The Bikini Carwash Company Double Feature
directed by Ed Hansen, Gary Orona,
starring Neriah Davis, Kristi Ducati
MVD Rewind
When you decide to watch a movie titled The Bikini Car Wash Company, you pretty much know what you’re getting into, and in the early 1990s on premium cable channels you could get into it a lot. The Bikini Car Wash Company was a familiar title in the wave of R-rated smut that filled the late night hours in what would colloquially become known as “Skinimax.” Eventually made-for-cable erotic thrillers would overtake the market, but for a time sexy comedies were the rage, and The Bikini Carwash Company filled the bill nicely and quickly generated a sequel. Now the car wash girls are back, in a double feature Blu-ray from the MVD Rewind Collection.
One of the things that really helped the films find footing was that they were fresh. So much of the competition at the time was from drive-in films from the late ’70s-early ’80s (H.O.T.S., 1979; Lunch Wagon, 1981) or weird ’70s West German sex comedies. The Bikini Carwash Company was very much a product of the early 1990s, aided immeasurably by some uncredited montage work from veteran exploitation filmmaker Jim Wynorski. The sequences he filmed did nothing to drive the plot or develop character arcs, but the topless soapy sponge and water hose fights with the cast of bikini and Playboy models is exactly what people were wanting to see. The claptrap about a nerd from Iowa taking over his uncle’s failing car wash in Los Angeles is but the justification for copious amounts of female nudity. Are they great art? Certainly not. These films probably aren’t even the best of what they are, but they do have a goofy charm and deliver exactly what is expected of them, which is to provide 90 minutes of sexy and brain dead fun.
The Bikini Carwash Company I & II played frequently on late-night premium cable, including John Irving Bloom’s Joe Bob’s Drive-in Theater on The Movie Channel, and, more improbably, were featured multiple times on USA Network’s USA Up All Night. With the amount of nudity that had to be cut out of these films for basic cable screenings, it is difficult to imagine what audiences got out of them. One would also assume there were extra-long interstitials from Gilbert Gottfried and Rhonda Sheer on those nights, as well. Regardless, The Bikini Carwash Company girls developed fans from both the censored and uncensored cuts of the film, and now they are available on a Blu-ray, complete with an audio commentary track from Jim Wyrnorski, who talks about how he got pulled in to try to save the project ,because the director was in trouble after the first day of an insanely tight six-day shoot, and how they set up fencing covered in moving blankets to block the view of the nude car wash shoots.
The MVD Rewind Collection is all about Gen X nostalgia, and for many fans of late night cable hijinks, this double feature of The Bikini Carwash Company will scratch that nostalgia itch perfectly.
