BODACIOUS BOOBS, DISTAFF DESTRUCTION AND BADASS BITCHES: THE CINEMA OF THE TOUGH CHICK

Let’s face it, ladies. You’re all familiar with the so-called “chick flick” genre of movies, willowy celluloid confections pandering to your perceived estrogenic desire to see nothing but endlessly repeated tales of weepy romance, makeovers where the wallflower protagonist is revealed to be hotter than a rod of uranium, “all men are scum” fare of the kind commonly infesting the Lifetime channel, and fantasies involving frumpy, neglected housewife types finding a hot and eager cock in a foreign country, usually someplace with a picturesque beach, and said turgid appendage usually provided by a tanned and tigerish guy in a Speedo that makes him look like he’s smuggling plums. That’s all well and good, but what about those times when you’re simply fed up with your life in general (and perhaps your significant other in particular), and you want to escape into a movie featuring smart, capable and tough women kicking, slicing, punching and blasting the motherfucking shit of anyone stupid enough to mess with them? Plenty of such movies do exist and while there are many such offerings, the majority of them are devoid of entertainment value by virtue of being nothing more than a display of nubile flesh and graphic violence concocted to appeal to a mostly male audience that’s satisfied with simply seeing lots of titties and showering blood filling the screen (which describes about half of the movies I love and own). So how does the discerning newbie viewer separate the wheat from the chaff and get straight to the gems the genre has to offer? Well, film fans, let this admittedly less than comprehensive handy guide serve as your beginner’s gateway into the glorious realm of the cinema of the Tough Chick.

Touch Chicks, or “broads” as they were known when embodied by Lauren Bacall and Mamie Van Doren back in the days of yore, are by no means a new phenomenon in the movies, but for all intents and purposes the Ground Zero of the genre would most likely be big-titty-maestro Russ Meyer’s seminal FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! from 1965.

The heroines (?) of the seminal FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! (L-R) Lori Williams, Haji and Tura Satana.

This black and white potboiler tracks the homicidal escapades of a trio of bosomy go-go dancers who enjoy drag racing against one another in the desert when not shaking their ample dairies in front of greasy, drunken Joe Sixpacks.

Tura Satana in the iconic role of homicidal go-go-dancing dyke Varla.

During one of their forays into the Californian wastes, their de facto leader, the hot and uber-butch Varla (played to indelible effect by Japanese-Apache former real-life girl gang leader Tura Satana), savagely murders a “square” racer using her karate and wrasslin’ skills, after which she kidnaps his bikini-clad, whiny girlfriend (played by Susan Bernard, PLAYBOY's Miss March for 1966, and lookalike for my friend Matt's wife). The dancers flee an inevitable confrontation with the law and in doing so they stumble across a reclusive old man and his two sons and seek shelter at their remote homestead. Turns out the old fart is loaded after a settlement from the train company he sued after being relegated to a wheelchair following a run-in with a locomotive, and Varla has her epicanthic eyes set on the prize. The geezer is also a pervy old bastard and sets his vile sights on the petite kidnap victim, but what’s a wheelchair-bound cripple going to do? Simple: direct his retarded and hulking bodybuilder son — charmingly named “the Vegetable” — to rape the poor girl while he watches, but Varla’s wise to his game… Meanwhile, Varla’s accomplices also have their own issues to sort out. Blonde and bubbly Billie (Lori Williams) — by far the most likable of the trio — is hankering for a man and aims to experience the Vegetable’s presumed Herculean carnal prowess, while Varla’s girlfriend, Rosie (Haji), struggles to keep herself in check while witnessing Varla’s unabashedly lubricious attempts at seducing the old man’s other son in hope of wrangling the whereabouts of his dad’s fortune out of him. It’s a fully packed, ultra-sleazy 83-minute masterpiece of pulchritude and pernicious pugilism, and has since gone on to earn a well-deserved cult following as the Rosetta Stone of the onscreen tough chick/bad girl ethos.

As the 1970’s happened and the fallout from the turbulent 1960’s influenced Hollywood, the action genre doors were kicked open and downright pulled off their hinges with the genesis of “blaxploitation” and the martial arts movie boom. Blaxploitation can be traced back to Melvin Van Peebles’ pioneering and uncompromising SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG (1971) and the major studio effort SHAFT (also 1971), and once it became apparent that “black is box office,” producers wasted no time in flooding the nascent market with all manner of melanin-based movies, most of which relied on the tried and true use of sex and violence to put butts in seats.

The one-of-a-kind sheer badassedness that is Miss Pam Grier.

