Tank Girl
Images courtesy of Park Circus/MGM
Legend has it that Rachel Talalay read Jamie Hewlett & Alan Martin’s Tank Girl comics for the first time when she was shooting Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. Who knows what bits and pieces wove themselves into her imagination, for Tank Girl captivates viewers with a similar sense of stylish mischief. After a catastrophic impact event, the one-of-a-kind protagonist, Rebecca, has taken it upon herself to defend the last independent potable water well against the evil energy magnate Kesslee. In the mid-1990s, the cultural mainstream didn’t know what to do with this prime cut of feminist-inflected pulp poetry. Talalay’s belligerent gem of a movie has been working its way from the margins of cult cinema to the broader awareness of cinephiles around the globe—and one day, the spirit of Tank Girl will occupy the center! (Olaf Möller)
Rachel Talalay (b. 1958, Chicago, Illinois) is one of the most prolific contemporary women genre directors. Shortly after graduating in Applied Mathematics from Yale University in 1980, she entered the film industry as a production assistant on John Waters’s satire Polyester. Working her way up the career ladder throughout the 1980s, she became a producer and, in 1991, seized the opportunity to direct Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991); two years later, she also directed the sci-fi slasher Ghost in the Machine. Her cinematic career effectively ended with the box-office failure of the comic-book adaptation Tank Girl (1995). She turned to television instead, working as a sought-after director on series like Doctor Who, The Flash, Sherlock, American Gods, and Supergirl, to name only a few. In 2020, she returned to the feature-film format with the Netflix fantasy comedy A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting.
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