Tank Girl (4K UHD Review)
Director
Rachel TalalayRelease Date(s)
1995 (February 24, 2026)Studio(s)
United Artists/Trilogy Entertainment Group/MGM (Vinegar Syndrome Ultra)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
In Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 action-adventure Point Break, after Bodhi (Patrick Swazye) and Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) get into a scuffle with some neo-Nazis, Bodhi tells Utah that “I saw you with those guys. You’re a pit bull. You didn’t hesitate, they didn’t back you down an inch. And that is very rare in this world.” On the other hand, while Utah’s girlfriend Tyler (Lori Petty) starts out as a strong, independent woman, by the end of the film she’s little more than a damsel in distress, stripped down to her underwear and waiting helplessly for Utah to rescue her. Despite the fact that Point Break was directed by a woman, it still ultimately succumbs to standard masculine action movie tropes (at least as far as the sole female character in the story is concerned, anyway).
Four years later, Petty would take the lead role in another action-adventure directed by a woman, Tank Girl. This time, she wouldn’t be relegated to the background—in fact, not only would she remain front and center throughout the entire film, but she ended up playing a character who could have intimidated even a pit bull like Johnny Utah into backing down. And that was a very rare thing for a female-led film from that era, even more so when you consider the fact that it was based on a comic book. But it was true to the nature of the source material: Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett’s Tank Girl, which was first published by Deadline in the U.K. and eventually made its way stateside via Dark Horse Comics. The books chronicled the misadventures of Rebecca Buck, aka Tank Girl, who roamed a postapocalyptic wasteland aboard her favorite tank, getting in and out of trouble along with her mutated kangaroo boyfriend Booga. It was an underground success, but not necessarily something that lent itself easily to cinematic adaptation.
Enter Rachel Talalay. Talalay had found success of her own while at New Line Cinema working as a producer on offbeat projects like Hairspray and Cry Baby, as well as on more mainstream fare like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. She parlayed that success into making her directorial debut on Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, and the results were polarizing, to say the least. (O.K., the 3D sequence was anaglyph, but... oh, never mind.) Yet whatever legitimate criticisms can be leveled at that film, she demonstrated unconventional thinking and a clear disdain for norms, as well as a knack for multimedia approaches. All of that made her a natural choice for translating the anarchic world of Tank Girl to the screen, and once she read the comic, she was hooked.
Yet the screenplay by Tedi Sarafian does try to provide a bit of structure to Tank Girl’s otherwise picaresque adventures—superficially, at least. It offers a backstory that explains how Rebecca (Petty) acquires her beloved tank, as well as a central nemesis in the form of the Water & Power corporation led by the ruthless Kesslee (Malcom McDowell). It also provides a loose narrative that establishes Tank Girl’s coterie of friends and associates like Jet Girl (Naomi Watts), Sub Girl (Ann Cusack), Sam (Stacy Linn Ramsower), and the mutated kangaroo Rippers Booga (Jeff Kober), Deetee (Reg E. Cathey), T-Saint (Ice-T), and Donner (Scott Coffey). It also throws in a few other nemeses like Sgt. Small (Don Harvey), Che’tsai (James Hong), Rat Face (Iggy Pop), and The Madam (an uncredited Anne Magnuson). Yet any attempt to describe the actual plot of Tank Girl is an exercise in futility, because just like the character of Tank Girl, it’s not about cause and effect; instead, it’s all about the here and now. Rebecca lives for the moment, with little thought about the future and only a few wistful nods toward her past. Tank Girl is the ultimate post-punk Riot grrrl, a veritable force of nature who can’t be contained by conventions of any kind, including narrative structures.
