Fleshed-out Feature
07/17/2001

The Philadelphians behind the popular "Bikini Bandits" web shorts are bring their high-camp concept and curvy vixens to a full-length film.

Mildly Retarded Amish Boy is stage left, in a cage. Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf sports an AK-47 assault rifle. And five leggy ladies in lingerie, platform boots and spike heels are huddled on a big red bed.

"All right, girls!" yells Evil Porn Director, in a blond wig, tinted shades, tan poly suit and orange shirt. "Now we're going to get hot and nasty!"

At which point the cage is opened and Amish Boy and two gentlemen, who in less-enlightened time might be referred to as village idiots, head for the curvy thespians, while the dwarf and some big dudes with automatic weapons chase them. Everybody whoops and screams.

Finally, well after the smoke machines stop and someone shouts, "Cut!," the Trocadero the on-time burlesque hall and present-day rock venue now serving as a set for Bikini Bandits: The Movie returns to a state of between-take calm.

"Hey, Jello, that was great!" says Steven Grasse, Bikini's real-life director, approaching Jello Biafra, the former San Francisco mayoral candidate and leader of the proto-punk band Dead Kennedys now playing the porn auteur. "Just do more. Go over the top!"

Then Grasse turns his attention to the supinated fivesome: "Girls," he says gently, scanning the mattress-scape of cleavage and calves. "You've got to look more scared."

So it goes on the set of the first feature-length Bikini Bandits, a (probably) straight-to-video affair characterized by an egregious absence of political or any other sensitivity that could become either (1) a phenom that will put Philadelphia on the movie map in ways M. Night Shyamalan never dreamed of, or (2) proof position that we're all going to hell in a handbasket.

The film, which concluded its 10-day Philadelphia-area shoot on Friday, features an ensemble cast that also includes Maynard James Keenan of the alt-metal band Tool (as the Pope), wackball L.A. comedian Bret Reilly (in dual roles), the Howard Stern Show's Gary the Retard (as himself), and Goonies-star-turned-tattooed-rocker Corey Feldman. Feldman, holed up in a dank backstage dressing room, isn't sure yet exactly what he's doing.

Bikini Bandits began last year as a wildly popular series of Internet shorts spawned from the fevered imagination of Grasse, co-owner of Philadelphia's renegade advertising agency Quaker City Mercantile. (Accounts: Puma athletic footwear, kamels cigarettes, Glenfiddich whiskey and Delilah's Den, the Philadelphia strip club from whence most of the Bikini Bandits have come.)

"We've had close to five million people download all the films so far," Grasse reports using a figure of hyperbolic inexactitude but on that nonetheless reflects the uge success of the series, available at www.AtomFilms.com and now packaged in the DVD Bikini Bandits: Freeze Mother @#%?!, which Grasse says is "selling like hotcakes."

The four- to five-minute works the inaugural "Bikini Bandits Episode 7," "Bikini Bandits and the Magic Lamp" (shot in Morocco), "Bikini Bandits and the Time Machine" (shot in colonial Philadelphia), "Bikini Bandits Go Dutch" (barn-raising in Amish country), and "Bikini Bandits Under the Big Top" (the circus) all revolve around a foursome of two-piece-wearin', firearm-bearin', hot-rod-driven' vixens who rob mini-arts, torment drooling men, and occasionally kill one by stuffing with processed food products.

"It's John waters-meets-Russ Meyer," says Grasse, who hastens to add that his works are shot better than the Baltimore schlockmeister's and his girls are prettier than the softcore artist's.

"It's all done in such a tongue-in-cheek way that we're actually making fun of people that are chauvinistic," he adds, attempting to deflect the obvious isn't-this-exploitation? Question.

"At th same time, we're making fun of people that are so politically correct that you can't do anything fun anymore without getting in trouble. We make fun of every race, creed and color in the tradition of Howard Stern. So, no oneescapes, and by offending everyone, you offend no one, hopefully although the thing we did yesterday might have gone to far. It involved Satan and the Pope."

