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| Images courtesy of MVD Rewind Collection |
Softcore pornography saw something of a renewal at the
beginning of the 1990s with pay-per-view and late-night cable television on the
rise as well as the proliferation of VHS rental stores. While softcore and even hardcore pornography
tailored to subgenres of sex comedy or porn parody, some of them are also very
capable of being high art or even outlaw cinema. Such was the case of Russ Meyer whose work can
be characterized as brilliant. Same with
Jack Hill who was something of a progenitor of the blaxploitation genre. And particularly the work of Stephen Sayadian
who has been overseeing 4K restorations of his works including the infamous
outlaw dystopian romp Café Flesh, these are filmmakers that stretched
the very definition of what you can do on film with sex and/or nudity in narrative
storytelling.
And then there are movies like The Bikini Carwash Company
installments one and two made between 1992 and 1993 which are the very
definition of an after-hours Baywatch or Barb Wire sort of
venture concentrated primarily on boobs, butts and frequent softcore sex
scenes. Some of it is occasionally funny
in the vein of Andy Sidaris and/or Jim Wynorski who incidentally costars in the
first film, but mostly this heavy-metal long haired cacophony of boobs
squeezing on soapy sudsy windowpanes and butts sticking out as girls bend over
to wash the hoods and trailers is an astoundingly tedious slog. Thanks to MVD’s Rewind Collection, both
movies come to blu-ray disc in a collector’s edition replete with a mini poster
though both films have been upconverted from standard definition to high-definition. The technical results yielded aren’t very good
with frame-rate issues on the second film, but considering the content of these
films it’ll do.
With the first somehow-R rated one by none other than 9½ Weeks
editor Ed Hansen based off of an idea by producer George Buck Flower who
cowrote it with Hansen, The Bikini Carwash Company is basically about a
guy whose uncle’s carwash business is flailing so he hires a bunch of girls
clad in bikinis to start up a kind of burlesque nudity filled revision of the
carwash. Starring Joe Dusic and
recurring skin flick softcore actress Kristi Ducati who reprises her role in
the second film as well as an ensemble cast of scantily clad women, it goes
through the usual machinations of music video montage rendered by Newhaven and
Snake City either of girls washing cars and/or having sex with the few
musclebound men on hand whose only other purpose onscreen is for occasional
half-assed comic relief. Eventually a hot
middle-aged lawyer comes in to defend the car wash from being shut down over
public indecency and she too gets to have her moment strutting around in nylons
and high heels as girls wash her like a car and so on and so forth. Honestly, this kinda had me longing for The
Greasy Strangler’s car wash scenes as a stark shock to the senses though I suppose
this film’s recurring flasher running gag will suffice on that front.
Next up is the unrated The Bikini Carwash Company II
by successful music karaoke video director Gary Orona who shot the previous
film as cinematographer, eventually working his way into the HBO/Cinemax
erotica circuit. Picking up where the
first one left off albeit with a few character changes including the jettisoning
of Joe Dusic from the saga completely, we find Kristi Ducati and her carwash
comrades suited up for office executive work.
With a new evil bigwig threatening to shut down the carwash company to
make room for a condominium project, an ultimatum is reached where she needs to
raise $4 million in order to save the company.
With lingerie sales on television becoming a hot commodity, the girls
decide to go that route and the resulting film has very little actual Bikini
Carwashing onscreen instead opting as a softcore kid cousin to Jay Levey’s
vastly superior UHF.
These are bad. Bad to
look at, bad to listen to, bad to process.
While there’s nothing wrong with an old-fashioned sex comedy or some titillation
or even plain tawdriness, these music-video montages designed to be played at
the back of bars adorning strip clubs are thoroughly soporific from top to
bottom. Barely garnering a smirk here
and there outside of some outrageous and hilariously dated CG rendered opening
credits sequences with poorly rendered cartoon sound effects to tickle the ribs
of whichever horny couples or boozing party dudes are watching this, running
around 90 minutes or so each these are terrible for people with ADHD who will
be quick to check their watches or how much running time is left on the
disc. Despite the upconverting efforts
made to bump up the transfers, both of these look worse than some of the
shot-on-video ports I’ve seen.
Compared to the aforementioned Russ Meyer or Andy Sidaris or
Stephen Sayadian, The Bikini Carwash Company films might get some
playback as beer-and-pizza trash though naked boobs and butts can only carry a
film so far. For time capsule archaeologists
keen on unearthing bygone artifacts of the 1990s era of straight-to-video lofi
lowbrow trash, fans will get some kind of stupid-eyed Vince McMahon by way of
Larry Flynt oriented Scopophilia out of it.
For the rest of us poor saps including movie critics tasked with eating
this stale undercooked slider in between cinematic filet mignons, The Bikini
Car Wash Company movies were a real arduous chore. Where the MVD Rewind Collection set finds
redemption is in the form of an audio commentary from none other than Jim Wynorski
who seems to be the primary target audience for these things.
--Andrew Kotwicki
