Directed by Jim Wynorski | Starring Angie Dickinson, Robert Culp, Danielle Brisebois
Ah, the glorious 1980s—an era where sequels were churned out with the care and finesse of a cafeteria meatloaf. And right there, flopped on your plastic tray, slathered in Corman-produced gravy, is Big Bad Mama II. It’s got shootouts. It’s got boobs. It’s got bootleggers, corrupt politicians, and Angie Dickinson doing her best to pretend any of it matters. But mostly, it’s got the desperate stench of a franchise trying to wring blood from a dry, dusty bra.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t a Godfather Part II. Hell, it’s not even a Cannonball Run II. This is the cinematic equivalent of finding a scratch-off ticket on the sidewalk and realizing someone already lost.
Plot: She’s Back, and She Brought a Gun (Again)
Angie Dickinson returns as Wilma McClatchie, matriarch of mayhem and part-time bank robber, full-time libertarian wet dream. This time around, she’s mad because a crooked politician and his goons killed her lover (in the first ten minutes—efficient, if nothing else). So what’s a gal to do in 1930s America? Load the car, grab the girls, and go on a Depression-era revenge tour, naturally.
Wilma and her two daughters rob their way across the country with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer in a tea shop. Along the way, there’s some half-baked love interests, some full-frontal nudity (because Roger Corman wouldn’t finance a Sunday school picnic without a pair of bouncing breasts), and a whole lot of gunfire that seems to hit everything except a coherent plot.
Angie Dickinson: Dragging the Whole Thing by Her High Heels
God bless Angie Dickinson. She shows up. She delivers lines with that whiskey-soaked rasp and a look in her eyes that says, “I had a mortgage payment due when I signed this contract.” She tries, really tries, to bring some grit to the role, even when she’s wearing an evening gown while wielding a Tommy gun like a disillusioned pin-up version of Al Capone.
But it’s clear she’s slumming it. Half the time she’s surrounded by extras who look like they wandered in from a high school production of Guys and Dolls. The other half she’s delivering monologues to characters with the emotional depth of discarded mannequins.
Still, there’s something admirable about her commitment. She treats this like it matters. And that kind of delusion is probably what got this movie made in the first place.
The Daughters: Vamps with Tommy Guns
Wilma’s two daughters are mostly there to look good, flash skin, and occasionally pretend to be outraged about injustice before they get distracted by the next guy with a mustache. One of them even gets a pseudo-romantic arc, but it’s buried so deep beneath gratuitous sex scenes and budget gunfights that you’d need an archaeologist to find it.
The younger daughter is played by Danielle Brisebois, who’s doing her best in a script that treats character development like an optional side dish. It’s hard to evolve when your main character motivation is “be sexy and shoot people sometimes.”
The Men: Cannon Fodder with Mustaches
Robert Culp, who once graced screens in I Spy and other respectable projects, pops up here like a guy who wandered onto the wrong set but figured, “Eh, why not?” He’s a slick politician, which in this universe means he wears a fedora and sneers at women with ambition. He dies. Probably. It’s hard to tell. So many people die in this movie, and yet not a single one leaves an impression.
Every other male character falls into one of two categories:
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Greasy and evil
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Dumb and dead
There is no third option.
The Action: Bang, Boobs, Repeat
The action sequences in Big Bad Mama II are choreographed like community theater fight scenes performed after three pitchers of sangria. There’s no suspense, just bullets and blood squibs going off with the randomness of a glitchy arcade machine.
Cars explode. People get shot. A few stuntmen leap out of windows. It’s all very Pepsi-sponsored Wild West Stunt Show at Six Flags, only with more nudity and fewer safety standards.
And then there’s the sex. Not sexy sex—just perfunctory, Corman-mandated “get ‘em out” scenes. It’s the kind of flesh parade that feels both joyless and required by contract.
The Tone: Bonnie and Clyde, but Dumber and Hornier
This movie wants to be pulp. It wants to be retro. It wants to be feminist, kind of, if your definition of feminism includes robbing banks in garters and getting ogled by every dude with a newspaper. But mostly it wants to keep you awake with gunfire and breasts.
And look, there’s nothing wrong with trash cinema when it owns its trash. But Big Bad Mama II is the kind of film that struts like it’s saying something, even though the only message it delivers is “Let’s do Big Bad Mama again but make it sleazier.”
The Soundtrack: Kazoo Gang Goes to War
You thought you’d heard bad music in movies before. This one ups the ante with banjo-heavy nonsense and cheap-sounding orchestration that feels like it was lifted from a spaghetti western and then re-mixed by a raccoon on Adderall. It doesn’t underscore tension—it tap dances on your nerves.
Final Judgment: Lock This One Up and Lose the Key
Big Bad Mama II is the definition of a sequel no one needed, wrapped in a narrative no one asked for, and executed with the precision of a Nerf gun in a wind tunnel. Angie Dickinson does her best to elevate the material, but she’s carrying a script that’s been dropped on its head too many times.
The movie is confused about its own message: is it about revenge? Family? Female empowerment? The joys of lacy underthings while committing felony robbery? It’s hard to say. But one thing’s clear: whatever spark the first film had, this one left it out in the rain.
Final Score: 3/10
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+1 for Angie’s commitment
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+1 for the occasional guilty chuckle
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+1 for a few charmingly trashy production choices
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-8 for everything else, especially that closing scene where the moral seems to be “don’t bring feminism to a gunfight unless your dress has a slit”
Big Bad Mama II is big, bad, and mama needs a better script.
