Lights Out Movie Reviews
Copyright (c) 1994, Bruce Diamond
All rights reserved



        Ŀ
           BAD GIRLS:  Jonathan Kaplan, director.  Ken Friedman    
           and Yolande Finch, screenplay.  Albert S. Ruddy &       
           Charles Finch & Gray Frederickson, story.  Starring     
           Madeleine Stowe, Mary Stuart Masterson, Drew Barry-     
           more, Andie MacDowell, James Russo, Robert Loggia,      
           and Dermot Mulroney.  Twentieth-Century Fox.            
           Rated R.                                                
        

          Sweethearts with six-shooters.  Cuties with Colt 45s.
     Pretties with pistols.  Four rip-roarin' chicks out to tame the
     Old West with new ways.  The same old Western clichs, done up in
     lipstick and skirts.  No, it's not hard to get a handle on BAD
     GIRLS; the problem is that once you know the premise (hard to
     avoid with this film's media saturation), there's not much more
     to discover.  The picture isn't particularly fresh, it isn't
     particularly bold, but it isn't particularly bad, either.  It
     just . . . is.

          Madeleine Stowe, Andie MacDowell, Mary Stuart Masterson, and
     Drew Barrymore star as the titular characters, all prostitutes on
     the run after Stowe shoots an Army colonel for getting a little
     rough.  Their goal, decided on the road, is to develop Anita's
     (Masterson) land in the Oregon Territory, a property she owned
     with her now-deceased husband.  Their first stop is a town where
     Cody (Stowe) has been wiring money for years; she's built up a
     comfortable nest egg of several thousand which will make for a
     good beginning on the West Coast.  If they can just get there.
     The colonel's widow has hired Pinkerton detectives to track her,
     a mysterious man, Joshua McCay (Dermot Mulroney), runs into them
     several times, and Cody comes face-to-face with her outlaw-
     running past when she collects her money from the bank.  By (a
     rather credibility-straining) coincidence, her former lover, the
     outlaw Kid Jarrett, is robbing the bank.  He steals her stake to
     get her to visit him, and all hell busts loose.  Each side takes
     a hostage, McCay jumps into the action, a townie is dragged into
     the fray involuntarily, and the only way to get out of this mess
     is to shoot your way out.  I must say, all four leads do cut
     impressive figures as gun-totin' ladies, apparently with shooting
     skills to match (at least, that's what the director, Jonathan
     Kaplan, successfully portrays), but we've seen it all before.
     We've just seen it with a different hormonal mix.

          Even though Kaplan is dishing up the same tired Western
     situations (jailbreaks, holdups, runaway wagons, hell-bent-for-
     leather riding, fast draws and slow drawls), there's something
     every so slightly refreshing to see the guns in female hands.
     There's an appeal beyond the novelty, perhaps because the
     feminist thread to this revisionist Western is highlighted by two
     scenes, and then dropped to the background.  Kaplan and the
     scriptwriters mercifully avoid the long, dreadful, ideological
     speeches that tend to dominate some films, whether they're
     championing the cause or not.  It's the same basic dictum of
     storytelling you'll find in every Writing 101 class:  show, don't
     tell.  The human animal learns more by example than by lecture,
     and by showing four capable female characters in BAD GIRLS, the
     filmmakers can say more about feminism than in a semester-long
     course on the subject.  Masterson sums up the subject in the
     film's best line:  "If your laws don't include me, then they
     don't apply to me."  It's just too bad that those words are
     wrapped in a standard Western plot with a cutesy, counter-pro-
     ductive title.

     RATING:  $$

