Movies
Bikini Bloodbath 2: Bikini Bloodbath Carwash (V)
“For this critic, the utter likeability of the BIKINI BLOODBATH series carries enough weight to override any creative incompetence. The nudity is often memorable, the montages are mind-numbingly brilliant, and the goofy dialogue is consistently worth a chuckle. Worth checking out as long as you know what you’re getting into.”
For those of you not familiar with the rich mythology behind the BIKINI BLOODBATH series, let’s recap:
In the shat-on-video original film from 2006, a bearded Chef hacked up a handful of topless high school girls (read: 30-year-old actors posing as jailbait), a group of football players explored their homoerotic futures, the audience was bombarded by random dance montages; all of which was accompanied by the butt-rock thrashings of White Liger, a truly bad-ass hair band. BIKINI BLOODBATH had boobs, laffs, hard rockin’ tunes….it had pretty much everything except a decent plot or respectable production values.
BIKINI BLOODBATH 2: BIKINI BLOODBATH CARWASH picks up a couple of years later: the high school skanks have now matured into fully-matriculated students at Community College University who occasionally tit-scrub cars at the local Debbie Rochon-owned car wash, but their day job doesn’t stop them from constantly chugging booze, getting topless, and dancing to bangin’ White Liger riffs. By the way, The Chef is still out to kill some bitches, and his gore is new and improved, but the kills are once again staged with all the directorial finesse of Kevin Smith on quaaludes.
Essentially CARWASH is a carbon copy of the original BIKINI BLOODBATH, an exploration of bare tits, bad acting, and a fistful of well-edited montages. And oh, the montages. Any serious discussion of CARWASH deserves at least a full paragraph regarding the film’s montages. Of course you can assume you’re going to get your soapy bikini car wash montage, that goes without saying, and with BIKINI BLOODBATH CARWASH, you get two of ‘em. There’s also a party dance montage (co-ed), a break-dancing montage staged on a splayed cardboard box (guys only), and a “suiting up for battle” montage, as the bitches prep for their final face-off against The Chef. Lots of montages. If montages were a fetish, CARWASH would be porn.
There’s really nothing much to recommend BIKINI BLOODBATH CARWASH unless you’re into mindless, shot-on-video bullshit. It’s not a very good movie. But for this critic, the utter likeability of the BIKINI BLOODBATH series carries enough weight to override any creative incompetence. The nudity is often memorable, the montages are mind-numbingly brilliant, and the goofy dialogue is consistently worth a chuckle. Worth checking out as long as you know what you’re getting into.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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