Tank Girl (1995)

 

150 best Science Fiction Movies (Rolling Stone list)

 

 

# 150. Tank Girl (1995)

 

“Here is a movie that dives into the bag of filmmaking tricks and chooses all of them. Trying to re-create the multimedia effect of the comic books it's based on, the film employs live action, animation, montages of still graphics, animatronic makeup, prosthetics, song-and-dance routines, models, fake backdrops, holography, title cards, matte drawings and computerized special effects. All … [it] really missed were 3-D and Smell-O-Vision.”

n   Critic Roger Ebert (regarding this film)

 

“The average mainstream movie, a hundred thousand people will see it one time, with a cult movie one person will see in a hundred thousand times.”

n   Actor Bruce Campell (who is not in this film)

 

Cult films are traditionally box-office failures though some hits do qualify, like Director Stanely Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), which “Tank Girl” tries to emulate. Their initial failure is often justly deserved as they are often quite bad on the whole, but they have a specialness shining through; they did one thing right, something very new and very different, allowing them to rise again after being beaten down by financial failure, Critical contempt, and/or its own-hard-to-ignore incompetence. That Secret Sauce that allows something as sordidly valueless like “Manos: The Hand of Fate” (1966) to still have an audience today because, as Critic Bobby Thompson wrote, "It's like a train wreck; you just can't take your eyes off it." I doubt many of my readers have even heard of that the same year’s top-grossing film, “Hawaii.”

 

“Tank Girl” initially bombed, but even then, its eventual Cult status was almost assured. Though a Hot Mess of a film, it didn’t only one, but a number of things, wonderfully right, and one of those things was more important than all the rest. These days, the key to appreciating all it accomplished and forgiving all its failures is pretty simple:

 

How much do you love lead Actress Lori Petty?

 

I do, and it seems I loved her more than most did back in 1995, but even then, almost everyone loved her at least a little bit. Even among the legions of Critics who condemned this film, most made a least a little room in their hearts to praise her.

 

It’s based on the English Comic Book Character “Tank Girl” (first appearing in 1988, originally Written by  Alan Martin and drawn by Jamie Hewlett). Set in a Post-Apocalyptic Australia and detailing the adventures of the Title Character, more properly named Rebecca Buck, an exceptionally cheerful embodiment of Antisocial Personality Disorder, who drives around the Wasteland in a Military Tank that doubles as her home. She’s described by Critic Deborah Cartmell as "unheroic or even accidental antihero," largely lacking in the Seven Cardinal Virtues her because she’s initially a Bounty Hunter/Mercenary working for a Secret Government Organization. She pissed off her Paymasters and became an Outlaw to all, but not because of some act of Noble Rebellion, but because she was too often a Cowardly, Drug-Addled, Screw-up, Transgressive in her Sexuality and (the final straw) failed to deliver a colostomy bag to the President in a timely fashion.

 

The film ditches most of that, but retains much of the Character’s core, or as the film’s Director, Rachel Talalay, said, “The person who would say the worst possible thing that could come out of her mouth in the worst possible situation to mess everything up.”

 

The comic was aggressively Punk in style, plotted with deliberate mis-care, celebrating its own disorganization, indulging in Literary Absurdism, Surrealism, and cheeky Nihilism. The picture panels seemed to beg for screen adaptation but the strong influence of Novelist William S. Burroughs’ Anarchistic Writing techniques made such an adaptation near-impossible. Other challenges to the film included that an acceptable running time was only about 1 ½ hours while it was trying to summarize a story (or story-ish-thing) that had been continuously progressing for more than a half-decade. Further, it’s not-low-but-not-huge budget of $25 million required Talalay to reach out for major studio backing (that’s another thing, Cult Films are generally Independently Produced) and she lacked the complete Creative Control over the project that Kubrick enjoyed over everything he did after 1960.

 

True, Talalay also lacked Kubrick’s beautiful focus and commanding hand, but still it seems that it was studio interference was really the last nail in this film’s coffin. In later interviews, Talalay takes blame for much of what went wrong, but also unleashes Tank-Girl-ish fury at all those who meddled in her Dream Project.

