Riding the dubious coattails of, or wrecking a page from Earth Girls are Easy which came out the same year, Galactic Gigolo (1988) is a sub-stupid sci-fi "comedy" (using the term lightly) about a space vegetable who comes to earth disguised as an ordinary & rather unappealing human with a mysterious ability to get any earth woman to want to have sex with him.

It ain't his vegetable pheromones because it even works through a television screen. Men see a dork; women see sensuality incarnate.

Not one good joke livens up the show at any point. Adolescent punning seems to be the height of it. Besides bad acting we are treated to bad photography, bad editing, bad lighting, & dull sex too tame to even qualify as soft core.

Galactic Gigolo doesn't seem to fill any conceivable need after its original purpose of riding along behind the 1988 advertising for Earth Girls.



Cemetery High (1989) begins with shtick parodying that concocted by William Castle to promote horror films in the 1950s. We're warned to close our eyes if we don't like gore every time we hear the Horror Gong. Plus if anyone might be offended by nudity, we should close our eyes whenever forewarned by the Hooter Honk.

The follow-up joke is that the film has no gore & if you close your eyes when you hear the Gore Gong, you might never learn there wasn't enough of a budget for any FX whatsoever. As for the Hooter Honk, there's a long shower scene of a nubile maiden, but after a while the whole Gong & Honk routine is just dropped.

It's a film about four so-called "slasher sluts" formerly victims of rape who take revenge against all men who, guilty or innocent, are universally "Scumsucking asshole slimeballs."

The killing starts off with axes & knives sans anything graphic on-screen, but very soon it's a "girls with guns" film. The girls do a lot of pseudo-sexy posing with guns, & quite a lot of guys fall down as though they've been shot, but it's all kind of like an amateur play, & seems to have been filmed with no retakes.

Bad sound recording steps all over the script's attempted jokes. The cast is far too old to be in high school, but the film's title may allude not to their physical age, but to the junior high school level of the humor.

I got not even one giggle out of this fiasco. The one scene that was almost funny was the probably unintentional casting of a lisping faggoty amateur actor as the doomed though innocuous heterosexual Charles.

As the "story" progresses, women everywhere are inspired by the vigilante sluts, & before you know it the streets aren't safe for men, who arm themselves to rebel against evil women.

The two guys who wrote the script seem to have had their hearts in the right place attempting a satire on sexism, but it simply fails. At first I had a hard time figuring out what the film's purpose even was. It's not sexploitation because apart from crude innuendo it's sexless. It's not violence because it lacks on-screen gore or action.

Slowly it becomes clear that the purpose of the film is to have girls posing with guns. Not using them interestingly, not getting revenge against bastards who deserve it, not looking competent with their guns, but just holding them & licking them & playing with them & taking sexy poses with them.

Ah-ha! A fetish film! And though I think girls with guns are indeed hot stuff in just about any halfway decent movie, they are not so if there's not any additional point, such as telling an exciting story. Girls holding guns is the whole point & this film attempts nothing else. Only whoever shares the highly specific fetish is apt to find it appealing.



These two films weren't just bad, they were awful, using misfiring comedy as an excuse to do nothing well. The attitude seems to be that since it's all a big joke anyway, none of it has to be the least bit effective.

If any of it really had been funny, that excuse for doing nothing interesting on screen might have worked somewhat. Of course, there's a whole genre of sub-sub-substandard comedy horror & comedy porn & comedy slash & comedy action made for the lowest of the low end of the video market. Anyone who loves cinema, including exploitation varieties, figures out how to avoid wasting money on these backyard film projects.

But I actually sought these films out on purpose because the director's very first film was Psychos in Love (1987) which does the comedy slasher routine extremely well, has funny-gross graphic gore, is just a wonderful no-budget film with real charm & the most hysterical theme song in all cheap-film history.

So I tricked myself into believing the director must be an unheralded genius at the crapola-end of the downmarket, & his recurring cast members Debi Thibeult & Carmine Capobianco were so cool as the Psychos in Love that surely they'd be enjoyabole in other films too. So though I'd been warned beforehand this crew has never done anything else worthwhile, I just refused to believe it. But now, alas, I understand why their work remains largely unheralded.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl