Buford's Beach Bunnies

Jeeter Buford (Jim Hanks, lookalike brother of Tom) is a young man who has spent years in institutions, ever since an incident at a brothel when he was 14 left him with a deathly fear of female contact. His father Harry (Barrett Cooper), owner of the Buford's Bunny Hole restaurant, has been hospitalized and is concerned for Jeeter's mental health. He offers three of his "bunnies," Lauren (Rikki Brando), Amber (Monique Parent), and Boopsie (Amy Page), a proposition: if any one of them can get Jeeter to overcome his condition, he'll give the successful girl $100,000. Harry's enormously obese niece, Beulah Lugosi (Ina Rogers), who's acting as manager of the Bunny Hole, overhears the proposition, and schemes to have Jeeter recommitted with the help of a local hypnotist, The Amazing Foreskin (David Robinson).

Boopsie and Amber both try to seduce Jeeter with no success, but Lauren, a psychology student, takes genuine interest in his predicament. When Jeeter rescues her from her too-hot-to-trot boyfriend Karl (Adam Wahl), she begins to genuinely fall for him, and he responds to her sensitivity. Harry arrives home from the hospital to find the two asleep in each other's arms, and congratulates Lauren as she later leaves the house, offering her the reward. Now in love with Jeeter, she turns the money down and goes back to work. Boopsie and Amber can't believe it's the seemingly "straight" Lauren who's won Jeeter over, and when Jeeter overhears them talking about Harry's reward, he believes that was Lauren's motivation. Beulah invites him out to dinner with her new boyfriend, "Forey"; the latter hypnotizes Jeeter into attacking a girl and a cop, resulting in his arrest.

Harry visits Jeeter in jail and reveals to him that Lauren really loves him, but Jeeter can't remember the events of the restaurant. Lauren, Boopsie, and Amber decide to do some investigating, and go back to the whorehouse where his trauma occurred. There, Lauren steals a file revealing what happened; the three girls then visit the Amazing Foreskin at his club and confront him. As Jeeter is going on trial and is about to be recommitted, Lauren arrives with the hypnotist and reveals that Beulah had been scheming to have Jeeter returned to the asylum in order to become Harry's beneficiary. Forey also regresses Jeeter back to the age of 14, where he remembers the incident that traumatized him: he witnessed Beulah, then one of the working girls, crushing to death a man who made fun of her. Beulah's treachery exposed, Jeeter is acquitted and goes on to marry Lauren.

BUFORD'S BEACH BUNNIES marks the marriage of Axis's usual pop-goes-the-blouse approach with the cheerfully juvenile humor of director/co-writer Mark Pirro, who has won a cult following with super-8 parody features like A POLISH VAMPIRE IN BURBANK and CURSE OF THE QUEERWOLF. Pirro's sight gags, puns, and throwaway jokes are, as usual, too silly to be offensive, but fail to achieve the densely-packed anarchy of a Zucker Brothers production. The cast generally play their characters as broad as a barn door; Hanks has his brother's hangdog appearance but lacks his comic gifts and energy, while Brando is an appealing lead actress.

BUFORD'S BEACH BUNNIES seems hampered by severe cutting imposed on it by video distributor Imperial Entertainment (the unedited version played on the Playboy Channel and other cable venues). The cuts appear to have been made to favor the sex scenes over the humor--several comic bits were lost--and even over the plot, which now proceeds haphazardly, with at least one scene apparently re-inserted in the wrong place. Several characters listed in the end credits are nowhere to be found in the movie, and the opening titles misspell, not only the name of co-scripter Alan Gries, but that of the film itself, now billed as "BUFFORD'S BEACH BUNNIES." (Extensive nudity, sexual situations, profanity.) leave a comment