The Carrying On of A Wayward Son

Girlfriends (1993)

IMDB Score: 2.5 out of 10

During the last month and a half I’ve spent watching bad movies, I’ve learned to appreciate one thing: truly terrible films.

While I will quickly grow bored and become restless during a movie that is mostly predictable and overtly trite, the really bad ones — the movies that reek with Don Quixote-esque misplaced madness and are weighed down with an impossibly large number of ill-conceived ideals — these are the movies that are infinitely watchable.

“Girlfriends,” a 1993 comedy (?)/thriller by Mark Steven Bosko and Wayne A. Harold, is such a film.

Never ask a lesbian to wipe your butt or you'll be staring down the barrel of a gun.

The duo, also responsible for the 1991 film “Killer Nerd” that stared comic book author Harvey Pekar’s friend Toby Radloff, proudly brings audiences a tale of crime and passion among lesbian rednecks and the sadomasochistic racists they like to kill.

Stars Nina Angeloff and Lori Scarlett have perfected the art of delivering terrible lines in the worst possible way. As Wanda and Pearle, two dim-witted lesbian criminals, the actresses spend the entirety of the 70-minute movie saying and doing terrible things. When they’re not turning tricks by the side of the road in order to buy fudgesicles, killing men and stealing their wallets or disrupting community theater, the two troublemakers are using despicable grammar, following terrible leaps of logic and dressing like waitresses from the Waffle House of Hell.

If you can’t root for the film’s main characters, surely you’ll root for their unfortunate victims, right?

Wrong.

The men that the two kill-happy lesbians whack are obnoxious, racist and so lazy they can’t even wipe their own asses — literally.

“Girlfriends” is a movie completely devoid of likable characters. While a talented filmmaker might have still managed to connect audiences with these denizens of the damned (see Todd Solondz’ “Happiness”) and create genuine pathos, Bosko and Harold only offer audiences an experience akin to watching a baby kitten walk into an alligator’s mouth.

You can’t help but watch — even though every fiber of your being tells you to look away.

With a film quality that looks like something that was submitted to “America’s Funniest Home Videos” circa-Bob Saget, “Girlfriends” makes no attempt to be a good movie. In fact, I’m convinced that the filmmakers intended to make a film as terrible as the one they did. Or at least I hope that was the case. Otherwise, any enjoyment I had while watching the film and laughing at the plot’s more outlandish turns will be replaced with sincere sadness.

I did learn a few things while watching “Girlfriends,” though.

For one, I learned never to trust a hillbilly lesbian who wants to harvest my seed for her and her girlfriend’s love child. I’ll probably end up dead in a ditch somewhere — being filmed with zany early ‘90s music video camera filters.

On the other hand, I also learned that turning tricks and killing johns actually could make you a pretty decent living. Or at least enough money to by fudgesicles.