For years in my liberal youth I thought this loophole was racist, an evil double standard in which white women were protected from exposure while “native” women were cruelly stripped of their bras, not to mention the equal protection of the MPAA. Watching Rapa Nui, in which there are dozens if not hundreds of wonderful bare breasts on view, I have changed my mind. Since female breasts are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the human anatomy, it is only a blessing if your culture celebrates them.
The movie, which is sublimely silly, takes place in the South Seas in the carefree days before missionaries and other visitors arrived to distribute brassieres, smallpox, and VD. The action takes place on Easter Island, “the navel of the world,” whose inhabitants languish under a senile king. The king is of the Long Ear tribe, which has enslaved the Short Ears and impoverished the island by building dozens of giant stone faces. The purpose of the faces is to attract the great White Canoe that the king believes will carry him off to heaven. No face can be big enough. “Build another one,” he tells the slaves at one point. “Then take the rest of the day off.”
This is a king, played with superb comic timing (by Eru Potaka-Dewes), who has lots of good lines. “Tell me you won’t make fishhooks of my thigh bones,” he tearfully implores his high priest. The priest, however, has the movie’s best line: “I’m busy! I’ve got chicken entrails to read!” Meanwhile, sweating slaves pull giant sledges and plot rebellion.
The plot stars Jason Scott Lee as Noro, a young Long Ear who has fallen in love with a Short Ear girl, the breathtakingly lovely Ramana. He goes to the chief for permission to marry her, which is granted—but on two conditions. (1) He must win the annual competition among the young men of the island; (2) she must spend six months locked in the darkness of the Cave of the White Virgin.
This is a lot better deal for him than her. The competition, sort of a Polynesian triathlon, requires the young men to climb down a cliff to the sea, swim to an offshore peak, climb the peak, steal the first eggs of spring from birds’ nests, swim back with them, climb the cliff, and present the eggs to the chief. Break an egg, and you’re an omelet. Meanwhile, the bride-to-be slowly goes blind in the Cave of the White Virgin, so called because that’s what you become after you lose your tan in the dark—always assuming, of course, that you were a virgin to begin with.
Concern for my reputation prevents me from recommending this movie. I wish I had more nerve. I wish I could simply write, “Look, of course it’s one of the worst movies ever made. But it has hilarious dialogue, a weirdo action climax, a bizarre explanation for the faces of Easter Island, and dozens if not hundreds of wonderful bare breasts.” I am, however, a responsible film critic and must conclude that Rapa Nui is a bad film. If you want to see it anyway, of course, that’s strictly your concern. I think I may check it out again myself.
Rape Squad
(Directed by Robert Kellichien; starring Peter Brown; 1975)
Sitting through Rape Squad is a fairly weird experience because the audience doesn’t know how to take it: A lot of the knee-jerk movie responses are challenged. It’s not an old-style sexist movie, but it’s not a feminist movie, either. The men in it are creeps at best and sex maniacs at worst, so the audience can’t get off on the usual macho punch lines. But the women, who organize an antirapist guerrilla unit, get the idea while floating completely nude in a whirlpool bath. So while they’re doing their rewrite of Betty Freidan, they’re putting on a skin show at the same time.
The whole movie’s like that, and we’re not surprised to learn that it was directed by a man but its principal author was a woman. The dialogue adopts a militantly feminist position, but the actresses recite it wearing miniskirts and see-through blouses (on those occasions, indeed, when they bother to dress at all).
In a typical scene, one of the squad members distributes antirape leaflets in a parking lot, which requires her to lean over the hoods of cars and display an expanse of thigh to truck drivers eating their lunch nearby. When they make rude remarks, she counterattacks fiercely, getting so angry that it’s necessary for her to lean forward and display some cleavage. We don’t know whether to look or listen. The story involves a rapist with the nickname “Jingle Bells,” who’s been terrorizing young women with his attacks. His disguise includes a goaltender’s mask, so he can’t be identified in lineups. Five of his victims, dissatisfied with the police work on the case, decide to form their own rape crisis program and take karate lessons. The karate instructor is a compact young woman who could no doubt demolish Bruce Lee single-handed; she has the girls practice hitting a dummy in the groin with nightsticks.
Once trained, the rape squad turns into a feminist vigilante unit. They’re everywhere, like Batman and Robin. A black pimp, for example, is mistreating one of his girls in a parking lot. A squad member calls in. The entire karate class piles into a VW bus and races to the rescue. The pimp is kicked unconscious while the girls bang up his Thunderbird with sledgehammers. Mission accomplished, they leave. The pimp groggily wakes up, only to be knocked unconscious by the hooker, who has instantaneously had her consciousness raised.
Wouldn’t you know, though, that when the chips are down, our heroines make all the dumb mistakes women do in movies where they’re mere sex objects (instead of liberated sex objects). Jingle Bells lures them into an abandoned zoo at night. The girls walk along single file. One decides to return to the car. Bells picks her off. Another one loses the heel from her shoe. He gets her, too. The other three turn around and there are frantic cries of “Where’s Gloria?” Where do you think? Haven’t you seen any Westerns lately, with the Indians picking off the stragglers?
There’s also a certain amount of entrapment, which the movie apparently approves of. Rape squad members wear their sexiest dresses to a nightclub where the manager is an alleged rapist. One of the girls allows herself to be picked up and taken to the guy’s apartment to see flicks of his last ski holiday in Switzerland. Uh, huh. Astoundingly, no such film is there to be shown. Why, the beast wants to make out! The victim screams, the rape squad breaks through the door, the karate instructor sends the depraved monster flying through the air, the girls wreck his apartment and then they pour indelible blue dye (labeled “sulphuric acid”—their little joke) on his genitals. That way, I guess, the next time he tries to get fresh with a sister she’ll know him by his true colors.
Rapid Fire
(Directed by Dwight H. Little; starring Brandon Lee, Powers Boothe; 1992)
Rapid Fire is a movie weary almost unto death with the sameness of its genre. It’s yet another mindless slog through the familiar materials of drug dealing, the Mafia, and the martial arts. The star is Brandon Lee, son of the legendary Bruce Lee, who, like James Dean, did something original and then died, inspiring hordes of feeble imitations. The costars include Powers Boothe, who has an uncanny ability to appear in movies that are beneath his talent, and Nick Mancuso, also talented, but oddly miscast as a Mafia don.
The plot has been pieced together from countless other movies, and involves Mancuso’s determination to get his hands on a piece of the action in a major heroin-smuggling operation that brings drugs from an unnamed Asian nation to Chicago. Brandon Lee is an innocent Chicago art student who, coincidentally, witnessed the massacre at Tienanmen Square and is a ranking martial arts champion. After he accidentally witnesses Mancuso committing murder during a fund-faiser for Chinese dissidents, Lee becomes the object of a four-way tug-of-war involving the Mafia, the drug smugglers, the good police, and the corrupt police.