Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers

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.

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers is a definite cult movie. There's a chainsaw in the title, so I guess Fred Olen Ray, the director, decided to cast Gunnar Hansen. Hansen was better as Leatherface, in this he just stands there and seems very inanimate. I liked this movie for what it is, a definite attempt at cult status. I think Olen Ray's Soroeity Babes In The Slime Bowl-A-Rama is a better film however.

"Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers" is one of the best examples of those trashy, cheesy, horror/spoofs of the 80s (Toxic Avenger and Blood Diner would be included in there as well) that I so fondly adore. The movie is short, sweet, and to the point but I enjoyed every excruciatingly bad B-movie moment, which by the way, is accompanied by the corniest one-liners you've ever heard since Freddy Krueger. Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers concerns (what else?) a cult of chainsaw massacring babes who use fresh limbs from their victims to serve to their "master" (I'm assuming this is where Gunnar Hansen comes in). And boy does he look embarrassed. One classic scene involves a nude Michelle Bauer messily hacking up some poor old sap while listening to Elvis Prestley. The look on her face is priceless. Blood, a wooden Gunnar Hansen, laughs aplenty, cheesy rock music, scream queens Michelle Bauer and Linnea Quigley (her shining moment is the "dance of the double chainsaws!") all wrapped into one...don't miss it.

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.