With her lovely, delicately sculpted face, lustrous long red hair, sparkling blue eyes, slender, shapely figure, ceaseless vivacity, and strong, assertive, engaging personality, the late, great, much-missed former "Playboy" Playmate of the Year turned surprisingly good actress Claudia Jennings was undoubtedly the Venus of delightfully low-rent nickel'n'dime white-trash 70's grind-house grunge -- and quite possibly the Ultimate Drive-In Movie Goddess. Her untimely, unfortunate death at the tragically young age of 29 -- she was hit head-on by a truck while driving her car en route to an audition for a part in a film which might have crossed her over into the mainstream -- has left a yawning void that no other actress could even begin to fill.
Luckily, Claudia left behind a most formidable legacy of top-rate Me Decade exploitation bilge, with such gloriously greasy'n'grungy goodies as "'Gatorbait," "Unholy Rollers," "The Great Texas Dynamite Chase," and this choice chunk of righteously raucous'n'raunchy sleaze-ball fun doing their part to keep Claudia's legend alive in $.99 cent two night rental bin eternity. Claudia's in peak spitfire, take-charge, no-bulls**t form here as Rose, a spoiled rotten little strumpet b**ch who wants to take over the highly successful restaurant cum prostitution, car-jacking and smuggling ring that's sternly run by her equally redoubtable, domineering, tough-minded mother Aunt Anna (a rip-snorting slice of fat, juicy, lip-licking prime A-cut ham from veteran soap opera actress Lieux Dressler, who also popped up in the indispensable fright film favorites "Grave of the Vampire" and "Kingdom of the Spiders"). Rose hooks up with a couple of slick'n'slimy Mafia hoods in order to take over Aunt Anna's prosperous, eminently desirable and highly illegal operation, with the whole thing culminating in a bitterly ironic mother/daughter gunslinger-style showdown which actually transpires in a dusty, desolate abandoned ghost town! Spirited, rowdy and immensely good-natured despite its scuzzy subject matter, "Truck Stop Women" makes for an insanely enjoyable affair that's loaded with all the right eager and aiming to please exploitation feature ingredients, namely ample gratuitous female nudity (Claudia in particular looks completely stunning sans shirt), shoot-outs, bloody rub-outs (watch for the scene where two dastardly fellows get trampled to death by irate cows!), double and triple crosses, a suitably lowbrow sense of rollicking, trashed-out humor, a hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-frying-pan "liberated women gleefully stick it to smug sexist oppressive dudes" feminist subtext (almost all the gals in this one use and abuse unsuspecting patsy guys for their own greedy self-serving reasons), deliciously ludicrous plot twists, and more gear-grinding, smoke-spewing, rubber-roasting full-throttle stomp on the gas mondo destructo truck chases than you can shake a rusty monkey wrench at. Highlights include one 18-wheeler taking the almighty plunge off a steep embankment and the corrupt, corpulent gutbucket sheriff having his beloved police car turned into an asphalt flapjack by a speeding Semi.
Director/co-screenwriter Mark ("Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw," "Class of 1984") Lester pumps the pace into hyper-kinetic overdrive and allows the infectiously enthusiastic actors to cheerfully emote their crazed heads off. Tubby sourpuss Gene Drew and scrawny goof-ball Dennis Fimple supply hilariously bumbling'n'fumbling comic relief as Aunt Anna's inept flunkies, John Martino lets the smarmy charm ooze freely as an excessively oily sludgewad mobster, familiar 70's TV movie face Paul Carr appears as a character so shady he even gets his own cheesy recurrent spaghetti Western-style twangy guitar theme, and generously over-proportioned Russ Meyer starlet Uschi Digard proudly displays her substantial wares as a perpetually topless truck stop trollop. The steady succession of blow-your-speakers-out boisterous country music from both the fantastic Rod Hart (the theme song's a real doozy) and the simply stupendous Big Mack and the Truckstoppers seriously smokes. All in all, what we've got here is a bona-fide four-star both thumbs way up 70's drive-in celluloid landmark of tremendous cultural importance and artistic integrity, meaning that it's flat-out mindless trash with absolutely no pretense or delusions of grandeur to speak of.
Luckily, Claudia left behind a most formidable legacy of top-rate Me Decade exploitation bilge, with such gloriously greasy'n'grungy goodies as "'Gatorbait," "Unholy Rollers," "The Great Texas Dynamite Chase," and this choice chunk of righteously raucous'n'raunchy sleaze-ball fun doing their part to keep Claudia's legend alive in $.99 cent two night rental bin eternity. Claudia's in peak spitfire, take-charge, no-bulls**t form here as Rose, a spoiled rotten little strumpet b**ch who wants to take over the highly successful restaurant cum prostitution, car-jacking and smuggling ring that's sternly run by her equally redoubtable, domineering, tough-minded mother Aunt Anna (a rip-snorting slice of fat, juicy, lip-licking prime A-cut ham from veteran soap opera actress Lieux Dressler, who also popped up in the indispensable fright film favorites "Grave of the Vampire" and "Kingdom of the Spiders"). Rose hooks up with a couple of slick'n'slimy Mafia hoods in order to take over Aunt Anna's prosperous, eminently desirable and highly illegal operation, with the whole thing culminating in a bitterly ironic mother/daughter gunslinger-style showdown which actually transpires in a dusty, desolate abandoned ghost town! Spirited, rowdy and immensely good-natured despite its scuzzy subject matter, "Truck Stop Women" makes for an insanely enjoyable affair that's loaded with all the right eager and aiming to please exploitation feature ingredients, namely ample gratuitous female nudity (Claudia in particular looks completely stunning sans shirt), shoot-outs, bloody rub-outs (watch for the scene where two dastardly fellows get trampled to death by irate cows!), double and triple crosses, a suitably lowbrow sense of rollicking, trashed-out humor, a hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-frying-pan "liberated women gleefully stick it to smug sexist oppressive dudes" feminist subtext (almost all the gals in this one use and abuse unsuspecting patsy guys for their own greedy self-serving reasons), deliciously ludicrous plot twists, and more gear-grinding, smoke-spewing, rubber-roasting full-throttle stomp on the gas mondo destructo truck chases than you can shake a rusty monkey wrench at. Highlights include one 18-wheeler taking the almighty plunge off a steep embankment and the corrupt, corpulent gutbucket sheriff having his beloved police car turned into an asphalt flapjack by a speeding Semi.
Director/co-screenwriter Mark ("Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw," "Class of 1984") Lester pumps the pace into hyper-kinetic overdrive and allows the infectiously enthusiastic actors to cheerfully emote their crazed heads off. Tubby sourpuss Gene Drew and scrawny goof-ball Dennis Fimple supply hilariously bumbling'n'fumbling comic relief as Aunt Anna's inept flunkies, John Martino lets the smarmy charm ooze freely as an excessively oily sludgewad mobster, familiar 70's TV movie face Paul Carr appears as a character so shady he even gets his own cheesy recurrent spaghetti Western-style twangy guitar theme, and generously over-proportioned Russ Meyer starlet Uschi Digard proudly displays her substantial wares as a perpetually topless truck stop trollop. The steady succession of blow-your-speakers-out boisterous country music from both the fantastic Rod Hart (the theme song's a real doozy) and the simply stupendous Big Mack and the Truckstoppers seriously smokes. All in all, what we've got here is a bona-fide four-star both thumbs way up 70's drive-in celluloid landmark of tremendous cultural importance and artistic integrity, meaning that it's flat-out mindless trash with absolutely no pretense or delusions of grandeur to speak of.