The Doll Squad (Ted V. Mikels, 1973)

The Doll Squad, my third time to the Ted V. Mikels well after the disappointing Blood Orgy of the She-Devils (a title that promised way more than it could deliver) and the much more entertaining The Corpse Grinders (an accurate title), is my new favorite Mikels movie. If you share my '70s fetish, this movie is the equivalent of Quentin Tarantino walking into a room occupied by 150 barefoot women. You get '70s bars, restaurants, karate schools, offices, cars, boats, apartment buildings, secret island lairs, jumpsuits and other memorable outfits, hairdos, large clunky computers, modern art, martini pitchers, wigs, mustaches, interior design, carpeting, etc. You get to sigh eternally in the early '70s drive-in universe, a time before corporate slickification and predatory tech be-smoothed and de-textured and surveilled and packaged the world and put everything in quotes. The counterculture put up a valiant effort in the '80s and '90s against the forces of all-consuming texture removal and content delivery, but the 21st century has been a real vibe-killer with Big Tech and the digital revolution sucking out so much of the feeling. I wish I could live an eternal loop as a mid- to late-twentysomething in different major cities and college towns between the 1920s and September 10, 2001, a sort of benevolent aesthete hedonist temporal loop vampire, but that's sadly not the way anything works.

Why am I getting so heavy when talking about the freakin' Doll Squad? What's wrong with me? It's alright, it's just the permanent eternal struggle in my soul between my aesthetic love of the 20th century, my aesthetic dislike of most aspects of the 21st century (with loads of exceptions; I'm still as excited as I've ever been by music outside of the fetid swamp of contemporary manufactured pop and pop/country, and there are still many great new movies every year outside of the dead spaces of Hollywood, fake indie, and made-for-streaming), my constant working goal to live in the present, my disrespect of nostalgia, my hope for what technology can accomplish (especially medical advances), my burning hatred for the controllers of Big Tech and their bad faith uses of it, and my complicated reverence for the way things used to be before AI, smart phones, social media, influencers, reaction videos, ads blaring at me at gas pumps, etc., became the way of things. I got heavy again. Sorry, I'm just very heavy these days. I'm having a hard time existing in this world that shares none of my values and is actively hostile to them. But you're not here for a lecture about the Shitty Now (term coined by my friend Dan Schneider; not the Nickelodeon creep, a different Dan Schneider). You're here for The Doll Squad, man. Let's get into it.

I had a blast with this one. I feel sorry for anyone who can't get into an elite squad of ass-kicking babes (including Tura Satana) in eye-popping ensembles traveling to a heavily guarded island compound to save the world from Dear Dead Delilah's Michael Ansara. When Hollywood makes this kind of movie (or used to before everything had to be about superheroes and elves and shit), they present it with a certain ironic detachment. They wink at the audience. "We both know this is bullshit," the Hollywood machine says. They're afraid to commit to the sensibility or they don't understand it or they halfheartedly copy it or they think they understand the sensibility but slick it up with too much big-time showbiz. The drive-in/exploitation filmmaker already has the sensibility, was probably born with it, and presents the ridiculousness with a refreshingly direct and natural and personalized approach. Even the cheapest, most money-grubbing exploitation filmmaker can find authentic pockets of weirdness and delight in places Hollywood big shots don't even know where to look. To put it in wrestling terms, the Hollywood approach is Vince McMahon sports entertainment while the drive-in/exploitation approach is classic Southern territory rasslin'.

The Doll Squad begins with a United States senator named Stockwell (John Carter) watching live coverage of a rocket launch on his office television. This is the first launch in a new space exploration project spearheaded by the senator, though how this project differs from the usual NASA biz remains unexplained in the film. Stockwell is soon joined by CIA operative Victor Connelly (Anthony Eisley). The two men exchange small talk about the launch until something goes wrong. The TV screen strobes and a strange voice tells Stockwell that since he ignored an earlier demand, bad shit is about to go down. The rocket then explodes. Stockwell and Connelly urgently run to the "computer room" to analyze the data and the recording the quick-thinking Connelly grabbed of the strange voice. Why does a U.S. senator have an intelligence-agency-level high-tech (in '70s terms) computer room next to his office, and why does the window view of the presumably D.C.-located office look like Los Angeles? Embrace the mystery, mortals. Let the gods know the answers.

Connelly and Stockwell do some compute-box beep-boopin', and the computer spits out a suggestion. The fellas need to call the Doll Squad. Bang! Enter kick-ass opening credits sequence, and then back to the office, where Doll Squad leader Sabrina Kincaid and her amazing outfit and low-cut top can be debriefed on the rocket mishap, secret recording, and crazy TV shenanigan. The men tell her which two other Doll Squad members she needs to wrangle into the investigation. Seems like Sabrina should know who she needs from her own team. Nevertheless, Sabrina pays a visit to the women suggested by the dudes at their respective day jobs, a karate school and a medical research lab. Both secret Doll Squad members are security experts. Unfortunately, they should've been a little more proactive with their own security. Some classic '70s dirtbags kill both of them shortly after Sabrina visits them. When one of the dirtbags tries to kill her, she uses her flamethrower cigarette lighter to scorch half his face and escape. Every explosion in this movie is insanely cartoony and cheap, looking like a bedazzled word balloon, and I love each one with all my heart.