Literary critic Harold Bloom referred to Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a “poem unlimited,” and in that vein, Tank Girl could be thought of as being a persona unlimited. In Bloom’s view, Hamlet’s “abyss of inwardness” can’t be bound by Shakespeare’s prose, and in the same way, Tank Girl’s astonishingly self-sufficient dynamism also can’t be contained by the boundaries of Talalay’s film. She can’t even be contained by any fruitless attempts to identify, to clarify and classify, exactly what she is—as is evidenced by the fact that she’s become something of a gay icon despite the fact that her own sexuality can’t be limited by the otherwise all-encompassing LGBTQIA+ category (I mean, there’s that whole Booga thing, m’kay?) What matters is that she’s firmly in control of her own sexuality and does whatever she wants to do with it—even those who threaten sexual assault become mere playthings for her. Come at her in any way, shape, or form, and it won’t back her down an inch—and to paraphrase Hazel O’Conner, give her an inch, and she’ll take more than a mile.
None of that would work without the irrepressible Lori Petty bringing Tank Girl to life—and amazingly enough, she wasn’t even the first choice for the role. But she made it indelibly her own, and once she came on board, she ended up serving as Talalay’s muse. She’s such an unstoppable force that even immovable objects like Ice-T and Malcolm McDowell look like shrinking violets in comparison—when Kesslee repeatedly fails to break Tank Girl no matter what awful things that he does to her, his frustration seems quite real. And when Petty drags Anne Magnuson into an impromptu performance of Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It accompanied by a Busby Berkely-style dance number, it feels perfectly natural in context. The reality is that Tank Girl wouldn’t have worked without Petty, full stop.
And while Talalay (spoiler alert) would end up landing in directorial jail after the box office failure of Tank Girl (at least as far as feature filmmaking is concerned), the reality is that it wouldn’t have worked without her, either. She took her relatively tame multimedia experimentation in Freddy’s Dead and raised it to the next level, blending live action, comic book panels, animation, pixelation, and jump-cut editing into a genuinely heady brew. Jamie Hewlett’s art in the Tank Girl comics used techniques like collage to represent Tank Girl’s fractured worldview, so all of the varied techniques that Talalay employed were a natural way to bring that style into live action. Talalay also forged her own path in finding collaborators in order to make all of that work, bringing in unique voices like Catherine Hardwicke as production designer and Arianne Phillips as costume designer. Petty’s performance owes as much to Phillips’ do-it-yourself punk rock flair as anything else; Tank Girl’s perpetually changing wardrobe is the perfect representation of her devil-may-care insouciance.
Yet Talalay’s most fateful choice of collaborator was arguably Bonnie Greenberg as music supervisor (Courtney Love is credited as executive music coordinator, but Greenberg is the one who actually did the work). Graeme Revell wrote the score, but Greenberg helped assemble a collection of tracks that did for the Nineties rock scene what the Valley Girl soundtrack had done for Eighties pop. It’s an impressive collection of songs from artists like Hole (naturally), Ice-T (also naturally), Björk, Portishead, Veruca Salt, Bush, Devo, L7, The Magnificent Bastards, Belly, and Richard Hell & The Voidoids (the latter of whom didn’t make it onto the soundtrack album, unfortunately). All that, plus Joan Jett and Paul Westerberg closing the film with their own cheeky rendition of Let’s Do It. What more could anyone want?
A lot more than that, unfortunately. The soundtrack peaked at #72 on the Billboard top 200, and that was a runaway success compared to how the film fared at the box office. It managed to pull in just $2 million on its opening weekend and then it sank like a stone after that, for a total domestic gross of barely $4 million (against a $25 million budget). As mentioned previously, that didn’t do Talalay’s feature filmmaking career any favors, but the reality is that Tank Girl was too far ahead of its time. Moviegoing audiences in 1995 just didn’t know what was good for them. Yet the character of Tank Girl couldn’t be bound by conventional norms like the box office charts any more than she could be bound by her own film. Thanks to Talalay and Petty (among others), Tank Girl has a life of her own that’s transcended bad reviews, box office failure, and yes, even Tank Girl itself. She’s become a cult movie icon for damned good reasons.
Johnny Utah may have been a pit bull, but Rebecca Buck is the one who puts the tiger in her own tank. If Hamlet is an abyss of inwardness, then Tank Girl is the apex of outwardness, the very pinnacle of the punk rock and/or Riot grrrl ethos. Not that she’d have any patience for that kind of taxonomic pedantry, mind you. She’s too busy moving forward to be pinned down so easily. And on her way out the door to her next misadventure, she’d dismiss any attempts at analysis with a disinterested wave of her hand:
“Look, it’s been swell, but the swelling’s gone down.”