 

We learn in the opening narration (by Actress Petty) that the End of the World as We Know It was 2022 because of a Meteor Impact, and we’re now looking at 2033, with the Earth and turned it into one big desert. “The World is screwed… no celebrities, no cable TV, no water.” In the film version, the comic book’s terrible Governments are a thing of the past and the real power rests with the Evil Water and Power Corporation (WP). Meanwhile our Heroine, Rebecca-not-yet-transformed-into-Tank-Girl (Petty), has a great life living outside the system in a community full of similar Anti-Establishment types who steal water from WP for their hydroponic garden full of healthy vegetables. Then her community is attacked by WP, her boyfriend, Richard (Brian Wimmer), is murdered, and Rebecca and several others are Enslaved.

 

Our main Villian, WP Overlord Kesslee (Malcom McDowell), is not in the comic book. He sees special potential in his captive Rebecca and forces her to be his Mercenary in his War against his arch-Enemies, the Rippers. Even before her first Mission starts, Rebecca escapes, stealing a Tank and leading another Slave, Jet Girl (Naomi Watts), into Rebellion with her. Embracing the philosophy of putting her bad attitude to good use, she runs straight to the arms of the Rippers with not-yet-fully-formed ideas about Liberating All Mankind and saving a little girl captured during the raid on her Commune, Sam (Stacey Lin Ramsower).

 

Though driven by a Revenge Motive, Rebecca-now-Tank-Girl never loses her joy in life. She postures as an Outlaw, but in the manner of Robin Hood mode, that ancient hero of 15^th c. ballads, not the embodiment of the comic book’s 20^th c. cynicism. She stands up for Victims of Sexual, Race, and Species Discriminations. This kind of watering-down stalks much of SF cinema (really, all cinema), an idea-driven Genre that’s audiences generally expect to dumb-itself-down, and whose envelope-expanding ambitions are always competing with those conventional elements included to make new-looking things easier to digest. One Critic noted, “If there’s a philosophy here, then Bart Simpson is Plato.”

 

Gone are Tank Girl’s selfishness and drug use (I didn’t even see marijuana in the hydroponic garden), and mostly sacrificed is the anti-Corporate Satire (the Villains are a Corporation, but that seems more obligatory than a statement), further it oddly treats her Bisexuality as more taboo that her penchant for Inter-Species Sex. Talalay must be responsible for much of this, she supervised Tedi Sarafian’s script (this was Sarafain’s first produced Script, everything that followed was SF,F&H or simply unrealistic, and none of it was very good), but it seems that to find the real villains we must pull the curtain back on Talalay’s own Corporate Masters.

 

Retaining a Transgressive posture while doing away with Transgressive or Controversial content is not a new thing; the Crime Film “Crossfire” (1947) was pretty bold, one of the first two Mainstream Hollywood movies to take on USA Jew-Hatred (the other was “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of the same year) but, in fact, the novel it’s based on, “The Brick Foxhole” (1945) by Richard Brooks, wasn’t about Jew-Hatred but something even more Taboo, the Victim was murdered because he was Gay. To pull off such Watering-Down well, the decisions must be made by people with Creative Investment in the project, for example, the great Producer Walt Disney sanitized the often wildly Child-Inappropriate content of Fairy Tales and creating timeless Children’s Classics.

 

Here, Talalay had that investment, and it shows, but the people above her were unenthused. More than a decade later Talalay joked (Please note: All quotes from Talalay that follow are compressed and reordered from four interviews), “Now you look at the movie and go ‘How can this be ‘R’-rated?’ But at that point – and it wasn’t that long ago – they made me cut so much out of it because they were so frightened of it. If we’d made it three years later [1999], when the “South Park” movie came out … it would have been ‘make the much hipper version that you want to make, and push the envelope further.’ They were scared of their own shadows.”

