The Wild World of Batwoman

Good lord a'mighty! Is this thing dull! The director made a slapstick film that takes itself deadly seriously. Huh?

And the Batwoman is more of a what-is-it. What's that on her head? And what's with the very large and strategically placed pin on her- um- bosom? Isn't that painful? Does her mother know she goes out like that in public? Is this where Janet Jackson got the idea?

One wonders with what inducement she collected about her her teenage minions. I gather the recruitment speech went something like this:

"As part of my entourage, you will be working to save the world from the criminal element. But I'm not going to give you any training, so you're not going to be very good at it. And I don't accept any girls that are any too bright. Furthermore, no fun will be allowed. You will be forced to recite ridiculous, meaningless formulae and must do so without cracking a smile. By way of relaxation, you will be forced to sit around the living room listening to me playing funeral dirges on the organ. Well? Who's with me?"

Come to think of it, no wonder they're such pushovers for the happy pills! I'd sure be popping happy pills if I was stuck in that organization!

Oh, extra bonus: totally random footage from The Mole People stuck in for no conceivable purpose.

Tom Servo's final comment on this movie. This movie bad. This movie VERY bad! There isn't one shred of plot to be found. There's dancing, some good guys, some bad guys, and something very bad that can't really be called acting. This movie hurt me and I think it hurt others as well.

Nothing in this movie makes any sense at all. And I don't just mean that in the "Hey, it didn't explain how she came to that conclusion" sense; I mean, the events in this movie are just randomly strung together, as if the editor had just taken the snippets of footage, tossed them in the air, and pieced them together in the order they fell. It's fun! Kids, try it yourself! You can't do a worse job than these guys!

There's a drug that makes scantily-clad women dance all the time. Everyone breaks for milk and cookies in the middle. In the climax, the villain "Rat Fink" spontaneously creates copies of himself, and the clones, Batwoman, and her henchmen chase each other around a round, 5'-diameter table for about five minutes. If you want your head to explode, brother is this the movie for you!

If "Manos, Hands of Fate" is the worst movie of all time, "The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman" is easily the most confusing. Let's see if I understand: there's this fortyish woman in a leotard that doesn't quite fit with a strange mask over her face, and she seems to be a receptionist or something for some R&D company who holds seances on company time while government auditors watch; and she has these nubile sorority babes as disciples who wear radio watches and dance and wiggle a lot; and there's this Dr. Claytin Forrester-lookalike mad scientist and his lackey who acts like a monkey and a couple of goofy guys who drool over the sorority babes and bump into each other while wearing stupid phoney beards; and somewhere in there there's a nuclear-powered hearing aid, and a guy who dresses like Zorro, or the Masked Marvel, and some mole people and a beach party and a dumpy looking scientist, ...

Nope! I still don't get it!

If you are a badfilm fan like myself, you might want to view this film. But I would definitely recommend sticking with the MST3K version with Mike and the Bots.

I don't feel that it is fair to compare this movie with something like Manos: The Hands of Fate. That is a totally different ball of wax. That was trying to be a straight-ahead horror film, and is funny because it is not remotely scary, is loaded with the incompetence of a completely inexperienced filmmaker, and filmed on a budget of two cents.

This movie, IS, in fact, trying to be bad on purpose. You know, because that's FUNNY. The Batman television show was something of a sensation when it originally came out. It's combination of comic book ridiculousness combined with straight-faced acting and a pop-art graphic design made the whole idea a verifiable hoot and a TV ratings juggernaut, at least for a second.

Enter z-grade, low budget movie auteur Jerry Warren, leaping with all his might on to the Batman bandwagon with The Wild World of Batwoman. The idea that "camp" could actually work creatively thus proved by the Batman TV show, Warren attempts the same idea, even down to the tribute to (ripping off of) the Batman character itself with Batwoman.

But attempting to create something self-consciously "camp," described by the old trope "so bad it's good" is a very dangerous task. The creative types working on the Batman TV show were experienced Hollywood hands, who knew what they were doing, of much greater talent than Mr. Warren and his company of rather unimpressive thespians, most of whom are young women chosen for their ability to pleasingly fill out a bikini (one of the most aesthetically pleasing parts of the film).

When attempting to create on purpose something that is funny because it is incompetent, or "wild" or "Crazy" or "out there", you are walking on a very narrow tightrope. And Warren and his crew fall off that tightrope time and time again. Making fun of outlandish comic book heroes and villains (or similarly, those from the old Hollywood movie serials) can be a ripe target for parody, or let's not give Warren too much credit, plain old goofing. (He never even approached the level of sophistication required in order to use the word satire.) But all we get here are jokes that fall flat, unfunny parodies, lame situations, and tired and laboring attempts at slapstick.

Slapstick, or physical comedy, is a form that usually gets little respect from those who fancy themselves film aficionados, but it can be done with vigor and effectiveness (The Three Stooges) or even balletic grace (Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin). However, Warren and his actors provide a limp, incompetent version of physical comedy that involves no thought at all. If a choreographer was used for these physical routines, he must have been dead for several years.

Someone else mentioned K. Gordon Murray, and this movie did have the same feel as one of his cheapo dubbed Mexican imports in spite of the movie being shot in California in English...not surprising since Jerry Warren earlier did a few films such as Curse of the Screaming Werewolf or something, which was a Mexican horror film cut together with a few new scenes Warren shot with Lon Chaney Jr. (Got to see that now, but I'm sure it's an unholy mess.)

About the only way to extract some entertainment juice from this leaden stone of a movie is the layering of Mike Nelson and the Bots on top of the whole rancid cheese on their Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. Some of the funniest one liners in MST3K history grace this presentation as Mike and his pals try to make sense of the truly nonsensical goings-on unspooling in front of their unbelieving eyes. But watching the film without their japery is truly a teeth-grinding waste of 88 minutes.

Score: Film alone: 2 out of 10. MST3K version: 8 out of 10.