Video Vixens!

Video Vixens is one of the funniest sexploitation comedies around. Norman Field (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, The Godson) is WKLITT television executive Clifford Bradley, paranoid of a conspiracy to deprive Americans of their sexual desires via added ingredients in the soap. He decides to cancel regular programming and put on a stag film awards show to reinvigorate America's sex life. George "Buck" Flowers (Taking It Off) as porn auteur Rex Boorski, is put in charge of making it all happen. Especially notable is Harrison Phillips as Gordon Gordon, film critic for Bradley's station, who is as prude as they come! He is ordered, much to his own mortification, to host the gala event. All three give incredibly tight performances. If you can get past the jokes about rape, something one is expected to do in films by Almodovar and Waters, Video Vixens works well even as a commentary of modern television twenty five plus years after its initial release. Broadcasting the Porn Academy Awards is not that far off in a society where a lesbian kiss on Ally McBeal gets high ratings and the use of four letter words and bare buttocks qualifies as breakthrough television. Plus the commercial and film parodies work well within the structure of the plot (like those in Putney Swope). Add to all of this the star power of sexploitation veterans Marie Arnold, Sandy Dempsey and Rainbeaux Smith, this film not only delivers the skin but also an entertaining plot and plenty of laughs to go along with it. That's something even Gordon Gordon would approve of!

Sophomoric romp is fairly enjoyable if you're looking for non-intellectual locker room humor and the female mystique as the chief components to a movie. There's plenty of wiggly-jiggly juvenile delinquency in VIDEO VIXENS, and a threadbare story centered on the network broadcasting of the first International Stag Film Awards. Playing entirely off this one-joke premise, there's really little else to mention.

Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith is luscious as ever in a mock commercial spot endorsing a feminine hygiene product called "TwinkleTwat", and this bit is about as good as it gets(good enough, apparently, to be redone for the 1976 muppet-porn classic LET MY PUPPETS COME, with "Twinkle Twat" renamed as "Sweet-Fish"). All-in-all, it's not exactly something to seek high and low for, but seeking low is more likely going to lead you to this film if you really feel compelled.

4/10

A sex comedy? Is that what it's meant to be? I suppose it's very much like a lot of this genre from the seventies. If you think of a George Romero film of this type then it's much worse. Admittedly there is some nudity to keep your interest but overall it's barely watchable.

Video Vixens is a spoof or parody of television awards programs like the Tony's or the Oscars.

Video Vixens aims to please the audience who enjoyed films like the Groove Tube. I originally rented the VHS because it had Cindy Manion (The Toxic Avenger, Preppies) on the cover. The people pictured in the front cover are not in the movie. I believe Troma got the home video rights to this.

It does have Robyn Hilton (Blazing Saddles) and George "Buck" Flower (Back to the Future, Pumpkinhead). Those are the only cast members that I recognize from other films.

Anyway, Video Vixens is 75 minutes worth or raunchy humor and gratuitous nudity. If you looking for these things you can do better than Video Vixens.

Clearly one expects a film like this to be at or near the bottom of the barrel. As a frame of reference, to better understand the range quality, to try the taste of beans after days of filets, one might occasionally sample a film that you expect to be bad. What one may be surprised to find out, as I was, is that for some films, like this one, the barrel has one bottom. There is no explanation, no description, no criticism that could impart the full measure of this movie's utterly astounding baseness. Whatever makes Plan 9 from Outer Space a loser and be found in spades in this gem of tasteless tripe. I am burning my copy so that one else might make the same mistake I did. There are better ways to test quality.