Movie Pervs,
Watching ‘The Great Bikini Offroad Adventure’ was a flashback to simpler times in many ways. In that it was surely recorded off a bad VHS copy with audio issues [HI-FI]. But also that a movie like this even could exist, the market had to be late night premium cable, because there’s not 5 minutes of the movie that there’s not a topless woman on screen [HI-FI]. But also, Only topless dancing, no touching unless its in a committed relationship. So it has this weird morality for a hard R movie.
There’s no point going through the plot on this masterpiece [HI-FI]. It has all the basics, Evil land developer, henchmen, a risky scheme to entice male customers out to the most barren of landscapes using girls in bikinis, [HI-FI], A discovery of a ancient Indian burial ground that ends up saving the day in the end anyway. So yes, even within the plot of the movie the girls DID NOT have to take their tops off, they did so just because they wanted to. I mean they weren’t getting paid for it… nooo that would be immoral [HI-FI]. They are just giving freely of their beauty so that Clayface can continue running jeeps full of city slickers out to the mudhole and pointing at rocks. Really all they would have had to do is ask Willie Tallsalt to show them where the artifacts were, maybe that was the girls plan all along.
I don’t know what kind of a freak Ole Willie is! Always lurking, always watching, quietly picking up discarded bikini tops (and never giving them back?). They didn’t show you his evidence orgy of soiled swimsuits. [HI-FI].
[HI-FI]
The real lesson is something I learned when my cable box mysteriously got all the pay per view channels for a week in 1993. You CAN get bored watching the same pair of monstrously fake breasts swing around for 45 minutes in different locations. [HI-FI]
-Mark
PS- You should really stay awake for the aftershow. This week we found the bottom of youtube!
Truth in advertising achieves new heights with THE GREAT BIKINI OFFROAD ADVENTURE, a made-for-video celebration of nature at its very finest, shot on location in the wilderness and white-water environs of Moab, Utah. Brazenly flaunting a plot which is simplicity itself, it manages to
segment and satisfy its target market in ways that far more expensive efforts might do well to imitate.
Duke Abbey (Floyd Irons) is a grizzled old-timer eking out a peripheral existence in the Mojave Desert, providing off-road jeep tours to vacationers. He's about to lose his business to foreclosure, and a voracious strip-mining concern plans to turn his little corner of paradise into lunar
landscape. When his perky niece, Lori (Lauren Hays), and her two college buds, Paulina (Avalon Anders) and Trisha (Laura Hudspeth), show up over spring break, a little good old-fashioned brainstorming produces the solution to Uncle Duke's financial woes: jeep tours featuring bikini-clad coeds as
tour guides--who aren't above losing their tops if the clientele so desire. Soon Duke's business is flourishing, as everyone from river rats to Japanese businessmen avail themselves of this new wrinkle in the tourism game. When his next-door-neighbor, a white-water river rafting guide, throws in
with them, business booms like gangbusters, despite a rash of corporate dirty tricks which border on the paramilitary. Eventually, the girls meet their quota, Duke makes his nut, and innate corporate greed is vanquished for yet another day.
Although the whole point of this exercise is to provide excuses to display comely young women with their shirts off, the tone is never spurious or unseemly, and everyone seems to be having a good time, which comes as welcome respite from the hyper-stylized passion generally on display in such
entertainments. This hearkens back to the golden years of drive-in exploitation, when Roger Corman types would give their zealous proteges a shopping list of exploitation staples--full dorsal nudity; frontal nudity from the waist up, etc.--and then turn them loose with a Bolex camera and a
three-man crew.
In addition, this benign throwaway takes the opportunity to interject some good old grassroots populist agitprop. The subtext here--if such a thing is possible--is The Monkey-Wrench Gang, crusty naturalist Edward Abbey's 1975 cult novel about eco-warriors in the New Mexico outback, which
popularized the term "monkey-wrenching"--tossing a monkey wrench into the works of corporate do-badders intent on strip-mining or clear-cutting the natural environment. The character name "Duke Abbey" is a conflation of Edward Abbey and his fictional hero, Hayduke. There's even a character named
Hayduke, dressed in combat fatigues and camouflage paint, who is constantly sneaking around and blowing things up. None of this is foregrounded, or would seem obtrusive to the unenlightened, but it's tons of fun for those who stumble across it. (Extensive nudity, sexual situations.)
