To my knowledge, noone in Hollywood has yet made a film devoted to strip poker. But there must be something about strip mining that has captured the fancy of writer/producer/director Gary Orona enough to have gone to the lengths he has with The Great Bikini Off Road Adventure.

In this picture, Orona takes the word "strip" to its ultimate double-entendre with a vista-impressive but farfetched yarn involving a trio of young lovelies who come to the rescue of a failing jeep tour company and in the process become staunch eco-warriors.

One of the girls (Lauren Hayes) is about to move to New York and a promising law career. However, her uncle Duke (Floyd Irons), as a kind of a last-ditch favor, asks her to look into a lease agreement between him and a nasty land developer who's trying to hustle him off his land. Irons, an actor with a rich, low-octave John Wayne set of vocal chords and a weathered map of the southwest written all over his face, needs $10,000 to be free and clear, to thwart the developer and save the land from intended mineral rape.

Where does one come up with that kind of cash — quick? In a T&A movie, that answer's pretty obvious. That Hayes, along with companions Avalon Anders and Laura Hudspeth, stumble upon the idea of giving tours of the area in their bikinis is the film's likeliest and greatest virtue and, unfailingly, its greatest vice. The tours (complete with sexually-obsessed Japanese stereotypes) quickly develop into a succession of gratuitous Penthouse Video layouts that stop south of the naked breast region and resolutely north of the belt buckle with unflinching predictability. Score one for cutoff jeans freaks, zero for butt lovers. Even Hayes' standard-issue cowgirl love scene gets so family values-oriented that one almost anticipates the patented Cirio H. Santiago panties-on shower scene to come sloshing on the screen at any moment.

With some Spy vs. Spy espionage humor (courtesy of Wade Wallace) tossed in for comic relief, The Great Bikini Off Road Adventure is as top-shelf in looks as anyone has a right to expect from a bikini movie. The scenery (natural and otherwise) is spectacular, and the humor is palatably non-irritating with excellent cast chemistry. Too bad the full nudity took a turn off the road.

Though she has a relatively minor role, with Avalon Anders' name as a draw, this entertaining feature should move very well in the stores.