Tank Girl

The 2024 Blu-ray release of Tank Girl by Eureka will let you enjoy this feminist 1995 pop culture classic. The movie itself is in full HD. It looks and sounds great. The title screen looks good and is in keeping with the film. There is a single menu for the main feature, the audio and special features. It is well laid out and easily accommodates all of the elements within it. Also it integrates well with the artwork on the title screen, which was done by Greg Staples.

Beyond the movie there are the special features. The audio commentary with Lori Petty (Rebecca Buck/Tank Girl) and the director Rachel Talalay is engaging. Talalay talks a lot about the difficulties with the studio, from big things like them deleting scenes to them objecting to tracks sung by female vocalists.

There are a number of interviews and short documentary pieces. They do of course sometimes cover the same ground, but they are universally delivered with a level of enthusiasm that carries right over any sameness. Some of these were available on previous releases of Tank Girl. Three are, however, new to this disc. The interviews with the artist Greg Staples, who worked on some of the Tank Girl covers, the set designer Catherine Hardwicke and one of the rippers, Doug Jones, bring some fresh insights and new stories related to the film.

The documentary pieces are generally well researched but fall down a little when it comes to the milieu of British comics in the late Eighties and Nineties. Many of the people who worked on Tank Girl cut their teeth at 2000AD. It was that publication that pioneered the mixing of the science fiction comic with the politically and socially subversive. They also miss out how integrated Tank Girl was with the indie music scene and with political expression.

One thing that I had hoped would be on this Blu-ray release was the deleted scenes. The studio went over the head of Talalay, taking control over the final edit of the film. They took out the start of the film. They took out the scene in Rebecca (Tank Girl)'s bedroom. That's part of her character arc gone. Most of the torture in the cold room disappeared. The post coital scene between Rebecca and the mutant kangaroo super soldier Booga (Jeff Kober), gone. Without that some of the rest of the film doesn't quite make sense. And the ending. MGM made a mess of the film.

About half an hour of deleted material used to circulate on VHS tape, the sound and picture quality in various states of recopied degradation. Some of it can be found on YouTube. It would have been great to see a decent version of it. Tank Girl is one film that is crying out for a director's cut.

Tank Girl is far from a perfect film. The studio is largely to blame for that - but is there another action movie from 1995 that you'd actually want to watch? Some people say it was ahead of its time. No, it was of its time. The film industry was just stuck in the 1960s.