personas other than hair color and no one did much but run around shooting guns. I was hoping each of them had some special skill that they could use in an action scene (you know - one is maybe good with knives, one in hand to hand combat, one kills by sitting on your face - that kind of stuff), but they just ran around a lot doing stupid stuff.

A total failure on any and every level. You do get some small reward though for sitting through it all when Sabrina’s theme song plays over the closing credits. It has this lounge singer feeling that tries to emulate all those bad James Bond themes and does a pretty good job of it. Well, of being bad like those James Bond themes, that is.

© 2008 MonsterHunter