 

 

Talalay was 32-years-old when this film was made, so within the age-range of the film’s target audience, but a bit old to have ever been exposed to the comic, especially because she’s from USA where “Tank Girl” was relatively unknown (though I’ve read it inspired USA Singer Gwen Stefani’s look and it was a monster hit in England, beloved by that Country’s Fashion Designers). Still, Talalay was of a tender-age to already have such a longish resume: She after graduating from Yale with a Mathematics degree she switched to a film career at 24-years-old, working as Production Assistant and/or Manager on low-budget Cult-Classics like Director John Waters’ “Polyester” (1981), made for less-than $300,000, and “Android” (1982), made for less-than $1 million and thrown together in a crazed rush to take advantage of the sets built for another movie that’s production was suddenly canceled. There she learned the all-important skill of organizing complex productions while keeping their costs down. In 1988, she’d graduated to Producer with “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: the Dream Master,” the film which demonstrated that ennui had caught up with the popular franchise, and another Waters’, “Hairspray.” (Most of the best films she was involved in were in association with Waters and his aesthetic permeates “Tank Girl.”) She finally graduated to Director with the very worst “A Nightmare on Elm Street” film, “The Final Freddy: Freddy's Dead” (1991) and the equally awful “The Ghost in the Machine” (1993).

 

Talay was introduced to the comic by her stepdaughter while working on “The Final Freddy....” She instantly fell in love and secured the rights. In retrospect it’s clear her successes while working in other job-titles than Director kept her still viable in her industry but it was really her control of this property, which had so much potential, that secured this her the plumb Directing gig, not any talent previously on display.

 

She proceeded pitching the project and was repeatedly turned down, “The first place I went was to Jim Cameron’s company [Lightstorm], and the executive there said to me ‘But we already have a movie with a female lead.’” At Dreamworks, “They said ‘We really appreciate you thinking that we’re hip enough to do this, but we’re not’. Jamie Hewlett just loved the idea that we were too hip for Spielberg.” She actually did get an offer from Disney, but her experience with “The Final Freddy…” and New Line Cinema already taught her about how studio interference making her job harder (she "would occasionally get internal memos telling me, 'Don't be too girly; don't be too sensitive.'"), and figured that the amount of violence and sex the film required would make a working relationship with Mickey Mouse impossible. She accepted the offer from United Artists (UA) because she expected better treatment.

 

She was wrong.

 

When she sold it to UA, Alan Ladd Jr. was in charge. During Development he was replaced by John Calley. “I don’t know what you do when you’re heavily into development and getting a film made, and you realise that your executive is the wrong person for it. You have to be awfully strong. I didn’t really know that it would go wrong until we got into post-production.”

 

Talalay worked closely with “Tank Girl’s” co-Creators Martin and Hewlett during the production, and they with Production Designer Catherine Hardwicke. She had to fight UA about almost everything, even hiring the then-unknown Hardwicke (now a prominent Director) and Talalay winning that this battle was among the film’s triumphs. Hardwicke successfully captured the look of the original product, cluttering every frame with Pop Culture allusions. Hardwicke’s task was not enviable as Hewlett’s marvelously drawn panels were inserted into the film at strategic moments (given motion by Animator Mike Smith and the flawless quick-cutting of Editor James Symons) which created a direct competition between the medium-budget live-action and the legendary pen.

 

This was the period after Tim Burton’s “Batman” (1989) but before “X—Men” (2000) when Comic-Book Movies were Big-Money, but studios had no idea how to approach them. They recognized that the old approach, the High Camp of the older “Batman” TV series (first aired 1966) wasn’t going to work, and there was interest in reaching across the pond to English comic series, cheaper to secure, proven popular, and differently conceived than the USA model, but … well … though “differently conceived” made them attractive to one level of Executives, but terrifying to the next level up. In the costly productions that followed there was a shocking indifference to serving the pre-existing Fan-Base, probably born of a fear of appealing only to a Niche audience. 1995 saw the release of another film based on another English comic book Character, “Judge Dredd,” which also bombed (even worse than this film) largely because it didn’t emulate that which it tried to adapt (that didn’t happen here).

 

During the Hellish post-production the studio insisting on almost entirely cutting out a major Character, Sub Girl (Ann Cusack). “So, who didn’t like Sub Girl? I don’t know. It could have been somebody’s mother, as far as I know, because they kept me from all the internal discussions. They just said ‘This is what you’re doing.’