Cinematographer Gale Tattersall shot Tank Girl on 35mm film (in Super-35 format) using Arriflex 535B cameras with spherical lenses. Release prints were anamorphic blowups that were framed at 2.39:1. This version is based on a 4K scan of the original camera negative, digitally restored and graded for High Dynamic Range in both Dolby Vision and HDR10, with the final results approved by Rachel Talalay. While the digital effects revolution had started by 1995, Tank Girl was composited optically, so the opening credits and any other opticals look a bit soft, with coarse grain, but everything tightens up once they’re over. Most of the speckling, dust, and other debris that was visible on previous Blu-rays has been cleaned up (although there’s still a prominent scratch on the right side of the frame starting at 75:23). Clarity and detail show even greater improvements over prior releases, providing clear proof that if you get ahead of the anamorphic blowup stage, Super-35 has a lot to offer in 4K.
Neither Talalay nor Tattersall were allowed to participate on the color timing of the original 35mm prints for Tank Girl, so this was her first opportunity to supervise her own grade for the film. And the grading here is indeed delightful, with brilliant colors that are as rich and intense as they should be, but never oversaturated. The flesh tones look accurate across the board, with none of the red push that Vinegar Syndrome titles can sometimes exhibit. Black levels are solid and there are vivid highlights on flames and explosions, but the contrast range always looks filmic and natural—well, as natural as the world of Tank Girl can be, anyway. It’s stylized cinematography for a stylized film, and it looks great in 4K with HDR. Everything has been encoded onto a BD-66, but with a 2.39:1 film leaving plenty of black space and limited extras on the UHD, there aren’t any major issues with compression artifacts.
Audio is offered in English 5.1 and 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English SDH subtitles. Tank Girl was released theatrically in 5.1 DTS, so that’s the way to go here. It’s as brash and abrasive as Tank Girl herself, with plenty of punch during the action scenes and a decent quantity of surround engagement. Much of that is atmospheric, but there are also some directionalized effects whirling around the viewer whenever appropriate. The dialogue remains front and center, with every pithy retort coming through loud and clear. But let’s face it, if you’re a real Tank Girl fan, you’re here for the music, so suffice it to say that the score and kickass soundtrack choices rule the mix even when they’re at a relatively low level in the background. (And when they’re foregrounded, turn it up to 11 and enjoy.)
The Vinegar Syndrome Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD release of Tank Girl is a two-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film. The insert is reversible, featuring new artwork on one side and the familiar blue-faced theatrical poster artwork on the other. It also includes a 40-page booklet with essays by Sarah Fensom, Heather Drain, and Elizabeth Purchell. Everything comes housed in a deluxe magnet box and slipcover set designed by JJ Harrison and Michael DeForge. It’s a great package that should please fans of the film (although no doubt someone will be offended by either the new artwork or the original artwork, but you can’t win the hearts and minds of everyone). Limited to 8,000 units, it’s still available directly from Vinegar Syndrome and a few select retailers. But there’s also a standard version that omits the slipcover, box, and booklet. Either way, the following extras are included:
DISC ONE: UHD
- Commentary with Kristen Lopez
DISC TWO: BD
- Commentary with Kristen Lopez
- Artful Inspiration (HD – 12:57)
- Gotta Be Me (HD – 14:25)
- Badass Feminine Energy (HD – 11:28)
- Donning the Ears (HD – 12:09)
- An Eye for the Apocalypse (HD – 11:41)
- Punk Rock Post-Apocalypse (HD – 24:03)
- Meet the Rippers (HD – 11:51)
- Tank in Translation (HD – 15:32)
- The Making of Tank Girl (Upscaled SD – 5:08)
- Original Ending (Upscaled SD – 1:23)
- Original Trailer (HD – 1:35)
The new commentary features Kristen Lopez, Editor in Chief of The Film Maven and author of Popcorn Disabilities: The Highs and Lows of Disabled Representation in the Movies. It’s a bit sparse, with her watching and reacting to things on the fly, but she does address the cast & crew, the comic, the film’s style, the Riot grrl angle, the needle drops, the parallels with Westerns, and many other subjects. Lopez is at her best when she discusses Rebecca’s sexual autonomy and how despite the presence of threats of rape, she’s never sexualized unless she’s the one doing the sexualizing. Lopez closes by discussing the reviews from 1995, noting that Tank Girl was definitely ahead of its time.
