Really, Hollywood? DANGER GIRL? Really?
Really, Hollywood? DANGER GIRL? Really?
Apr 12
I guess we’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel now. Adrian Askarieh, who produced the vomit-inducingly awful video-game movie Hitman, is apparently set to bring Danger Girl to our screens. Danger Girl was a short-lived comic series from about a decade ago about unrealistically-proportioned women using their sex appeal and lesser capabalities, such as intelligence, to bring down the Fourth Reich (???) led by some dude with glowing red eyes and a pirate hat. Also one of their nemeses was so gnarly she could stand almost naked in the snow in Moscow with nothing but a cigar to keep her warm (see below).
Trawling google images to find suitable images for this post was harder than you’d think. It’s not that there’s nudity or sex scenes or anything, it’s just that nearly every single pose the girls adopts is overtly sexual, and they’re usually not wearing enough clothes to put on a generally-SFW website. But the picture of badgirl Natalia Kassle was too funny not to include.
Ostensibly a pastiche of the type of women who appear in James Bond movies, Danger Girl is essentially Charlie’s Angels, with fewer clothes and less ethnic diversity. The sluttiest one (the one wearing leather) is apparently Australian, but that’s as diverse as the Danger Team gets. What’s creepy is that they all have exactly the same body; maybe they were each constrained in a corset from birth and thus developed breath-inhibitingly small waists? And maybe they all visited the same plastic surgeon for the chest and backside implants they all appear to have indulged in?
Okay, okay, it’s not meant to be taken seriously, with names like Major Maxim and Johnny Barracuda filling the pages of the comic, but really, Danger Girl is just about the sex appeal, and even though the comics’ makers will smugly tell you that these girls are all tough femme fatales that kick ass and take names, the comic was obviously created by and for juvenile straight males. The poses, the pouts, the cleavage — the book is just page after page of male gaze, to the point that it becomes desensitising. And the smartest, most useful Danger Girl is also the ugliest one — isn’t that a nice message to be sending to the kids of the world?
All right, what can we expect from a movie based on one of the most chauvinistic pieces of pop culture in the history of the universe? Well, the director is Todd Lincoln, who’s got a couple of “in-production” credits on IMDB and nothing more. His The Apparition is due to hit screens later this year, so we’ll get an idea of his talent then. Casting is clearly going to be very important and I’m sure the internet will wait with bated breath to hear who gets to fill the boots (and bras) of the main trio of ladies, but I think the filmmakers will have to work hard to differentiate their product from Charlie’s Angels.
In interviews the producer has claimed they’re aiming for Batman Begins-esque focus on character, and a Kick-Ass-esque focus on style and heart, which sounds like a much more mature approach than Danger Girls deserves. Then again, Adrian Askarieh probably thought the gratuitous nudity in Hitman was mature and character-focused — in which case the Danger Girl movie will be just as atrocious as its source comic.
Expect an announcement at this year’s San Diego comic convention regarding release dates, shooting schedules and more fun details; type “Danger Girl” into google images at your own discretion.
