Let’s get one thing straight: my penis Despite the plural title of Policewomen, Crown International Pictures’ playful drive-in actioner is really about a singular police woman, and it’s not Sgt. Pepper Anderson. It’s Lacy Bond (Sondra Currie, star of Al Adamson’s rape-revenge Western, Jessi’s Girls), and after thwarting a prison riot, she’s recruited to bring down a gold-smuggling operation run by an old racist coot (“Who’s the black?”) and comprised of babes in bikinis.

The cops give Lacy some gadgets that would make Q semi-erect, and in she goes, using her martial-arts skills to kick various baddies into submission (and one ally in the balls, just for fun). All the while, she rarely wears a bra, but does squeeze her curvy hips into a pair of very 1974 pants whose pattern presages the AIDS quilt.

Speaking of STDs, writer/director Lee Frost (The Black Gestapo, The Thing with Two Heads) packs in some loose love scenes for Lacy, including a partner who post-coitally orders her when the shit starts to hit the fan, “Get me some white pants!” This is actually the flick’s second-best line, behind the aforementioned coot’s insistence that “Nobody gives a shit what happens to an old Volkswagen!”

But they do give a shit about Policewomen. At least I do. It’s hard not to when the screen is set ablaze by Currie’s ridiculous, redheaded hotness. —Rod Lott

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Sadly, Yo-Yo Girl Cop is one of those flicks adorned with a totally awesome title to which it can’t possibly live up. You roll the dice and hope it can, please please please … snake eyes, sucker.

Japanese pop singer Aya Matsuura fills the title role of a no-good street ruffian recruited by the authorities to assume the identity of Asamiya Saki and infiltrate a local high school, where exists an underground student-terrorist movement to blow up places and, thus, overthrow the country.

To do this, she dons a schoolgirl uniform and has a metal yo-yo strapped to her thigh for a weapon. This is the stuff of many a socially isolated man’s masturbatory fantasies, but also a long-running manga (1976-1982) on which this tired actioner is based.

A romance angle further slows things down, but things pick up in the final scenes, particularly where a leather-clad Asamiya uses her mad yo-yo skillz to do battle with the school’s bitchiest girl, also clad in leather. You understand. —Rod Lott

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Charles Bronson is Joe Martin, a happily married Army vet whose black-market/ex-con past comes back to haunt him when a former associate breaks into his home. Joe shoots him dead, but he and wife Fabienne (Liv Ullman) have trouble getting rid of his corpse the same way Batman does oceanside bombs.

Before long, bigger trouble arrives in the form of Joe’s other criminal comrades, led by the gruff Capt. Ross (James Mason in a Gilligan hat) who’s come to get what they’re owed. Ross takes a shine to Joe’s boat, which Joe doesn’t like, so they kidnap Fabienne and their daughter instead. Joe doesn’t like that, either.

You know how this all will end, because the first two words in this review are “Charles Bronson.” But hell, it’s fun watching all that come down. Plus, you’ve just gotta hear Mason enunciate “Indochina.” It’s classic, and so is Bronson’s real-life wife (Jill Ireland) as a free-spirited hippie who burns reefer on the open highway, telling him she likes “to smoke what I like, to ball who I like.” To each his own, right?

Given this French-lensed flick can be found on many a public-domain collection, you’d expect it to suck, but really, it’s pretty action-packed. After all, the director is Terence Young, who’d just come off helming three of the first four James Bond films. Most notably, Cold Sweat climaxes in a life-or-death car race against time topping out at over 140 mph — watch a poor cyclist run off the road do a head-over-handlebars front flip — and takes the energy straight to the final moments. —Rod Lott

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Torque is essentially the same story as The Fast and the Furious, but told with motorcycles. And it’s 2 goofy 2 be any good.

The Ring’s Martin Henderson stars as Ford, a renegade cyclist who ditched his girlfriend (Monet Mazur, too clean-scrubbed to convincingly play white trash) for a romp in Thailand after stealing some motorcycles with crystal meth in the gas tanks from a sniveling, mullet-sporting bad guy named Henry James (not the author of The Turn of the Screw, but Matt Schulze from The Transporter). Now, Ford is back to set things straight with Henry and the feds.

Only it ain’t that easy because he’s also pursued by a rival biker gang known as The Reapers, led by a snarling Ice Cube, who thinks Ford has murdered his brother, because that’s just what Henry wants everyone to believe. And while that may resemble a plot, the script does nothing to forward it. Oh, the characters talk, all right — it’s just everything they say is meaningless, like the words of Charlie Brown’s school teacher, unless it’s a priceless gem of bad dialogue. This movie is jam-packed with exchanges like “Nice bike.” “Nice ass.”

Nice try. With its saturated, slightly washed-out colors, I liked the way Torque looks. I just didn’t like how it sounds, feels, tastes or smells. Every frame is jacked-up and pimped out to resemble a Mountain Dew commercial. Every character lacks peripheral vision and a hearing range beyond two feet so that people and motorcycles can sneak up on them all the time, yet the dudes have no trouble communicating with one another during their loud rides.

But action is the hook for a flick like Torque — unfortunately, it’s ludicrous. Cycles zip and zap everywhere, including through a moving train filled with passengers, but the climactic chase has Ford and Henry James facing off through downtown L.A. at 200 mph and having somehow obtained expert reflexes. This scene flies by at such speed that you cannot tell what the hell is happening … and maybe that’s for the best. —Rod Lott

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Already convinced by previous viewings that Chained Heat was the ne plus ultra of the storied women-in-prison genre, what surprised me the most when I recently revisited it was the realization that television producer Tom Fontana totally ripped it off when he created the infamous HBO prison drama, Oz.

Don’t believe me? Well, Oz told the tale of the misery and corruption found in a men’s prison and focused on characters like Tobius Beecher, an otherwise law-abiding everyman who ran over a kid while drunk behind the wheel; Vern Schillinger, a cruel, dangerous Aryan who set his sights on Beecher’s ass and made it his own; and Kareem Said, a highly educated Muslim who frequently fought for control of Oz’s black prison population.

And Chained Heat? It tells the story of the misery and corruption found in a women’s prison that focuses on characters like Carol Henderson (Linda Blair), an otherwise law-abiding everywoman who ran over and killed a man by accident; Ericka (Sybil Danning), a cruel, dangerous Aryan who sets her sights on Carol’s ass and tries to make it her own; and Duchess (Tamera Dobson), the Vassar-educated queen bee of the prison’s (frequently mentioned, but largely unseen) black prison population.

Plus, in both, none of the prisoners ever wear bras. And I mean never ever!

Sadly, the only version of Chained Heat currently available on DVD is a butchered, 88-minute cable edit that keeps most of the nudity (hooray!), but none of the violence (boo!). Despite this, it remains the greatest example of perhaps the most truly exploitative exploitation genre there is, and its influence clearly lives on.

And did I mention how it’s devoid of anything even remotely resembling a bra? —Allan Mott

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