Without question the central female figure of the blaxploitation era was Pam Grier, who started out in low budget, shot-in-the-Phillipines “women in prison” flicks, and later set the standard for what we now consider to be the black action heroine. One need look no further than the history of blacks in this country to determine that black women have put up with and survived through a lot of truly horrible situations, so their toughness was kind of a well known given, thus making the gun-toting, karate-fighting, and occasionally castrating aspect of such characters totally plausible to audiences, and Pam Grier was exactly the right actress to fill that role at the right time.

Grier’s output was considerable, but the film that perfectly sums up what her appeal was all about is 1973’s COFFY, a classic thriller that pits Grier’s titular nurse against the drug dealing vermin whose narcotics put her little sister into a coma from which she may never recover. Coffy proves just as violent and ruthless as her prey — blowing one dealer’s head off at point blank range with a sawed-off shotgun in the film’s first five minutes — and her trail of vengeance both compels and surprises as she does whatever it takes to achieve her goal. Memorable sequences include Coffy infiltrating the ranks of a pimp’s stable of whores and starting a brutal catfight in which she conceals utility razor blades in her planet-sized Afro, and a distinctly one-sided fight with a huge and enraged bull dyke who thinks Coffy’s been messing with her strung-out girlfriend. Badassed to the core, COFFY was a big hit on the grindhouse and drive-in circuit and cemented Grier’s place as the queen of the blaxploitation milieu.

The proto-Xena cheapie THE ARENA, in which we get Pam Grier (rocking an impressive '70's bush) as a gladiatrix. Nothing wrong with that scenario!

Special note should also be given to the shot-in-Italy THE ARENA (1974) for its proto-Xena tale of female gladiators during the days of the Roman Empire, a scenario that allowed Grier to strut her top-heavy stuff as captured African tribal dancer Mamawi while wielding a trident against all comers and eventually leading a successful slave revolt. It’s cheesy and horrendously dubbed, but it’s hard to beat as an entertaining way to kill eighty-three minutes.

Pam Grier and Margaret Markov — once paired in the far less interesting BLACK MAMA, WHITE MAMA (guess who played who? — taking no shit in THE ARENA.

The aforementioned martial arts movie boom threw just about every conceivable Asian whupass scenario onto the screen in the wake of Bruce Lee and ENTER THE DRAGON (1973), and one of the most visceral films of the era was 1974’s THE STREET FIGHTER. Starring the brooding and intense Sonny Chiba as a modern day Japanese karate expert anti-hero whose skills bore none of Bruce Lee’s grace but contained all the lethal and gory effectiveness of a McCullogh chain saw, the film garnered an “X” rating for violence and gore when first released in the United States and was swiftly re-edited and re-released with sixteen minutes of gore excised, a move that effectively rendered the film nigh incomprehensible. Nonetheless the film earned a cult following and in no time Sonny Chiba was cranking out karate movies with gusto, often starring actors he’d groomed through Japan Action Club school. One such protégée was Etsuko “Sue” Shihomi, who played a memorable supporting character in THE STREET FIGHTER, and while that film did little to showcase her considerable martial arts acumen, that oversight was rectified with the release of SISTER STREET FIGHTER to U.S. theaters in 1976.

Japanese release poster for ONNA HISSATSU KEN ("Killing Fist Woman"), known to grindhouse attendees everywhere as SISTER STREET FIGHTER.

Contrary to popular belief, the film (and its sequels) have no connection to THE STREET FIGHTERother than sharing many of the same cast members, and being fine examples of wall-to-wall karate mayhem that the Japanese refined to a rather sanguinary art form. While not as outright bloody as The Street Fighter, Shihomi’s first starring vehicle is a highly entertaining — if illogical — story of a female martial arts expert searching for her cop brother who’s been captured by sadistic drug dealers. There’s really not much plot, but rather a launching pad/excuse for shattering fight scene after shattering fight scene, and god help anyone who gets in Etsuko’s way.

Etsuko Shihomi.

Every bit the badass Lee and Chiba were, Shihomi’s character is one of the Tough Chick genres most formidable fighters and is a pleasure to watch in action. (Just make sure to skip all of her other starring vehicles, with the exception of SONNY CHIBA'S DRAGON PRINCESS, since they more or less royally suck.)

Meiko Kaji classes up the place while administering razor-sharp ass-whuppings as LADY SNOWBLOOD.

