"Bad Girls" (1994) directed by Jonathan Kaplan is definitely a typical Western. It has the riding, the gun slinging, and the cowboys and prostitutes to fill it out. Yet with one large modification, the roles of the women are very different from what has come to be expected as the norm in this genre. The four leading women, even in their given roles as prostitutes, lead the movie and drive the storyline. The first woman, Cody Zamora (Madeleine Stowe) shoots a man for not stepping away from Anita Crown (Mary Stewart Masterson) her friend and fellow harlot. A group of religious zealots that happened to be protesting the hotel where the women worked brought her out to be hanged. Anita and the other two women, Eileen Spenser and Lilly Laronette (Andie MacDowell and Drew Barrymore) pack up to rescue Cody from the noose. From that point on, they are wanted women. They have strong wills and challenge the men that wish to capture them, or humiliate them. I like the idea of this movie in that you would turn gender roles in Westerns on its head, but there are so many instances that made the movie predictable and played down the intended role for the women. The women, regardless of how capable they are at shooting a gun and getting out of bad situations, seemed to just make trouble for themselves. This might have been a way to show the human fallibility, but it further perpetuates the Western genre classification. The only way they got out was though "movie luck," the event where the antagonists' bullets never reach the protagonists or miss them completely, while the protagonist has perfect aim. My opinion of this movie is that it gets a little tedious, has seemingly unnecessary nude scenes, and is fairly predictable. This movie is merely entertaining on a superficial level.
Review of Bad Girls
