If Christopher Bickel’s Bad Girls fails to hook you in its first five minutes, here’s a list of things you must despise seeing in movies: attractive women in their underwear, attractive women out of their underwear, violent strip club robberies, car chases, car crashes, coke trips, acid trips, violent convenience store robberies, violent bar fights and violent deer collisions.
After murdering their instantly former employer and taking “a shitload of money and drugs,” three exotic dancers make a run for the Mexico border: the blonde Carolyn (Shelby Lois Guinn), the Black Mitzi Anne (Sanethia Dresch) and brunette leader Val (Morgan Shaley Renew), she of the double-height eyebrows. As one citizen tells the TV news, “They’re just like Bonnie and Clyde, but they’re all Bonnie and there’s three of ’em!”
With Bah-stun accents, bad puns and broken beer bottles galore, the ladies go from one brutal encounter to another. No male is spared, at least of humiliation, from a blue-balled frat boy to a white supremacist running a 24-hour donut and ammo shop. Stops are made for shows by bands like Christmas Tits and Poltergasm, if only to kidnap their members. The movie is one long chase, with two federal agents (Dove Dupree and Mike Amason) on their tails. “We’re gonna find ’em, fuck ’em, fry ’em and forget ’em!” vows the nasal spray-addicted agent to his partner. “Figuratively!”
Obviously influenced by Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Bickel (The Theta Girl) moves his sophomore film at a jet-propulsion pace, rarely slowing to take a breath. Although stocked with music I wouldn’t listen to, the soundtrack matches the girls’ spring-loaded antics by going into Dexedrine-aggro mode, as does Bickle’s Natural Born Killers-styled editing of excess and overlays. The overall energy he conjures help mitigate deficiencies in a repetitive story and the purposely campy performances. It’s a ride, for sure, and one that dares to kill its babies. Not figuratively! —Rod Lott