Bad Girls by Grace + 1 Comment

Bad Girls is one of those movies that I don't think a lot of people remember (it came out in 1994), and if they do, they remember it as straight-to-video schlock. And that's probably not a completely unfair memory--it's really not a very good film. It is funny and campy without meaning to be, it has good actresses doing a terrible job with their terrible lines, and it borders on spaghetti-western silliness.

That being said, much like Bandidas, it's still worth watching. Why? Well, the main reason is that the four actresses (Madeleine Stowe, Mary Stuart Masterson, Andie McDowell, and Drew Barrymore) are all pretty cool (well, mostly pretty cool), and you get to watch all of them ride, shoot, and otherwise carry on like old West bandits. It's just that simple. It's fun to watch women ride and shoot and carry on. I'm all for it.

A more nuanced reason it's worth watching is that the story is based not solely on women's relationships with men (though there is still too much of that for my liking), but on the four lead characters' relationships with each other. They take care of each other, from the film's beginning to its end. The movie begins with all four women working as prostitutes, but you never really see them prostitute themselves. The first scene has Cody (Madeleine Stowe) shooting a man who is abusing Anita (Mary Stuart Masterson). When the townspeople are going to hang Cody, Anita, along with Eileen (Andie McDowell) and Lilly (Drew Barrymore) rescue her. And the four of them take off on the lamb, Pinkerton detectives hot on their trail.

From there you see the women form a closer bond, deciding to head to the Oregon territory, where Anita has a property claim left to her by her dead husband. You see them drinking around a campfire and frolicking naked in the river (OK, unnecessary with the nudity, but it's nice to see women hanging out in a film regardless). Unfortunately, then the male involvement starts, in the form of the male "bad guy," Kid Jarrett (James Russo) and two male helpers to the group of women, farmer William Tucker (James LeGros) and sketchy prospector Josh McCoy (Dermont Mulroney). Though the boys don't take center stage as much as they could (and do in some films), they're still more of a presence than I'd like. Kid Jarrett in particular is problematic. He enters the film rescuing Cody from the Pinkerton men (while robbing a bank), then goes on to physically and sexually assault both Cody and Lilly in the course of the rest of the movie. While Tucker and McCoy are both "good guys," they are problematic as well, particularly McCoy, who comes on the scene as Cody's rescuer after she's been beaten up by Jarrett. However, the relationship that establishes between Cody and McCoy doesn't follow along gender lines exactly--she remains in charge and in control until his death towards the end of the film.

A final reason I really liked this film is a small short scene featured Mary Stuart Masterson, who I think is the best of the four actresses. Her character, Anita, has staked all of her hopes (and those of her friends) on a land claim in the Oregon territory Anita had with her dead husband, and she's not as keen as the other women on being an outlaw. After being told the claim is worthless to a single woman, Anita gives a small speech about how as a woman she had no worth before she was married, and no worth as a widow, and a least a bit of worth as a whore. She ends by saying that "if your laws don't include me, well then, they don't apply to me either." It's the high point of the movie for me, and the next we see of Anita she's accepting a pistol and suddenly magically knows how to shoot it (like I said, cheese ball, but still, uplifting).

So since I liked all these things about it, why only two stars? Well, at the end of the day it's just not a very good movie, for one thing. The script is terrible, the acting is bad, and the plot is silly. And I really hate the sexual violence, and how it seems to be par for the course. It's implied rather than shown, which I appreciate, but I'd love to see a movie where it just didn't happen. More than any of that, though, this film has serious race issues. The four female leads are all white, as are the two positive male characters. The gang of bandits led by Kid Jarrett, however, are all vaguely Hispanic (some of them more so than others). So good=female=white, and bad=male=non-white. Gee, that's a paradigm I could live without ever seeing again. And for thoughtlessly adhering to it, Bad Girls gets only two stars.

Posted by Grace in 2 Stars: So Close