 

“And it would be like someone going ‘I’m offended that there are dildos in her bedroom’, so that whole scene has to be cut out. Oh my God, dildos! So that was how irrational it all was.

 

“So, I remember calling my lawyer and telling him this, and he said ‘There’s nothing rational going on, Rachel’. And he was just brilliant, because he said ‘Nothing makes sense.’”

 

The studio even cut the rain storm from the original ending, something anticipated by almost every previous image and as a result the following animation made little sense.

 

Talalay was most pissed off about the Musical Number, a Busby Berkley-influenced dance routine to a cover of Cole Porter’s, "Let's Do It" while Tank-Girl was robbing a posh Brothel (called “Liquid Silver,” likely a reference to the earlier Punk/Cult/SF film, “Liquid Sky” (1982)):

 

“They chopped it to shreds. Finally, the music supervisor [Dick Bernstein] went in and said ‘You cannot put this out like this’. They took half the stanzas out, so that it didn’t even cut, and she asked them to at least give her the length that they wanted and to let her cut it so that it wasn’t a travesty. We went in and re-did it so that we got it the length that they wanted it, so it wasn’t so musically hideous. It’s still missing one of my favourite stanzas…

 

“There were scenes where we’d do a test-screening and a scene would be the most popular. One would be on the list of most popular scenes, and then they would recut it, take all the good stuff out of it and it would stop being on the list of most-popular scenes.

 

“So, I would go and say ‘Here are your statistics – on this cut, twenty percent of people listed this as their favourite scene’…which is huge ... ‘So therefore, can we put the cut back the way it was? Because you’ve taken out what people liked about it.’. And they would go ‘No.’

 

“Normally you’ve got the director fighting the statistics and going ‘No, no, no, but I love that scene and it has to stay on’ and the studio going ‘but here we tested it!’. And here I was doing the opposite, saying ‘Look, we tested it and now you’ve emasculated the scene.’ And people don’t care. And they’re going ‘Well tough, it’s just what we think’ …

 

“There were numerous times in post-production when I called my lawyer and said ‘I want to leave the show’, and he said ‘No, you have to stay and fight, or nobody will fight for it.’”

 

Talalay claims that after exhausting battles she got about 20% of the cuts restored. “But I occasionally read things like ‘Why didn’t Rachel just stand-up and..’ blah blah blah, and I think ‘Boy, you have no idea. I’m happy that you can think that and hate me, but you have no idea what it was like being in the middle of what I was in the middle of’ … But I don’t resent at all the comic-book fans who feel I didn’t succeed, because I didn’t succeed.”

 

And even more insults were to come, “When they put the VHS out, I was very upset – we shot in widescreen, in Cinemascope, and when they put the VHS out they didn’t even bother to letterbox it. VHS is 4:3, which means forty percent of the frame is missing.”

 

But still, there was Actress Petty.

 

She was the spitting image of the Heroine, Critic Owen Gleibermann describes, “Visually, she’s all lithe, seductive angles: long limbs and stretchy torso, a platinum-blond fringed buzz cut that brings out the razory thrust of her lips and cheeks.” The website Movie Scene added, “Petty who delivers one of the most striking and random characters who I have come across who despite being rough is also sexy and at times surprisingly cute.” Petty now seems the only conceivable choice for the role, but, in fact, she wasn’t.

 

Apparently to prove the English-cred of a product coming from a USA Director and studio, and mostly filmed in Arizona, there was an Open Casting Event in London; though only a publicity stunt, its became famous because three of the girls who met on the line really hit-it-off and decided to start the band called “Spice Girls.” Lalalay had already cast an English-expatriate now based in New York, Actress Emily Loyd, for the lead. Well into rehearsals Talalay had to fire Loyd for a combination of being difficult because of her worsening Mental Illness and resisting an already agreed upon haircut. (Lalay avoiding a complaint leveled against the “Judge Dredd” movie, wherein Actor Sylvester Stallone reneged on his promise to wear a helmet that half-covered his face, something the comic’s Fans complained about that endlessly).

