Check Out Chicks

Just 5 years ago Bluebird Films in England was releasing films by the bushel-basket and "Check Out Chicks" (also spelled as one-word Checkout on the DVD box) is typical. Now dormant, label is living off its voluminous catalog and the idiosyncratic charm of its output.

You won't think of Benny Hill, but his "naughty but nice" approach (plus the busty eye candy Hill's Angels) perhaps inspired the goofy Bluebird house style. Here we're presented with a lengthy series of blackout sketches, executed with confrontational improv comedy dialog, leading to multiple-sex as threesomes or more, all taking place near the checkout counter of a supermarket. Sexy uniforms are the rule and the pleasantly top-heavy cast is recruited from the upper ranks of Brit Porn actresses.

The difference between this and the omnipresent gonzo sex that passes for pornography nowadays is in the secret Bluebird sauce. There's a joie de vivre to these Brits horsing around and then humping that is missing from our Staeside mechanical sex and preposterously fake expressions of passion and emotion with porn phrases I haven't had to memorize for some pop quiz but which are imprinted on my consciousness by endless repetition, just like those advertising TV jingles of my youth that one never forgets.

The cast list is so long and so familiar that usual superstar Cindy Behr gets last billing among the dozen femmes, though likely first in the hearts of her countrymen. Yes, spunk is flying (and being swapped mouth to mouth) as the film approaches its third hour. It's silly but oddly entertaining.