Rating: **
Review Date: 5/21/05
Director: Steven Grasse
Cast: Heather-Victoria Ray, Corey Feldman
This DVD contains the first dozen episodes of the irreverent web series, "Bikini Bandits." What started as a creative and amusing short film on Atom Films bloomed into an entire franchise for frustrated filmmaker Steven Grasse. (Gee, can you remember when Atom Films used to actually be a viable and lucrative business?!?) The main elements of "Bikini Bandits" are scantily clad girls, guns, hot rods, porn, and swearing. The pilot episode is a wet dream of adolescent fantasy as four beautiful women in swimsuits pull up to a convenience store in a sexy muscle car and rob the place at gunpoint. Expertly filmed and featuring the utterly amazing Heather-Victoria Ray, it's an excellent helping of female empowered girls with guns mayhem. Unfortunately, with the exception of "The Outsider," the rest of the episodes are uninteresting and inexcuseably juvenile. They also suffer from contemporary editing trends and an overabundance of teenage attitude, which makes them hard to watch. And that's what frustrates me the most. Here we have an excellent premise, technically competent filmmakers, and some fabulous women, and the end results are spoiled by heinous writing and pointless stupidity. Sadly, I think the filmmakers were raised on strippers and porn, and that immature mentality resonates throughout the work. I would treat the material MUCH differently, but the sad fact of the matter is that they're doing it and I'm NOT. How depressing...