Where to watch Bad Girls
2 1/2 Stars
When saloon prostitute Cody Zamora rescues her friend Anita from an abusive customer by killing him, she is sentenced to hang. However, Anita and their two friends Eileen and Lilly rescue Cody and the four make a run for Texas, pursued by Graves and O’Brady, two Pinkerton detectives hired to track them. When Cody withdraws her savings from a Texas bank, the women believe they can now start a new life in Oregon. But Cody’s old partner Kid Jarrett takes Cody’s money when his gang robs the bank, and so the four so-called “Honky- Tonk Harlots” set out to recover the money, with the Pinkertons hot on their trail.
First, there were Young Guns, and now we have Young Girls, er, Bad Girls, as the title goes. This Western with women dominating the primary roles was a wildly revisionist take on the genre circa 1994, but today the film plays out in a tame and campy fashion, making Bad Girls a guilty pleasure. The magnificent Madeleine Stowe, who appears in three movie releases in the first quarter of ’94, is the HBIC. Her mixture of steely-eyed determination and sex appeal makes her an ideal lead protagonist for the story.
Bad Girls is a violent revenge fantasy that works well in spurts until the plot turns into a series of rescues. However, the performances from the leads and Robert Loggia as the patriarch of a gang of murders anchor the film. There is also comic relief in the form of two detectives looking for the female outlaws but fumbling the gig due to their drunkenness and ineptitude. Bad Girls is a fast-paced western that isn’t the embarrassment the pre-release buzz suggested; instead, it’s an entertaining revisionist take that honors the genre while providing a quartet of hard-boiled heroines.
Directed by: Jonathan Kaplan
Written by: Albert S. Ruddy, Charles Finch, Gray Frederickson
Starring: Madeleine Stowe, Mary Stuart Masterson, Andie MacDowell