Another day, another dollar. Right?

The 1995 release of Tank Girl - The Movie would go on to become one of the most infamous cases of “comic book done wrong”. And a bitter reminder to future generations about how bad things can get when American middle-level producers try to stick the cool-by-association label to their output, acquiring the rights to any obscure “cult” phenomenon and then proceeding to butcher it senselessly.

Following a sky-high rights auction (at one point Mr. Spielberg himself chipped in) and some dubious expectations from Tank Girl fans, it ended up a) being a huge flop and b) bankrupting the magazine that featured the comic book as well.

To which I can only say: “Wow. Really?”

From the look of things, it’s a cheap, sad affair. Production values were trying for a campy, wink-wink two-dimension feel, maybe. But everything falls horribly flat. Come on. It looks like a Christophe Lambert vehicle from the mid-Nineties. And guess what? It plays out exactly like a Christophe Lambert vehicle from the mid-Nineties. Damn you. Damn you all to hell.

And yes, the very diverse and very large “featuring music by…” cards at the end should have warned us to stay away. Instead, we caught it on cable, were fooled by the cute intro and stayed there, unable to move.

Like they say - avoid female directors. They ovulate.

Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “Ice T is a gangsta ass kangaroo. Calling him a ripper didn’t change the fact that that nigga was a damn kangaroo neither.”

As Chris Rock put it, “yeah, man, New Jack City was a loooooong time ago”.

One wonders - exactly which type of audience were they after?

The trailer manages to swing both ways: it looks like a straight-to-video genre effort and a Serious Issues message picture.

Bizarre choice of music - the street corner beat followed by one of the faster cuts that dominate the soundtrack followed again by the corner beat - frames the action as if it were a videoclip, which might enforce the “let’s appeal to the MTV crowd” option. Also, Ice-T’s presence is prominently showcased - and rightly so, given that a) he does play a main character and b) he was shaping up to be a star rapper.

On the other hand, Wesley Snipes is the first face/name popping up (and will go on to swallow the whole film, giving it the coveted cool-by-association Tony Montana vibe), but the rest of the trailer presents him as just one element in an ensemble, gunning for the “what’s happening in our society at large” slant.

(And while we’re on the subject - it’s a bit hard to believe that Tracy Camilla Johns was a box office draw, five years after Nola Darling - but then again, neither was Judd Nelson.)

Still, the Van Peebles aesthetic is quite alive throughout the thing: camera angles askew and all that haven’t aged well, but they anchor the film to what would eventually become the main “urban” shooting trend. At least for a few years.

Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “am I my brother’s keeper lol”.