All Rise...

Judge David Johnson anxiously awaits the softcore parody of Slumdog Millionaire.

The Charge

I know there's a Batpod joke to be made here somewhere…

The Case

When you were watching The Dark Knight, were you thinking "Man, this would make a great sex parody!" Good news, you and the idiots behind this goofy softcore romp are operating on the same wavelength.

Our hero is Batbabe (Darian Caine), a mild-mannered stripper by day, and a scantily-clad vigilante by night, who patrols the city, exposing her breasts to passersby. Her greatest foe is The Jerker, a costumed psycho who can't lay off the auto-erotica and has pilfered the pornography of the citizenry. This predictably causes great unrest and it falls to Batbabe and her ally Commissioner Boredom (rimshot) to track down The Jerker and blah blah blah look, more nudity!

As you can tell by the synopsis, the plot to Batbabe was likely cribbed from a ninth grader's Gen Chem notebook. It is astonishingly infantile. Giving this disc a spin will give you this kind of high-brow comedy: The Jerker, flying around in his penis-shaped airship, opens fire on a pursuing police helicopter, coating it with—that's right—ejaculate. Because he's The Jerker! And no matter where this a-hole goes his hands are down his pants. That's the gag. Some naughty plastic prosthetics are also featured prominently.

On the other side of the equation is our heroine, Batbabe. Nudie film veteran Darian Caine stumbles through most of her lines and pretty much murders all of her comic quips; an accomplished actress, she's not. But she is willing to bid farewell to any and all garments and engage in vigorous couch lovemaking with a Luchedore (for real), which I suppose, besides "breathing while upright," represents the sum total of requirements for the role.

I've seen my share of these debauched parodies and while Batbabe is by far the dumbest and most sophomoric of them all, it's definitely loaded with the most flesh. Every ten minutes or so, whether it makes sense in the story or not, someone somewhere is getting disrobed. Typically they're of the female variety, engaging in lewd acts with other females, but once in a while a dude will get on in the action. The common thread: everyone looks bored.

The DVD release is relatively lean. Picture quality (1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen) is mediocre and the 2.0 stereo mix makes noise, so it's got that going for it, which is nice. Extras: deleted scenes, trailers and a filmmakers commentary that's surprisingly insightful for what is essentially the blending of a late-night Cinemax skin flick and the transcription of rest stop bathroom graffiti. (Note: the disc case states that there are "erotic shorts" included; there weren't.)

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