★★★★½
“Pre-school superheroines kick serious tongue-in-cheek butt.”
This sprang virtually fully-formed from the twisted mind of McCracken back in 1992, as a student film: even then, he intended it as a series, with most the characters, both heroines and villains, already present. The main change was to the title, the Cartoon Network balking at presenting a show called The Whoop-Ass Girls, and so the “can of whoop-ass” which was originally part of their make-up, was replaced by Chemical X.
The heroines number three: Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup, attendees at Pokey Oaks Kindergarten who just happen to have amazing superpowers – flying, laser-eye beams, incredible strength, you know the sort of thing. Each episode sees them take on a monster which threatens to destroy their home city of Townsville, or a diabolical plot by the likes of Mojo Jojo, super-intelligent simian who is perhaps their most common foe. There’s never any doubt over the outcome; the PPGs will win, and (no matter what the title says) there will be large quantities of animated whoop-ass.
Yet despite this predictability in the plot, the series continues to amaze and delight, with great characters on both sides of the law, fantastic imagination, and fabulous lines like, “The Bubbles you know is dead – I’m HARDCORE now…”. Plus there’s a whole series of riffs on pop-culture – what cartoon show would do a shot-for-shot remake of a scene from The Big Lebowski…just because? It also manages to be moral without being overly preachy, and has retained its sense of the absurd throughout. If there’s a weakness, it’s the same as any episodic show: some eps work better than others, and there are certainly dull moments. But when on-form – which is more often than not – there isn’t a more enjoyable 22 minutes of television to be seen.
Creator: Craig McCracken
Star: Cathy Cavadini, Tara Strong, E.G.Daily, Roger L. Jackson
After a couple of less-than-perfect entries in the ‘robbery girls’ subgenre, this came as a refreshing blast, with decent characterisation and a storyline that goes past the painfully obvious. Mind you, the moral remains the same – crime doesn’t pay – but at least the road taken to get there is interesting and complex. These women all have their own reasons for wanting to rob banks: getting back at society for perceived injustice, supporting a child, or simply for kicks. Interestingly, you can see both their point of view and society’s, the latter most clearly in a surprisingly sympathetic cop, Strode (John C. McGinley). The results are more a product of tragic circumstance than anything else.
Benefiting from a slew of decent performances, A&G manages to surpass most of the competition and become a worthy entry in the “gladiatrix” sub-genre. This is perhaps because the cast have been hired either because they can act or because they can fight, while simultaneously not embarrassing themselves in the other department. Pity poor Hiltz, who is in virtually every scene, yet doesn’t even get her name on the cover.
Purely on a historical level, this 1985 film merits attention since it started the whole action-heroine genre in Hong Kong cinema, which thrived for the next decade, producing some of the finest entries ever made. It also was, effectively, the start of the careers of Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock. Interesting to see how they’ve since headed in opposite directions: Rothrock to low-budget erotic thrillers, Yeoh to the Academy Awards.
Women-in-prison is not a genre greatly within our remit, since they’re often just an excuse for a bit of soft-core masochism. There are occasional exceptions, however, and this is one, with its origins as a network TV show forcing restraint of the more exploitative aspects, as well as permitting the characters to develop more fully than in a movie.
While there have been stand-out Buffy episodes since, season two perhaps ranks as the most consistently high in quality. There’s hardly an episode that ranks as less than excellent, and the writing is sparklingly witty, with more eminently quotable lines than you can shake a stake at.
Right from the opening credits, a debt to the Brothers Grimm is clear. In this modern-day version, Red’s stepfather is a sleazebag crackhead, and her mother a street hooker; when both get carted off to jail, Vanessa Lutz (Witherspoon) heads, with basket, up Interstate 5 towards Grandma’s house. Except that on the way, she meets Bob Wolverton (Sutherland), the notorious I-5 killer. And what big teeth he has!
Somewhere around the middle of the series, I realised that this is soap-opera, pure and simple. As someone who’d never be seen dead watching a soap, this was disturbing. Fortunately, moments later, Jim Fenner did something else truly rotten to the core, and my attention went back to H.M. Prison Larkhall. Such is the joy of the show: it defies categorization.