Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 1, 1995 TAG: 9504030052
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The "love child of Barbarella and the Banana Splits" as the moviemakers suggest?
The spawn of Mad Max and Madonna perhaps?
How about just "Tank Girl," the punked-out, fearless, gun-loving survivalist with a heart of gold.
Or you could say - pretty safely - instant cult classic.
That's what the moviemakers obviously had in mind with this movie, which possesses the spirit of a Mad Max movie (without all the gloom), a high-energy music video, and animation sequences as transitions or escape hatches when things get hairy for Our Heroine.
Played by Lori Petty (the little sister of Geena Davis's character in "A League Of Their Own,") Rebecca - Tank Girl - makes "La Femme Nikita" look like a cream puff. Her idea of foreplay is to force her boyfriend to strip at gunpoint and aim straight at his modestly arranged hands. Her reaction to big guns is, well, let's just say ... the bigger the better.
And when she encounters a badly mutilated dead guy in the sand?
"Uck," she says. "You are SO dead."
But what's a girl to do when the Earth has been scorched by a giant comet, there hasn't been a rainfall in more than 10 years and water has become a commodity so valuable that people will go to war over it?
She must survive a creative variety of torture by the evil leader of Water and Power (Malcolm McDowell, who eventually must trade his head in for a holograph), steal a tank and join forces with The Rippers.
Played by rapper Ice-T, Jeff Kober, Reg E. Cathey and Scott Coffey, The Rippers are half-man, half-kangaroo. They live in an abandoned bowling alley under the desert, listen to their Kerouac-wannabe leader recite bad beat poetry and plot ways to regain control of scarce water supplies. And dance. And howl when they're sad.
One thing they DON'T do is use guns. They jump into the air and knock their enemies down.
The heavy gunplay is left to the women - Tank Girl and her sidekick Jet Girl (Naomi Watts), who not only want to bring down Water and Power but rescue Rebecca's young friend.
But don't go trying to read this as some kind of feminist film.
With Rachel Talalay providing direction (she produced John Waters's "Cry Baby" and "Hairspray"), and Courtney Love-Cobain supervising the soundtrack (Portishead, L7, Hole, Veruca Salt and Sky Cries Mary included), "Tank Girl" does not ask to be taken seriously.
Yes, it's violent, but not graphically so.
It's just a movie based on a comic book - retaining the color, energy and silliness of that form but fleshing it out enough to make it not just interesting but totally entertaining.
\ Tank Girl ***
R (for language, violence and sexual innuendo) 114 minutes, a United Artists release, showing at Valley View Cinema 6
by CNB