Who doesn’t like mob movies? Not me. That is, I do like them. Yes. I hope I’ve made myself clear. Anyway, I reviewed the Polish mob movie Mafia Women for Attack from Planet B:
Several of [writer-director Patryk] Vega’s characters were lifted without attribution from older, better intellectual properties. The bald police captain has a Kojak-like penchant for eating lollipops. The mafia boss is given to experiencing Tony Soprano-style panic attacks. The boss’s teenage daughter is the worst singer in Warsaw, but everyone applauds her cat-strangling efforts. Et cetera. Basically, law enforcement and crime families in Poland are the same as American cops and goons, except the Poles eat pierogi and the Americans eat pizza.
Oh, but does it coalesce into a delicious kielbasa stew, or is it as bad as Vega’s Botoks? Only one way to find out, and that’s by clicking!
The clumsy, shrill feminist message running throughout the film is undercut by the plot. A female urologist’s husband tells her that he wants a divorce because he finds her vagina hideous to look at. He even uses the term “beef curtains.” (I don’t know if that’s an exact translation; all I can do is read the subtitles.) Later that day, the understandably unsettled doctor with the unappealing genitals insists that a male patient provide a semen sample by masturbating in front of her. After she gets fired for this piece of questionable professional behavior, she becomes a pioneer in vaginal plastic surgery, and even has her own female parts prettified. Today’s woke feminism would, no doubt, have her shouting her pride in her, ah, “beef curtains” instead of having them adjusted according to sexist male standards of attractiveness.
The best thing about Strip Club Massacre is the title, because it perfectly sets up exploitative expectations. Where things sort of fell apart was in all aspects of the execution: the substandard B.P.M. (Boobs Per Minute) and the actual massacre itself, which may set a record for the slowest, most tedious mass murder in cinematic history. The poor B.P.M. rating isn’t a crushing disappointment, as at last count there are more websites devoted to the exposition of bare bosoms than there are stars in the sky, but what I found odd was the casting choice: none of the strippers with speaking parts actually, well, stripped. Or danced very much. In any other genre this wouldn’t be an issue, but this is an exploitation movie with Strip Club in the title, so it’s a problem.
Loqueesha’s low budget makes itself known early on: the lighting is drab, most of the scenes are shot close up, and the few bits of green screen are so terrible that they should have been left on the hard drive. (It’s the 21st century, so I can’t say “cutting room floor” anymore.) None of the actors looked happy to be there, and delivered their lines with an awkward kind of affect that accurately reflected the script’s leaden dialogue. Unnecessary, expository scenes involving radio execs took the viewer out of the story, and montages of average people listening to Loqueesha’s sage advice on the radio fell flat. Sometimes you have to decide that the baby is ugly early on so you can stop putting it in front of the camera. Nobody in production had the wit to do that.
Starring comedian Jim Gaffigan, 
I reviewed a documentary for 
