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Bikini Girls On Ice

2009
Dir: Geoff Klein

Stranded on their way to a bikini car-wash fundraiser, a group of young women find refuge in an abandoned gas station on the outskirts of town. Soon their broken down bus is the least of their worries as a maniacal axe-wielding mechanic starts picking them off one by one.

Bikini Girls on Ice is a throwback to old school slasher-movie exploitation. Combining elements of House of Wax, Psycho, The Toolbox Murders and countless other 80s backwoods slasher flicks, it really doesn’t waste any time and cuts straight to the chase with a particularly atmospheric and taut opening scene in which a lone woman (Suzi Lorraine) is murdered by an unseen and particularly nasty assailant when she stops off at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. Old conventions are rolled out as much as they are slyly exploited, particularly the use of phones and vehicles with a habit of breaking down.

With a title like Bikini Girls on Ice, you’d be forgiven for thinking you know exactly what to expect. What is most surprising is that Bikini Girls actually takes itself rather seriously – all the way to its dark conclusion – and for the most part, proves to be a generic slasher fest with its roots planted firmly in old-school horrors like Friday the 13th et al. There is even a Crazy-Ralph type harbinger of doom who shows up to warn the women that if they stay at the gas station after dark, they’ll be dooooomed! Bikini Girls had the potential for parody galore, and its trashy title falsely suggests a much different tone than the one it actually exhibits. Instead, it sticks rather rigidly to preconceived conventions and plays it so straight it never really manages to stand out or do anything interesting. 


I half hoped it would echo Death Proof with the friends finally banding together in a showdown against the killer; maybe with some April March songs thrown in for good measure. Not so. It does for empowering its female characters what Jason did for property value in the Crystal Lake vicinity. Various vague subplots involving hinted-at back-stories, rivalry, betrayal and shifting dynamics between the women are left unexplored. For a moment it evokes memories of the likes of Curtains, House on Sorority Row and The Descent with its all-women group of friends confined to a single location for an extended period of time under incredibly stressful circumstances. However, the hinted-at dynamics of the group are never explored. Slasher fans should revel in the various stalking sequences though, as tension is effectively ratcheted and, when they occur, the ferocity of the attacks are quite startling in their intensity. This slasher villain is a greasy mechanic with severe anger issues whose aggression and violence is as extreme as his back story is absent. 

Proceedings are effectively aided by a creepy score courtesy of Benjamin Beladi and Michael Vickerage, and a particularly tense scene involving a box of keys and pounding coming from the trunk of a car serves as one of the suspenseful highlights. A number of shots featuring various characters looking into a freezer as the camera skulks quietly up behind them are also incredibly creepy.

A conventional, stylishly shot slasher.

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