I mentioned a few weeks back that Call Me Mister was one of the few films currently in the FXM Retro rotation that I hadn't written a blog post about. It turns out there's at least one other, although it's also one of the most recent films that the FXM Retro block runs: the 1994 western Bad Girls. It's got another airing tomorrow (March 12) at 1:15 PM, so I recently watched it to do the review here.
The movie starts off in the stereotypical movie western town of Echo City sometime in the 1890s. Four women have fallen on hard times, with the result that they've had to resort to working at the local brothel to earn a living. Meanwhile, the local branch of the Temperance Union has been campaigning against prostitution. So when Anita (Mary Stuart Masterson) kills in self-defense a john who tries to hurt her, nobody other than the other prostitutes has any sympathy for her. The town intends to hang her, but as she's on the gallows, three fellow prostitutes -- Cody (Madeleine Stowe), Eileen (Andie MacDowell), and Lily (Drew Barrymore) -- come to her rescue, literally absconding with her.
A lot of people are on the trail of the four women, notably the Pinkerton detectives. But it's a lone, man, Josh McCoy (Dermot Mulroney), who runs into them first. He claims to be a prospector, but none of the women believe him since he's not grizzled enough for that. But he gives the ladies the news that they're not going to be safe hiding out where they are.
Anita only went into prostitution because she's a widow. Her husband had a homestead in Oregon, and Anita would like to go there to claim her inheritance, but she's in need of money. Thankfully, Cody has saved up enough for the four of them to get to Oregon and work the land together. They just have to go to the bank to get it. And then they do, they discover that the Pinkertons have shown up in town as well. Worse, they and the Pinkertons have gotten there just as an old flame of Cody's, Kid Jarrett (James Russo) and his gang have decided to rob the bank!
Cody decides she's going to try to get Anita's money back from Jarrett, while the other three make their way to a ranch that just happens to belong to a man they met in town and whom they tricked into freeing Eileen from jail. Meanwhile, the four women figure out a way to try to get revenge on Jarrett, starting with double-crossing him on a train robbery....
It's easy to see why the four actresses in the lead role would want to make a movie like Bad Girls. Or, at least it's easy to see why they would have wanted to make what was in the original script. Script changes among other things led Bad Girls to be a critical failure upon its release in 1994. Personally, I think that terrible critical reception is mildly unfair.
The plot is mostly serviceable, in that it's something that you could have seen in any western from the golden era of westerns 40 years earlier, only with female protagonists instead of male protagonists. But that is in fact one of the problems with the movie, that there's pretty much nothing original in the movie beyond the female protagonists. The other big flaw for me was the too-modern filming techniques. Bad Girls repeatedly came across to me as one of those movies where the direction and cinematography are intrusive, with needless zooms and switching to slow motion.
Still, the four leads are appealing even if they aren't stretched enough. And as always, you may want to watch for yourself and draw your own conlusions.
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