BCI/Eclipse / Widescreen (1.78:1 ) and Fullscreen (1.33:1) / Color / 1 disc / 192 minutes

The pairing of jaunty romantic nudie flick SUPERCHICK with the gritty-but-flawed war film HUSTLER SQUAD is one of the more unbalanced offerings in the WELCOME TO THE GRINDHOUSE series from BCI/Eclipse.

It’s not just that HUSTLER SQUAD is miserable and joyless — it’s just downright painful to watch, both from a technical and creative standpoint. Oh and by the way, it’s a fullscreen, non-letterboxed presentation, even though that’s really the least of that film’s problems. Fortunately, the disc is still worth a view because the A-feature, SUPERCHICK, is probably one of the more sublime offerings in the series.

SUPERCHICK (1973) is the story of Crown International Airlines (heheh) stewardess Tara B. True, played with wonderful innocence by future Hollywood astrologist Joyce Jillson. Tara has a different lover at each layover: a brain surgeon in New York, a playboy beach bum in Miami, and a rock star in Los Angeles. While she isn’t flying or attending to her boyfriends, she studies karate and seeks out new sexual experiences. She’s unstoppable too, fending off rapist bikers, the police and everything else in her way.

We see Tara’s transformation into Superchick in the film’s opening moments as she steps off her plane and heads for the nearest telephone booth. When she emerges, the timid stewardess has transformed into a head-turning leggy blonde dressed in black.

Superchick’s boyfriends are anything but super themselves. Her New York man is frightened of germs and prefers classical music to sex. Her L.A. guy is an insecure rocker trying to find a new sound. Her Miami man owes the local mob a debt, which they intend to collect using Superchick’s airline connections.

The majority of the film simply follows Superchick’s exploits between her three destinations. She parties with pot-heads in California, hangs with a “Hollywood skin flick producer” and one of his girls, Mayday (The well-endowed Uschi Digard of SUPERVIXENS fame), plays tennis in Miami and goes to the opera in New York.

Eventually the Miami mob tricks her into sneaking guns onto an airplane so a group of thugs can hijack the plane and steal a bag of money from a rival mobster on-board. You know Superchick will save the day!

SUPERCHICK is a solid three-star effort. It floats along at a pleasant pace and manages to stay just sleazy enough without flagging into softcore porn territory. There’s ample nudity, just T&A mostly (although the scenes with Uschi are not to be missed). Best of all, the soundtrack is full of funky 1970s groove music. Pick this one up for lighthearted raunchy fun! “That’s Choice!”

The wonderfully named but poorly acted/written/produced HUSTLER SQUAD (1976) has the distinction of being the first film I’ve really disliked in the GRINDHOUSE series, and thus gets a shameful one-star rating.

The premise for this film is fantastic: Prostitutes are recruited to sleep with and assassinate top Japanese war leaders. How can you screw up a premise like that? Well, you take a great idea and bog it down with a glacial plot, some of the most awful lighting (or lack thereof), and a script that focuses on awkward attempts at character development rather than the tried-and-true troika of boobs, bombs and bullets.

The film opens as a group of fighters from the “Filipino Underground” try to overthrow an island taken as a pleasure dome of sorts by invading Japanese. The invasion fails and U.S. military brass based in Australia place foul-mouthed loose cannon Lt. Stony Stonewell (John Ericson) in charge of a follow-up mission. Stonewell decides the only way to ensure success in overthrowing the Japanese is to send in a squad of killer women.

To that end, he recruits the help of underground fighter Paco Rodriguez (Ramon Revilla) and four women of various backgrounds, some criminal, some not. After a training montage with patriotic music, the ladies parachute in and begin their dirty work.

The action, sexual or otherwise is awful scant. Only after one of the ladies picks up a sword and goes on a rampage akin to Bruce Willis’ pawn shop murder spree in PULP FICTION does this dog of a film get interesting.

Considering that the template for this film had already been laid-out in movies such as THE DIRTY DOZEN, and that scantily-clad babes with guns is basically a slam-dunk, it’s really hard to understand how this film failed. Making movies, even bad ones, isn’t easy — but man, this should have been cake! This movie tries to take itself way too seriously. Its 98-minute long running length seems excruciating as one dull, dark scene after another play out in plodding depravity.

Even if the story were better, the movie itself is still nearly impossible to watch. Have these people never heard of day-for-night shooting? This is the darkest movie I have ever seen! It’s one bare-bulb trying to light an entire beach, shot with cheap lenses and grainy film. And the sound effects? Ever heard dialog played on a microcasette recorder buried in a cave? That’s what this sounded like.

There are two redeeming scenes: The cheesy training montage with the ladies gliding on ziplines and waggling under barbed wire; and the actual assassinations, featuring a couple creative deaths. But even those halcyon moments don’t make the film worth bothering with. Avoid it. “It’s getting rough!”

Get the disc for SUPERCHICK, but merely admire the cover art for HUSTLER SQUAD! This release comes with a handful of trailers, including THE PINK ANGELS, THE BODYGUARD and more.

Read our other reviews from double-feature releases in the WELCOME TO THE GRINDHOUSE series:

• Black Candles / Evil Eye
• Don’t Answer the Phone / Prime Evil