(NOTE: I reviewed a barebones screener for this. The press release states that it will come "packed with exclusive extras, including deleted scenes, interviews, music videos, media appearances and more.")
It didn't take long for me to figure out that LINGERIE FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIPS: LACE VS. LEATHER (2013) was your usual WWE-inspired "sports entertainment" production with colorful fictional contestants battling according to a scripted storyline.
It didn't take much longer after that, unfortunately, to ascertain that this particular example of the genre not only lacked the budget, gloss, and relative excitement of the WWE, but that it failed even to match the dubious standards set by the old TV series "G.L.O.W. (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling)."
Whereas "G.L.O.W." presented over-the-top archetypal characters such as the all-American girl, the psycho, the farmer's daughter, the punk rocker, the fascist femme fatale, etc. performing broad farce before, after, and during some ferocious ring action, the women of L.F.C. are barely distinguishable from one another apart from race and body type. They're also a dull bunch whose personas, if one can call them that, are as bland and limp as their faux fighting skills.
The low-rent arena doesn't even offer the excitement of live spectators, instead giving us a blurry simulated crowd undulating in some kind of green-screen limbo. The fights themselves consist of a pair of lingerie-clad babes hopping around throwing weak jabs and slappy kicks and then rolling around for awhile until, mercifully, a horn blows and there's a judges' decision.
The image has the murky, cheap-video look of a full-screen picture stretched into widescreen, with jittery camerawork and choppy editing used to inject some vitality into the listless "bouts." Half the fight time consists of cutaways to talking heads blathering endlessly to disguise the fact that nobody involved seems to know how to actually choreograph this kind of action.
The heads doing most of the talking are L.F.C. founder Roni Taylor, a statuesque redhead who supposedly saw two ring girls get into a fight during a MMA match once and noticed that the audience was more interested in them than in the actual bout, and her husband Jason Parsons, a former MMA fighter who coaches one half of the girls.
The other half are coached by musclebound former wrestler Arik Loegen, whose extreme vanity, horndoggishness, and cluelessness about mixed martial arts (along with just about everything else) provide the show with its only real comedy, meager as it is.
We also get endless interview segments with the girls themselves, who make the lady wrestlers of "G.L.O.W." seem like Emmy contenders. Part of this can be blamed on a script that doesn't give them anything interesting to say, but it's clear that they weren't hired for their acting skills, which are totally non-convincing even within the context of a scripted comedy-based storyline.
Anyone watching this for the titillation factor is likely in for a disappointment since none of the contestants are actual knockouts and the lingerie they wear isn't overly exciting. There is some eye candy, of course, depending on each individual viewer's tastes--my favorites were blonde bodybuilder Feather Hadden and generously-endowed snake handler Jenevieve Serpentine.
Tara "Guillotine" Gaddy manages to generate a bit of ring excitement with her signature move, which consists of smothering her opponent with her breasts (a tactic she refers to as "The Motorboat") while a bout between the two Asian girls in the group, buxom Helen Mei and Hawaii native Susan Nakata, has a nice moment or two. A surprise finish in the mismatch between muscular Hadden and diminutive Jody Connacher, while predictable, stretches credulity even for a show of this nature.
At any rate, these limply staged fights and the endless interview clips that augment them are hardly anything to go out of your way to see. Most of the between-match plotline is boring as well, with the only really sexy scene I can recall being a brief one in which the girls try on some new lingerie in front of their dressing room mirror. Otherwise, the terminally unentertaining LINGERIE FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIPS: LACE VS. LEATHER is pretty much tapped out from the starting bell.
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