Vinegar Syndrome has also added seven new interviews for this release. Artful Inspiration is with Rachel Talalay and cartoonist/animator Gary Baseman. It’s not really an interview per se, but rather a dialogue between the two of them where he draws out her feelings about the Tank Girl character and then helps her find a way to express them through drawing. They also examine some of the original production artwork along the way, and Talalay makes the interesting observation that in some ways, Tank Girl is a precursor to KPop Demon Hunters (which she loves). As featurettes go, it’s a little different, but kind of fun.
Gotta Be Me is with Lori Petty, who says that she worked with so many female, African-American, and LGBTQ directors during the Nineties because straight white directors didn’t want to hire her. Petty has nothing but praise for fellow Tank Girl vets like Naomi Watts, Malcom McDowell, Arianne Phillips, and Catherine Hardwicke. Donning the Ears is with Scott Coffey, who explains how he got cast and describes the challenges of working under layers of prosthetics. It was intimidating at first, but it eventually became liberating in terms of developing the character. It helps that all of the Ripper actors had great camaraderie together. Meet the Rippers is with former Stan Winston Studios crew members J. Alan Scott and Shane P. Mahan, who went on to found Legacy Effects. Creating the Rippers was no less challenging on their end, because they needed to be self-contained animatronic creatures operated by radio control.
An Eye for the Apocalypse is with casting director Pam Dixon, who says that she operates by instinct and knows within 30 seconds of meeting someone if they’re going to have something that will work for a given role. Rachel Talalay had such a clear vision for the film that it was even easier to find the right kinds of actors to play each part. Badass Feminine Energy is with Catherine Hardwicke, who loved the idea of working on bringing the imaginative environments from the comic to life. The producers initially didn’t want to hire her since she didn’t have extensive credits behind her, but she won them over once she met with them. Punk Rock Post-Apocalypse is with Arianne Phillips, who was originally inspired by the sexually liberating costumes in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That led to her seeking out a career in design that started with music videos. To her, dress is a form of self-expression, and the DIY nature of the costumes in Tank Girl was a perfect way of expressing their characters. Tank in Translation is with storyboard artist/second unit director Peter Ramsey, who explains why it’s hard to faithfully translate a comic book to film. The best that you can do is capture the look and feel, which is exactly what Tank Girl did.
The rest of the extras are archival ones, starting with The Making of Tank Girl, which is a brief EPK featurette. It includes interviews with Rachel Talalay, Lori Petty, Malcolm McDowell, Naomi Watts, Ice-T, and Stan Winston, plus some behind-the-scenes footage, but there’s not much here. (Note that the audio is out of phase between the left and right channels, so if you have a decoder on, it will end up in the surround channels, and if you don’t, it may make your head feel like it’s about to explode.) The Original Ending is... well, let’s just say that there’s a good reason why it wasn’t used and leave it at that.
As a whole, it’s a fine slate of extras, but there are a few things missing here from previous editions. The 2013 Shout! Factory Blu-ray included different interviews with Talalay, Petty, and Hardwicke, plus a commentary track with Talalay and Petty. The 2024 Region B Blu-ray from Eureka in the U.K. added interviews with Greg Staples and Doug Jones, plus visual essays by Lindsay Hallam and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. The 2024 Blu-ray from Umbrella in Australia offered its own set of interviews with Talalay, Petty, Hardwicke, and Jones. But Vinegar Syndrome’s set unquestionably trumps all of them in terms of video quality, and their extras are nothing to sneeze at. It’s a great set that will pretty much be mandatory for fans of Tank Girl. (And if you’re not a fan, what’s wrong with you?)
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).