Also hailing from the Land of the Rising Sun is 1973’s LADY SNOWBLOOD, based on the manga story written by Kazue Koike, the legendary author of the classic samurai saga Lone Wolf and Cub (which was also adapted into a series of classic films). Starring cult Tough Chick actress Meiko Kaji, this revenge tale focuses on Yuki, the visual epitome of classy and demure geisha beauty, and her quest to avenge the violent and unwarranted deaths of her school teacher father and brother and the unjust imprisonment of her mother. While behind bars, Yuki’s mother realizes she has no backup child to avenge her murdered loved ones, so she indiscriminately gives herself to any prison guard who will have her in hope of conceiving a son. She dies giving birth to Yuki, and the girl is raised by a kindly monk who molds her into a swordswoman of lethal skill and talent. When she’s around eighteen or so, Yuki embarks on the trail of the killers, some of whom have become powerful political figures, and her prim demeanor provides her with a perfect way of hiding in plain sight. Yuki’s odyssey is long, hard and painful, but her focus and determination make her an implacable foe to be reckoned with. Followed by an inferior sequel, LADY SNOWBLOOD: LOVE SONG OF VENGEANCE, LADY SNOWBLOOD is easily the most “artsy” film on this list thanks to its gorgeous cinematography and intriguing direction by Toshiya Fujita. That’s not to say that it rivals the work of Akira Kurosawa, but it is definitely one of the better and more unusual of the ‘70’s-era samurai flicks.

The 1970’s exploitation wave proved fertile ground for the Tough Chick movie, and perhaps no other effort of the era personifies the crazy, over-the-top potential of the genre like 1975’s THE JEZEBELS, later re-titled and better known as SWITCHBLADE SISTERS.

SWITCHBLADE SISTERS: the completely warped direct descendant of FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! and one of the most entertaining bad girl movies of all time.

Tellingly directed and co-written by Jack Hill, the writer and director of COFFY, SWITCHBLADE SISTERS is an unintentionally (?) hilarious and insane piece of work that could probably never get made today, and more’s the pity. The ludicrous story revolves around the adventures of the Dagger Debs (the distaff complement to the way-too-old-to-be-playing-teenagers Daggers gang) and their many run-ins with the law and other gangs, and the internal power struggle between chipmunk-faced leader Lace (the scenery-chewing Robbie lee) and tough newcomer Maggie (Joanne nail, whose costume makes her look like a superhero) , who has transferred to the Debs’ high school.

Lace (Robbie Lee) shows Donut who's boss. (BTW, Donut is played by Kitty Bruce, daughter of "sick" humor pioneer Lenny Bruce.)

When Maggie’s brief affair (more accurately described as a rape that changes gears) with pregnant Lace’s meathead boyfriend, Daggers leader Dominic, is discovered, it’s only a matter of time until Maggie and Lace must fight it out for supremacy. But Maggie’s already taken over the Debs by impressing them with her assorted criminal deeds, seceded them from the Daggers, and renamed the girl gang as the Jezebels, so when the inevitable set-to finally takes place, Lace is practically foaming at the mouth like a rabid squirrel. Featuring a staggeringly loony script that’s loaded with ridiculous dialog, black lesbian separatists who train as an urban guerilla army and build a homemade tank/assault vehicle,

rival gangs who wear outfits guaranteed to wilt the audience’s corneas, howlingly idiotic massacres in a roller rink and on the streets of the story’s unnamed city (presumably somewhere in California), Switchblade Sisters can not-inaccurately be described as a less literate take on A Clockwork Orange’s teen violence-ridden dystopia, and would make for the ideal second half of a double feature with FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!

Following its heyday in the 1970’s the Tough Chick genre mellowed considerably. Although bright spots like ALIENS (1986) and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991) re-defined the pre-existing characters Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor into icons of the form and THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT (1996)shamelessly ripped off Modesty Blaise to fun effect, the Tough Chick films offered up by mainstream Hollywood studios simply didn’t pack the straight-to-the-guts punch held by their predecessors. That may be due to an unconscious (?) backlash against movies placing women in action hero roles usually dominated by the likes of the Stallone, Shwarzenegger and Van Damme stable of male fantasy fulfillers, or it may go hand in hand with the gradual extinction of grindhouses and drive-ins as multiplexes proliferated. Whatever the case, the halcyon days of Tough Chick cinema are now behind us, but thankfully preserved on DVD, there to serve as inspiration for a hoped-for resurgence.

