TIFF 09: BITCH SLAP Review

Prepare to get slapped!  Following more than a year of talk and expectation, Rick Jacobson's exploitation throwback Bitch Slap had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last night in a raucous night loaded with more guns, punches thrown and exposed cleavage per minute than should be legally allowed.

Trixie, Hel and Camaro have a plan, the trio of stunningly beautiful women joining together to pull off the theft of two million dollars worth of diamonds.  There are only two problems.  The diamonds are already in the possession of a powerful crime lord and each of the girls are carrying their own hidden secrets, secrets that risk putting them at one another's throats.

Very much designed to be a fanboy's wet dream, Bitch Slap is an unapologetic tribute to the golden era of exploitation, every shot filled with as much T&A as can possibly be filled in, each of the women designed to play up some sexual stereotype - the hard-ass biker, the stripper and the naughty business woman.  The trio can scarcely move without being locked into some sort of slo-mo glamor shot and director Jacobson clearly delights in running them through as many fan-service scenarios as he possibly can - everything from spontaneous water fights to lesbian make-out sequences to plenty of girl-on-girl brawling.

But it's not just sex that sells and Jacobson knows it: There's the violence half of the sex-and-violence equation as well and there's plenty of that as well.  Gun play, beat downs, mass explosions - you want it, you got it.  Hell, if you're in to the bizarre there's even an ongoing tribute to Japanese cult schoolgirl film Sukeban Deka that out-does the official recent entries into that series' canon by a healthy margin.

So we've got the T&A and we've got the action but the girls can't be fighting and / or bending over all the time, now can they?  From time to time they've got to speak, too, and for those moments Jacobson and his writing partner Eric Gruendemann have clearly taken enormous pleasure in an ongoing game of one-upmanship, each of them delighting in cranking out line after ridiculous line of wildly over-the-top dialogue, virtually every other line that passes through the girl's mouths designed to be some sort double-meaning catch-phrase.

In these days of cheap technology it seems as though everybody with a camera and a VHS library believes that they have the goods to produce their own low budget exploitation opus.  The vast majority of them are wrong.  Dead wrong.  And the result is stacks upon stacks of barely-watchable shite.  Bitch Slap is not one of these movies, not by a long shot.  Jacobson is a skilled director matched with an equally skilled crew, the whole lot of them going for broke in the name of pure entertainment.  The art design and production values are top notch, the behind the scenes talents equally so.  Stunt woman extrodinaire Zoe Bell makes a cameo appearance but is far more present as the picture's stunt co-ordinator, giving each of the women a totally believable physical presence.  The women themselves are full of charisma, leaping through costume changes and action pieces with just as much energy as they deliver line after line of wildly over the top dialogue.  The support parts?  Fantastic, with Jacobson pulling in favors from his Xena and Hercules days stashing players from both - including Kevin Sorbo, Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor into key support roles.

Subtext? There aint no subtext here.  Bitch Slap is all about the surface appeal, all about delivering a good time to fans who like their entertainment a little on the trashy side.  And that it absolutely does, the film paying off at a level slightly above expectations - expectations that were already fairly high based on the stellar trailers.