Return of the killer babe

WATCH out, guys! There's a new sort of movie around. The sort of movie in which the boy doesn't so much get off with the girl as get offed by the girl.

What's more, this bad-girl behaviour is spreading all over the movie world. In France the latest example of the girls-with-guns genre has been banned from French cinemas at the instigation of the far-Right party, the National Front, for being "obscene" and "anti- male".

Virginie Despente's movie, Baise-Moi, is certainly that. The girls on the run in this rage-filled road trip bring death and destruction to many an over-familiar man, especially the "creep" who is made to bend over and grunt like a "macho pig" before being dispatched from the rear with a revolver.

But Baise-Moi (which translates as Rape Me) is a far more serious, as well being a far more sexually explicit, film than most of the new gun-girl movies.

By contrast, Mathew Bright's updating of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale in his black comedy, Confessions of a Trick Baby, avoids sex for violence, though this movie also takes a dim view of men - the only surviving male being the oven-bound witch who turns out to be a Hispanic cannibalistic drag queen, as played by Vincent Gallo.

Finally, there's British comedy thriller Beautiful Creatures, where the only nice male is a dog. This also tends to avoid sex, except for a curious fantasy sequence in which Rachel Weisz gyrates in bondage for a fan of Chicks with Chains magazine.

But Bill Eagles's comic-thriller makes up for any sexual restraint with more than enough of its own manslaughter.

"I like to do Westerns with girls," says Mathew Bright, the writer- director of Trick Baby, the second in his trilogy of updated fairy tales. "I love the idea of taking these little girls and giving them Clint Eastwood-type roles. In the original stories the girls were always supposed to be tough, but I make them disgustingly criminal as well. Oh, yeah," he adds, "it's fun." Fun is the word that unifies all three of these disparate films. Even the sober-minded Despentes says she wanted her two female leads to be "more aggressive" but also to have "more fun". And while Beautiful Creatures is more of a conventional caper movie, the film's scriptwriter, Simon Donald, says he wanted to keep it fresh and that was helped by having two female leads. "Men in thrillers always know what to do, they know the rules. But if you have two women having to deal with a dead body or stacks of stolen cash, then they have to invent ways of coping. So I knew that if I threw as much trouble as I could at them, that would be a way to have some spontaneous fun."

Susan Lynch, who stars as one of these two women, alongside Weisz, agrees: "You don't often get the opportunity to be an instigator. Most of the time as an actress you're the receptor, the one who helps someone else on their journey. Here it was great because there's an enormous freedom in being the one who hatches the plans."

Lynch refuses to be drawn into grand statements about turning the tables on men. "If people come out of the cinema thinking deeply about how we killed all those men, then we've failed; because the film's really like being back in the school yard playing cowboys and Indians - only now it's our turn to play the cowboys."

Bright is equally adamant that he avoided "really meaningful stuff" about female violence, but does believe that his "babes with bullets" reflect a real social change. "Women are way tougher now. Look at those Busby Berkeley girls in the old musicals. They jiggled.

I like jiggling. It's great. But you take a bunch of dance girls now, put 'em in a line, and there's not too much jiggling.

Those are hard bodies, and if you tried to mess with one of them, chances are she'd kick the shit out of you."

But that difference, he believes, "hasn't been expressed in movies as much as it could be. We still have the girls screaming and acting helpless, but that doesn't apply to any women I know."

Despite his disavowals of any political message behind his movie, Bright's film has stirred up a surprising amount of opposition - even before it was completed. "The Canadian crew were all smiles at first, but as soon as they signed up, they declared war." Why?

"They were disgusted by the script," replies Bright. "They said the actors were taking real drugs. Then, during a scene when the girls make love, one of the unions protested that we were sexually harassing the crew because they had to watch the scene being filmed.

It was like working in the Soviet Union."

Once it was filmed, Bright then had to face the American censors. But, as outlandish as their observations were ("Girls under 17 don't masturbate"), at least his film can be seen. Baise-Moi doesn't even enjoy that privilege in France and it's very likely that its brutally graphic rape scene will provoke the same censorial response in Britain. So why did this novelist and first-time director include graphic close-up shots of penetration during the scene? She explains: "We didn't invent rape. I've been raped and one of my actresses has been raped.

Rapists, when they're raping you, are not nice people. It's horrific, so I don't see why I shouldn't treat it that way."

Despente's forthright words caused much controversy in France when her novel (from which her film is taken) was publishedsix years ago. She is equally blunt now. "It's ridiculous to leave sex to pornography. I think it's very important to say that we can use sex on the screen for other things besides male excitement. Yes, it's a tough title - but I think women who see the film will realise that we didn't make a pro-rape movie or a movie that is pro-passivity for women."

As Despentes admits, Baise-Moi is not a movie "where the male gets a lot of pleasure".

But that could apply to a lot of guns-and-girls pictures, a suspicion which is confirmed by Mathew Bright's choice for his next film. It's Three Little Pigs - and yes, you guessed it, this time the big bad wolf is a woman.

Confessions of a Trick Baby is on general release; Beautiful Creatures opens 19 January; Baise-Moi, 30 March.

BAD GIRL MOVIE CLASSICS

A Fool There Was: Theda Bara, proto-vamp, drives her two squeezes to suicide.

Then laughs.

* Les Diaboliques: a wife and a mistress off their timeshared man - this being French, they'll never get away with it.

* Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill!: this 1965 Thelma and Louise template offers a lot more guns, gore and dirty bits.

* Thelma and Louise: watered down femo-rage from Ridley Scott still has plenty of gun-toting larks.

* Body Heat: Kathleen Turner delivers the line of the century to William Hurt - "You're not too bright, are you? I like that in a man." - then sets about trying to frame him for her husband's murder. Which she committed, natch.

lHonest: All Saints girlies toy with real horror show, but beneath the blood, all they've got are bad lines and worse wigs.

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