BIG BLACK-ASS COWBOY RIDES OFF INTO THE SUNSET: R.I.P., PAUL BECTION (1952-2026)

It is with a mixture of grief and relief that I note the passing of Marvel Bullpen brother and friend Paul "Big Black-Ass Cowboy" Becton (1952-2026). The relief comes from knowing that his decades of medical suffering and their attended psychological and emotional torment are finally, blessedly over.

Paul was a big guy, and I do mean BIG, as when I met him he stood at around 6'7" and weighed close to 400 pounds. His mirth was as large as he was, and his skills at coloring and pulp magazine-style illustration were quite impressive. We shared deep mutual interest in nearly everything comics, pop culture, and rock 'n' roll-related, and few could geek-out on Paul's level. His knowledge of and love for classic westerns was second to noe, but he refused to check out any Italian westerns, not even those helmed by the great Sergio Leone, because, and I quote, "No one in those stories actually has a job. Just a bunch of assholes wandering around in goddamned ponchos!"

We shared a lot both at Marvel and outside, and as the years went by Paul's physical condition majorly deteriorated. He suffered an injury while playing football during college, an injury that impaired his mobility and no doubt contributed to his weight, and during the years after Marvel, while living in the Staten Island the house that he shared with his utter prick of a brother, Paul fell through the stairs inside the house, due to the wood rotting, injuring his other leg, thus relegating him to a number of physical rehab facilities, where he was forced to live for many years, as the house was condemned and no one was allowed further admittance. The house ended up getting demolished, and Paul was unable to retrieve any of the lifetime of collectible treasures that accumulated on his own and via his career in comics.

I regularly visited Paul in one of the rehab centers on Staten Island, bringing him sketchbooks to draw in and drawing tools, plus occasionally smuggling in requested bottles of his favorite hooch. It was tragic seeing him trapped in the facility, and his soul-deep misery was palpable. Unfortunately I had to stop visiting him when I began my own journey down the path of inescapable medical misery, by which time he had moved out of the facility and began living in a ground-level flat rented from a friend. But not long after he was set free from the rehab facility, Paul suffered a debilitating stroke, and that was pretty much all she wrote, until his recent passing. No one that I asked knew exactly where Paul was living during his final years, and I wish I had known so I could have visited with him one last time.

My memories of Paul and his stories are many, too many to list here, but I will let this story that he told me during our Marvel years serve as an example of his sense of humor:

"When my father and his brother were little kids they used to get harassed by this annoying old lady who lived in the neighborhood and just loved to get into their business. She'd see them on their way home from running errands for my grandmother and she'd call them over, saying 'Whatchoo boys got in that bag? Lemme see!' Since they were kids and they were taught that they had to obey their elders, they had no choice but to comply with the old bitch's request to let her inspect their bag. She never took anything but I guess she just got off on fucking with two kids.

"Anyway, one day they had enough of that bullshit, so my dad and my uncle each took a big shit into a bag and, as per their routine, walked past the old bitch's house. Sure enough, there came the familiar croak of 'Whatchoo boys got in that bag? Lemme see!' The boys handed over the bag and ran like hell. My father said that when the old crow told my grandparents what they had done, he and my uncle got a major ass-whuppin' that night, but it was worth it and that old bat never fucked with them again!"

Rest well, o Big Black-Ass Cowboy. Your trail of woe has finally come to an end. May you enjoy the Last Roundup.

 At Library Bar, celebrating my birthday (June, 2006).

SO FUCKING TIRED

The face of mental/physical/emotional exhaustion.

As is no doubt wholly apparent from my regularly posting about the situation, I hate my life.

Since around 2010, my life has been an endless odyssey of one form of medical misery or another and I have weathered all of it, with the unexpected benefit of it allowing me a lot of time for introspection and deep examination of my life and the elements of it that made me who I am, both for better and for worse at different points in my development. We're talking a couple of stent surgeries, followed by years of suffering through the torment that is chronic atopic dermatitis of a severity that shocked even international dermatological specialists, becoming a guinea pig for the miracle drug Dupixent (which cleared up my atopic dermatitis and saw me becoming the poster boy for its initial success). Then came finding out that my kidney function was almost nil, so I had to get a fistula surgically created in my left forearm so I could begin ongoing dialysis treatments, and that first year of adjusting to the rigors of dialysis being a study in learning to handle excruciating pain and the process's resulting near-complete lack of energy and occasional ancillary insomnia. Up next came the esophageal condition that caused my airway to sometimes close off so I would be unable to breathe for about one or two minutes at a time (which was terrifying until I remembered how to hold my breath from swimming), along with near-ceaseless hiccup-adjacent spasms that could be quelled by multiple rounds of my "water trick" every day. And don't get me started on last August's cardiac bypass surgery. Oh, and my recent viral infection that saw me hospitalized sick as a dog, with my system in toxic shock that resulted in all of the skin on my body shedding like a snake and subsequently regenerating, albeit a tad more leathery.

