Review of Angels' Brigade

I've been watching a lot of MST3K lately, mainly because my girlfriend and I enjoy them and have thirty of them on DVD. We had been on a roll, blindly picking out some of the funniest MSTs ever (Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, Time Chasers, et al). Then along came Angels Revenge. (That's how the filmmakers title it -- it should be Angels' Revenge.) This is the epitome of bad film-making. The plot comes straight from what must have been a hormone-crazed, cocaine-snorting man with money. There are more holes in this movie than a particularly hole-filled piece of Swiss cheese. Seven completely unrelated women come together to overthrow a drug kingpin (Peter Lawford) and the most ridiculous plot points ensue. The movie opens with an hour long flashback featuring bad singing and dancing routines, "action" sequences riddled with cartoon sound effects (hearing a "boing!" and a "thwap!" during these scenes is pure camp), and it attempts to explain how these seven crime fighters came to be. It's really just a reason to show the T&A on these minorly attractive women. (I will say I laughed when Tom Servo said to the black stunt driving woman of this group, "Hey, Gene Shalit wants his hair back!") The acting is stretching the meaning of the definition of acting awfully thin, despite appearances by Alan Hale (the Skipper), Jim Baccus (Mr. Howell), and even Jack Palance as the middleman in this drug ring. The first time he approaches the teacher-cum-crime fighter character, Crow says (in Jack's voice), "I want to be teacher's pet," followed quickly by, "Hey, what's with this 'incomplete' crap?" Suffice it to say that the "acting" on display here is the reason they make acting schools. None of the leading women apparently attended.

I really like MST3K, but even Mike and the 'bots struggled through this one. Some movies are just so bad that making fun of them almost becomes difficult to watch. This is a prime example of one of those movies.