Friday, January 21, 2022

622-Angels Revenge


Film Year:  1979
Genre:  Action, Comedy
Director:  Greydon Clark
Starring:  Sylvia Anderson, Lieu Chinh, Jacqueline Cole, Liza Greer, Robin Greer, Susan Kiger, Noela Velasco, Peter Lawford, Jack Palance, Jim Backus, Alan Hale
MST Season:  6

The Movie

Long before the three letter wonder McG made a duo of terrible self-parody films and Elizabeth Banks decided to inject more girl power into her passable modern update, America in the 1970's was obsessed with a little television series called Charlie's Angels.  Starring Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson, and it's overnight sensation Farrah Fawcett, the series was about a group of lady detectives who got their hands dirty and proved they could kick butt harder than any man could.  Despite being surface level icons of the power of women, Charlie's Angels always seemed to have more male appeal than it did for women.  Surface level, the show was about a bunch of pretty ladies who didn't wear bras and liked to kick high, and thus a sort of counterproductive fanbase grew out of it.  I theorize that's why McG's films were box office hits and Banks's film was not.  McG took the male gaze and embraced it, pushing it to absurdist levels, and every man in the year 2000 flocked out to see sexy ladies in tight outfits do wire-fu.  Banks tried to take back the woman positivity image of the premise and made a movie that would appeal to young girls, but it couldn't escape the male gaze stigma and never found the audience that it was aiming it.

(Side note:  I think Banks's film is fairly entertaining.  Give it a try if you have a free evening and are in the mood for a silly action movie and you might get some kicks out of it)

But long before Charlie's Angels themselves hit the big screen there was this little cash-in movie from 79, which came out when the Angels themselves found their popularity waning due to changing out its castmembers, including poster seller Farrah.  But the appeal of sexy women wearing low cut tops will never die, and here we are.  Greydon Clark, visionary director of the Joe Don Baker vehicle Final Justice, directs this big screen adaptation of Not-Charlie's Angels, which features seven, not three, hot women with tight shirts going up against a drug cartel.  And they're not detectives, just hot women, so it's totally different than Charlie's Angels.

And there's no Charlie.  So just Angels.  See?  Not the same.

But all kidding aside, the one thing that sets Angels Revenge apart from Charlie's Angels is mostly its parody tone.  Charlie's Angels was mostly just your average crime investigation show, only with more sexy outfits.  There wasn't a whole lot to it that stood out other than those sexy outfits.  Angels Revenge takes more of the "I see what you did there" approach that the McG Charlie's Angels movies did and offers a bit of a mockery of it while trying to tell its own adventure tale.  And let me tell you, I think the McG Charlie's Angels movies are lousy enough as is, but Angels Revenge is even worse.

The movie wears sex on its sleeve without mentioning it too much.  The women all know they can use their boobs to their advantage, which they do in spades, even if it's only through innuendo.  The Angels themselves are more or less character tropes than actual characters.  Each has a personality trait they latch onto and that's all they ever seem to offer (other than boobs).  We have a jive-talkin' tall black woman, the Asian who knows martial arts (she's from Vietnam but wields a katana and teaches karate?), the schoolteacher, the lounge singer, the model, the kid, and...the other one.  The characters in this movie are like the Transformers in a Michael Bay Transformers movie.  They just have a thing and that's all they do.

I guess you could try and sell this movie as a parody of Charlie's Angels, but it's not a particularly funny one.  Action is infused with sound effects you'd hear on The Flintstones, while the innuendo is neither clever or sexy enough to amuse.  Jim Backus is here too, from Mr. Magoo and Gilligan's Island fame, and he does his Jim Backus routine, which for better or worse is probably the funniest thing in the movie.  His fellow Gilligan's Island castmate Alan Hale is also in the movie but he only has the fraction of Backus's screentime.

Ultimately there is no real reason to watch Angels Revenge.  The boobs are bigger and there are tighter clothes, but the premise is half-baked and stops and starts in fits and hardly ever feels like it's going anywhere.  Just taking in an episode of Charlie's Angels offers a better experience and most of those episodes revolve around tired rehashed plots from better shows.  It takes effort to get lower than that, but Angels Revenge works really hard to reach the bottom of the barrel.


The Episodes of the

"You know what, I'm just giving in and looking at the breasts."

Good idea.

Here's the thing about this episode, this movie is aggressively hard to work with.  I'm sure there is a subset of MSTies out there who love what Angels Revenge has to offer the series, like there are folks out there who think Catalina Caper made for a great episode, but the experience never comes through for me because there is no balance between the riffing and the movie.  Angels Revenge is a kooky experience as a film and there are certainly things to make fun of, but is there enough to wring ninety minutes out of?  There are moments that Mike and the Bots make a keen observation on the silliness of this movie, but they are interlaced by a lot of them sounding deflated by just how much this movie pummels them with.  There even places where their only jokes is an exhalation, as if the movie is defeating them.  The movie can be bouncy and the riffing can be playful but Angels Revenge isn't entirely an experience that I want to repeat, because while it's not painful it just doesn't really offer a lot.

The host segments are highlighted by Dr. Forrester and Frank's quest for ratings, which may have been inspired by the show's ratings dip on Comedy Central in the sixth season, which was somewhat prophetic of the show's soon cancellation.  But the segments are quirky and quite fun, as they turn Mike and the Bots into the cast of Renegade for a brief ratings boost.  Crow's Blaxploitation movie is solidly funny too.  More patented sixth season brief and simple gag segments include Mike as Fonzie (and Crow and Servo's rejection of it) while Aaron Spelling's mansion orbits the Satellite of Love.  I'll admit the latter one actually made me laugh out loud and for a while, because it was so stupid, pointless, and out of left field.

Angels Revenge is said to be the last rerun of the series that was broadcast on Comedy Central before the network stopped airing the show altogether, which is a bit of a bittersweet honor for it (The Screaming Skull was the last episode on Sci-Fi before reruns were pulled from that network).  It's not really a fitting final impression of the series for the network to leave behind, though it has its moments.  I can't quite recommend this one as it seems like sort of a black licorice episode.  Those who enjoy the taste will go gaga for it, but there are some of us out there who'll never touch the stuff.

Not Recommended


The DVD

Angels Revenge was released by Rhino on the Volume 2 DVD collection, with solid video and audio.  There were no special features.  Shout Factory eventually re-released this set on DVD.  There were also no special features.

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