Wonder Women (1973)

          Ignore the title’s allusion to a certain Amazon princess. Rather than being wholesome empowerment, this flick is a grungy and slightly insane thriller with aspects of horror and science fiction. The title refers to a squad of lethal babes who serve at the pleasure of their mad-scientist employer, also a woman. Judged by any rational criteria, Wonder Women is thoroughly rotten, thanks to an idiotic plot, an overabundance of boring chase scenes, and other shortcomings. Consumed as a straight shot of grindhouse weirdness, Wonder Women is quite something. Here’s an attempt at synopsizing the loopy storyline. In the Philippines, evil Dr. Tsu (Nancy Kwan) tasks her babe squad with kidnapping top athletes, including a popular jai alai player. Dr. Tsu harvests the athletes’ organs and sells them to rich old clients who want to reclaim their vitality. An insurance company holding a policy on the jai alai player hires ex-cop Mike Harber (Ross Hagen) to find the missing athlete. After several run-ins with Dr. Hsu’s lissome agents, Mike gets brought to the doctor’s lair, where she tries to seduce him with a session of “brain sex.” (More on that shortly.) Will our intrepid hero escape the honey trap and return the kidnapped athletes to their rightful places in the world’s stadiums? And what’s the deal with the long sequence taking place at a cockfight?

          Wonder Women is really two movies in one. The stuff with Mike conducting his investigation comprises a standard thrilla-in-Manila potboiler, all chase scenes and fist fights and shootouts. The stuff with Dr. Hsu, photographed exclusively on soundstages, is trippy—with all the brightly colored backgrounds and tinfoil production design, Dr. Hsu’s world seems like the same one occupied by those weird aliens in Godzilla movies. Dr. Hsu even has a dungeon filled with survivors from experiments in crossbreeding men and animals. (Shades of Dr. Moreau.) As if all that weren’t enough, Wonder Women also features catfights, dart guns, karate, nude underwater ballet, Sid Haig wearing a puffy shirt, and Vic Diaz—corpulent and sweaty, just the way you like him—driving a cab. And then there’s the brain-sex bit. In the movie’s wildest scene, Hagen and Kwan strap on helmets, sit next to each other, and moan and writhe uncontrollably while their cerebellums get carnal. It’s amazing they made it through the whole bit without laughing themselves silly. You won’t.

Wonder Women: FUNKY

Bad Charleston Charlie (1973)

A rotten would-be farce about Depression-era criminals, Bad Charleston Charlie represents a failed attempt by actor Ross Hagen to create a star vehicle. In addition to playing the leading role, he cowrote the script (with Ivan Nagy, who directed) and produced the project. Set somewhere in the American heartland, the picture begins with Charlie Jacobs (Hagen) and his buddy Thad (Kelly Thordsen) quitting their jobs at a mine after one too many humiliating demands for payoffs from a corrupt union boss. Declaring their intent to become “important” people, they take inspiration from the exploits of Al Capone and begin careers as gangsters. Eventually, Charlie and his rapidly growing cadre of followers antagonize a corrupt local cop and the members of a KKK cell, so they find themselves with enemies on both sides of the law. Prostitution figures into the mix, as well, since Charlie makes most of his money peddling female flesh. Despite antiauthoritarian themes and high-spirited action, Bad Charleston Charlie is a world apart from the myriad similar films that Roger Corman produced in the ’60s and ’70s to draft off the success of Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Even the worst of Corman’s gangster pictures has a clearly defined narrative, but this flick just trundles from one pointless episode to the next, striving for a lighthearted tone but missing the mark because the characters are repugnant and the jokes aren’t funny. Not helping matters is Nagy’s horrendous camerawork; although he later became a serviceable hack making junk for TV and the straight-to-video market, he’s out of his depth throughout this project, which was his directorial debut. On the plus side, Hagen recruited a few decent actors to play supporting roles (watch for John Carradine as a drunken reporter), and Hagen’s buddy-comedy shtick with Thordsen almost works.

Bad Charleston Charlie: LAME