Stacked Racks from Mars (Review)
Stacked Racks from Mars
2014
Written and directed by Dean McKendrick
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They got all this way before they realized they left Grandpa back at the gas station!
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Earth is once again the target of alien conquest and alien lust in Stacked Racks from Mars! Invading aliens are always coming to Earth with plans to invade, and plans to have fun shore leaves, which almost always result in the aliens choosing not to invade. If there’s one thing humans are known for in the galaxy, it’s fucking anything and everything that comes to Earth. ALF, ET, Predator, Mac – they all pulled in tons of tail! Where do you think Disney gets the raw components for their latest generation of kids from?
Stacked Racks from Mars is another femalien invasion movie where alien ladies possess the bodies of Earth ladies and proceed to go on a sex spree. This time, the ladies specifically say they were conscious the entire time while the aliens use their bodies to have sex with random people. However, they don’t seem to be shocked at all by the experience of being possessed and coerced into situations of rape, and are instead more mad at their husbands, who have sex with the alien women. That’s a neat trick to try to dismiss the fact the women are being raped, and unfortunately I have to give demerits to Stacked Racks from Mars because I’ve never been comfortable with these scenes, and prefer everyone being totally down with getting down. At least this time the women are freed, unlike in Housewives from Another World, where they are trapped forever while the aliens control their bodies.
Stacked Racks from Mars is cartoonish in nature, with several scenes that are played up for ridiculousness. The ending especially, which gives off Benny Hill vibes and deflates what should be more serious repercussions. If you miss that spaceship set that gets used a lot in low-budget features, it makes a reappearance, complete with a sex scene on the table. All the other classic Retromedia/Synthetic Filmwerx stuff is present, from the usual core cast (with a few newbies) to the familiar music.

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The Devil Wears Nada (Review)
The Devil Wears Nada
2009
Written and directed by Jim Wynorski (as Salvadore Ross)
Now this is some Jim Wynorski treasure! The Devil Wears Nada is a fantastic achievement of fun story and sexy content, while still being ridiculous and creative. Wynorski can produce magic if he’s into it, and from the creativity he gives behind and in front of the camera, you can tell he’s having a ball here
The Devil Wears Nada takes its name (obviously) from The Devil Wears Prada, and here we also have an overbearing boss at a fashion magazine lording over her newest assistant. Things go a bit further here, Julia Crimson is far worse of a boss than Miranda Priestley. The humiliation becomes more sexual, though Candy seems to have no problem having sex with her boss or a random male model even under threat of termination. It is revealed that Julia Crimson is blackmailing another character (via more sexual humiliation – incriminating photos) and gets a comeuppance that we never saw in the Glenn Close film. Turning the boss into more of a caricature does make things more fun and removes a bit of moral ambiguity.
The Devil Wears Nada gives another chance to go over the themes of its inspiration movie, with the overworked assistant at a magazine dealing with a nightmare boss and the promise of future rewards if she just sticks through all the crap she has to go through. Thanks to the job market in the US imploding, the scenario plays out like a lot of the unpaid internships that seems to be more of the rule than exception at magazines. These internships are often just unpaid 60 hour workweek jobs in expensive cities that only the rich can afford to go through, creating an artificial barrier in the magazine industry. These internships have become increasingly controversial and are technically illegal in some areas, but persist. In addition, they are often defended by those that have gone through them as a necessary part of magazine production, creating a self-feeding destructive cycle that causes many in the industry to turn a blind eye to its own failings (as rocking the boat might just cost your your job in a very competitive field!)
The Devil Wears Prada deals with the struggle that professional women tangle with, their careers or their personal lives. The Devil Wears Nada is of the opinion that you can have your cake and eat it too, and the terrible boss is just an obstacle to overcome. Candy’s defeat of Julia Crimson (and subsequent promotion to co-boss along with former assistant Becca Saperstein) is a result of playing by Julia’s own rules, but turning them around, and is accomplished by the various people Julia Crimson has wronged banding together. When Prada was released, it featured a lot of backlash from former employees of Anna Wintour condemning the book as a mean-spirited gotcha, and that author Lauren Weisberger did not appreciate the opportunities the job presented her. This circling the wagons to defend treating employees terribly is not conductive to a good business environment, and makes the defenders look like they need to justify their own abuse (and is mirrored by the aforementioned unpaid internship defenses!) Nada‘s rejects this in favor of a socialistic workers utopia where the workers team up with a money man to eliminate strife and bring peace to the land (and get rewarded!) Not only does this unionization bring strength to the workers, but Julia Crimson is such a threat that people team together regardless of class affiliation to eliminate her as a problem. Nada offers a vision where hard work and creativity are rewarded, and by working together more is accomplished than everyone suffering separately. In this spirit, Nada defeats Prada in the messaging.
