Tank Girl

Tank Girl, a United Artists production released March 31, 1995, adapted Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin's anarchic comic from the British magazine Deadline. Director Rachel Talalay built the film around Lori Petty as Rebecca "Tank Girl" Buck, a wisecracking rebel loose in a 2033 where a comet has triggered a decade-long drought and the Water & Power corporation controls what's left of the water. Malcolm McDowell played the villain Kesslee, Ice-T appeared under Stan Winston-built prosthetics as one of the kangaroo-mutant Rippers, and a young Naomi Watts played Jet Girl. Courtney Love assembled the soundtrack — the era's alt-rock on one disc, Björk and Devo among the acts, with Scott Weiland's side project the Magnificent Bastards recording "Mockingbird Girl" for it after Love asked him directly.

The studio had other ideas. It recut the film against Talalay's wishes, and gaps in the story were patched with animated sequences in the comic's style. The movie tanked: $6 million at the box office against a $25 million budget. The comic's creators disowned it — Hewlett called the script "lousy" and the whole experience "a bit of a sore point."

Yet Tank Girl refused to stay dead. It found its real audience later, embraced as a cult classic for its riot-grrrl attitude, its feminist streak, and Petty's gleefully unhinged performance — too weird to forget, too earnest in its strangeness to dismiss. For a movie that bombed on arrival, it lodged itself permanently in the memory of everyone who met it.