Bad Girl is Modern Exploitation In A Slick Package – Review
Bad Girl, Bad Girl, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when audiences get a look at you? If The Asylum has anything to say about it, this bad girl will love you to death.
Most movie fans know The Asylum as the direct to video studio keen on producing low budget copycat films of upcoming summer blockbusters. With titles like Transmorphers, Alien vs Hunter, Almighty Thor and Snakes On A Train, you can’t help but be entertained by the sheer balls of their business strategy. That being said, the psycho-teen thriller Bad Girl is is trying to be it’s own beast and the beast is hungry.
If The Asylum has anything to say about it, this Bad Girl will love you to death.
Building a career writing, producing and directing kid friendly animated titles such as Vic The Viking, Blinky Bill and Maya The Bee, writer/director Fin Edquist has taken a shocking 180 turn with his moody live action feature and mothers better lock up their children. Mostly to keep the rest of us safe.
From the trailer, older Cinephile’s could easily point to Macaulay Culkin’s bad boy turn in 1993’s The Good Son as a touchstone for the homicidal adolescent mayhem of Bad Girl. Squint a bit at the promo image above and you just might think it’s an alternate cut of The Runaways film from a few years back, with Kristen Stewart’s Joan Jett clutching a butcher knife instead of a guitar. The derivative nature of the film is not to its detriment however.
You’ve heard of 2 Broke Girls, get ready for 2 Broken Girls. Bad Girl’s main character Amy has a history of behavioral problems with her foster parents that leads to her being seduced into a friendship with a seemingly angelic blond neighbor girl calling herself Chloe. Soon the girls are more than just friends.
But all is not as it seems when the disturbing truth behind Chloe’s own damaged nature and convoluted web of lies begins to unravel in unexpectedly violent ways. So the question becomes, will the twists and turns of Bad Girl push you to the breaking point or push you away?
While the film is competently shot in the modern aesthetic, the themes and setting are pure exploitation. If this film had been made in 1976, it would have surely been called Lesbian Psycho Teens In Love and the description is not far off.
Bad Girl is intensely raw with drug use, sex and violence in parts and while the suspense itself doesn’t pick up until about halfway through the film’s run time, the cracked psyche of our villain is wonderfully amplified against the mundanity of the rural Australian town where the story is set.
Parallels to Single White Female are evident in Bad Girl by the end, but the performances by the cast are still very engaging. Samara Weaving is absolutely entrancing as the manipulative Chloe and her resemblance to fellow Australian, Margot Robbie, who played the similarly psychotic Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad last year just adds to the effect.
As Amy, Sara West peels back enough layers to show us the vulnerability of a conflicted foster child that can fight back for her adopted family when pushed too far. Special mention goes to composer Warren Ellis for his killer score which adds a creepy layer of atmosphere to the story.
Bad Girl is by no means a bad film, quite the opposite. I found myself completely engaged in the story throughout and the climax is a pure adrenaline rush. While not exactly a horror film, this is one offering from The Asylum that is definitely worth seeking out for a wickedly entertaining night of titillating tension.
Luckily Bad Girl is coming to a theater near you this week, for one night only, thanks to Cinemark and The Asylum’s Thursday Nights At The Asylum film series. Bad Girl is lucky number 7 in this series and you should consider yourself lucky if you get a chance to see it on the big screen.
Click Here to see the list of Cinemark theaters bringing the twisted world of Bad Girl to you.