Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers

To say that this is Fred Olen Ray's best film doesn't quite cover it. It's the only half-way decent movie he ever made. The movie has - gasp! - actual characters you can tell apart from a block of wood, and doesn't spend - gasp! - over an hour of screen time showing said characters running around doing nothing. Furthermore - gasp! - the script is cheesy and entertaining in the best way, filled with ridiculous one liners and double entendres in a spoof of film noir.

The guy who plays the main character, "Jack Chandler", actually has a face and manner to suit the hard boiled detective, and the movie also benefits from the scream queen double bill of the beautiful Michelle Bauer and Linnea Quigley. Genre fans will appreciate Gunnar Hansen's appearance in another movie to do with chainsaws, though his "performance" makes you wish he'd stuck with the mask and apron.

The plot is something to do with a chainsaw worshipping cult from ancient Egypt - no kidding - who cut people up to sacrifice them to their deity. Bauer has a great nude scene as one of the hardware worshiping minions, hacking a guy up and getting her beautiful naked body sprayed with fake blood. She is so sexy right from her first appearance in the movie, in which she happens to be clothed, that it makes you wish other starlets in b-flicks could study her performance and realise it's about more than just taking your top off.

Linnea Quigley is also fantastic as the good girl gone bad, the role she was usually most comfortable in.

If you're a fan of b-horror movies and haven't seen this one, it's well worth checking out. It's typically low key and low budget, but the starlets light up the screen, and it's entertaining throughout.

Fred Olen Ray was the reigning emperor of trashy low-budgeted B-movies during the late 1980's, so with his reputation and a fabulous title like "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers", this movie was destined to become a cult classic even long before anyone had seen it! The film is quite bad, of course, but also irresistibly charming, effectively tongue-in-cheek and massively entertaining in case you dig campy and brainless horror guff. Writer/director Fred Olen Ray and his entire ensemble cast noticeably had copious amounts of fun with this production, and there's no reason we shouldn't have either, thanks to the light-headed atmosphere, plentiful of gratuitous nudity, amateurish gore and a handful of hilarious and inventive gags. Jay Richardson pretends to be a bona fide Humprey "Maltese Falcon" Bogart in his role of chain-smoking and deep voice narrating private detective Jack Chandler. He's looking for a runaway teenage girl named Samantha (Linnea Quigley, who was 30 at the time) in the raunchy and perilous streets of Los Angeles. Jack crosses paths with a dangerously crazy cult of which the members are prostitutes worshiping the chainsaw and hacking up their customers' bodies in front of their spiritual leader. The latter is none other than Gunnar "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" Hansen; who will presumably remain personified with chainsaw horror until his dying days. Jack fears that Samantha needs to be rescued from the cult, but the girl has her own personal and hidden agenda. At times, "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers" is a little bit tedious and intolerably cheap, but throughout most of the (relatively short) running time it's a successful parody and trash flick. You can't but chuckle with certain dialogs and situations, like Hansen's extended speech bringing an ode to the chainsaw, and the grotesque nude massacre sequences are downright hilarious. This film that is also partially responsible for the huge popularity of B-movie actresses/scream queens Linnea Quigley and Michelle Bauer. In what's arguably the best scene of the entire movie, Michelle Bauer dances naked to the tunes of an Elvis Presley song with a gigantic chainsaw in her hands. She mangles her hapless victim, but not before carefully protecting a poster of her singer idol with plastic wrapping. Classic! Definitely not recommended for about 99% of the world's population, but compulsory viewing for avid cult/horror fanatics.

I wholeheartedly agree with earlier reviewers that said this movie is one of the best of its genre--unfortunately that genre is worthless crap. This is an early example of horror/comedy "scream queen" movies, featuring two of the more ubiquitous screams queens Michelle Bauer and Linnaea Quigley, and directed by one of the pioneers of these kind of films (along with Dave DeCoutea and Jim Wynorski)--Fred Olen Ray. This movie, however, is surprisingly creative and long on plot, and it actually has more than one set and a budget that approaches whole numbers. It is also genuinely funny in places.

These kind of films were largely inspired by the 70's Roger Corman-produced films like "Hollywood Boulevard" or "Caged Heat" (Jim Wynorski actually got his start with Corman--thank's a lot, Roger), but there's a good reason many of the directors of those films went onto bigger and (usually) better things while the three amigos here have kept doing this same thing year after year. There's a big difference between seriously making schlocky films that nevertheless demonstrate real talent, and just mugging your way through self-consciously campy "cult films" in attempt to disguise a total lack of it. Olen Ray, at least, has a genuine love of film which shows in some of his best work (Wynorski, as he himself brags in every interview, is more interested in improving his own dating life than in making good movies, while the openly gay DeCouteau is just a hack by any standard).

As for the "scream queens", Quigley and Bauer, they certainly camp it up as usual, but make enough of effort that they seem more like genuine actresses than strippers here. This is the kind of the movie that really floats to the top of the HUGE pool of worthless crap movies that have been churned out since the early 80's, but it also, mind you, doesn't quite float ABOVE that pool. If you like these kinds of movies, of course, you won't want to miss it. And for everyone else?--well, you could do worse, I guess.

This is the Fred Olen Ray of his golden era, before start making soft core skinnemax flicks. An homage to The Chainsaw Texas Massacre, with the original Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) and a chainsaw duel between two eighties b-movie goddess. What more do you want? Some gore? you got it. Cheese? this is beyond cheese. Fred Olen Ray is a b-movie fan and here he delivers entertainment from a fan to all the fans. Hope he come back to make this kind of stuff. Im a big fan of his old stuff like this one, like Evil Toons and all that kind of stuff. OK, the eighties are gone i understand it but the spirit of it can live. I heard that he will make a sequel to this movie. Hope so.

With its tongue firmly planted in its cheek, this camp B-movie horror, by Fred Olen Ray, manages to be fairly infectious fun, delivering everything one could wish for in a movie with such a delightfully trashy title: a ridiculously silly plot, a half dozen women willing to strip off in front of the camera, some crap special effects (plastic body parts and a few gallons of fake blood), and a running time just short enough to ensure that the film doesn't outstay its welcome.

Jay Richardson plays Jack Chandler, a sleazy private-eye searching for missing teenager Samantha (Linnea Quigley). During the course of his investigations, he meets Mercedes (Michelle Bauer), a sexy, but murderous hooker, and subsequently discovers the existence of a chainsaw worshipping cult, led by The Stranger, (Gunnar Hansen).

With its deliberately cheesy film-noir voice-over, some very bad comedy, frequent nudity from scream queens Quigley and Bauer, and some daft OTT power-tool dismemberment, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers isn't as unwatchable as the title suggests. If you're in the mood for a spot of unpretentious low-budget fun, then check out this entertaining 80s cult classic.