 

Petty, USA-born, was Loyd’s replacement. Talalay said, "she is crazy in her own life and [the film] needed somebody like that.”

 

Petty is exuberant, tossing out near-pornographic single-entendres with great aplomb. Critic Almar Haflidason, who hated the film, aptly summarized her character, “Every retort from her lip-glossed trash mouth is a sexual come on.” Her voice was somehow girlish and smokey at the same time and (Gleiberman again), “Petty uses that mock-innocent squeak to toss out insults like so many spitballs.”

 

When Rebecca first finds her Tank she says “I’m in love,” and immediately she straddles the cannon and slides down its length suggestively to the tune of Issac Hayes’ “Theme from ‘Shaft’” (1971). She’ll do this again while when intimidating a male foe, "Feeling a little inadequate?" Elsewhere, she speaks her appreciation of different gun, "My God, the sheer size of it!" In a scene cut from the movie, she slips a condom over a banana before throwing it at a Soldier. (This Feminist film is obsessed phallic imagery.) Elsewhere, bound in a straight-jacket, she complains, "It's really hard for me to play with myself in this thing!"

 

She does love her tank, spouting other affections towards it like “To the Bat-tank!” but she shows little respect for anyone else, like telling a savaged corpse, "Ugh, you are SO dead." And her way of saying farewell is, "It's been swell, but the swelling's gone down." She kicks and punches men’s balls repeatedly, burps loudly and enthusiastically, and cooks BBQ while in the middle of a car chase.

 

She wears about twenty different costumes and haircuts, all loud, colorful, and chic-sloppy. This film is haunted by are egregious continuity problems, most likely the product of post-production butchery, but some clearly deliberate, like Tank Girl changing clothes and hair cut from scene-to-scene when the was no logical opportunity to do so in-between. Costume Designers Arianne Phillips and Tony Gardner (the latter uncredited) seemed to be having as much as Petty. There’s an especially telling scene when Tank Girl is rudely dismissive of the Fashion Advice provided by an AI at the Brothel as she assembles for herself the outfit she wore during the Musical Number.

 

Petty wasn’t the only worthy performance. Actor McDowell was much praised. Kesslee was the kind of Megalomanic had become McDowell’s bread-and-butter while averaging about five films or TV episodes a year, all supporting parts, collecting a paycheck while not really having to do much work. Here though, he’s convincing as his Character in ways he hadn’t been since “Chains of Desire” (1992). He played Kesslee as a grown-up version of his Star-Making Character Alex DeLarge from “A Clockwork Orange” bringing in the same Boyishness though no longer young, and the same bright-eyed Pleasure in Cruelty. Better-still, he and Petty shared more chemistry than Rebecca had with her boyfriend in the opening scenes. His character also came with some neat visual tricks too, Cyborg arm, a Holographic head, and a weapon the drains and purifies its victims water content, filling a conveniently attached plastic drinking bottle.

 

McDowell praised Costumer Phillips for giving him a way into Kesslee. Phillps wrote, “He came to the fitting and he was really appreciative. He said 'I haven't had time to do my research ... this has really helped me tremendously to figure out my character and have an angle on my character.'” She put him in black suit with a white waistcoat and white shirt with no tie. He responded, “‘Yes, I know who I am now!’”

 

McDowell offered similar praise to both Director Lalalay and Actress Petty, saying “Tank Girl” had the "same flavour" as “A Clockwork Orange.”

 

The then-unknown Actress Watts’ part as the shy and bespectacled Jet Girl was small and reportedly Watts is ashamed of the movie now, which is a shame. Hers was the only Naturalistic Performance in the array of unabashedly Cartoon Characters and she shines in her mostly throw-away scenes.

 

Rapper/Actor Ice Tea was T-Saint, a member of the Tribe of Kesslee’s adversaries, the Rippers. They’re described in the opening narration as, “A demonic army of blood-thirsty, human-eating, purse-snatching, mutant creatures,” and though Ice Tea is almost unrecognizable under his make-up and prosthetics he, as usual, has pissed-off attitude to burn.

