On their way to a bikini car-wash fundraiser, a group of scantily-clad college girls including sporty Jenna (Cindel Chartrand), her flirty roommate Sam (Danielle Doetsch), bitchy Lena (Christina Sciortino), slutty bisexual Nikki (Kerri Taylor) and her sexy on-off lover Brooke (Caroline Faille) are stranded at an abandoned gas station on the outskirts of town. Between flirting with nice girl Jenna, driver Tommy (Ivan Peric) struggles to fix their broken down bus while his dorky friend Blake (Jarek Gader) fails to score with the luscious Lena. As the girls unwisely decide to explore their surroundings, they fall prey to a grungy, axe-wielding maniac (William Jarand) who stores their dead bodies in his freezer. And that's pretty much it…
Imagine you're at Glastonbury and some quiffed poser takes the stage and shouts "Hey guys, I've invented this new kind of music called rock & roll!" Then strums a few bars of something that sounds suspiciously like Hound Dog. That sums up the curious viewing experience that is Bikini Girls On Ice, a low-budget Canadian slasher so formulaic you'd swear it was a spoof. Except for the most part, co-writer and director Geoff Klein seems serious. Indie horror used to be a vital outlet for edgy, satirical social commentary. Now it's an assembly line of sophomoric tributes to zombie movies or Eighties slasher fare. Bikini Girls... steals lazily from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1973) and a raft of lesser movies that were derivative in the first place, yet acts like it is the first film ever to have a busty blonde wander stupidly into a strange dark house.
The cute cast really do spend the whole film running around in skimpy bikinis, but the T&A masks a certain contempt for women as either dumb bimbos or manipulative bitches whom the script suggests get what they deserve. Which is all the more surprising given the abundance of female creative personnel listed in the credits, including makeup and effects supervisor Marie Ashley Nelson. Though light on gore compared to others of its ilk, the film still dwells on the killings to a tedious degree. The first half grinds as one girl after another stumbles to her death, along with a pair of luckless French tourists. Once virtually the whole cast have been wiped out, things settle into the usual cat-and-mouse between our predictable "final girl" and the equally predictably indestructible killer. Quite how this bozo survives being repeatedly stabbed and blasted by shotgun is anyone's guess.
It is certainly better acted (Christina Sciortino makes the strongest impression with a wastefully committed turn) and more competently made than the usual DTV nonsense. First-time director Klein yokes some atmosphere from his grimy settings and pulls off some suspenseful chase sequences, but offers nothing to sustain the film between the stalk and slash stuff. Save your money and watch Texas Chain Saw Massacre again. Bikinis provided by Ujena Swimwear - whose prominent credit implies this film is some sort of strange commercial?
