MAD COWGIRL (2006) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Gregory Hatanaka
Sarah Lassez, James Duval, Linton Semage,
Walter Koenig, Devon Odessa, Vic Chao
Sarah Lassez, who looks enough like Julia Roberts to be her sister, plays a meat inspector named Therese, whose voracious appetite for the stuff she inspects could be leading to symptoms of mad cow disease. A chaotic social satire in multiple languages that gets by for an hour or so by taking random potshots at televangelists, Hong Kong action movies, self-serving political hacks (on C-Span, playing themselves) and, most damningly, the beef industry. (The odds that you'll want to go out for a steak after watching it are minimal.) Eventually, the lack of anything close to a coherent story takes its toll, and the movie concludes with a spoof of "Kill Bill" that might seem more inspired, or less redundant, if "Kill Bill" wasn't already a spoof of itself. To the extent that the film holds together at all, it's because of Lassez, who tears into her role the way Therese might tear into a prime fillet. No Julia Roberts movie ever left its heroine covered in this much blood.