 

The Rippers were Mutant Kangaroos infused with Reincarnated Human personalities and born of some bizarre experiments financed by the WP but then they Rebelled. As for their Monstrousness … well… Yes, they proved to be Murderous efficient Guerilla Fighters, but when Tank Girl joins their band, they prove to share more with the Commune Tank Girl was Kidnapped from than the Tyrants and Thugs of WP. They have a great love of dancing, drums, and Beat Poetry. It’s no surprise Tank Girl enters into a Romance with one, but not the expected T-Saint, reincarnated from a tough Cop, but sweet natured and dim-witted Booga (Jeff Kober), reincarnated from a loyal dog (in the comic he’s a reincarnated Toy Designer, in case you’re wondering how a dog learned to speak English), this reflects Tank Girls attitude towards male-female Power Relationships.

 

The Creatures were designed by FX-Makeup legend Stan Winston whom Lalalay didn’t think she could afford, but he cut his price because he loved the challenge. He stated Ripper’s would be, "the best characters we've had the opportunity to do." The Rippers featured no puppets or CGI because Lalalay wanted fuller performances from her Rippers than one would encounter with the Pin-Up Girl/Monster of “Species” released the same year. The Mutants had articulated ears and tails, activated by remote control, and mechanical snouts, responding to the movement of the Actors' mouths plus remote control, each Ripper required three technicians in addition to the Actor. The result was Light-Years ahead of cinema’s closest comparison, “Matilda” (1978), though the level of technology applied in both films was largely the same.

 

“Stan … did a full naked version of Booga [at a cost of $5,000]… I mean full anatomical. We shot some outtakes of this completely naked creation, and I would love to go back and get that footage, because that would be enough to sell it ... Well that, I knew, we weren’t getting away with, but since Stan built it, I was going to shoot it.”

 

There was an unexplicit Love-Scene between Rebecca and Booga, but sensing UA would balk at a depiction of Bestiality, the Romance was deliberately left out of the first draft of the script. Only in “the second or third” versions, with the Booga Character already established in the minds of the Producers, was it slipped in because by then Booga, "was a character and not just a kangaroo [so] it wasn't an issue anymore."

 

Even in the accepted version of the Love Scene, the most famous piece of costuming was cruelly down-played. In the comic, Tank Girl had a bra that looked like two ICBMs. The bra made it into the movie, but the only permitted shot was head-on, so the missiles no longer looked like missiles (that somehow managed to be in the animations).

 

Ice-T’s music was featured in the film, as well as Devo (memorably used in opening credits), L7, Veruca Salt, Björk, Portishead, Bush, Joan Jett, and Paul Westerberg. Talalay hired the famous (notorious?) Rocker Courtney Love as her Executive Music Coordinator and extra-long song-samples proved a more significant contribution than Graem Revell’s score. Love was originally supposed to be Jet Girl, but demurred from such a large commitment after the suicide of her husband, Rocker Kurt Cobain.

 

But even for all of this, appreciated as it was, I still have to agree with most of the bad things people said about the film at the time. I opened this essay with promising words from Critic Ebert, unfortunately he closed his own review with this scolding observation, “Director Sidney Lumet has a new book out about how to make movies. In it he observes that slowly-paced scenes can actually make a movie seem to go faster than a relentless pacing that never stops.”

 

Leonard Klady, “What’s missing from the mix is an engaging story to bind together its intriguing bits ...

a classic case of kitchen-sink filmmaking, in which the principals have thrown everything into the stew, hoping enough will stick to the audience.”

 

A Critic whose name I have now lost, “A true punk heroine would have been a pleasure, with excessive violence, nudity, and something to shock society.  Instead, the worst thing your grandma might say about Tank Girl is that she really should use less foul language.” 

 

And the above-mentioned Gleiberman admired many things in the film, but ultimately concluded the it clearly would “rather be cute than dangerous.”

