Cruisin' For A Bruisin'

In the last decade, more deadly dolls have fueled Hollywood’s — and our — imagination than ever before. ¹ Around the United States, in the biggest of cities and smallest of towns, movie theaters and video stores offer up box office blockbusters and straight-to-video releases featuring young, sexy, female killers. Many of today’s lethal lovelies are central characters, not just sidekicks, and they kill using a variety of weapons, for any number of reasons, in a plethora of genres and genre mixes. Sometimes — as in Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992), Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), Mortal Thoughts (Alan Rudolph, 1991), The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990), Heathers (Michael Lehman, 1989), Black Widow (Bob Rafelson, 1986), Aliens (James Cameron, 1986) and The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983) (the list grows longer every day) — they are killed and/or convicted for their crimes; more frequently — as in Jennifer 8 (Bruce Robinson, 1992), The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (Curtis Hanson, 1992), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui, 1992), Switch (Blake Edwards, 1991), Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990), The Handmaid’s Tale (Volker Schlondorff, 1990), Parents (Bob Balaban, 1989), The Accused (Jonathan Kaplan, 1988), Fatal Attraction (Adrien Lyne, 1987), Nuts (Martin Ritt, 1987), Surf Nazis Must Die (Peter George, 1987), Jagged Edge (Richard Marquand, 1985), Aliens, Sudden Impact (Clint Eastwood, 1983), and Eating Raoul (Paul Bartel, 1982) — they are not. ² Whether or not they are killed or convicted, however, many of these women “cruise” because they have been “bruised,” and most are in some way “bruised” as a result of having “cruised.”