What a damn shame! Never before I encountered a movie with such potentially brilliant story ideas, and yet somehow it ended up being an indescribably irritating and tragically dull mess! The main character, as well as most of the supportive ones, is probably the most fascinatingly eccentric person to ever lead a modern horror adventure and the situations she encounters are inventive and freaky as hell. Sounds terrific, but then what went wrong? I tell you what went wrong; director Gregory Hatanaka keeps on interrupting his own fabulous concepts with pseudo-artistic nagging and visual gimmicks that totally ruin the pace and the low-budget exploitation atmosphere. The young, intelligent and sexy Therese is the ideal woman. Therese is a nymphomaniac, desperately in love with a sinister TV-evangelist, but she also won't say no to some lesbian sex or even an incestuous relationship with her crazy brother Thierry. She's a food inspector and he imports meat of questionable quality standards. Convinced she's infected with the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease after eating one of her brother's Canadian steaks; Therese slowly loses her mind and starts to believe she's the Kung-Fu fighting heroine of her own favorite grindhouse movie "The Girl with the Thunderbolt Kick". The plot is so demented it becomes brilliant, like Tarantino on acid, especially when Therese considers herself to be on a mission to annihilate the Ten Tigers of Kwan Tang, or whatever they're called. It's a really regrettable to announce that according to me personally, at least the ingeniousness of the plot is brought down by experimental editing, exaggeratedly hectic camera-work and the director's super massive ego. "Mad Cowgirl" is gory, sleazy and surrealistic, but it quite isn't the homage to rancid 70's exploitation director Hatanaka intended it to be. It's more reminiscent to Gregg Araki's "The Doom Generation", only with even more nastiness and dementia. Sarah Lassez is a rather talented young actress and I hope she'll be offered some better screenplays in the near future. Young cult icon and inexplicably cool dude James Duval is his usual confused self as Therese's brother and I'm sure nobody expected Star Trek veteran Walter Koenig to appear in a production like this, and definitely not in the unconventional role of uncanny TV-preacher. The film contains loads of unexplained but rather fascinating little elements, like some of Therese's acquaintances speaking foreign languages (and she being able to understand them) and brief flashes of Japanese news reports. Weird
but too obviously wannabe-intellectual for no reason. "Mad Cowgirl" has quite a large fan-base and the most fanatic admirers will probably claim that I completely don't understand the underlying brilliance of Hatanka's filming style, but whatever. The film could have been much better.
