Monday, January 18, 2016

Blast-Off Girls (1967)

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Writer: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Composer: Larry Wellington

Starring: Dan Conway, Ray Sager, Tom Tyrell, Ron Liace, Dennis Hickey, Ralph Mullin, Chris Wolski, Lawrence J. Aberwood, Neil Julien, Don Logay, Jack Horner, Colonel Harland Sanders

More info: IMDb

Tagline: It's What's Happening, Baby!

Plot: A sleazy record promotor tries to make it big with a local Chicago garage band and plans to make them famous while keeping the profits for himself.



My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again?  Maybe.

Horrible poster, fun trailer that tells you nothing. Man, there's so much potential here but the low budget, crappy filmmaking keeps it mired in semi-boredom.  You get some groovy tunes, a despicable villain and a good story but you also get lots of bad acting (not necessarily a bad thing), lots of stretched out dialogue (these actors, especially Dan Conway, playing the evil record producer Boojie Baker, needed some advice on tightening up his lines) which drags the scenes down.  Lewis could've done something about that.  I dug the ending.  It's got a Beatles/Monkeys fun vibe to it.  The film is presented with a not too dirty non-anamorphic widescreen print. It's part of a Something Weird Video double bill with JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT (1968) and, naturally, there's a ton of extras that are often better than the films they support, although a commentary track from Lewis would be most welcome for this picture.. You get 10 trashy trailers, 2 fun and trashy shorts, 3 intermission shorts, a gallery of drive-in exploitation art with radio spots (usually I don't include galleries as an extras because they generally stink like mad but SWV does it right and makes them entertaining as hell) and this disc has a drive-in mode that mixes the extras and the films together for one long night of fun.  On that alone this disc is a solid recommendation.  That and a cameo by Col. Fuckin' Sanders!!!


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