But The Devil Wears Nada is not without its own problems. Candy is coerced into sexual relations in order to save her job, and male characters such as the model Michael are willing participants. And as mentioned, Candy and Becca’s eventual winning of the editors-in-chief job is awarded by a male money man, showing that despite all their work, things still resolve because a male decides. If these tradeoffs are enough to keep Nada as a strong and smart women get ahead film, or if they condemn it to an also-ran status is up to the viewer. I feel that Nada sends more postive messages than negative, and this is doubly so considering it is in the softcore genre, a section of film where far too often women are just treated as objects.
The cast list for The Devil Wears Nada is abysmal, with many people going uncredited. Luckily powerfred at SoftcoreReviews (NSFW link – http://www.sreviews.com/smf/index.php?topic=4619.0 ) confirmed most of the unlisted actresses (with some help from Jim!) So enjoy the mostly complete credits. Some actresses are unknown, and many characters don’t have spoken names. Wynorski packed The Devil Wears Nada to the gills with hot chicks, almost doubling the average cast size for one of these softcore flicks.

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The Super Sex Program
The Super Sex Program
aka The Big Bust Theory
2013
Written and directed by Dean McKendrick
Nerds attempt to discover the secret of love in The Super Sex Program (or The Big Bust Theory if you bought the DVD!) Alexandre Boizvert and Eric Masteron play big nerds and completely go 100% stereotypical goofy voices, like this is a lost Revenge of the Nerds chapter or an episode of The Big Bang Theory. But instead of being a bunch of jokes about nerd culture, instead we get what turns out to be a sweet story about finding out what love is, and learning to interact socially without being a loser.
We get the new logo for Synthetic Filmwerx, now abbreviated as SFW. Directed by Fred Ole— Dean McKendrick?!?!?! Yes, duty has been split between McKendrick and Ray with the latest batch of films (McKendrick wrote or cowrote many from years prior) But don’t fret, the same tone and style is still very evident in the latest batch of Bikini movies. If anything, this latest entry kicks things into a new level of story telling while still delivering naked people bumping uglies. Perhaps the tales from MRG’s brand of films are pushing the envelope into more complex storytelling, or perhaps this evolved independently (and until I watch the other films from this batch, I won’t know for sure)
At one point the characters develop a “love potion” that is supposed to drive women wild with passion. Normally in these films, the characters then use the potion on women and essentially rape them, or at least get the women to do things they wouldn’t normally do if they weren’t thinking straight. Here, the whole thing is thrown on it’s ear, one application doesn’t matter because the woman wants to have sex with the nerd, while the other nerd’s adventure turns out to all be in his mind and the woman rejects him (the potion also doesn’t work.)
Later, they build a woman that they’ve programmed to totally be attracted to them, like this is Weird Science or the Aerosmith video to “Hole in my Soul” Of course, this fails to work either, the robot woman is mysteriously reprogrammed to only like hot chicks. The nerds accept this programming and don’t try to program her back. The schemes of the nerds are orchestrated by their boss Dr. Carmichael, but there is a method to his madness that becomes abundantly clear.
The positive and fun film is a nice breath of fresh air, and shows you can tackle some of the relationship issues MRG films cover without being forced to be 100% serious all the time. The lessons mirror those from nerd and geek film, without feeling too much like they’re covering well-tread ground. The various story threads manage to play out not quite the way you expect. And Christine Nguyen in glasses making goofy faces? Points for that alone! Jazy Berlin also throws in a great performance as the robot Alice, turning what would be in many films a forgettable role into a memorable character.
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Busty Housewives of Beverly Hills
Busty Housewives of Beverly Hills
2012
Written by Dean McKendrick
Directed by Fred Olen Ray (as Nicholas Medina)
While I usually am gung ho for the Fred Olen Ray films, Busty Housewives of Beverly Hills left a sour taste in my mouth. During the film, the main character hypnotizes a female character and essentially rapes her, and causes her to be raped several other times. It’s all played as “magical control” where the woman suddenly becomes super horny and can’t help herself. But it is rape. And that’s not cool, nor does it make Busty Housewives of Beverly Hills a fun film to watch with your significant other.
