Rating: 9/20
Plot: A barnstorming female baseball team runs into some trouble in Hicksville after the opposing coach refuses to pay.
Note: This also goes by the much-better name of Baseball Bimbos in Hillbilly Hell.
The most surprising things about this are that it came out in 1990 and that it was directed by a woman. It's actually director Tanya Rosenberg's only credit which was surprising to me because it's not completely inept film-making or anything. No, she expertly showed off these scantily-clad and oft-naked women just like a male exploitative director in the 1970s would have, most notably during an extended and completely pointless shower scene. This is a lot like Rambo with the whole "Hunters became the hunted" idea on the poster up there, only the makers of Rambo thankfully didn't try to find any excuse they could to get their main character naked. Plenty of skin in Blood Games, gratuitous, if you're into that sort of thing. I, of course, only watched this because I was in the mood for a good baseball movie, but there's only baseball in the first ten minutes of the movie unless you count women hitting rednecks in strategic locations with bats as baseball. That game was a disappointment though. [SPOILER ALERT] The girls win 17-2? C'mon, drunk rednecks, that's just embarrassing. This movie definitely gives psychotic country folk a bad name, not because they try to rape members of a female baseball team or murder people. No, it's the way they celebrate and talk trash during a baseball game they are losing so badly. One said, "Hey, let me show you my bat!" after a double and added some hip gyrations, very similar to a move that got me in trouble during a church softball game. My favorite redneck is played by the great George "Buck" Flower who even gets a scene where he's attacked by a group of women after caught being a peeping-Buck during the shower scene. He's got a trucker cap that says "The check is in the mail" which I assume came from his own personal collection, and for most of the movie but especially the locker room scene, it looks like he accidentally wandered onto the set or something. My favorite line in the movie is from main redneck Mino: "You're fucking with the devil now, boy." I think it's how he said it, with a little gravel in his voice box. He's played by a guy named Ken Carpenter who got a strange filmography. He acted and was a crew member for a movie in '74, had an uncredited role in a 1977 movie, and then did nine films between 1989 and 1994 before apparently dropping off the face of the earth until 2011 when he played a ranger in a movie that he wrote and produced called The Terror at Big Bear Lake: Thrillogy. He could have easily had a career as a poor-man's Sam Elliott though. Anyway, this isn't exactly a baseball classic like I expected and it's not quality storytelling either, but it's kind of fun in bits and pieces. And I'm sure a feminist would love it!
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