Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988)


Sometimes I question whether a movie like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers really needs a review.  It's a Fred Olen Ray film, which means expectations are quite low even if this happens to be the best Fred Olen Ray film in his long career.  A title like this is going to get watched by the people it is intended for., and i    t's not something that is going to be set up for viewing during an overnighter with the church youth group.  

Ray can't help but do some cinematic mugging in about every shot in the movie.  At the heart it's a comedy, making fun of both outrageous horror and exploitation films while also riffing on 1940s film noire.  It works occasionally, but the ultra-cheap production values and the disappointment when it comes to showing the actual chainsaws in action - save for Linnea Quigley's dance toward the end - is quite palpable. 

Jack Chandler (John Henry Richardson) is a private eye in Los Angeles, and he is currently on a case to find a missing teenager named Samantha (Quigley) from Oxnard.  Upon investigating he finds that the police may have someone in custody that fits her description.  He visits Police Chief Harrison (Dennis T. Mooney), but the girl they have isn't her.  However, she is a prostitute who cut up her john with a chainsaw.

Clues lead to a place called the West Side Bar, which has been visited by a number of men recently found dismembered.  Seeking a woman named Mercedes (Michelle Bauer), he soon finds out that Samantha has fallen in with a group of prostitutes led by the Master (Gunnar Hansen) who are in a cult that worships ancient Egyptian gods and their use of the chainsaw in human sacrifice.  Jack must save Samantha, and himself, while bringing down the evil cult.

Despite the lurid title everything is a bit corny and fun.  There is a good line of dialog explaining why ancient Egyptian gods would be using chainsaws, and Michelle Bauer does a nice job of showing all she has - both in acting and other ways - as the second in command of the cult.  Gunnar Hansen looks imposing, but unfortunately he was a better stuntman than actor, as the Stranger (as the Master is billed in the credits) ceases to be intimidating once Hansen starts to speak.  Linnea Quigley, as usual, is game for just about anything and seems to be truly enjoying herself here, although the question about Samantha's age is a bit troubling even if she claims to be 21.

This does have a great opening, which I wish the rest of the movie could have kept up with, but as soon as we see the first victim with someone (it turns out to be Ray) obviously throwing fake body parts and squirting fake blood off screen it just goes from silly to dumb.  Too bad because Bauer, like Quigley, seems to enjoy her role, but even she looks bemused at the attempts to get around special effects.  Many of the goofier bits of comedy don't help, especially since at times it feels more like a softcore porn parody than a real film. 

The result is a bunch of jokes falling flat, a bunch of kills falling flat, and the only redeeming quality of the whole film being the nudity, of which there is copious amounts.  Since it's the usual band of scream queens from the era that's not a bad thing, and Linnea Quigley in body paint dancing with two chainsaws is interesting, even if it looks a bit awkward.  

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988)
Time: 75 minutes
Starring: John Henry Richardson, Linnea Quigley, Michelle Bauer, Dennis Mooney, Gunnar Hansen
Director: Fred Olen Ray

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more