The Masturbating Gunman

Fantom Seed Slinger

The Masturbating Gunman
aka Masked Avenger Versus
Ultra-Villain in the Lair
of the Naked Bikini
Directed by Mark Savage
Australia 2000
Severin Blu Ray Zone 1

Warning: Spoilers... because, wow!

The Masturbating Gunman (known bizarrely in some territories by a much less appropriate title, as Masked Avenger Versus Ultra-Villain In the Lair Of The Naked Bikini) is a micro-budget film by Mark Savage. It’s actually a lot of fun and straddles the line between softcore comedy action with just a dash of added nunsploitation... pretty well. It’s also, it has to be said, truly ridiculous and a film which you really have to suspend your disbelief in order to enjoy it properly, for what it is.

It starts off with the truly unstrustworthy statement that the film is ‘based on a true story’ and follows this with a quote from a fictional person which certainly flags up one of the director’s influences... “If you don’t stop, you’ll go blind. - Hiroshima Nikkatsu” and so the Nikkatsu name firmly establishes that the director wants to make an action thriller and, this is certainly an off beat one, with a plot the likes of Seijun Suzuki might contemplate. However, instead of the rice sniffing hero of Suzuki’s Branded To Kill we have Robin Brenna as the panty sniffing private detective who, when on a case, dons the black leather gimp mask that transforms him into the title character... The Masturbating Gunman. He and his lame assistant take on missing person/abduction cases and he uses the panties of the missing person to completely profile the missing gals and then track them throughout the country via his keen sense of smell.

During a scene early on in the film, we see him track down a girl and rescue her from a bunch of kidnappers on a beach, in an action sequence which serves to set the tone of the movie while also introducing us to the gunman’s other personality quirk, which is a huge flaw in his chosen profession. Whenever he sees a beautiful woman and is turned on by her, he has to stop whatever he’s doing and masturbate to her until he’s finished. Something we also see at the start of the film when he hires a sex worker to look at him while he jerks off... and huge gouts of semen cover his masked face, in a scene with a preamble much reminiscent of the way Sergio Leone might stage a showdown in one of his spaghetti westerns.

So in the action sequence in question, we see him take out two gunmen and then, reaching into the gaping wound of one bad guy, he pulls out his intestine and uses it as a whip to disarm the main man. Alas, a bikini clad woman is also on hand and he has to stop what he’s doing, fall on the floor and masturbate. He manages to finish just before the bad guy hits him on the head with a rock and saves the day.

After this set up, we meet the main villain, Helmut Gunta, played by Peter Beitans, a ruthless but bizarre criminal who has just got out of jail and orders his hired goons to find him a virgin so he can father the ultimate God-like child as an heir to his villainous organisation. Where his goons make a mistake is in kidnapping a nun from the local church (played by Nene Powell) who happens to be the sister of... you guessed it... The Masturbating Gunman. Luckily, she realises what’s happening and leaves her panties behind outside the church, for her brother to find.

And the film is totally silly, over the top and, a little strained on occasion in terms of how it’s edited (I suspect not quite everything got shot) but, for a micro-budget feature, it’s actually pretty impressive with all the actors playing it straight faced and totally going for it... which is hard when the script is full of lines like “They say he must jerk before he does his work” or “Only a gay man would jerk off to a woman with a moustache”.

Spoilers now though so, if you don’t want to know how strange this film gets (and how much you have to cross your fingers and go with it due to the sheer ridiculousness of the content), then read no further. After a lengthy action scene near the end of the movie, the villain has laid on a series of stripping woman, each one slowing the hero down a little more while he has to masturbate to each on in turn until, by the time he’s ‘well spent’ after the last one, he is in the clutches of the enemy. However, his nun sister opens her legs to inspire him and he jerks a fresh load of come into his enemies faces, incapacitating many of them.

However, this is still not enough but then the deux ex machina comes from a place where, I didn’t see coming (if you’ll pardon the expression) even from the set up. That is to say, there’s a scene earlier in the picture where, behind the main villains back... the nun sleeps with every one of the thugs and steals their guns while she does so, leaving the villain’s army without any guns at a crucial time. It pays off later when her brother has accidentally pulled his cock off from too much wanking and has no more of his deadly weapon left because, when all hope seems lost, she starts masturbating and ejaculates around 15 automatic weapons from inside her vagina where she has hidden them, allowing her brother to grab one and save the day.

So yeah, like I said, did not see that one coming.

My main problem at the start of the movie was the cheap sounding synthesiser score by Bryony Marks... which I can tell you now is not the way to score a masturbation scene shot like a Leone western. However, the score does actually work quite well in context of other things with a couple of nice leitmotifs and it does reasonably well as a solid piece of musical glue to hang the story onto... so I would say give it a chance because that score’s got more legs than you may, at first, realise.

And that’s me about shot my load on this review, I think. The Masturbating Gunman is a fun slice of exploitation movie which, if you can handle the kind of production values that this kind of micro-budget tends to throw up, should keep most explorers of unusual movie making entertained for an hour and a half. I really enjoyed this one and am pleased Severin saw fit to issue this (although I can’t imagine it getting a release in the UK, is my guess). Definitely worth a look though, I would say and, where else would you see a movie with these two entries in the end credits roll... Cum Wrangler - Julie Stone, Masturbation Consultants - Cast and Crew.