Jerry (Dick Miller) is a cook who’s on the verge of losing his drive-in diner. Frustrated, he sells the business to his waitresses Angel (Jillian Kesner from Firecracker) and Cupcake (Sterling Fraizer) for a song. Along with the help of a French chef (Dorothy Buhrman), they entice customers by wearing skimpy Wonder Woman-inspired outfits. Trouble brews when the head of an oil company (Al Hopson) wants to tear the place down and put up an “automated gas station of the future”.
Directed by Barbara (Humanoids from the Deep) Peeters and written by Stephanie (director of Terminal Island) Rothman, Starhops clings to the reliable cliché of having a couple of hot women using their sex appeal to drum up customers at a failing business. While this is an ideal premise, it’s all much too tame for it to work. It’s all tease and no please. That would’ve been okay if there were some laughs to be had, but the humor is all juvenile and dumb.
It also doesn’t help that there’s not enough plot here for an entire feature. Because of that, Peeters has to pad things out with a gratuitous montage of people roller-skating (which looks like it came out of a completely different movie), a long disco nightclub scene (which features some prototypical breakdancing), and comically long scenes of the sun rising and setting. (Not to mention the fact that they play the annoying “Starhops” theme song in every other scene.) The flick was edited by Steven Zallian, and if those seemingly endless and pointless scenes are any indication, it’s a good thing that he eventually quit his day job as an editor and went into screenwriting as he would go on to win an Oscar for Best Screenplay for Schindler’s List.
The cast do what they can with the limp material. Kesner and Frazier are likeable, but they just can’t carry the entire movie on their looks alone. It was fun seeing Peter (Ghoulies) Liapis as the klutzy love interest and Matthew (director of Freeway) Bright as an annoying customer though. It was also a shame that Miller didn’t have more to do. Once his grouchy character exits the picture (which is pretty early on), things quickly go downhill from there.
AKA: Curb Service.
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