Directed by Gregory Hatanaka
Review by Dan Greene



Released by: Cinema Epoch
Year of release: 2007
Running time: 89 minutes
Rating: NR
Color Format: Color
Audio / Subtitles: English/French/Sinhala in Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby Digital 2.0 with occasional embedded subtitles.
Region Code: Region 1 NTSC
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
16:9 enhanced: Yes
Special features: Deleted scenes & outtakes; stills gallery; biographies; theatrical trailer; grindhouse kung fu movie trailers.
Trailer Online: Yes

The front-cover artwork for Gregory Hatanaka’s faux-shocking exercise in tedium, MAD COWGIRL, would seem to advertise the film as an escapee from the Troma catalogue, while the back-cover boilerplate heralds this as the second coming of Jodorowsky. Frankly, it fails to deliver on both counts—and then some.

The “story” concerns Therese, a mixed-up young lady with an addiction to beef, a fetish for clergymen, and an obsession with Z-grade American kung fu. If that description makes the film sound like a series of arbitrarily-chosen non sequiturs… it probably is. Complicating Therese’s life further, her butcher-shop brother (and lover… ewww) may have unintentionally infected her with mad cow disease. Then again, maybe not. She may just be crazy all on her own.

Starring a recognizable cast of Gregg Araki alumni (Sarah Lassez, James Duval) and STAR TREK’s own Mr. Chekov (Walter Koenig), MAD COWGIRL plays out like a handful of student shorts, pieced together as an afterthought and blatantly pining to be DONNIE DARKO. It’s a shame, too, considering the fairly competent acting (I think this is James Duval’s most natural performance, to date) and the mostly high-quality look of the film (MAD COWGIRL was shot on the Panasonic AG-DVX100 MiniDV camera, then transferred to film). The one and only tenuous connection between the beef / clergy / kung fu / incest plotlines is Therese’s psychosis. I was consistently uninterested in anything that was going on. Furthermore, distracting directorial choices abound. Therese’s doctor—played by respected Sri Lankan actor/filmmaker Linton Semage—speaks to her in his native tongue of Sinhala, yet she understands instantly and responds in English. What must have seemed to the filmmakers like an inspired denial of the barriers of language (or—let’s be honest—an extra touch of postmodern weirdness) just comes across as downright perplexing.

Ultimately, MAD COWGIRL reinforces the old adage that you can’t force weirdness, and you can’t set out to build a cult classic from the ground up. That’s why cult classics are cult classics—nobody saw them coming, but they struck a chord with a tight-knit audience of freaks & geeks. When you force something into existence, you end up with a silly, incoherent bore.

Bonus features include over 30 minutes of equally uninspired deleted scenes and outtakes, a gallery of production stills, cast and filmmaker bios, the theatrical trailer, and a few public domain trailers for grindhouse kung fu movies.