 

Though the Hot-Mess and Studio Interference problems are easy enough to explain, it still mystifies that a film as insanely timely as “Tank Girl” didn’t click despite its flaws. It was the first Riot Grrrl movie, a Sub-Culture of the Punk Sub-Culture that was almost certainly inspired by the comic. Riot Grrrl was born in the USA in 1991 when a group of women from Washington State and Washington DC (so, 2,798 miles apart), held a meeting about sexism in the various local Punk scenes across the United States. They were Sex-Positive, Third-Wave Feminists, younger and louder than the Gloria Steinem breed, and, importantly, initially all Musical Artists, fighting for a place where they could, as women, express emotions like Cheerful Rage and indulge in Gross-Out Humor that were generally only acceptable for male Songwriters. Critic Megan Carpenter, “The movie delighted a generation of women who wanted to see the ways they saw the world arrayed against them reflected onscreen — and who also wanted to wear combat boots with fishnets.”

 

It was also released only three-and-a-half years after the Scandal triggered by Anita Hill's allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, two years after the “Year of the Woman,” when, in reaction to the Hill/Thomas scandal a Blue Political Wave raised the number of women serving in the US Senate from only two up to a defiant six, and less-than-a-year after Paula Jones' allegations of sexual harassment against President Bill Clinton became public. Taking that under consideration, the most obvious reason Character Jet Girl survived the cuts that near-eliminated Sub Girl was a sub-plot concerning her being Sexually Harassed by, and then taking Revenge on, a WP Minion named Sergeant Small (Don Harvey and, yes, the Character name is yet another phallic reference).

 

Gleiberman again, “It passed the Bechdel Test on women in film [a test almost accidently created by comic book Writer/Artist Alison Bechdel in 1985 to measure how seriously a film takes its female Characters] before anybody else in Hollywood was even taking it [it entered the vocabulary of Film Criticism in the 2010s]— and, technically, Tank Girl … and Jet Girl … never have a conversation about men unless it's about killing them.”

 

 

Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, in their book “Cult Cinema (published 2011), went father, arguing that “Tank Girl” reached farther than any of other films of its time, or even after, that were offering strong female leads, including those from other female Directors. Mathijs and Sexton questioned if the other films were they truly feminist or that the perception was merely "the effect of the performance of feminist attitudes in its reception. They accused Director Kathryn Bigelow (who released “Strange Days” that same year) of being “too masculine” to be rightly Feminist. Similarly. They scolded this film’s Production Designer, Hardwicke, after she turned Director, of only catering to "hetero-normativity” (Hardwicke’s her first film, “Thirteen” (2004) was about a teen being led astray because she fell in with a bad influence and in the end running back into the arms of her mother, and her most famous film, “Twilight” (2008), was a romantic Vampire tale that reflects a Mormon world-view). The authors considered only “Tank Girl” to be a "'real' feminist cult film."

 

 

But, referring back to Lalalay’s above-reference to “South Park,” I could also argue “insanely timely” also means “mold-breaking” and therefore also could mean “too soon.” Carpentier again, “It didn't feel like a movie made for men, and it didn't feel like a ‘chick flick,’ as we were then given to understand those categories; it wasn't a ‘date movie’ or a ‘kids' movie’ or an ‘art house film.’ It was an action film — a comic book movie, even, when those were hardly a thing unless they starred Michael Keaton — and a sci-fi one at that.”

 

Of course there’s also another, simpler, explanation: market oversaturation. 1995 offered us a bump-crop of decently-to-hugely budgeted SF films that were remarkably diverse and some were remarkably good, but most of them bombed. Restraining myself to budgets of $20 million and above, there were few heathy vegetables came out of Hollywood’s hydroponic gardens and so most deserved their ignominious fate. The bad ones were: “Congo,” “Johnny Mnemonic,” the above mentioned “Judge Dredd,” “Village of the Damned,” “Virtuosity,” and “Waterworld.”

 

But there were Masterpieces that lost money too: “The City of Lost Children” (a French language film) and “12 Monkeys.”

 

So what chance was there for the ambitious but seriously flawed films like this one and the above-mentioned “Strange Days”?

