The bodybuilding craze of the 80’s and that decade’s focus on physical fitness are the cultural winds that sailed Body Girls into adult theaters in 1983. Another pop comedy by director Bob Chinn for Caribbean Films, it would be Chinn’s penultimate effort for the company and with Hyapatia Lee who was then on a meteoric ride to superstardom.
Jackie La Lay (Lee), is the proprietor of a gym which is home to some of the top female bodybuilding competitors around. As she schmoozes Jim (Bud Lee), the coordinator of an upcoming contest, and Arnold Feregano (Francois Papillon), its celebrity judge, a micro-cabal of slobs (Rick Ryder and Gary Eberhart), working on behalf of the rival West Side Iron Pumpers, do their best to undermine La Lay’s plans to win the competition. Naturally, Jackie and her crew are a wily bunch that proves hard to outfox.
When judged against most the comedies Bob Chinn made from 1976 forward, something is definitely missing from Body Girls. All the elements are certainly there as the film sports colorful sets, sharp camera work courtesy of Jack Remy, and undeniably gorgeous actors aplenty. But the skeletal and emaciated story and script for Body Girls, written by Bud and Hyapatia Lee, is little more than an idea that’s too weak to really travel anywhere on its own, so Chinn details it with as much sex as can possibly be had. This is a fair enough strategy as he’d been down this road before five years prior with Candy Stripers and turned an impossibly thin idea into a scorching piece of celluloid that remains an unimpeachable masterwork of west coast hardcore.
But five years represent an eternity in the adult film industry, most especially the five years that separated 1978 and 1983. The hippies and surfer girls have slightly aged out of the business or are beginning to move on as the heavily-80’s aesthetic of California bleach blondes, bronzed hardbodies, and saline injections begin to creep in to fill the void. Body Girls is still mostly on the right side of the divide, but the elements in the mix are beginning to yield lighter returns as the vast majority of the film’s characters are mostly there to occupy space and are little more than faces on a screen.
Where things went dreadfully sideways as the Golden Age films began to sunset on the lapping shores of home video is when the light funk found in library music by folks like Pete Jacques began to give way to Sunset Strip synth rock that might or might not include a Flying-V guitar solo performed by a guy who wears wrist sweatbands. And somewhere in that delta between those two musical poles is whatever pop subgenre the hideous theme song to Body Girls belongs. Credited to some outfit called Chief and Hoss, it’s an operatic caterwaul that has a special gift for strewing itself across the better part of your brain, taking weeks to work its way out of your head, and creating an instant party foul before the otherwise snazzy and dynamic opening credits end.
The one distinctive thing about Chinn’s comedies for both Pacific Coast Pictures and Caribbean Films is that they all have a visual presentation and propulsive motion that resembles an adult comic strip. As the budgets were much larger with Caribbean, this colorfully exaggerated design is most pronounced in their productions due to the expert art direction and sets by Vince Earl, Jim Malibu, and Marvin Wood. The purple sweatsuit that wardrobe vet Raynor Shine stuck Bud Lee with in the opening scene is undoubtedly queasy but it absolutely blends with this film’s overall color scheme which also includes a lot of blues, reds, and mauves. And with so many sex scenes to handle, Chinn puts editor Pearl Diamond through the ringer as she has to keep up with quite a bit of action. However, she does a pretty marvelous job at keeping everything well-paced and chugging along. Body Girls may be wispy and it may meander but it’s never boring.
As far as the cast is concerned, Hyapatia is radiant, per usual; Shanna McCollough is pretty adorable but not terribly memorable; both Eberhart and Ryder have a lot of fun; Francois Papillon’s wide-eyed energy is absolutely lovable; and Eric Edwards pops up for a delightful day’s work in which he didn’t even have to get fully undressed or, really, even stand up (and, of the cast, he might actually be the one who gets the most genuine laughs). Of the four films Hyapatia Lee made for Caribbean, Bud was in three of them and is featured the most prominently here. Despite his face twisting into an unbearable mix of old-fashioned mugging and painful werewolf transformation during his orgasmic reactions, he’s congenial in his role and is mostly likable when he’s not delivering sizzling pillow talk lines which do more to break the mood than anything. Additionally, his delivery on the “Lady, let’s get physical” closer can get right the fuck out of here.
Body Girls may be another Hyapatia Lee vehicle but it is Erica Boyer who emerges as the MVP in the film. Not does she do about as good a job as she can with what’s given to her character, she emerges as the most spirited and versatile in terms of the sexual performances. Her sweaty encounter with Nick Nighter is the most impressive of all of the couplings in the gym’s extended and extraordinary sex-buffet centerpiece; and that’s on top of her massage-gone-right scene with Robin Everett which won an XRCO Award in 1984 for Best Girl-Girl Scene (and was won fair and square).
While Bob Chinn made plenty of films where the girls use their sexual wiles to one-up the forces out to usurp them (Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls, The China Cat, and Taxi Girls), a lot of the script of Body Girls involves the women fucking the judges to get a favorable outcome which, in the end, seems… I dunno… a little rigged. But I guess this IS the 80’s and a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, especially in the era of cutthroat competition and hyper-capitalism. And at least they’re giving blowjobs with a wink and not explicit threats at gunpoint like those chuds from West Side Iron Pumpers. The less violence, the better. But that being said, during the competition at the climax of Body Girls, season tickets to an upcoming roller derby are promoted by the overhead announcer which made me immediately think, despite it probably being a friggin’ headache to both coordinate and shoot, THAT would have made for one hell of a Bob Chinn picture.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
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