BangBang Cinema: Bitch Slap

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mM7ORw5m78

I couldn’t find any recently released firearms fun for my inaugural column. So I dug through some DVD releases and unearthed a quaint little art house film called Bitch Slap. The cover art—boasting a trio of armed, sweaty, dirty women—sets the tone for this politically correct cinematic investigation into feminism’s role in our violent, misogynistic society. As you can imagine, Bitch Slap holds a cherished place in my collection. Based on bad-ass babe boobs. Not politics. Or quality. No, definitely not quality. Bitch Slap is a bit of a mess. A hot, sexy, sexy hot mess. With guns.

Bitch Slap was filmed at two locations: a trailer in the middle of the desert and a sound stage with a green screen. The trailer wins. In terms of the CGI, Bitch Slap is consistently bad, which is actually good (follow me here). The lack of realism or apparent cinematography gives the film a distinctively cheesy look that compliments its campy style. Think of movies like 300, The Spirit or Sin City—made for the price of their catering budget. One of their catering budgets. For one day.

Bitch Slap answers a question I’ve long had: what would a movie look like if it was shot entirely like a 90-minute Victoria’s Secret commercial? It would look exactly like this: hot women gyrating and groping each other, plenty of fast cuts from tits to ass to tits to ass to sultry facial expressions. Rinse with water, engage in a wet T-shirt contest and repeat.

That’s my take. Clearly, the filmmakers were going for a 50s style campy Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! vibe, updated with more foul language, more boob groping and more slang for vagina than you could waggle your dong at. Now that’s cooking with class! Sample: if you want to access a secret door, you’ve got to jerk off an African fertility statue a little bit before inserting an afro-pick to it’s testicle area.

You may at this point be thinking “is that really such a bad thing?” The short answer is no. The long answer is “No, that’s not so bad. But the movie still sucks.” You may also be wondering about guns, as this site’s called The Truth About Guns not The Truth About Movies and Titties.

America Olivo plays the hottest of the three leads (call me). Throughout the film, “Camero” sports a Glock. Here and there she doubles up on Glockage. When she whips it out, Camero seems pretty competent with the handgun. Most of her shooting is done at DIRTY METAPHOR HERE distance.

Camero carries her gun in her waist band Mexican-carry style, and likes to keep her finger on the trigger at all times. So not the safest of shooters. But then again not the sanest. Her big bang: an upclose (and personal) execution.

Hel, the red head in heat, I mean charge, is given something the movies backers would have us believe is a futuristic rail gun. It looks more like a FAMAS assault rifle with four pounds of useless plastic glued on.

Whoever designed this weapon probably knows what a gun looks like. But the person who decided how it should be used is Silverstone (clueless). Since it is a make-believe weapon, I guess it almost makes sense that there is some sort of wind-up before it shoots, though without a rotary barrel that is stretching my goodwill too far.

When in use, everyone shoots from the hip (poor form) and sprays rounds into the sand at people’s feet. Now, they’re intentionally missing, but they treat the gun more like a bullet hose and just spray it from one side to the other rather slowly, kicking up tons of sand. You can’t blame anyone for not being able to handle it correctly though, because if you take a comfortably sized rifle and pile on useless plastic, it gets a bit unwieldy.

MP5s make several appearances, as do a couple of shotguns that are quite probably plastic airsoft replicas. An Ingram MAC10 gets some love, as does a relatively generic revolver, some plastic looking M16s, and an AK-47 is thrown in for good measure. Kevin Sorbo cameos as a secret agent who dual wields two of the plastic M16s. Yeah, that’s right.  A fully-automatic rifle in each hand, he sprays computer generated imagery right at the screen.

The AK-47 is thrown in randomly and shot from the hip. The sound effects at this point are so garbled and the action so randomly filmed that you can’t really tell what’s getting shot or if anything is working as it should. The MP5 appears in the hands of cops, bad guys, and Camero, though the only person who is effective with it is super-babe Camero. Both her and its primary user, a thug, treat the gun more like a pistol than an SMG, holding it with arms outstretch and just letting a hundred bullets rip from its 30 round magazine.

Camero (can you tell I paid attention to her?) again opts for the up-close-and-personal approach with the MP5, shooting a dude point blank in the face and spraying thick, brain and blood infused material onto the camera lens. At the risk of clinging to my guns and my religion, it’s the best kill of the movie.

If you pay close attention, you’ll also see a Beretta 92. The Airsoft prop comes into play briefly as a penis substitute in a faux-dick waving contest, but it never gets to blow it’s load. Later you can see it hanging in a drop-leg holster and you’ll probably also find it at your local Toys ‘R Us.

Instead of working the firearms for all their worth (lots), stunt coordinator Zoe Bell (Death Proof) pits the ladies against all and sundry in a series of entertaining fist fights; they include more punches, kicks, and bites to the clunge than permitted under the Geneva Convention. When the guns come out to play, they’re hidden behind tons of fake muzzle flashes.

The climactic final gunfight includes a flame thrower and an M72 LAW that plays out like a High School Film Student’s wet nightmare, complete with random, nonsensical explosions.

If the ending weren’t completely ridiculous, I may have actually liked Bitch Slap a bit more. My inner 13-year-old pervert is a very active part of my life, so when the screen is full of slow motion shots of beautiful girls with breasts bursting from blouses in the middle of a water fight, I’m paying close attention and taking notes. Toss in a lengthy lesbo sequence and when this movie comes on Showtime late at night, you’ll have a hard time not staring into the beautiful abyss for awhile.

Final thoughts? Not enough guns for the gun nuts, not enough nude boobs for the perverts. But if you readily embrace your soft-core teasing pin-up fantasies and want to see girls punch each other in the girly area, Bitch Slap is a hit worth taking once. If you prefer your movies with something called a plot, skip it. Obviously.