BITCH SLAP – Rick Jacobson

Three bursting out girls: a down-and-out and a bit thick stripper, a drug addicted quick to hit and a sort of special agent get to face notorious Pinkie, a crime king none of them has ever seen. They find themselves in the desert to retrieve a plunder stolen to the boss himself, but the events don’t roll out the expected way, especially after Gage’s murder, who was Pinkie’s puppet and the sole to know the precise hiding place of the booty.

A quotation on mankind’s wickedness inspired by Joseph Conrad is the beginning of BITCH SLAP. A clear hymn to expolitation and B-movies such as Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! or Dragstrip Girl, all the way through a Tarantino revival (GrindHouse) and the comics-like aesthetics well-beloved by Robert Rodriguez as seen in Sin City. An entertaining toy in itself, entirely pivoted on the 3 main characters’ bodies always displaying themselves at throwing buckets of water on one another, sexy poses, winky looks and lesbo scenes whch mark almost every scene shift.

The film is constructed on different time sketches: the present (the girls in the desert) the past (in which we watch the scenes in a backwarding order, starting from the first one back to the beginning). Every spring back in time implies a sort of cartoonish flashback, where digital art (most of all the backgrounds added on green screen) and the hyper-realism rule the scene creating a whirl of explosions, blood jets, stripteases and broken glass.

The heavy metal soundtrack is remarkable, beating time of BITCH SLAP with a rocky mid-tempo (in the sexy-scenes introducing us the main characters), accelerated by using double pedal (in the hand-to-hand combats), synth strings (for the say-so romantic moments) and rock-blues rides (in the glamourous moments).

BITCH SLAP steals with wide open hands from Quentin Tarantino (who himself took inspiration elsewhere but running the risk of not being appreciated), makes the 60s filmography like his own and exploits the drive-in genre of that latest period. As to directing tecnique we see a constant use of ralenty and close-up interchanged to long- shot, chiseled in a hectic editing.

Expect nothing but a roaring and mess-driver B-movie filled up with beautiful female bodies, frantic action and vivid colors. A lot of fun with nothing more under the surface coating. But do we always need it, a subtext? Prepare some pop-corn, turn the volume up and enjoy the go-go exploitation!

A movie by Rick Jacobson
Cast Julia Voth, Erin Cummings, America Olivo, Michael Hurst, Kevin Sorbo, Renée O’Connor