The Mini-Skirt Mob (1968)

Traveling rodeo star Jeff Logan (Ross Hagen, Avenging Angel) has just lassoed a different kind of filly: a purty new wife! Her name is Connie (Sherry Jackson, Gunn), and the couple is still in the RV-rockin’ honeymoon phase when a lithesome figure from Jeff’s past pops up.

It’s his ex-girlfriend, Shayne, for whom he was not crying to come back. With perfectly coiffed blonde hair unbecoming of a Honda hellcat, not to mention belies a nail-tough demeanor, Shayne (Diane McBain, Wicked, Wicked) is the leader of the she-devils on wheels who call themselves The Mini-Skirt Mob.

Still harboring quite the lady boner for an nonreciprocal Jeff, who left any bad-boy longings in the dust, Shayne won’t let the two lovebirds alone. In fact, with an assist from Lon (Jeremy Slate, The Centerfold Girls), she’s rarin’ to split them asunder. Why, if she can’t have him, no one will — except the Grim Reaper!

I can’t speak for you, reader, but having two beautiful women fight over you? To the death? I can relate.

Shot in the arid Arizona desert by House of the Damned’s Maury Dexter, The Mini-Skirt Mob is one of the more toothless biker pics to emerge from the era when they actually were in vogue. Despite a significant plot point’s commonality with Lee Frost’s comparatively ballsy Chrome and Hot Leather (they also share space on the official DVD), the AIP offering feels like adults playing pretend — not that there’s really anything wrong with that when you’re revisiting the bones of a long-expired genre. McBain’s villain is presented more as someone to be jeered, rather than feared, as if a catfight is bound to break out at some point. And it does.

The most interesting element to The Mini-Skirt Mob is in its casting of two supporting characters, giving The Bad Seed child star Patty McCormack a grown-girl part as Shayne’s sassy sister, and future Repo Man Harry Dean Stanton an early film role as bad boy Spook, perpetual drunk and dangler of bikini tops. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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