Die Schlamm-Babies

I usually enjoy camp/comedy films but I must say this 1984 release was not done very well. Ruth Gordon plays the Delta Phi house mom and her many talents were wasted in this low budget camp/comedy. The girls of Delta Phi are behind on their rent so they partner with a slick male entrepreneur (James Wilder) and head to Vegas as a team of inexperienced mud wrestlers to battle a team of pro female mud wrestlers who are managed by a veteran promoter who has ties with the mob, which means he always gets his way. I won't provide any spoilers but I will say that the grand finale was a bust (no pun intended).

I give it a disappointing 3 out of 10 IMDb rating.

But I finally did and got stoned and laughed my butt off with my friends! It's as funny as Animal House and Ruth Gordon as the sorority stoned housekeeper is as cool as the pot smoking rabbit the girl Magic carries around under her hat! It's meant to fun and campy and went for it with much success! Great stuff filmed with ultra light flying down the Las Vegas Strip which I don't know how the director ever pulled off before CGI made it so easy for helmets today! This movie was way ahead of it's time and the filmmakers made st rerelease it now when Cannabis is legal and fun films like this can't be found anymore. Roll a fatty, kick back and let the laughs and craziness begin; Ruth Gordon mud wrestling, a pot head rabbit, and villains that Mugsy and her wild house girls take on would make a circus envious! Excellent! SO HAPOY I BOUGHT THIS, I heard about it from lots of friends but it was more rewarding than I ever thought!

This film is poorly acted and has a real "home made" feel..it's about 5 steps below a "B" movie. Laura Branigan must have been convinced that this would be a good opportunity to break into films after spending 2 years in an acting school...her character is boring and her acting is quite hollow. To top it all off, she doesn't even sing in this film. Ruth Gordon shines, as always, even though there isn't much for her to do. The casting was questionable also - any film portraying college girls obviously much older than that who run to Las Vegas to save their sorority house by mud wrestling isn't worth your time. Laura Branigan even used a body double for her wrestling scenes...other antics include getting a rabbit high on marijuana, a man taping a cucumber to his leg to look like a big penis, and a party at the Sorority House where people dive into a baby pool filled with mud. Fun, fun, fun, people...

This movie was indeed "bad" when it was released back in 1985. Now, nineteen years later, it's just good IL camp. This movie is like a poster-child for "Cheesey 80's Movie". It is funny, sometimes unintentionally, and is an absolute perfect movie to watch with some friends for a good laugh. Some of the movie's highlights are; seeing pop-singer, Laura Branigan, smoke a joint. Watch Ruth Gordon eat pot brownies, smoke weed, cuss like a sailor and mud wrestle. And see how styles and fashions have changed and not changed over the last two decades. I recommend it "highly".

Mugsy's Girls (a.k.a. Delta Pi) is a fairly typical early to mid-80s Animal House rip off, with the added value of mud wrestling. Long story short, a sorority house is in hock to your typical foreign loan shark, and decides to participate in a mud wrestling contest to earn the cash they need to purchase the house and pay off the loan shark. Led by Gordon, their indomitable house mother, they head off to Las Vegas.

The plot itself is highly predictable, with many of the jokes telegraphed a mile away. The budget is very obviously low, and one suspects half of it went to getting Gordon and Branigan to appear in this schlock. (You know you're dealing with a home made affair when a significant portion of the cast is the director's family, and a C-list star like Ken Norton gets high billing for what is essentially a cameo.)

Nevertheless, the film delivers on what most of the audience is really watching for-pretty young women wallowing around in mud. The mud wrestling sequence takes up roughly the last third of the movie, and it delivers. The actresses are more than pretty enough, and most of them appear to do the wrestling themselves. (Although Branigan is very clearly replaced by a body double.)