After hitting the gun range with the senator and the operative while wearing a form-fitting, midriff-baring ensemble, Sabrina shows the skeptical senator her suitcase full of Bond-style gadgets and tells them she needs to assemble the entire Doll Squad to take down the baddies. The senator, wowed by the gadgets, drops his skepticism and gives Sabrina two weeks, the same amount of time he's been given by the president to prevent the termination of his space project.

Sabrina collects her squad, including the legendary Tura Satana as Lavelle Sumara, and gets down to business. A Satana digression: I was lucky enough to see Satana and fellow Russ Meyer alumni Haji and Lori Williams in person at an Alamo Drafthouse-sponsored drive-in double feature at a speedway a few miles outside of Austin back in 2002. Organizationally, it was a bit of a shitshow, but Satana had no fear of getting out amongst the people and mingling with the crowd. When I was wandering the speedway before it got dark enough to screen the movies, I happened upon her holding court in front of a small crowd of fans and got to hear some stories about her brief romance with Elvis. "Holy shit, I'm five feet away from Tura Satana, and she's telling Elvis stories!" I remember thinking. Pretty cool, and despite the organizational chaos (including a ridiculously inadequate number of restroom facilities), I'm grateful for the experience, especially now that Satana and Haji are no longer with us.

Speaking of Elvis, former government agent and lover of Sabrina turned evil madman Eamon O'Reilly (Michael Ansara) is hatching evil plans from his swanky pad, which looks like it shared the same interior decorator as Graceland. He has an evil henchmen, Joseph (William Bagdad), and a slightly less evil but still somewhat evil girlfriend, Maria (Hee-Haw's Lisa Todd), to do his bidding. After his plans to destroy the Doll Squad go awry, Eamon heads to his secret island lair guarded by his own private army, where he mingles with an international cadre of baddies who have nefarious world-conquering plans. The Doll Squad, hip to the lair, put on their bikinis and charter a private boat to the island under the guise of going on a rock-collecting trip.

Off the boat and on the island, the squad members change into more cool outfits, split into two groups, and sneak close to the compound, with two of the members disposing of two of the private army through the ol' vodka dosed with liquid that makes you explode gag. Love that gag. Reunited once more, the Dolls change outfits yet again, this time into matching green jumpsuits for the full-on assault on the compound. Love the jumpsuits, love the compound assault.

While I wish we had a little more time on the city streets before the action shifted to the island, I was never bored. Some critics of the film think it's overlong and a bit draggy in this section, but I disagree. The performances remain enjoyable (though I wish Satana had more to do), the action remains intense, the explosions remain hilarious, the outfits remain incredible, and the splatter is H.G. Lewis-worthy. Corpse Grinders, you've been knocked down to number 2 on my Ted V. Mikels power rankings.

Speaking of Mikels, he lived a wild and free life until his death from colon cancer in 2016 at the age of 87. A semi-prolific director of independent exploitation films who sported a memorable waxed handlebar mustache and never left the house without his boar's-tooth necklace, Mikels was born in St. Paul, Minnesota to Eastern European immigrant parents. The family moved to Portland, Oregon when Mikels was nine, and he developed in interest in photography, theater, and film, as well as archery, horses, and stunt work. In his twenties, Mikels started a production company in Bend, Oregon, that produced educational films and short films from aspiring filmmakers. He also did some work as a stuntman and research consultant for Hollywood westerns shooting in Oregon, though he never achieved his dream of directing a Hollywood studio film.

Moving to Los Angeles in the '60s, Mikels directed a string of drive-in/grindhouse features until the early '80s, living in a home decorated like a castle (the interiors of which were frequently used as locations in his films, including The Doll Squad), in which he lived with as many as a dozen women at a time. Mikels became almost as well known for throwing raging parties as for directing exploitation movies. Moving to Las Vegas in the '80s and staying for the rest of his life, Mikels set up another castle-esque party mansion and directed another string of exploitation movies after a mid-'80s lull. Besides the movies I already mentioned in this post, Mikels' filmography includes Dr. Sex, Girl in Gold Boots, The Astro-Zombies, Ten Violent Women, Mission: Killfast, Paranormal Extremes: Text Messages from the Dead, and his only G-rated film, Heart of a Boy, the inspirational tale of an inspirational five-year-old who needs a heart transplant, causing the community to rally behind him inspirationally. I'm guessing that one won't make my Ted V. Mikels power rankings.