Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Wild

Last night I joined BM and DM to watch the Mystery Science Theatre version of 'The Wild Wild World of Batwoman'. It was a 1966 effort by some people who had nothing to say but come hell or high water, they were going to say it.


The plot, if one could call it that, concerned Batwoman and her merry band of Batgirls. Batwoman was a mysterious figure in a reinforced black bathing suit, stockings, stilletto heels, a cape, a glittery mask and a headpiece that wouldn't have looked out of place on an African witch-doctor. She oversaw the deployment of her Batgirls, who were sort of like Charlie's Angels only without the competence, charisma, brains, resourcefulness or snappy one liners.


There were, however, more of them.


Batwoman didn't do all that much herself, having outsourced her actual duties (which apparently included completely failing to help people) to the Batgirls. Mostly she went to high-powered business meetings, where she was always taken very seriously despite looking like a hooker who'd got lost on her way to Carnivale.


Meanwhile her arch-nemesis Ratfink plotted to steal a mysterious new listening device, aided by a couple of vaudvillian goons, a mad scientist whose accent drifted between Vienna and Bombay and all points in between, and a Igor-like sidekick who must have financed the movie because the camera never failed to cross to his 'antics' whenever the action was going a little stale... which of course was most of the time.


The mad scientist had invented a drug that filled people with an irresistible desire to start go-go dancing, which came in very useful. Nothing helps you bypass half a dozen well-armed Batgirls like slipping them a go-go mickey: then all you have to do is squeeze around their crazy gyrations and steal the mysterious new listening device. Of course if they hadn't had the go-go drug, they could have just distracted the girls by some other means - surfer boys, light organ music, or small shiny objects - since they had the attention spans of brain-damaged Irish Setters.


If nothing else, the film featured many scenes of nubile 60s girls go-go dancing, so it wasn't all bad. Even so, by the end the robots were demanding in ever more strident terms that Mike kill them, or just screaming "END! END!" at the screen.


In conclusion, if that was Batwoman's wild wild world, I'd hate to see what her sedate sedate world was like. As Crow said, "This is like a Warhol film, only with less of a plot."

1 Comments:

Blogger Eric B. said...

With the kind of day I've had, I could use some of that go-go juice.

I have the non-mst3k "Devil Girl From Mars" up next in my netflix. We'll see how that goes.

1:16 AM  

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