Bangers (a.k.a Zombie Ninja Gangbangers) (1997)

Although I consider my local movie rental joint to be a Mecca of cult films and b-movies from third-rate Alien rip-offs to Zardoz, there are some films I would never find if not for people like my webmaster Nathan, such as this one. As part of a friendly *cough* exchange, I agreed to review Bangers (or, as it is known on the IMDB, Zombie Ninja Gangbangers) if he went through my personal Waterloo, Vice Academy. It remains to be seen which one of us got the short end of the stick, but I have to admit now that there are two hours of my life I would like to have back, please.

The big problem with Bangers - and this is something like saying "the big problem with driving off a cliff in a flaming car" - is that it proves John Waters' saying, "There is good bad taste and bad bad taste." Besides the logistics of a 'zombie rape movie' (by definition, wouldn't a zombie lack the biological capability, not to mention the drive for sex?), just reading a description of the film hints that it would definitely fall under the latter category.

Our heroine is Alice, a stripper who does prostitution on the side. Alice is played by Stephanie Beaton, who looks just as irritated to be in this movie as I am to be watching it, and bears a pretty strong resemblence to Tori Amos, which was just disconcerting for me considering what happens to the character. And, yep, just as the title promises, she is raped and then beaten by a pair of zombies (at one point in the film, the number magically increases to three), a scene that goes on for roughly ten minutes. After this, a bloodied Alice goes to the police but the detective she talks to knows that she has worked as a call-girl and has a drug history so he dismisses her story (in fairness, he mostly does so because she insists that the perps were undead) but then, because someone decided the movie wasn't tasteless enough, the detective then proceeds to rape her. Recovering from this ordeal, she next tries to get help from her best friend Betty, who also dismisses her story and berates her for being a prostitute and a drug addict. In a refreshing change of pace, though, Betty does not also rape her, although I have the feeling that it might have been in the original draft of the script (wait, this script had drafts?).

Alice tries to drown her sorrows in a bar where she is comforted by the bar's owner, played by longtime porn star Kit Natividad who, for her seven minute appearance here, got top billing (with a misspelled name) and an appearance on the cover. Her contribution to the 'plot' done, Nativadad goes on with what I assume is the whole reason this thing got made, a fifteen-minute strip show in front of a cheering audience every bit as rigged as the laugh track of a sitcom. Like I said, this scene goes on for quite a bit and Nativadad is very generous with her rather hefty...assetts, but keep in mind that she won her title of Miss Nude America over 30 years ago and is now old enough to be somebody's grandmother. I'm sure there's an audience for this kind of thing (if there wasn't, there wouldn't be porns with titles like Ninety and Naughty and Granny's Interracial Gangbang and, before I get an e-mail, no, I didn't make these up), but I doubt even they'd put up with everything they have to go through to get to that scene, especially when they can just go and rent Sextette (If anyone does watch this, despite my warnings and the film's obscurity, try to keep yourself sane by listening to the director's voice which you can hear given Natividad directions to face the camera.)

Anyway, after that little treat, Alice tells her story to a bouncer who throws her out because...oh, who the hell cares. Right afterwards, the zombies suddenly show back up and rape her again! Don't worry, though, because this time there's some 'comic relief' with a Japanese tourist who takes pictures of the whole thing (he's weirdly credited as 'the Chinese tourist'...can't these people even get their stereotype jokes right?!). Terrified that the zombies will keep coming after her again and again, Alice eagerly accepts the help of a teenager named Adam who has been beaten up by the zombies before. Together the two just happen to read about a local mad scientist, Dr. Mondo, who now runs a nearby video store and just happens to be an expert in reanimating dead tissue. Instead of making an assumption that Mondo's experiments are probably the cause of all the zombie attacks (something that's verified for the audience by the fact that Dr. Mondo is the same person we see having a woman killed in the opening sequence), Alice and Adam reach the far more sensible idea of enlisting Mondo's help in creating a zombie ninja bodygaurd to protect them! Meeting with Mondo in the lab under the rental store he manages/owns (I have to admit, the combination of 'mad scientist' and 'cult movie rental store manager' is, dare I say it, clever), Alice, in an another instance of this film's disturbing interpretation of comedy, gets him to go along with the plan by seducing him through showing him the bruises from her beatings.

It pains me to write this, but this is about the point where the plot really falls apart. Dr. Mondo creates the zombie, but it turns out to have been made with the brain of Robin Williams and it goes off on a very, very long 'komedic' monologue while wearing a jester's cap Alice warms up to this undead protector after Mondo leaves, but then this new zombie tries to rape her too (fortunately for her and us, it doesn't succeed). Even after fleeing Mondo's lab, Alice is confronted with more zombies, one of whom is inexplicably Adam, and then there's two or three 'shock' endings which you won't want to think about. The end.

By the time I finished convulsing on the floor and popped the tape out of my VCR, I couldn't help but get the impression that I had just seen not only an example, but the epitome, of 'bad bad taste.' Even most exploitation film makers, after indulging in long, loving scenes of murder and torture, stop short of explicit rape. There's a good reason for that. The fact that they chose to base so much of their movie on rape is tasteless enough, but they also feature rape scenes that are just too shoddy and nasty, especially when mixed with the movie's frat house level of humor. Add on to this a 'we obviously made this up as we went along' script, weak camera work, and an amazing tendency to stretch out almost every scene at least three times longer than it needs to be and you have a film like Bangers, the sort of movie you probably couldn't find on even the darkest shelf of your mom-and-pop rental store - and be better off for it.