Man I do love me some exploitation movies. Absolutely love ‘em. Nun-sploitation, Blaxsploitation, women in prison movies, bitches getting revenge movies, Emmanuelle movies… exploitation flicks make no pretense to be anything other than what they are and who can’t find some joy in that? Modern filmmakers love them some exploitation too. Rodriguez and Tarantino brought some grindhouse back with their ‘Grindhouse’ double feature, Scott Sanders brought back some blaxsploitation with his blaxsploitation masterpiece ‘Black Dynamite’ and now director Richard Jacobson mixes all kinds of exploitation genre’s in his film ‘Bitch Slap’ which kind of misses the exploitation boat.

Hel (Erin Cummings), who is the de-facto leader of our crew and Camero (America Olvio), who is flat out her mind, are a couple of tough as nails, breastiful hunnies who we meet in a deserted desert location searching for 200 million in stolen diamonds. Also along for the ride is the ditzy stripper Trixie (Julia Voth) who possesses a lot of the critical info as to where these diamonds might actually be. In the trunk of the classic ride these ladies are driving is low level gangster Gage (Michael Hurst) who these ladies are physically abusing to some extreme levels to find out where he’s hidden these diamonds.

The ladies become concerned when they discover that the diamonds they are looking for belong the Kasier Sose-esque character of Pinky, a man so feared and so violent that the mere mention of his name causes individuals to wet their pants in dread.

And that’s pretty much it as far as the story goes in this movie. There are flashbacks, each one going progressively further back in time to describe how these ladies arrived at this particular point in time, there are characters who will show up at our location to add to the exploitation mayhem and of course there’s plenty of inappropriately dressed hot chick action, dirty chick action, wet chick action and girl on girl action as any decent exploitation movie should possess. Roll credits.

Director Rich Jacobson does pull from the well of a number of genre’s for his film as we get to see a little ‘Our Man Flint’ style spy-sploitation action, a touch of Japanese yoyo girl exploitation provided quite well via the form of actress Minae Noji, a touch of women in prison, a splash of nun-sploitation and a heavy does bitches in heat exploitation… so why didn’t it work? ‘Bitch Slap’ is a strange case of a movie being too much while at the same time not being nearly enough.

Let’s start with ‘too much’ part. For starters this movie is way too long. A hundred minutes of exploitation is just way too much exploitation and you feel this length. For instance there is this long, drawn out bitch battle sequence and while it was a well filmed,the scene it went on way too long. Then we had to watch a second long drawn out bitch battle scene between the same two bitches and this just added up to way too much bitch battling. This is what DVD is for as we market that DVD as the Extended Bitch Battle Edition. The last movie directed by Rick Jacobson that I saw was the movie ‘Bad Guys’ which I liked more than this movie but that film, like this film, had a preponderance of slo-mo usage. I like slo-mo as much as the next guy but I’m thinking for his next movie Rick might want to hold back on the usage of the whole slo-mo split screen effect. If my man had used regular speed as opposed to slo-mo in just half of those scenes that’s ten minutes shaved off right there. Most of the scenes, particularly the scenes that took place in the desert, which was almost all of the scenes in the movie, just went on way too long. On the other hand the flashback scenes which were the best scenes in the movie, in particular the secret agent scenes, just didn’t last long enough.

Now we come to the point where it just wasn’t enough. While watching well developed young women in tight clothes and push up brassieres splashing each other with water is fun and all, that’s titillation - that’s not exploitation. I needed these bitches to be ex-polit-ed. The starlets in this movie were plenty hot and all, but they weren’t exactly Streep, Blanchette and Mirren in this movie… point being that I could find no real reason for them not to get naked and be completely exploited in this exploitation movie. Pam Grier and Margaret Markov, big time 70’s exploitation stars for instance, were a couple of actresses that had full knowledge of what a true exploitation movie was all about and as such this is what I was expecting from ‘Bitch Slap’ but this is not what I got. The nerve.

I admired the effort put forth in ‘Bitch Slap’, I really did, as it had enough style and personality for two movies. I also thought the execution of this effort was done properly, at least in the sense that I think the filmmakers got what they were looking for. But let’s just say we have a difference in philosophy in regards to what I believe an exploitation send up should be, and call it a day.