My brother has a huge DVD collection that numbers in the hundreds, so when I don’t have the time (or the cash) to go to the video store to rent a few flicks, I just head on over to his place to browse through the selection. The last time I was there, I picked up Bad Girls, a film I’d never heard of before despite the fact that it has some big names in the cast: Drew Barrymore, Andie MacDowell, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Madeleine Stowe.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take very long to see why no one ever talks about this movie. It was terrible, and I’m sure the four leading ladies view it as nothing but a blight on their résumés!

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): As the film opens, we see that the four “bad girls” of the title are so designated because they work as saloon prostitutes in the Old West. Their names are Cody (played by Stowe), Anita (Masterson), Eileen (MacDowell), and Lilly (Barrymore), but frankly, the characters were so underdeveloped that I had trouble keeping their names straight the whole time.

The girls get into trouble when Cody shoots and kills a customer who was getting way too rough with Anita. Though any reasonable judge would have considered Cody’s action justifiable, there apparently wasn’t much of a legal system back then because she’s sentenced to hang.

Of course her friends won’t let that happen, so they storm the gallows just in time and ride off into the mountains. They spend the next few days trying to evade the Pinkerton detectives on their trail, and then they head to Texas where Cody has several thousand dollars in savings. The plan is to get the money so they can go to Oregon to open and operate a sawmill. The revelation of this plan gives rise to one of the cheesiest lines in the entire movie: “We sold our bodies, why couldn’t we sell some wood?”

But just as Cody is about to withdraw the funds, her ex-partner Kid Jarrett (James Russo) happens to rob the very same bank she’s in. He takes her money along with everything else in the vault, so the girls are back at square one.

The rest of the film then deals with the way the four friends try to recover their money and make their dream come true. There are various obstacles and challenges along the way, I’m sure you can guess that the girls turn out just fine in the end.

My Reaction: I find that I don’t have much to say about this movie. It was bad in so many obviously cliché ways that there’s really no point in running through every single thing that bugged me. Between the plot holes, questionable character motivations, and crappy dialogue, there are absolutely no redeeming qualities that would make the film worth your time.

Overall, I thought Bad Girls was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. I give it just 1 star out of 5, and recommend that you stay far away from it!