BIKINI GIRLS ON ICE (2009) Review

Directed by: Geoff Klein
Written by: Geoff Klein, Jeff Ross
Starring: Cindel Chartrand, Danielle Doetsch, William Jarand, Suzi Lorraine, Christina Sciortino, Tarek Gader, Ivan Peric

A slasher titled BIKINI GIRLS ON ICE is kind of a hard thing to ignore. Even if you expect it to be pretty terrible (like I did) there’s a certain curiosity that just begs to be satisfied. After all, in my experience girls in bikinis never seem to make movies any worse, in fact in some cases they make them infinitely better. Sadly that’s not the case here. Instead what we have here is a routine slasher the likes of which we've all seen many, many times before. But that in itself isn't a bad thing, after all this subgenre hasn't changed all that much over the years and a nice solid slasher that doesn't necessarily bring anything new to the table can still be very enjoyable. But not only does this film bring nothing new to the scene, what it does bring is done either badly or at the very best of times mediocre.
A group of hot college girls are organizing a bikini car wash to help raise some quick cash. Along the way their bus brakes down just as they approach an abandoned gas station in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately for them this gas station isn't quite abandoned, in fact it’s inhabited by a hulking, sweating, mute psychopath named Moe. And Moe sure doesn't like people trespassing on his property. As expected he begins systematically picking them off one by one, killing them before dumping them into freezers packed with ice. Why? Because he can.

I have always been a firm believer in the fact that a slasher villain doesn't need some kind of backstory for a movie to be successful. It’s been done plenty of times before. But here is a movie that really could have done with something, anything resembling a backstory for the killer, if only to answer the question; what in the blue fuck is this guy’s obsession with ice? And where does he get it all? Does he work at an ice factory? I just can’t see this creep strolling down to the local supermarket and filling his shopping cart full of bags of ice. And if all of his freezers are filled with dead bodies, where does he store the rest of the ice? And why does he even need the ice? I'm pretty sure a body will be just as frozen in a freezer without ice. But I forget, movies (horror movies in particular) don’t need to be logical. That may be so but I still think it’s a bit ridiculous to throw something like that in there and then not explain it at all.

Obviously the big draw card here is the first half of the film’s title. BIKINI GIRLS. You’d think that getting a bunch of college girls all soaped up before having them run around and get slaughtered by a killer would be a hard thing to fuck up. Well apparently it’s not as difficult as you would expect.
First of all is the fact that although the film’s title teases us with the prospect of nudity, there is almost nothing. There’s a single sex scene where we get a fleeting glance at some breasts but that’s it.
And to make things worse this is a slasher with basically no gore. Every kill is a repeat of the previous one. We get a shot of Moe hacking or stabbing repeatedly with whatever weapon he currently has at hand, the body of the victim just out of frame and a few quick shots of blood splattering a nearby wall.
I don’t know if the excuse for this was a limited budget or what but if there’s one thing you don’t skimp on in a slasher it’s the gore. Sure there is a throat slice later on that actually looks decent but the rest of the death scenes are seriously disappointing.

One thing that the film did get right was making the characters so unlikeable that you just can’t wait for them to die. Unfortunately because of the unsatisfying kill scenes it’s not as rewarding as it should be.
The dialogue is pretty horrible and the acting is your average low budget slasher level stuff, but to be honest even if it were some amazing Academy Award winning shit it still wouldn't have made the movie any better. BIKINI GIRLS ON ICE may have an alluring title but it is a wasted opportunity in both gore and nudity. Seriously, if they’d amped up the boob and gore ratio at least I would have been able to ignore all of the other shit.