BAD GIRLS gleefully subverts genre tropes in telling its lurid, hyperreal tale. After robbing a strip club, three desperate teenage girls lead a grizzled Federal Agent on a lysergic cross-country chase, scoring a duffle bag full of money, drugs, and a crew of willing kidnapees along the way.
BAD GIRLS is an underground film produced by amateurs in South Carolina for $16,000 — “about one-half of the CATERING BUDGET for a typical made-for-TV movie,” Bickel proudly indicates. The majority of that budget (some of which was raised by crowd-funding, some came from Bickel’s day-job in a record store) went to pay the cast and crew a modest daily stipend — something which director Bickel cites as being “of utmost importance to keeping harmony on set.”
Citing influences as diverse as Jack Hill, Russ Meyer, Greg Araki, R Kern, John Waters, and Robert Downey (Sr.), Bickel has crafted a vision more than just the sum parts of those influences — it is something unique in current underground cinema.
“These are characters people haven’t seen before, interacting in a violent world that is almost-but-not-quite our own,” says director Christopher Bickel of the “exaggerated reality” of the BAD GIRLS universe. “When you’re making a movie for the cost of a used car, you’re forced to get creative with the storytelling in ways that Hollywood focus-groups don’t allow. You won’t find BAD GIRLS in a Walmart because it doesn’t belong in a Walmart.”
Nikolas Schreck, author of The Satanic Screen and The Manson File says, “Not since Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! have three lethal ladies on a rampage lit up the screen like the inviting infernal trio in Christopher Bickel’s hallucinatory candy-colored joy ride into the ultraviolent abyss of amoral All-American dysfunction. An artfully stylized irreverent pop art road movie spiked with black humor, Bad Girls races to it’s grim conclusion at carnival rollercoaster pace, joyfully making sex, drugs, and rock and roll unrespectable again.”
