The idea is simple, really: take all of the "good parts" from your existing nudie-slasher flicks, shoot some new footage to tie them all together, and voila! sell the resulting "new" movie to your unsuspecting customers. Television shows have been doing "clip shows" since taped programs overtook live ones; it was only a matter of time before Fred Olen Ray, mastermind of the low-budget horror film industry, figured it out too.
The actual product is better than you'd expect. Mercifully, Ray isn't satisfied with merely recapping the better portions of films like Sorority House Massacre 2, Tower of Terror, Slumber Party Massacre, Emmanuelle V, Evil Toons, and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers -- he wants to poke fun at them, too. So the foundations are laid for what appears to be a standard soft-core porn flick -- the voiced-over narration as a woman pulls into a long driveway in her sports car, informing us that she is attending a gathering of Scream Queens. Do flash-and-dash actresses have seminars? According to this film, they do, and those seminars are the stuff of which 13-year old boy's dream. If you want a serious exploration of what effects taking it all off can have on a young woman's career, watch Some Nudity Required.
"Always make sure that there are no
killers around-- then never check again!"
The format is as follows: scream queens Brinke Stevens, Monique Gabrielle, Kelli Maroney, Michelle Bauer, and Roxanne Kernohan come together at the behest of the mysterious, unseen Count Orlock. Because they can't find Count Orlock, the girls decide to hold a séance. When that fails, the five starlets retire to a hot tub, where they discuss the subtleties of baring your body for the camera while running from crazed maniacs, aliens, monsters, etc. Topics are introduced by an actress, followed by representative clips for each topic, and finally summed up in a new performance by the presenting scream queen. Brinke Stevens, for instance, shows us how the proper horror victim should take a shower. ("Always rub the soap on your breasts first, but be sure to stay in the water, so there's no possible way you could get clean... next, tilt your head back and close your eyes. This gives the killer a clear shot to creep up on you. Hold this for about five seconds, then act like you hear something, and look around quickly. Since you don't see anything you can now go back to soaping your breasts with your eyes closed.")
She's a lumberjack and she's oh-oh-OK.
There are lots of funny little touches thrown in: when the girls order a Ouija board to be delivered, it comes with lingerie; the way they cram five buxom women into one tiny hot tub; the knowing gleam in their eyes as they explain each detail of a scream queen's duties -- as if it were a seminar on the responsibilities of United Nations representatives instead of how to properly doff one's top. These ladies are clearly having a good time making jokes their own expense while surreptitiously jabbing at the schoolboy mentalities of their voyeuristic fans.
Michelle Bauer has the best segment of the bunch, with some tips on how to properly handle a chainsaw, should you be called upon to do a striptease while wielding such a power tool. While Michelle does mention that the fewer clothes one has on, the better, she fails to take note of the one point common to all of these chainsaw scenes: the motor makes an impressive noise, but the chain has been removed from the blade. Now, we're not criticizing the safety measures taken by low-budget horror filmmakers to protect their sexy leading ladies, perhaps it should not be as obvious as this particular act, which was performed outside in full daylight. Still, Bauer's performance is one of the few segments which actually manages to be both sexy and funny, so we'll forgive this particular mistake.
Teetering on the brink of greatness.
Inspiration does seem to run low towards the end of the movie. If you were expecting some sort of answer to the questions like "Who brought them here?" or "Why were they brought here?" you may be a little disappointed. In a closing sequenced designed to distract us from this total lack of narrative closure, director Ray just has them take off their tops and start to bathe each... other...
