Starring Meri Marshall, April Stewart, Mary Kohnert, Jack DeLeon, Jon Sharp, Patricia Scott Michel, Michael Karm, Steve Lyon, Randy Vasquez, Stuart Fratkin, Tony Cox
Directed by Rafal Zielinski
Expectations: Low. I don’t even know what to expect.
On the general scale:
On the B-Movie scale:
Welcome back to the screwball 80s sex comedy, courtesy of director Rafal Zielinski, the man who brought the world the Screwballs series and one of the final Empire films, Spellcaster. Y’know those pool party scenes that are inevitably in every 80s comedy? String three of them back-to-back and you’ve got Valet Girls! Surprisingly enough though, Valet Girls is much more female-positive than you’d expect from the genre, even if the whole movie is basically old men trying to hook up with eighteen-year-old girls casting couch style.
Lucy & Rosalind are a pair of girls looking for their big break, but so far, all they’re doing is parking cars for the Valet Girls company. They’re forced to wear lace stockings for the job, but they’re good sports about it and don’t take no shit from anyone. One day they catch wind that a big record producer is going to be at a party at Dirk Zebra’s house in Beverly Hills, so they drive over there after work post-haste. This leads into the first of the three pool party scenes.
Thankfully the comedy here is actually funny, which is always nice, but never taken for granted when viewing older “comedy” films. This is definitely one of those raunchy 80s comedies that laid it all out on the table: from cocaine to topless girls to dildo jokes, Valet Girls has it all. Consequentially the film seems a lot more timeless than it should because of the recent return of the raunchy comedy, although stupid shit like The Hangover would never dare have this many titties in it for fear of alienating the prospective female audience. This is a big part of the charm of Valet Girls, it is what it is, it doesn’t apologize and it’s a lot of fun for it. Also, at its heart the film has a strong female empowerment vibe which I enjoyed a lot, with the main girls throwing everything back into the misogynist’s faces and by the end, getting the ultimate revenge on the main offenders.
Valet Girls is not without its faults though, as there’s only so much pool party you can pack into one movie without it getting somewhat boring. It’s still rather successful for what it is though, and I had a good time watching it. This is sugary 80s bubblegum, and for my money, this is a million times better than the much more popular and well-known movie Valet Girls apes its title from, Valley Girl.
Next week, it’s the start of the 2nd Annual Horrific October! It’s all kickin’ off with the off-shoot entry into the Subspecies series, 1997’s Vampire Journals!