Bad Meaning Good case study #10: 'She-Wolves Of The Wasteland'

Wednesday, December 23 2009

In April of 2009, myself and DJ Intel launched the 'Bad Meaning Good' monthly movie event at The Burlington in Chicago (which takes place on the first Monday of every month). The idea behind the night is to screen cult classics, exploit movies, unintentional comedies and every other kind of film we collectively decide is so bad that it's actually good. In the ongoing search for the perfect 'Bad Meaning Good' film I've decided to take on a weekly (or AT LEAST once-per-week) blog entry in which I'll review, summarize and rate bad movies of every variety imaginable. The goal is to reach somewhere in the range of 75-100 posts within a year, at which point I'll look for a place to publish a first volume of 'Bad Meaning Good' reviews in book form. Stay tuned...

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Bad Meaning Good case study #8:
'She-Wolves Of The Wasteland' aka 'Phoenix The Warrior' (dir. Robert Hayes)

Summary:
It's the future and the world has been ravaged by chemical warfare. All men are presumed dead and a witch-like dictator-bitch runs the show. Her name is the Reverend Mother and she barks orders from a room draped in plastic sheeting while being fed through tubes and some sort of space age dialysis machine that keeps her alive. Women who have survived the fallout exist in one of two camps: They are either subservient to the Reverend Mother's (we'll call her RM for short) dictatorship and surrender themselves to be harvested for their life-giving abilities that keep the RM alive, or they go rogue in the wasteland and are relentlessly pursued by the RM's crack team of punk rock bounty hunter babes.

A woman named Keela achieves the near impossible double-whammy of not only escaping the RM's compound but also being the first woman in untold generations to have become impregnated with a male seed. (This premise does create something of a logic gap when it comes to understanding how exactly women continued to produce more and more women for so many years without any men around but I digress...) Forced to flee in a quest for survival, Keela teams up with the renegade warrior Phoenix (played by the uber-hot Kathleen Kinmont) in a chase through the wasteland that has life-or-death implications for both them and humanity at large.

Along the way they miraculously discover a lone man-in-hiding presumed to be the only living male on Earth. Tired of living a life in seclusion, he joins their quest to free the women of the wasteland and do away with the RM once and for all.

The title is more than a tad misleading because there is nothing remotely wolf-like or even wolf-related in this film at all. Instead what follows is a whole lot of 'Mad Max'-styled, post-apocolyptic silliness. It also deserves note that 'She-Wolves...' came out the same year as both 'Willow' and 'Hell Comes To Frogtown', two other films it greatly resembles in terms of both content and aesthetics. It's all pretty low-rent, made-for-cable stuff though and functions primarily as a vehicle for scantily clad babes with punk-ish, glam haircuts to ride around the desert in dune buggies while firing assault rifles and generally looking pretty damn hot. This is the kind of movie where women on the run in animal skin bikinis stop to take topless showers under waterfalls... And this is of course a good thing. While a few of the women look just a little bit too much like Vince Neil for comfort, the majority are a good notch or two above the prevailing b-movie grade chicks of the era. No doubt, 'She-Wolves Of The Wasteland' is a thoroughly and undoubtedly 80's sort of affair.

How 'Bad Meaning Good' was it?:
For ostensibly mindless, T&A entertainment, 'She-Wolves...' was FAR more entertaining than it had any business being. There really wasn't a dull minute in the entire thing and it had the kind of pacing and directorial makings of a far superior film. In that regard it's really not much of a surprise to me to see that director Robert Hayes has had a 20+ year film career as a cinematographer, DP and camera operator.

As fodder for camp enthusiasts it leaves much to recommend as well. We see 'Gladiator'-style death fights in the round between babes in junkshop armor fashioned from hockey shoulder pads, broom handle weaponry, shin guards and other ridiculous and assorted wasteland get-ups. Nearly every character has a name that would instantly qualify her for employment with the American Gladiators (Riptide, Whiplash, Cobalt, Chainsaw, Neon, Snapper, Ginsu, etc.) and the whole thing is scored by a propulsive drum machines and electro bass soundtrack with flourishes of Boards Of Canada-style, analog synthesizer portamento freak-outs.

The performances are of course generally laughable but Keela, the lead (played by ex-Playboy Playmate Peggy McIntaggart), lends the film a degree of acting anti-chops that, off the top of my head, I've only seen equaled by actors in 'Samurai Cop' and 'Troll 2'. She's REALLY bad.

In the film's funniest sequence, the protagonists' journey lands them in the "badlands", a sequestered area haunted by the 'Rezules', a group of nomadic, occultist folk who worship at the altar of television's past. The badlands are littered with skeletons on lay-z-boys (presumably having died while watching tv) and while the Rezules prepare to kill the main characters, they make a ritualistic, chant-like offering to their deities: "Sesame Street... The Flintstones... The Jetsons"... It's one of several of the film's laugh-out-loud moments and an utterly inspired turn of script-writing stupidity.

Additionally, there's a wealth of hilarious and out-of-the-blue dialog crudeness and some extremely economical, well-placed vulgarities to keep you laughing along the way. While the film at times had the look of a bad 80's music video stretched to feature length, I often found myself shocked by how much I was enjoying it and those of you seeking out a quality piece of mindless entertainment could do much, much worse than this.

Stamp it with that 'Bad Meaning Good' seal of approval. 'She-Wolves Of The Wastland', you have won me over.

'Bad Meaning Good'-O-Meter:
7.9/10

Check out some of the film's sweet action below...

Tags: Bad Meaning Good, Bad Meaning Good Case Studies

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