Blast-Off Girls



Another Herschell Gordon Lewis quickie, Blast-Off Girls is basically A Hard Day's Night done smutty. An evil manager takes a teen band under his wing, renaming them the Big Blast and using a stable of willing women to bribe or extort the right people into making the band into the next big thing. The moral of this movie is that men, especially older paunchy men in the 1960s, will do anything to sleep with a girl in a short skirt. Meanwhile the band gets pissed off that while the manager is making enough money to light cigars with $1 bills (big spender!), they haven't been paid anything, so they try to leave him. The manager throws a party for them with tons of pot, then arranges for them to get busted by a cop friend of his. Thus the manager forces them to sign even worse contracts with him. To get out of it our heroes pretend to be stoned during their big TV appearance.

Most of the movie is the band performing their alleged hits, which are just horrible. But don't let that make you miss the scene where the band stops by a Kentucky Fried Chicken and performs a song for Col. Sanders. Not the cartoon character, but the real deal!

This movie is available from Something Weird as a double feature with Just For the Hell Of It. As usual there are some great extras. My favorite is a very long drive-in pitch for "Facts of Life" books, one for boys and one for girls. The guy giving the pitch keeps mentions that he has written for Reader's Digest and appeared on "the Carson Show," keeps referring to the unnamed "sponsors" who are offering the books "at cost of printing, binding, shipping and handling," and making bizarre statistical claims like there are 5,000,000 divorces in the U.S. every year and that 9 out of 10 divorces are because the husband doesn't know the wife's eight erogenous zones. Good stuff.

Posted: Mon - November 10, 2003 at      

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