REBEL GIRL

FROM FINANCIAL FLOP TO AHEAD-OF-ITS TIME #METOO CHAMPION… TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER IT MADE THE COVER OF SFX ISSUE ONE, DIRECTOR RACHEL TALALAY AND STAR LORI PETTY REFLECT ON THE ROLLERCOASTER AFTERLIFE OF TANK GIRL

- SIMON BLAND

“IN MANY WAYS IT’S BECOME MUCH more relevant,” suggests director Rachel Talalay of her 1995 comic book movie Tank Girl. “It’s so much more apparent now just how ahead of our time we were.” Hindsight offers an odd perspective. For Talalay, revisiting the release of her polarising adaptation of Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett’s comic isn’t easy. Creating this post-apocalyptic tale of a scorched future where a single mega-company controls all of the world’s remaining resources – and the one neo-punk screwball brave enough to call time on their antics – was far from an enjoyable experience.

In fact, the fall out from the film’s constant last-minute tinkering and fumbled release was almost enough to derail Talalay’s career. So it goes without saying that celebrating Tank Girl’s quarter-century has more than a touch of the bittersweet about it.

Arriving about two decades too early, Tank Girl saw Lori Petty star as the tattooed and grinning antihero she was seemingly born to play. Set against a Mad Max-esque backdrop of dust and desolation, it pits its quip-a-minute heroine against the Malcolm McDowellfronted Water & Power corporation, alongside Naomi Watts’s introverted mech-head Jet Girl and a gang of hideous human-kangaroo hybrids led by rapper Ice-T and brought to life via the prosthetic wizardry of Stan Winston. It had all the trappings of a ’90s movie: gaudy visual effects, zany characters, and a sky-high concept that was brimming with originality. Yet at its core was something previously unseen and – to some – potentially dangerous: a radical feminist icon flipping the bird to the powers that be.