All of that galloping horse shit was a lot to deal with on its own, but then my mother ended up in a near-fatal car accident that put her into a coma for a while — I hope to someday be able to erase from my memory the sight of her laying there, un-moving and silent, intubated, and looking utterly helpless — followed by her pulling through that only to be diagnosed with cancer in both lungs at the age of 85. Over the next several years I watched helplessly as her advanced age and illness caused her once mighty force of nature to fizzle out like a damp squib, which was only worsened by her surviving a minor stroke that further robbed her of her sharp mental acuity. And while I did what I could to be of help and comfort to her, I was trapped in the prison sentence of my own medical nightmares, and I could only be in Westport when my medical schedule and diminished physical stamina would allow, which forced me to leave the lion's sharp of being my mother's helpmate to the stalwart soul that is Roger, without whom neither of us could have weathered things through to the end in anything resembling an organized manner. Then Mildred left us and the sale of the house and disposal of its contents came next, which I traveled to Westport to deal with on weekends as best I could, with the aid of Roger, Kathleen, Daisy, and a legion of caring souls whose presence and help saved my fracturing sanity.

It is now roughly four months since my mother's demise and my own medical miseries persist, coupled with the fact that my main hospital, Mount Sinai, no longer accepts my insurance due to contract negotiations with my insurance provider going sour. Truth be told, I've been breaking under all of this and have yet to get new insurance, but I am getting myself together enough to resume taking care of business and I aim to spend most of Thursday on the phone with Mount Sinai, looking into continuance of service, considering that I am a patient with chronic kidney disease and have been on the State's waiting list for a kidney transplant for going on six years.

None of this is in any way uplifting, and compounding all of it is the fact that many of my dear friends live elsewhere and/or they have schedules that do not allow for any or much interaction, which would be contingent upon how much energy I can muster to socialize after another week on dialysis.

In short, my life sucks. That's why I go to Tea and Sympathy as often as I do. Its cozy interior evokes a hominess that I have not felt since I was very young, and its roster of delicious food and tea serve as a great source of comfort when there is little of that elsewhere in my day-to-day existence. When I am there I am reminded of what it feels like to be a living, functioning human being, rather than the ambulatory husk that hauls itself to dialysis or any number of other medical or hospital-related can't-miss appointments. My times of seeing and being with my friends are tragically few, and when I do get time with them, it is invariably over far too soon.

And having said all of that, it's back to the center in but a few hours, and I. can tell you with full candor that I would rather be anywhere else instead. Someday all of this misery will blessedly be over and done with, but the ongoing nature of it that I experience daily is downright Sysyphian. In a past life I must have sinned like a motherfucker, because the ancient Greeks had it right. Tartarus is real. I know. I fucking live there. 

CHEECH & CHONG'S LAST MOVIE (2025)

I grew up a fan of the stoner comedy albums of Cheech & Chong, years before I ever inhaled of the sacred sweetleaf, enjoying their work because it was basically old school-style radio comedy for the then-modern era. The success of the humor had nothing to do with having experienced being stoned. It was simply about the misadventures of two hapless stoners and other characters in their daily lives, so it was highly relatable. Their movies, which is where they made their real money, were a mixed bag, with, in my opinion, only UP IN SMOKE and CHEECH & CHONG'S NEXT MOVIE being legitimate classics, and NICE DREAMS and THINGS ARE TOUGH ALL OVER being entertaining enough, if not particularly inspired. Which brings us to CHEECH & CHONG'S LAST MOVIE. 

 Man (Tommy Chong) and Pedro DePacas (Cheech Marin) during their 1970's heyday.

The film is a bit of a misnomer, in that it isn't a narrative comedy, and is instead a bittersweet career memoir framed within an aimless road trip by Cheech & Chong as their old man selves. Those of us who are fans and who have researched their history will be aware of the behind the scenes details, but it serves as a solid history lesson for newcomers. Cheech & Chong's comedy was very much of its post-hippie era and might not translate well to today's sensibilities, but back then they were HUGE, literally the comedy equivalent of rock superstars.

                                                  The '70's comedy legends in the 21st century.

CHEECH & CHONG'S LAST MOVIE is recommended for comedy historians and fans who want to see our heroes one final times before the inevitable meet the reaper, a time that's sadly growing ever closer.