 

Still, if there was a Just God, then how could this film bomb while complete trash like the above-mentioned “Species” make boat loads of cash? Maybe because “Species” had more nudity while indulging in, rather than challenging, conventional misogyny.

 

Back to Talalay, “I really thought I’m going to break the glass ceiling and there’s going to be success for women in action … It was so devastating to me when it wasn’t … If you look at the statistics now, there’s fifty percent the number of female directors as there were when I made ‘Tank Girl.’ Now you’re talking about eight percent versus sixteen percent. What is wrong with this picture? It hasn’t gotten any better, and I was really hoping that I was going to be the breakthrough movie.”

 

Before “Tank Girl” … well … tanked, it was supposed to make both Talalay and Petty Super Stars. Things never got very bad for Petty, despite missing out on Super-Stardom she kept getting plum roles. It was harder for Lalaly as it was her third problematic film in second-in-a-row financial failure. A lot of bad press came out of that. The comic’s Creators, though involved in the production, eventually quit in disgust and bad-mouthed the movie later. According to Hewlett, "The script was lousy; me and Alan kept rewriting it and putting “Grange Hill” [English TV series first aired 1978] jokes and ‘Benny Hill’ [English TV series first aired 1969] jokes in, and they obviously weren't getting it. They forgot to film about ten major scenes so we had to animate them [note: more likely they were filmed and cut] ... it was a horrible experience." The film was even blamed for the demise of “Deadline,” the magazine “Tank Girl” was then-published in.

 

More than a decade later, Talalay started to become optimistic. In 2008 she said, “I’ve been talking to the studio about re-optioning it. I went in and had a conversation with them, because in order to re-option it, I needed to make sure that they didn’t want to re-do it themselves ... I don’t want them to say really is ‘Yes, we do want it’, I want them to say ‘Yes, go ahead and option it and do it in the way you feel that you weren’t able to do it the first time.’

 

“There’s nobody there who was there from the original days, obviously. You’re talking about a completely different group of people ... Everything has moved on, everything is different now, and we can talk about it again.”

 

But later still, the picture she painted wasn’t so rosey, “Recently I was told ‘There’s somebody there from the old days that doesn’t like you’. I was told that and I was like ‘Grrrr…ok! Whatever!’. How am I supposed to respond to that? Do I get over it after thirteen years?

 

A cloud may have blocked that ray of sunshine then, but that finally that cloud past as well. In 2014 Shout Factory bought the film from UA and released it on Blue Ray, improving the color transfer and finally presenting it in wide-screen format (those elements redeeming the underappreciated work of Cinematographer Gale Tattersall). “They went back to the negative. It almost made me cry when I saw it first on blu-ray. Just the beauty of the transfer. I had never seen it look that good since the theatre.”

 

“I get fan mail all the time. Thank God for the Internet. It is seminal. One of the coolest things happened recently is my daughter just started university and they did a screening of it there. One of the woman astronauts took it up to space. That’s the one she insisted on having with her in outer space. So, I guess you couldn’t ask for more. Except, you know, I’d love to have more money to make my next films.”

 

Better still, Tank Girl had an obvious influence on how Actress Margo Robbi evolved the Character of Harley Quinn in-between “Suicide Squad” (2016) and “Birds of Prey: and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn” (2020) so, in 2019, Robbi’s Production company, LuckyChap, bought the rights.

 

There’s no mention of Talalay in that deal, but she did return to the Director’s chair before the decade was out, mostly making TV episodes/movies, but still prestige ones like “Ally McBeal” (between 1999-2002), “Doctor Who” (between 2014-2023), and “Sherlock” (2017) and also receiving Accolades for “The Wind in the Willows” (2006).

 

“What makes me so proud of the movie is that in spite of everything that we went through and all the problems and how disappointed I am on some levels, and how much ahead of the curve I was when I made it, I still manage to have something that’s lasting. I get fan-mail now just like I did then … ‘Judge Dredd’ came out at the same time, and it doesn’t have the same longevity because … at least I hit an audience that I was aiming to hit.”

 

Trailer:

PKTV 00074224 000230572 (youtube.com)