Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		2.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.0

Bad Girls Blu-ray Movie Review

Emphasis on the former.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman May 8, 2012

Do I look like a criminal?

Here's a manufactured, by-the-book, cliché-riddled movie if ever there was one. It's a movie that's of the brainless variety, with its only claim to fame or reason to watch being its turning of the tables, replacing the expected lead characters with different lead characters. In this case, it's removing the scruffy, hardened Western leading men with a quartet of pretty ladies who might not have scraggly days-old beards but who do prance around in dirty dresses and with faces covered in mud and blood. It's an interesting dynamic, a would-be intriguing premise, but Bad Girls falls so laughably far into convention that one simply cannot take the movie seriously or enjoy its skewered character roster for all the lame humor, generic dialogue, expected situations, unimaginative score, bland direction, and overacting. Bad Girls has it all, and rarely is the movie watchable, let alone entertaining. At its best, it's an easy target for ridicule, the sort movie aficionados watch for an opportunity to poke fun at something rather than for true entertainment value or dramatic resonance. The movie is a prime example of lame 90's filmmaking, a quickly-produced, no-thought, low-quality Action picture built around a "unique" premise that doesn't work because it never otherwise escapes tired convention.

Chicas malas.

Echo City is home to houses of ill repute, gamblers, and drunkards. In other words, it's a fairly typical Western frontier town. When one of the local prostitutes, Anita (Mary Stuart Masterson), loses control of her client, one of Anita's co-workers, Cody (Madeleine Stowe), shoots the man dead. He shot first, and the killing was justified, but the town nonetheless sees fit to string Cody up and rid itself of her murdering, whoring ways. Cody's rescued from the noose in a daring maneuver by Anita and two more fellow prostitutes, Eileen (Andie MacDowell) and Lily (Drew Barrymore). Now, they're on the run, wanted by the law, and being sought by the widow of the man Cody killed. Their plan is to take possession of a large swath of Oregon territory held by Anita's deceased husband and together open a lumber mill, hoping to strike it rich on the Westward expansion movement. But their dreams are put on hold when they become mixed up in all sorts of shady dealings on their way to putting together the funds they need to settle down in the Northwest, far away from their old lives and even further away from those who would see them hang.

Plot cadence, actor effort, music, photography, everything in Bad Girls seems straight out of the Western movie bargain bin. How the movie wrangled four top leading ladies for what is basically a cheap male fantasy is anyone's guess. The premise is nothing to sneeze at. Done correctly, this might have been a serviceable-to-entertaining genre picture with a twist. As it is, the movie barely passes the sniff test. It seems cobbled together quickly, with little care for rhythm, cohesion, characterization, or quality. The forced Comedy severely hurts the movie; a more serious, blood-soaked, dark affair might have made the movie more exciting and sexier to boot. Instead, it's one light, meaningless cliché after another, a laborious 100 minutes of cinema fluff that never gets off the ground. Add that the characters never seem balanced. They're composites of the harlot, the gunslinger, the hero, and the villain. The movie never figures out who they are, concerned more with the why than the who, at least beyond the gender. This is a one-trick simpleton pony of a movie that banks everything on the premise of replacing men with women and hoping that audiences won't notice that there's nothing else of interest. Sadly, the novelty wears off quickly, leaving an empty, unfulfilling experience that's one of the lesser films the genre has ever seen.

Worse, the movie seems content to simply rip off better Westerns with little concern. It screams Young Guns and its sequel, right down to the poster art. Rather than a bunch of pretty men, a bunch of pretty women comprise the main cast, and they do as the men, running and riding about, though here aimlessly, for the most part, and to a predictable cadence at that. Certainly, the movie works as raw eye candy. The quartet of Andie MacDowell, Drew Barrymore, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Madeleine Stowe looks great throughout, whether all fixed up in the brothel or made up to be thrown down in the mud and covered in blood. But there the movie goes again with that assumption that all it needs are these women in the lead to work. The cast never seems to have much fun with the movie, as if they themselves expected a little more from it. The ladies don't lack presence, but they don't bring much to their admittedly flat and lazily-painted characters who run the gauntlet of old West female cut-outs, this time, however, given a gun and some skill to make up for the fact. It never makes people out of them, just pretty faces with firearms, unlike, say, the vastly superior Sharon Stone character from The Quick and the Dead, a character with the benefit of a well-rounded story and place in the movie, not just a novelty or eye candy in an otherwise male-dominated landscape.

Bad Girls Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Bad Girls rides onto Blu-ray with a disappointing 1080p high definition transfer. This is fairly typical of these Fox-turned Anchor Bay releases; it's clear this is an old master lazily plopped onto Blu-ray with little concern for quality, though hence the cheap price. The image is speckled, through not obnoxiously so, throughout. Rather heavy edge enhancement plagues the image from start to finish. Details appear smoothed down and washed out. The film takes on a pasty, lifeless, and flat texture. There's absolutely no definition on dusty streets, wooden and stone building façades, or human faces and Western garb. Colors are bland, though green grasses and a few brighter outfits do look fair and offer a nice temporary reprieve from the brown earthen tones that dominate the movie. Banding and blocking are minimal, but blacks tend to overwhelm surrounding elements. Between the poor details and the edge enhancement, this one just doesn't do much for audiences in search of superior HD fare.

Bad Girls Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Bad Girls features a serviceable but far from memorable Dolby TrueHD 5.1 lossless soundtrack. Though music plays with fair spacing -- including a prominent surround support element -- it lacks precision clarity. This holds true whether light score or more rousing action accompaniments. Sound does maneuver through the listening area with general ease and accuracy, nicely effecting the on-screen goings-on. Horse and buggy rattle across the stage, for instance, nicely painting a sonic picture that positively reinforces the visuals. Minor atmospherics are nicely inserted, whether chirping birds or the light din of galloping horses and chatty townsfolk. Gunfire and explosions both enter the soundstage with satisfactory clarity, energy, and accuracy. Dialogue is generally clean and grounded in the center, though there are times it becomes slightly muddled underneath competing elements, such as an early scene in a bar before Cody shoots Anita's attacker. This track won't set sound systems ablaze, but it's a capable presentation and the "highlight" of this release.

Bad Girls Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

All that's included is the Bad Girls theatrical trailer (1080p, 1:31).

Bad Girls Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Bad Girls might be good for a chuckle or three, but serious genre aficionados will rightly look down on this one. Bad Girls offers routine filmmaking, generic characters, a poor pace, and does little with its switch-a-roo premise. There's some fine eye candy to be sure, and the ladies look great even covered in dust, but the film is otherwise a poor excuse for a rich Western. Anchor Bay's Blu-ray release of this 20th Century Fox catalogue title features substandard video, midlevel audio, and no supplements that cannot be found by a few keystrokes on Youtube. Skip it.