Okay, so it’s not strictly true to say all action movie heroines are insane, but it’s true that the action heroine movie academy has one of those “You Don’t Have to Be Crazy To Work Here But It Helps” signs on every single wall in the building. Is it because women supposedly have to be pushed to the brink of insanity and beyond to react with violence while men will happily blow up a school simply because it gave them a funny look? I don’t know, but if you don’t agree with me I’ll drive a burning petrol tanker into your laundry, which probably says something about something.
10: River Tam in Firefly / Serenity
Remember when you were a kid and your parents pushed you really, really, really hard to be your best? Yeah, me neither. But imagine if they did and they decided to send you off to The Wonder Academy For Amazing Super-Students and it turned out to instead be The KillBot Factory run by sinister figures wearing washing-up gloves? And then you had to go on the lam in space with the guy from Castle and the cheating wife from Homeland? Yeah, I’d probably be kicking serious ass after that too.
9: Nikita in La Femme Nikita
It was downplayed a bit in the various television versions but in the French original it’s fairly clear that Nikita was a few croissants short of a bagel, what with being completely off her nut while breaking into a chemists and killing a cop and so on. Fortunately, becoming a professional killer for the state makes her all better, right? Hey, after the CIA sent Charles Manson on all those secret missions into the Soviet Union he came back totally cured.
8: Samantha / Charly in The Long Kiss Goodnight
You tell me: is completely forgetting everything about your life as an amoral quasi-government killer and going off to the suburbs to live an ultra-cheesy family life the act of a sane person? Probably not. Then again, neither is spending the last two years watching Packed to the Rafters hoping that they’re going to use this exact same plot twist with Rebecca Gibney’s character.
7: Catwoman in Batman Returns
Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer) was your average mousey secretary until Max Schrek (Christopher Walken, not the German impressionistic film director) threw her out a window. Now she’s acting like a cat and wearing an outfit seemingly sewn together out of garbage bags. Why couldn’t this have happened to the mousey secretary Pfeiffer played in New Year’s Eve? Clawing Zac Ephron to death has got to be a crowd-pleaser.
6: Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction
Any way you look at it, boiling up someone’s pet rabbit is pretty crazy. Well, unless there’s a famine or something. And even then boiling is no way to cook a rabbit; you want to roast it, get some sauce happening, stick a few potatoes in there, make real a meal of things. But considering the rabbit was a one-night stand that didn’t call back, Glenn Close’s revenge on its sleazy ass is pretty kick-ass. I mean, I kinda fell asleep during the first half of the film, but I think I got the gist. Isn’t this the film that invented that popular phrase “going at it like rabbits”?
5: Eve from Eve of Destruction
Eve ain’t no ordinary crazy robot with an atomic bomb inside her. No, she’s got a brain based on the mind of the super-scientist that built her, and now all the scientist’s repressed urges and scary childhood traumas are coming out – in robot form! “Dear Penthouse Forum, I never thought these stories were real, but last week an atomic sexbot rammed my car until the airbag deployed… if you know what I mean”. Fun fact: director Duncan Gibbins died trying to save his cat from a bushfire in the Hollywood Hills.
4: The Bride from Kill Bill
Let’s put it this way: is chewing a man’s face off rational behaviour? How about slicing up a few dozen yakuza thugs? Would you feel like a rational human being after clawing your way out of your own grave? The Bride isn’t exactly someone you’d like to get stuck next to on a long-haul flight, and not just because she keeps sticking her sword in the cup holder.
3: Xenia Onatopp from GoldenEye
While most of the Bond “bad girls” over the years have just been plain evil, Onatopp – that’s a real Russian surname, right? – was clearly nuttier than fruit’n nut vodka, what with crushing men between her thighs and… well, I can’t remember what else, the thigh stuff was pretty distracting. Oh right! She got turned on by shooting people. So she’s basically a female Bruce Willis. What, I thought everyone knew he was like that.
2: Hedy from Single White Female
Remember the bunny boiling in Fatal Attraction? Well, this time there’s a creepy girl trying to take over her flatmate’s life by dressing like her and screwing her boyfriend by pretending to be her (c’mon, that’s an instant ‘A’ at spy school) who throws a cute puppy out a high rise window. Someone really should make a movie where all these dead pets come back from the grave for vengeance. Who wouldn’t want to watch a zombie version of Milo & Otis?
1: Sarah Connor from Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Okay, on the one hand she’s the mother of the future, crushed under the unbearable burden of knowing the atomic war that will devastate mankind is coming and there’s nothing she can do to stop it. On the other hand, she’s in a nuthouse, which is usually a pretty good indication that you belong in a nuthouse. In fact, even her son starts rolling his eyes at her nutty ranting towards the end of the movie. You kinda get the impression that if she couldn’t snap the neck of everyone around her with a flick of a wrist, John and the Terminator would have ditched her at that truck stop outside of L.A. I’m still slightly surprised the TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles didn’t have a three-part episode where she was a crazy cat lady.