DIRECTED BY: Rachel Talalay
FEATURING: Lori Petty, Naomi Watts, Malcolm McDowell, Ice-T, Iggy Pop
PLOT: Set in the apocalyptic future, an outlandish young punk battles the mega-corporation that controls the world’s water, with a little help, of course, from mutant kangaroos.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The peculiar visual palette and oddball characters in Tank Girl don’t stand out from the omnipresent colorful punk aesthetics of its time. Its tonal inconsistency and mildly bizarre violence (along with a manic Lori Petty) can serve as a sort of goofy surreal serenade, but it never ventures far enough from its comic book origins to really sizzle.
COMMENTS: The 1990’s was an interesting, vibrant period for punk culture. The 1981 Penelope Spheeris documentary The Decline of Western Civilization introduced us to heaps of buzz-cut youngsters sporting thrashed denim and safety pins, their mumbled words scattered due to their adrenaline pumped, amphetamine-fried brains. Nearly a decade later, after punk had (to some degree) conceded to generic glam/hair metal, Spheeris released part three of Decline, but the kids looked different this time around. Gone were the black and white clothes, the shaved heads. These kids had rainbow spiked hair held up with egg whites, as they snorted neon Slurpees up their noses while their zit-infested faces smothered the camera. In the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death, kids on the fringes of the punk scene were embracing pop sensibilities and dying their hair like Billy Joe from Green Day while they bought Offspring shirts and purple hair dye from Hot Topic. It was an ideal time for a project like the counterculture comic book adaptation Tank Girl to get greenlit. Tank Girl, which shares an aesthetic with other excessively lively and colorful 90’s movies like Batman Forever and Double Dragon, emerged as a mainstream amalgamation of a larger cultural shift that would continue with the punkish neon of movies like The Phantom and SLC Punk. Channeling inspiration from punk rock culture and feminism, Tank Girl soars with excessive frivolity.
Staying close to true punk form, Tank Girl also contains crass humor and some reasonably nihilistic violence. Like the militant, borderline-psychotic urban youth that got their kicks from cheap speed and beating up poseurs, the titular character (Lori Petty) seems to get off on pain, whether inflicted on herself or others. She chuckles mirthfully after strapping some grenades to a goon’s vest—a combat move that brings to mind a certain Caped Crusader’s mischief in another punk-indebted 90’s film—and responds to a grave threat from Kesslee (villain Malcolm McDowell) with the line “I like pain”. Indeed, Tank Girl snottily defies convention by wearing its B-movie badge with honor. All the performances seem to sync with the frisky ambiance, the one exception being the nascent Watts as the square Jet Girl, who in a perfect world may have fared better swapping her role Continue reading CAPSULE: TANK GIRL (1995)
contained numerous extra features, but the picture was not as clear. Interested parties may want to shop around for the version that best meets their needs.
“A Trip to the Orphanage” appears to be an outtake from Saddest Music, reimagined as a pure mood piece. The finale of “Orphange”—when Maria de Medeiros kisses a sleepwalker on the cheek, and he says “goodnight, mother” to her—actually appears in the film. There, the episode has no explanation. You won’t get one in “Orphanage,” either. The man walks through a wintry street with a sleepy, dazed expression. We also see shots of de Medeiros’ China doll face, and briefly view her posing with an anonymous child. A woman appears and sings a generic aria of lament: “so fraught with pain his yearning soul…” A sparse piano accompanies her. Snow falls over all the characters, and lace curtains billowing in the wind are superimposed on the picture; sometimes there’s one set of drapes waving in the foreground and a second set in the background. Singer Sarah Constible’s voice is opera-trained and lovely, and “Orphanage” is a Canadian saudade that’s as melancholy as a lone snowflake drifting on the wind. It’s also just as light, and in a mere four minutes it’s there and gone, just like a dream.
“Sombra Dolorosa” returns us to more familiarly comic Maddin territory, with a deranged plot, hysterical intertitles (“to save your daughter you must defeat… El Muerto!!”), and the same psychotic editing that characterized