Vice Academy Part 2

The original Vice Academy was a staple of my late night movie watching as a kid thanks to USA Up All Night, but I never got around to see this sequel until last night. It's a perfectly acceptable and occasionally fun sequel with Linnea Quigley and Ginger Lynn Allen still giving it their all and camping it up as Didi and Holly - two new police recruits who don't seem to know how to do anything. They have to keep proving their worth by tracking down and apprehending perps that the regular police force can't, which was, more of less, the same concept as the original film, except this time they've graduated and are a part of the force.

As expected, there's a good deal of T 'n A, but it never comes across as sleazy as it should, because the film mostly focuses on the comedy aspects. It's light, silly, and absolutely ridiculous, but the filmmakers and cast keep things lively and it's very entertaining if you don't forget to turn off your brain and go along for the ride.

About 15 minutes into "Vice Academy Part 2" I thought the words 'dumb' and 'clumsy' would be accurate enough to describe this comedy. At the end of the movie, though, there was only one thing left to say about it... Utterly moronic. So yes, things go from bad to worse in "Vice Academy Part 2". Arguably, the only two reasons to see this film are Linnea Quigley and Ginger Lynn Allen. They're both good-looking blondes who can't act (something they're very well aware of themselves), and since I have no particular interest in these two ladies I can safely say this whole sorry excuse of a film was completely lost on me. But since I was familiar with Linnea's history as a scream queen in horror movies and Ginger (an ex-pornstar?) apparently has fans of her own, I decided to take a risk and give the dubious "Vice Academy Part 2" a watch. So well, I brought this onto myself.

There's virtually no plot to speak of. Some female criminal called Spanish Fly is out to destroy the population of L.A. and she's aiming to do this by polluting the city's water supply with an aphrodisiac. She starts by poisoning the L.A. police department first. Holly (Ginger) & Didi (Linnea) are on the verge of getting fired, but end up getting the assignment of stopping Spanish Fly. Since there's only two main sets in this movie - the police office building and a night club - you can expect not much to happen during the next 90 minutes. And whenever nothing's happening (which is most of the time), the scenes are rigged together with lame sex-jokes.

As if writer/director Rick Sloane had one sudden moment of pure genius inspiration, all of the sudden he throws Bimbo Cop into the story. An incredibly cheesy cyborg-cop - who just looks like a female wrestler with a complementary silly outfit - who's supposed to save the day and arrest Spanish Fly at the night club, which is also the perfect setting of course for Ginger & Linnea to perform a striptease act. So yes, the two leading ladies bare their breasts eventually. Obviously, it's meant to be the movie's highlight and it pretty much is.

"Vice Academy Part 2" is the equivalent of the Troma company trying to make a straight-up (sexy) comedy. It's very hard to fathom that their were in fact 6 movies made in this "Vice Academy" franchise. It must be a real torment to sit through them all. At least for me, I imagine it to be. I've had more than enough of my share already with this one.

"Vice Academy 2" is worth sitting through only for Ginger Lynn Allen: she is cute, she appears in black lingerie, she wears a revealing dress, she performs (along with Linnea Quigley) a strip dance, and she throws one mean right punch. Other than her, the film is so PAINFULLY drawn-out, so insultingly lame, so persistently witless that you simply won't believe it (just one example: what a brilliant idea to create a powerful half-woman/half-robot crime-fighter and then put a switch on its back that anyone can easily move to "worthless" or "overload" mode). If complete lack of talent was a crime, writer-director Rick Sloane would be serving a life sentence. My rating is pretty generous for this one. (*1/2)

Holly and Didi are new to the force and have to contend with a villainess who's threatening to poison the water, a robot bimbo-cop and a mean guy cop who thinks they're worthless for the meager reason that they didn't send backup when he was getting beat up (what a meanie). This film is just as worthless as the first one, if not more so. However,being a HUGE fan of "Bachelor Party" I liked Toni Alessandrini's minor part, showing more skin then in that great movie.

My Grade: D+

DVD Extras:Director's commentary;Interviews ;filmographies for Linnea Quigley and Jayne Hamil; and theatrical Trailer (which features nudity)

Eye Candy: Ginger Lynn Allen as Holly, Linnea Quigley as Didi, and Toni Alessandrini as Aphrodite each get topless

This sequel to the original "Vice Academy" is even duller and more incomprehensible than the first. There *may* be more plot here, but it is told so badly that it doesn't involve you at all, and thus you can't even follow it from scene to scene.

The overarching narrative, if it can be said to have one (it really doesn't) seems to involve a bad girl called Spanish Fly who wants to spike the town's water supply with an aphrodisiac. Linnea Quigley and Ginger Lynn Allen, no longer members of the academy (so why does the word "academy" appear in the title?) apparently have to go undercover as strippers to catch the bad girl. That is allegedly the main story, but they only appear as strippers for about one scene, as does the main antagonist. So what is the rest of the movie? Sketches without punchlines? That's as good as I can get to explaining it.

There is a subplot this time about a misogynistic, hunky male cop who looks more like a stripper in his cop outfit than Quigley and Allen. Indeed, he probably spends more of the movie undressed, at one stage confronted by Quigley in the men's locker room, who rips off his towel, exposing his bare butt to the camera, and his groin to her, so that she can mock his lack of manhood. Later on, he is stripped to his bikini underwear and chained up in a BDSM type scenario, ensuring that this movie will only ever be watched or remembered by fans of humiliation themed fetish porn.

Remember how in the first "Vice Academy" there was a feeling like the cast and crew were having more fun making the movie than you were watching it? Like the whole thing was a private joke on their behalf, like they thought the whole movie was so ridiculous as to be funny without needing any jokes? Being a sequel, there's less of that this time around - it was obviously only made to cash in on the first - but this time there is a joke character in the form of female bodybuilder Teagan playing a character called "BimboCop", who is, indeed, supposed to be a kind of robot, complete with a synthesised voice.

I bet their sides split when they came up with that one.