Let me tell you something, academia can kill your love of films if you’re not careful. Seriously, there is nothing more likely to turn you off the delights of celluloid than sitting through several Danish, surrealist, feminist, art house flicks.

When studying (I use the word lightly) a degree in film you have to find ways to maintain your enthusiasm. This can mean making or writing your own films, looking at how a certain genre of film reflects the social ills of a late capitalist society or, and this is what I did, you hunt down and you watch all of the most tasteless, violent, brainless, un-pc films you can find and revel in how much they aren’t what you’re supposed to be watching.

Don’t get me wrong, I acquired as many smart-arse, lefty pretentions as the next bloke while at Uni; they, however, could never dull my love of exploitation cinema. Everything from 80s gore masterpieces, 70s kung-fu epics or the delirious world of Spaghetti Westerns. Exploitation cinema is crass, cheap and tasteless, and it is brilliant.

Imagine my joy then at the recent DVD release of Rick Jacobson’s Bitch Slap. A white knuckle ride of violence, awful dialogue and soft-core lesbian sex. Considering Jacobson’s past as director of TV shows like Xena and Hercules, the intellectual quality (or lack thereof) of the film won’t come as a great surprise, though the cameo appearances from both Lucy Lawless and Kevin Sorbo might. What people may find shocking is the sheer level of violence involved, not clean family violence mind - bloody, face pounding violence.

The plot, not that it matters, involves three pneumatic babes and a kidnapped crime boss. What starts as a simple heist movie takes more ludicrous twists and turns than anything else you’ve seen this year, including dismemberment by motorbike, girl-only bare knuckle fighting, a nunnery and, to quote bad girl Camero, “a whole lotta gash bashing”.

Now a liberal like me may find this all a little much if it wasn’t for the fact that this film has its tongue rammed firmly in its cheek, as well as a few other orifices. Nothing about this film is to be taken even remotely seriously, apart from maybe the director’s love of pure trash. Everything here, from the fetish for classic cars to the “bitches-and-hoes” rap and rock music on the soundtrack, is specifically geared towards a male audience, and constructed to stick two fingers up in the face of ‘good taste’.

It would be a little over dramatic to say we need movies like this, we don’t. But we don’t need a lot of the little luxuries that make life more fun. Films like Bitch Slap (and by extension Death Proof, Planet Terror and Sin City) may not be giving Citizen Kane a run for its money, but the world sure would be a more boring place without them.