The Doll Squad (1973)

The Doll Squad is an all-girl squad of secret agents who do battle against some fruit cake intent on spreading bubonic plague via some rats. The villain’s most nefarious scheme though was walking around his swinging bachelor pad hideout with his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest while it was drenched in his own flop sweat!

Uh, if you’re about to take over the world, can’t you either get an antiperspirant that works or at least a fresh shirt, you stinky bitch? Talk all you want about bringing the world to its knees, but I can’t stop gagging at your Frisbees, sweathog.

As you may have already surmised though, the villain’s hyperhidrosis isn’t really the worst part of the movie, it’s just the one that will give you that bitter beer face. Some of you may also experience bitter beer face when you get a load at the wardrobe selection of everyone involved. Why? Because Sears was apparently having a sale on ugly white belts.

Everyone in this movie was wearing them. You had the Doll Squad with their very functional tight green body suits accessorizing them with gaudy white belts. Not to be outdone, the army of guys that the villain has on retainer stalking around his compound are dressed like some banana republic’s military junta, but also decked out with white belts.

Somehow though the master criminal himself – a pudgy, sweaty guy that looked like he was wearing a rug that would have made Claude Raines wince – manages to outdo them all as he prances around in a half unbuttoned silky blue shirt and silver studded belt. Hey, Bad Guy, we’ll catch you at Studio 54 later on!

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Having established that director Ted V. Mikels (The Corpse Grinders) should have budgeted a substantial chunk of change for some Speed Stick as well as not allowed the stars to provide their own wardrobe (fashion don’ts ranged from ties to jackets to dresses), we now need to figure out what exactly is a Doll Squad, why they are invading a hideout that is alternately described as being on an island and also located somewhere in the “hills”, and why you would ever go on a commando raid wearing go-go boots.

The Starflight II program suffers a setback when it blows up shortly after launch and a voice comes over the television that a senator is watching it on to taunt him. The President gives them two weeks to find out who is behind this terrorist attack and when crack secret agent Sabrina listens to the tape of the guy taunting the senator, she recognizes the voice but just can’t place it.

Sabrina decides that she needs to get the rest of the Doll Squad together which means she goes to the local kung fu studio and hospital to let her sister agents know that their country needs them again, though as a nurse and kung fu instructor they are already serving their country admirably in civilian life.

Two hoods follow Sabrina around and kill these two chicks after they meet with her, leading me to believe that having a secret agent walking around telling other secret agents to meet at the local Howard Johnson’s later that night is not as secure a situation as you would have thought.

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Sabrina goes back to HQ and uses this magical super computer thing to figure out that the person behind all this was former agent Eamon Miller. Just then, the traitorous secretary shows up and gets caught by Sabrina. In what some may have been a bit of a tactical blunder, but a big break for the Doll Squad, the secretary kills herself only after giving up some vital information on Eamon’s whereabouts.

Sabrina goes about getting some more Doll Squad members and even though her traipsing around with “Secret Agent Recruiter” tattooed on her forehead got everyone wasted last time, Eamon doesn’t think to send more minions out to do the same thing again. Of course, why these losers just didn’t kill Sabrina right at the beginning is something you can ponder along with how an alleged supervillain could get electrocuted after being drenched with a martini and touched with the cord from a lamp. (Don’t ask.)

Using all her secret agent abilities, Sabrina deduces Eamon’s location from where his evil-doctor buddy is living and an invasion is planned! The Doll Squad muck around on the island for what seems like hours and shoot about a hundred guards. I don’t know how Eamon pays for all this, where he houses these guys or why no one else in the area notices the guy whose property is barb wired off and patrolled with a small army of goobers, but this is an island, right?

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And what’s the point of an island hideaway if the Doll Squad can just row their boat ashore without any problems? I was also thinking that maybe once Sabrina figured out where Eamon’s hideout was, she might have just telephoned her boss to let him know so that he could order a Daisy Cutter dropped on this moron or at the very least send in a force bigger than five honeys in tight uniforms.

Lots of shooting and a few pathetic fight scenes pepper the remnants of the movie before stuff gets blown up. It was an unfortunate choice that Mikels made to show lots of stuff blowing up since he had absolutely no grasp on how to show a convincing explosion on screen.

The Doll Squad themselves weren’t very interesting and none of them had any personality other than hair color and no one did much but run around shooting guns. I was hoping each of them had some special skill that they could use in an action scene (you know – one is maybe good with knives, one in hand to hand combat, one kills by sitting on your face – that kind of stuff), but they just ran around a lot doing stupid stuff.

A total failure on any and every level. You do get some small reward though for sitting through it all when Sabrina’s theme song plays over the closing credits. It has this lounge singer feeling that tries to emulate all those bad James Bond themes and does a pretty good job of it. Well, of being bad like those James Bond themes, that is.

© 2013 MonsterHunter

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