Extremely R-Rated Thriller Is So Relentlessly Tasteless, You Need To Watch It Twice

By Robert Scucci
| Published 17 seconds ago

I love a good parody film when done right, especially when they fall into the police procedural wheelhouse. The Naked Gun franchise perfected the formula, and even had a surprisingly solid reboot last year, with Liam Neeson taking over for Leslie Nielsen. One film that was eaten alive by critics, 1993’s Fatal Instinct, is another favorite of mine despite its 14 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes. While the film follows in the footsteps of The Naked Gun, it’s often dismissed as a cheap imitation and a lackluster Basic Instinct parody.

Which brings us to 1996’s Blondes Have More Guns, which is basically an even cheaper, more tasteless version of Fatal Instinct, thanks to Troma Entertainment’s involvement. For some reason, though, I love it. It’s a movie that plays the numbers game when it comes to jokes-per-minute, and more often than not, they don’t land. But this is one of those rare cases where I found myself laughing at the jokes that don’t land because I admire the audacity. They’re throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, and the pace is so rapid-fire that you need to watch it twice to catch everything you missed the first time around.

Dick, Harry, And Captain Hook Are On The Case! 

Blondes Have More Guns begins with a blonde woman wielding a chainsaw, not a gun. She murders a man while bumping uglies, and the next day’s crime scene introduces us to grossly incompetent Detectives Dick Smoker (Richard Neil) and Harry Bates (Michael McGaharn), under the supervision of their vodka-chugging superior, Captain Hook (André Brazeau). Tagging along with Dick is his dog, which is really just an uncredited guy in a dog suit who comes and goes as he pleases.

Right away, the detectives find a suspect in Montana Beaver-Shotz (Elizabeth Key), but things become even more complicated when her half-sister, Dakota Beaver (Gloria Lusiak), starts making her presence known and implicating herself in the murder, which is just one of many linked to a possible serial killer on the loose.

Harry, haunted by the death of his wife to the point where he constantly has to remind everybody that his wife is dead to maintain the hard-boiled noir vibe, becomes romantically entangled with Montana and Dakota, clouding his judgment during the investigation. From here, Blondes Have More Guns becomes complete chaos and follows all the Naked Gun beats you know and love, but uses vulgarity as its main vehicle to get where it’s going.

So Stupid That It’s Smart

If there’s one quote that sums up Blondes Have More Guns, it’s in the opening scene, when Captain Hook, in between huge gulps of liquor, states, “Look, Harry, this is the fourth murder this month involving a scarf, a chain, a saw, and a dead body. If I was a betting man, I’d wager there was a connection between them.” Everybody is so stupid in this film that it’s clear how much thought went into the screenplay, as juvenile and tasteless as it is. The wit comes from how dimwitted every single character is.

Jamming as many sight gags as humanly possible into every frame is just the icing on the cake in Blondes Have More Guns. After a while, the mystery and plot take a back seat so we can feast our eyes on two idiots wearing badges who don’t know their asses from a doughnut hole. It’s such a treat watching this gaggle of clowns commit so hard to the bit.

Movies like Blondes Have More Guns always earn my respect because they go all in on absurdity. It doesn’t hurt that this is basically Naked Gun meets Fatal Instinct, but with as much toilet humor and oversexed dialogue as Troma could cram into it.

BLONDES HAVE MORE GUNS SCORE

Blondes Have More Guns isn’t high art. Heck, some people would argue it’s not art at all. But it’s a glorious trainwreck that leans into neo-noir mystery, police procedural drama, and straight-faced buffoonery that fans of tasteless parody can absolutely get behind. If you want to solve the mystery for yourself, you can stream the title for free on Tubi as of this writing.