This film arrives with quite a chequered history. After shooting for a mere nine days, producers Andre Morgan and Al Ruddy, citing the usual "creative differences" impasse, unceremoniously fired director Tamra Davis and brought in Jonathan Kaplan to take over the reins. Under his aegis the script, a female-centric Western, was substantially rewritten, substituting most of Davis' alleged more gritty proto-feminist aesthetics with the generic, broad-based genre sensibilities that Young Guns exploited in 1988, only this time utilising the sexual allure of four attractive female leads. Looking like they just stepped out of a cowboy outfitters boutique on their way to a magazine photo shoot, Madeleine Stowe, Andie McDowell, Mary Stuart Masterton and Drew Barrymore play four of the most photogenic Wild West prostitutes this side of a dude ranch in Montana. Their haute couture adventure begins with a murder and a jail break then quickly segues to a double-cross bank robbery, a cross-country pursuit and finally a time-honored, black-hat-villian showdown where the quartet seals its new-found feminist leanings with a fancy bit of gun-play. Written by Ken Friedmand and Yolande Finch, Bad Girls is a contrived, anachronistic exercise in formula film-making without the formula. One can only speculate how quickly the real West could have been won had designer-wearing, hair-style fashionistas like these were every bordello's chief attraction. Laudable as it may have been for the four stars to ride out the storm and stick around, the resulting film is undeserving of their loyalty. Had the ladies bothered to appraise themselves of the new script's serious shortcomings, they would have been perfectly within their rights to reject it, cut their losses, and throw some of their characters' girl-power weight behind their original director's vision. It surely couldn't have been any worse than this.
