Thursday, September 7, 2017

THE WILD WILD WORLD OF BATWOMAN (1966) ** ½


Batwoman (Katherine Victor) is a crimefighter who looks like one of the Golden Girls is all dressed up to go to an Eyes Wide Shut party.  Her arch-nemesis is a guy named Rat Fink who wears a fedora over top of his lucha libre mask.  When Rat Fink steals a top secret atomic hearing aid (it allows the user to listen in on any phone conversation) Batwoman and her all-girl army of bikini babes set out to recover it.

This is one of director Jerry Warren’s more coherent movies, if you can believe it.  Even then, there’s still inexplicable footage of The Mole People edited in for no good reason whatsoever.  I can’t say it’s as “good” as Teenage Zombies, but it’s about on par with Face of the Screaming Werewolf.

The shoestring budget, awful costumes, and bad performances lend the movie a certain amount of charm.  That’s not quite enough to sustain the entire running time, but it’s enough to make for an intermittently amusing flick.  Whenever things threaten to get dull, the scenes of scantily clad women go-go dancing help to maintain your interest.

There is at least one hilariously offensive sequence that is memorable.  That’s when Batwoman and some friends conduct a séance in order to find the whereabouts of Rat Fink.  During the séance, the voice of the spirit keeps getting interrupted by a spirit speaking Chinese.  It’s so wrongheaded and goofy that you just have to laugh.

AKA:  She Was a Hippy Vampire.  AKA:  The Wild World of Batwoman.  

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