American Angels: Baptism of Blood (1989)

And then, after the hilarious contest that is advertised just before the movie starts, you get an hour and forty minutes of crap. American Angels is about a group of professional female wrestlers called, you guessed it, the American Angels. It seems that ratings have been falling the previous year (for reasons which had to have been obvious), so the managers send out a scout to find interesting new talent. The guy that they send out is Diamond Dave, who is supposed to be the biggest and most famous wrestling manager in Hollywood. Yeah, you remember this guy as the dumb-as-a-post redneck from Gator Bait II, right? Anyway, he's a total moron from beginning to end, so let's move on.

Jan Mackenzie, also recognizable from Gator Bait II, plays the part of Luscious Lisa, the new talent that Diamond Dave finds as a goofy stripper in Bakersfield. When she is inaugurated to the team, the other Angels give her the predictable hard time (seeing how she's stealing the show), and all sorts of cat-fighting mayhem ensues. And as if 99 minutes of female wrestling wasn't torture enough, they decided to throw in a MIDGET to wrestle for a while (cue Diamond Dave's intellectual comment, 'Twist him! Make that little midget squeal!').

There is a pathetic attempt to create an emotional subplot as Lisa struggles to make her grandfather proud of her while she works in a profession that he - like any other person with two brain cells working simultaneously would do - sees as a disgrace. The other idiotic subplot to totally ignore is the one about one of the Angels' problems with a gangster back in Chicago. It seems that she owes him a substantial amount of money, and he intends to come after her. I'm not sure she should be afraid though, because early in the film, he throws her into a trashcan and screams at her that it's his town and that he owns everything in it. That's pretty impressive, but it makes you wonder why someone so important hangs out in a rat-infested alley next to a bunch of disgusting dumpsters. Not a real powerful image.

Ultimately, we get some sort of a climactic fight scene between Luscious Lisa and Mimi, the Angel with whom she has the biggest rivalry. It's your basic main event, tacked onto the end of the movie, narrated by a dumbass sportscaster who doesn't know a right leg from a left leg, and that takes place in an arena that seems to be populated mostly by young boys who enthusiastically cheer on their favorite g-string clad American Angel. And then of course, when Lisa executes her infamous move, 'the snap,' which she learned from her famous grandfather (who once killed someone with the move), the moronic sportscaster mentions that he wasn't even sure that 'the snap' even existed. That would make the move much more impressive and maybe even memorable if it had been anything more than a flying kick to the head. Are there any moves in wrestling that DON'T involve a flying kick to the head?!

Clearly, American Angels is a dim-witted movie that commands no respect whatsoever, but ironically, professional wrestling, male OR female, has never been as respectable as this crap. On the other hand, you can't look at the cover of a film like this and expect to get a cerebral workout from watching it, but it's bad movies like this that make the good movies so much better. This is why I watch movies like this, by the way. I know from the moment I see it at the video store that it's going to be so bad that it will almost hurt to watch it, but it really makes me appreciate the good movies.