Director Brett Piper once again blows dust off the ancient art of stop-motion animation for this pre-fab cult flick from Shock-O-Rama. The owner of a dinosaur-themed strip club (the “Go-Go-Saurus”) is desperate for cash to buy the joint before his late partner’s widow takes over. As it is, business has been lousy, his strippers are exhausted from overwork, and the few patrons they draw are more interested in brawling than boobs. He decides to try his hand at a little drug trafficking, but the marijuana he arranges to buy is not only a crate short, but infested with bizarre, overgrown blood-sucking ticks. Soon the Go-Go-Saurus is teeming with pests, and those who get bitten by these unstoppable bugs are behaving strangely, discarding their inhibitions and indulging in public nudity and Sapphic sex. Things get even more complicated when a crazed ex-DEA agent starts waving his gun around, and the exterminator’s poison just makes the bugs grow larger and deadlier. Meanwhile, Misty Mundae takes a shower …
“Bite Me!” balances the gags and the gore nicely, despite the flimsy nature of the entire production. Piper’s special effects are done the old fashioned way with clay models, and while deft with the process, his results are only nominally convincing. Most of the laughs are pure corn (having the bug’s bite act as an aphrodisiac is a device right out of Softcore 101), but the cast is game for anything and they play it to the hilt. Mundae goes into Rambo mode and chainsaws an arachnid the size of a Shetland Pony, nearsighted Erika Smith (“The Sexy Adventures of Van Helsing”) attempts a saucy burlesque routine without glasses and brains herself against the brass pole, and Julian Wells (“Who Wants To Be An Erotic Billionaire?”) channels the spirit of Courtney Love after a ladies’ room encounter with the bloodsuckers. Piper doesn’t hit the overkill button until the final act, when a man-sized mutant insect finally gets the eyes rolling, but this modest horror-comedy toes the line between clever and stupid more nimbly than most.
Along with the standard collection of navel-gazing documentaries on the DVD release is a gruesome video for rockers CKY that features “Bite Me!” star Misty Mundae. The song is lousy, but the clip is memorable for Mundae’s seductive gore-soaked knife dance; a simple kitchen accident drives the lass to erotic acts of self-mutilation for our viewing pleasure. This being a man’s, man’s, man’s world, of course, her masturbatory slicing is interrupted at the very end by a masked killer, proving that even when a girl gives us exactly what we want, some big-shot has to have the last word.
