Tank Girl.

Review #2516: Tank Girl.

Cast: 

Lori Petty (Tank Girl), Ice-T (T-Saint), Naomi Watts (Jet Girl), Malcolm McDowell (Kesslee), Don Harvey (Sgt. Small), Jeff Kober (Booga), Reg E. Cathey (Deetee), Scott Coffey (Donner), Stacy Linn Ramsower (Sam), Ann Cusack (Sub Girl), Brian Wimmer (Richard), Iggy Pop (Rat Face), Ann Magnuson (The Madam), Dawn Robinson (Model), Billy L. Sullivan (Max), James Hong (Che'tsai), Charles Lucia (Capt. Derouche), with Harlan Clark (Additional Ripper), Doug Jones (Ripper), Ata Scanlan (Additional Ripper), Alvarez Wortham (Additional Ripper), and Roz Witt (Dr. Nikita) Directed by Rachel Talalay (#1144 - Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare)

Review: 

"It’s such an iconic image. I think all strong women react in the same way to this outspoken crazed female icon. I was such a punk warrior. When I went in to pitch it – I mean, all you had to do was show the image. And when we sent the script out, the cover page was a comic book page. Even now when I talk to people who design for video games they say that there’s never a pitch for a female character that doesn’t include an image from Tank Girl. She’s the tough, punk warrior woman. She’s the icon of that. And every tough, interesting woman I know wants to be her."

I will admit that I had vaguely heard of this movie for years but was just lazy to see it (I first heard of this movie from the Nostalgia Critic* many years ago). Apparently, Rachel Talalay was given a Tank Girl comic to read by her stepdaughter when shooting her first film with Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991). Tank Girl first appeared in print in 1988 in Deadline (a British comic magazine) that was developed by Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett; you might be interested to know that Hewlett, whose drawings were extracted for use in the title sequence of the film, later moved into a place with Blur's Damon Albarn that led to them being involved with the virtual band Gorillaz in 1998*. Talalay (the unpaid production assistant-turned-accountant-turned-producer-turned-director) got interested in doing a movie and found the Deadline publisher was already trying to find a studio. Eventually, MGM/United Artists became involved with doing the film (Talalay apparently rejected an offer from Disney, believing that they would not allow the amount of violence/sexual references required). Talalay then picked Catherine Hardwicke to be the production designer, while Tedi Sarafian wrote the screenplay. Made on a budget of $25 million in New Mexico and Arizona (mostly in an abandoned open-pit mine), there were considerable edits made by the studio that ranged from a "naked Ripper suit", edits to the torture scene, edits to one role in particular, and, naturally, the original ending where Tank Girl burps as it starts to rain. The animated sequences (as done by Mike Smith) were put in because they didn't have the money to do the action sequences (apparently the tank wasn't particularly fast). Martin and Hewlett did not like the finished product, believing in a subsequent interview that nobody could really make a successful movie of the character (as for Tank Girl, it went through a hiatus before returning for an on-and-off basis since 2007). Talalay and Petty were proud enough of the film that they did a live viewing party of the film in 2020.

Imagine: it's the year 2033 and all the water is gone. It's a freewheeling, bratty, odd little movie...and I can't help but like it. It's strange too, because a good chunk of the critiques of the film could just as easily be spun around for people (like me, only I probably won't go into detail about feminism, because, well, good luck with that*) that praise the film as a zany and free-spirited mess. There is a certain type of charm that appeals to me for most of its 104-minute runtime in its energy that is infectious. Apparently, the production team did not expect to get the services of Stan Winston but go figure, they were so enthusiastic that they cut their usual rates in half to meet the budget for the Rippers you see on screen: articulated ears and tails activated remotely and, well, no puppetry. Suffice to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but hey, half man/kangaroo, I can roll with it for a movie that likes to lurk in a offbeat wasteland (your milage may vary over how it would've gone if the film had not been edited down to, uh, take out the prosthetic penis). Petty (cast after consideration to go with Emily Lloyd) is delightfully loony enough to make for an entertaining antihero, one who has their own kinks and interests that could turn anything to make a crack at. Far be it from a movie that asks about power or the circumstances of what a wasteland looks like, you just get an unruly movie that has time to have a music interlude of "Let's Do It". Evidently, McDowell had a few decent memories making the movie, and, yes, this seems right up his alley to play a villain that loves water so much that he stabs people with a device that sucks the water right out of their body. How could one not enjoy him here? The rest of the cast roll along with causal engagement with a movie that moves to its own beat, for better or worse. As a whole, Tank Girl is the kind of movie that clicked enough for me to have fun with, although I can understand where it didn't exactly rock the world back in 1995. Offbeat and anarchic in ways that can be off-putting to those with less patience

 

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

Song of the day!

*For a time, the Critic was my jam alongside Cinemassacre. And The Cinema Snob, eventually. 

*I used to know someone in college who dug them. The friendship didn't last at all, but at least Gorillaz is pretty decent.

*There was a discussion in a book, once, about talking about what cult films were "feminist" that called this film a "real feminist cult film" while labeling films by Kathryn Bigelow and Catherine Hardwicke as "too masculine", which honestly sounds like sour grapes more than anything.

Evidently, there was a mockumentary for the film, if you love it that much: Tank Girl Documentary 1995