Making the move from the Web to the widescreens from featurettes to full-length motion picture seemed like a natural progression for Grasse and his Quaker City Mercantile (formerly known as Gyro Worldwide) partner Shamala Joshi, a thin intense woman who has been directing movie's second unit and who shows up at the Arch Street set breathless and weary after a long day with ad clients in New York. Financing for the low-budget (Grasse won't say how low) feature, which is expected to reach video outlets in six months, came from AtomFilms and a Nuremberg production company, ("For some reason, bikini Bandits are big in germany," Grasse says.)

As cowritten by Grasse, 35, there is no cohesive storyline to Bikini Bandits: The Movie. Instead, "it's structured a lot like Kentucky Fried Movie or Monty Python's Meaning of Life," explains the director, wearing a red Budweiser cap, a gray Daytona Beach Bike Week T-shirt, baggy cargo shorts, and a look of suprising tranquility. He also cites MTV's Jackass, that high-brow affair in which projectiles are fired at guy's private parts, as a source of inspiration.

"It's [got] a very adolescent viewpoint on the world," acknowledges Grasse, whose younger brother, Peter, assays the role of Amish Boy. "It's like, what if the whole world was a Van Halen video?'

In the role of lead Bandit is Heather-Victoria Ray, a veteran of USA Tropical Tease and Hulk Hogan's Thunder in Paradise. Wearing a leopard-print two-piece, the actress reclines on a lounge chair behind the mixing board waiting for the scene in which she and her cohorts - Cynthia Diaz, Heather McDonnell and Betty Tru - rescue Amish Boy and five females from the clutches of Evil Porn Land. A bartender at Life in Old City and a makeup artist for a number of area bands, Ray has beautiful eyes.

"A lot of people take it the wrong way, or get offended by the Bikini Bandits," she says. "But, I mean, I get offended by the government. There are so many things that everyone wants to get offended about. Well, then don't watch it - it's simple. But for those who can take it with an open mind and a light heart because that's all it is, it's just purely lighthearted humor then they're going to see a lot of creative ideas."

Feldmen, who just turned 30, surveys the scene the 300-pound biker dudes, the dwarf, the babes with the seasoned eye of someone who recently starred as a deranged gynecologist in Troma Films' Citizen Toxic: The Toxic Avenger part 4.

"I'm basically playing myself," he reports, adding, with deadpan amusement, "it was obviously a great mistake to be involved in this great project. There's going to be a lawsuit pending. I've been greatly insulted since I've been here: I've been treated awfully. They put me in a dark, smelly room. I've been treat like some kind of abandoned stepchild, and obviously it's just the most tasteless project.

"I did it for art, truthfully. Steven Grasse contacted me and said he wanted me to do this art piece called Bikini Bandits and I thought, well, you know, in my career there's been Stand by Me, there's been Dream a Little Dream, and then the pinnacle, really could become Bikini Bandits. That really could be the crux, if you will, of my being."

For Joshi, who came to advertising from New York's fashion industry, her sitting here surrounded by dozens of heavily tattooed camera operators and assistant directors, sound technicians and customers, is the realization of a long-held ambition.

It was always our dreams that, when we were successful enough, we would go and have a clothing line or publish a book and ultimately make movies," she says. "Steven wanted to direct, and I wanted to direct, and we're just really into film. It's a love of both of ours. It's amazing that this thing that began as a lark has turned into, well, something."

Turned into, well, something indeed.

Up in the balcony, Ray and her bandits are hiking up their bikini bottoms, slinging their prop weaponry, and waiting for the cue to descend upon the nefarious Jello Biafra. Their first line iof dialogue shouted in unson as they point their artillery at Biafra and his goons 'is the Bandits series' signature phrase, the exclamation that inspired the DVD's title. Suffice to say, it starts with "Freeze."

They run through the scene a couple of times, and then Grasse calls a wrap.

"Why does everything have to be so deep and meaningful and have a message?," he wonders. "To me, a movie should be entertaining and fun."

"One day, maybe, we'll so something more serious," Grasse adds, then pauses to contemplate that possibility.

But, nah, probably not."

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Fleshed Out Feature