There is a group of people who enjoy scenes where women are brainwashed or hypnotized or drugged into becoming incredibly horny and thus needing sex right this instant. Some of it undoubtedly spurs from the time-honored tradition of going out, getting drunk, and getting laid. With a little alcohol in their system, inhibitions drop. All of the depictions feature women who are enthusiastic about the sex they are about to do no under their entire free will. There is an undercurrent that all these women would be banging left and right if they could, so these effects just let them do what they want to do. Others seem into it because it is a form of humiliation of the woman, that she somehow deserves to have sex with random guys because she has lots of sex anyways. That points to a deeper problem, and much more disturbing. Now, this is fiction, no one is actually being raped, and fantasies are fine as long as they are fantasies. Some fantasies I can do without seeing depicted in the media I consume.
It’s not the first time this scenario has shown up in a Fred Olen Ray film – Bikini Jones features a scene where she’s essentially drugged, a character in Bikini Pirates is possessed by a ghost and gets it on, Tanya X in The Girl from B.I.K.I.N.I. is literally drugged and raped, and the female characters in Housewives From Another World are all taken over by time-traveling aliens and essentially consumed(murdered) by them. All of these scenarios are terrible, and though you can try to argue excuses for some of them, they are what they are. They do make things unenjoyable, and I am at the point where I don’t want to watch them anymore. I was heartened because of something that happens in 2013’s The Super Sex Program that throws these on their ear, so maybe things are changing.
Busty Housewives of Beverly Hills not only has a rapist main character, but almost every character is a bad person. It’s a weird movie where the only somewhat decent character is a hired killer. Most characters are scummy and excuse their bad behavior, while Carmine the killer is honest about being a bad person. That doesn’t save him from suffering the same fate as many of the other characters, frozen in place for an unknown time period. Their ultimate fate unknown, as Dave Nelson and his wife leave to be miserable elsewhere. While Busty Housewives of Beverly Hills seems like it’s making a stand against mindless consumerism, that point is lost beneath the layers of terrible behavior.
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Beverly Lynne, bikini movie madness, Billy Chappell, Eric Masterson, Evan Stone, Fred Olen Ray, Jade Starr, Kelli McCarty, Kylee Nash, Lesbians, Michael Gaglio, softcore, Ted Newsom, Tony Marino
Secret Lives
Secret Lives
2010
Written by ???
Directed by Austin Brooks
As we’ve seen time and time again, one of the major story types of softcore films are murder mysteries. These plots help gives softcore some pulp street cred (erotica is a long-standing pulp tradition) as well as adding danger elements to help make the films more exciting. Many of the films are essentially episodes of detective shows, modified for the personality of the lead and given sequences that would make NYPD Blue blush. Mainline Releasing/ MRG Entertainment has a slew of them, so Secret Lives will become an example case.
Secret Lives goes along at a leisurely pace, a type of realistic storytelling that shows us characters walking the whole way through buildings, having long conversations and monologues, and seems more of a play expanded to film and then stuffed with padding to justify the sets and stock footage. But weirdly enough, that sort of makes it feel more real, that these characters who are part of this fantasy sex world have to deal with some of the same problems that everyone faces. And our heroes are no angels, they endanger their case and their jobs and even their lives, saved by the fact the killer seems to have left her mind far behind
Also there’s lots of wang in this movie. Which is good for softcore, even if it’s not my thing, because there are couples that watch these film, even if it isn’t the target audience. And it’s cool to toss the ladies or gay men a few “bones” now an then, even if it is only soft bones. People who have a problem with that probably have their own
We’re led to believe that Kenzie is the main character from the beginning, but we actually follow Detective Mick Ferguson around for most of the film. The “secret lives” hinted by the title only makes sense if you view the relationship of the main characters – which they try to keep hidden to protect their career and cases – as a sort of secret life. But it’s not really that secret, and by the end they just realize hiding things will just leave to problems. The big flaw is there is no real resolution. Kenzie and Mick commit to staying together, but even though we know who the murderer is, things are left to offscreen characters to find the evidence and save the day.
Secret Lives features stylized flashbacks, including several long sex sequences. An effort is made to keep the viewer from being confused while still running through the checklist of things required for softcore cinema. The pacing is something that may put people off, but it lends Secret Lives a bit of distinction in my eyes. Secret Lives throws some expected ideas out the window while still delivering other common tropes, a creative mix that is welcome in an environment that can grow stagnant.
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Angelica Saige, Beverly Lynne, Brendan Connor, Chris Johnson, George McFadden, Krissy Lynn, Mainline Releasing, Mell Flynn, softcore