Teenie Weenie Bikini Squad (4½ Stars)

This is the 29th film in the Medina Collection, made in 2011. I admit that I wanted to give all the films in the Medina Collection a flat four star rating, so that I wouldn't have the headache of having to compare them with one another. The films are good, but nobody, not even Fred Olen Ray himself, would call them great, so four stars is a fair rating. However, this film stands above the 28 films I've watched so far. The plot is more complex than anything that has gone before. This is probably because it's the first film in the collection that was written by Dean McKendrick.

The film is based on Charlie's Angels, and here are the three girls, from left to right Nikki, Sandy and Jasmine. In case you don't know the actresses already, they're Kylee Nash, Brandin Rackley and Michelle Maylene. They are hired to investigate a series of mysterious deaths in the Playpen Mansion.

The girls report to Boswell, or rather Mike Gaglio, in their best bikinis. How does the poor man manage to keep his mind on his work? Mike tells the girls that this is a personal matter to him, because he's had a subscription to Playpen Magazine for many years, though he only buys it for the articles. Really? I find the articles in Playboy Magazine dull. A friend of mine in Germany once told me that he read Playboy (the German edition) because it was the only left-wing liberal magazine on sale. Maybe that's why I thought the articles were so dull.

Evan Stone returns as a regular actor after being absent from the last nine films. You'll immediately notice that his hair is shorter. The last film that he made was "Bikini Royale" in 2008. In 2009 he had his hair cut to play Jim Kirk in Axel Braun's first Star Trek film. There's a video of his hair being cut in the DVD extras. It was a momentous occasion that deserved to be recorded. Since then he's grown his hair slightly longer, but not as long as it used to be.

This is my favourite scene in the film. Evan Stone is the ultimate Mr. Macho in all his films, so I'm glad to see him taken down a notch. He's no match for the Teenie Weenie Bikini Squad. They leave him tied up, naked except for his shirt. This should happen to him more often.

Ted Newsom appears as Tef, the owner of Playpen Magazine. Wow! Doesn't Tef look more Hef than Hef? Ted Newsom was born to play this role. His speech will go down in history:

"As everyone knows, for decades the dream of every little girl in every little town across this great nation has been to become the Playpen Girl of the Month. Nothing says success like a staple through the navel".

Those are powerful fighting words. Unfortunately, the real Hef, Hugh Hefner, has lost his way. He's decided that Playboy Magazine should no longer contain photos of naked women. That's tragic. How could such a great man become so confused in his old age?

There's a newspaper shown in the film. The headline says that the lead article is about the Playpen empire crumbling. If you look carefully at the article itself, it's about same-sex marriages in California. That has nothing to do with the headline. Sloppy.