I made sure Bar Girls was the first movie Malinda saw so that it could only improve from there, and sure enough, she was so horrified watching Bar Girls that she made me turn it off after thirty minutes. It took me a few minutes to convince her that the rest of the movies were much, much better, and later, after seeing them all, she easily agreed that Bar Girls is indeed the Worst Lesbian Movie in the World.

So how exactly did Bar Girls earn this distinction? Let me count the ways. First there's the fact that almost everyone in the film is a graduate of the School of Over-Acting, and the dialogue is painfully cliched, awkward, or uninspired. For example, the two main characters actually refer to sex as "the grown-up," and a newly-bisexual character trying to flirt with another woman says "I'm looking for women to join a female encounter group for women who want to gain empowerment through getting in touch with their own femaleness." A few other choice lines: "You, friend of semen?" and "She's very learned in the ways of lesbianism." I could go on, but I'm breaking out in hives as I write these lines.

The music which accompanies the movie sounds like my sister and me doing karaoke in our basement when we were twelve, and the 80's clothing the women wear was bad even in it's own decade--not to mention that the director appears to be obsessed with lesbians in wierd hats.

Although some of the settings are realistic (the coffeeshop Little Frida's for example), the lesbian bar in which much of the action takes place is clearly someone's living room. And although there is an attempt to show a diversity of lesbian "types," even the butch lesbians have long hair (with hats).

There are so many cringe-inducing moments in the film--like when Loretta is trying to do a "sexy dance" in her driveway the first night she meets Rachel, or when a straight chick with a really fake Russian accent tries to seduce Loretta over the phone--that I stopped counting them halfway through (also, it's hard to count when you're hiding your head under the sofa cushion in horror). The characters even look off into the distance for several seconds first before flashbacks, like the long, pregnant pauses you see on soap operas before a commercial.

And have I mentioned the proliferation of bad hats that no self-respecting lesbian or bisexual woman would ever wear?

But even worse than the over-acting, awkward dialogue, rampant stereotyping, bad music, clothes and hair, the movie actually interrupts the action several times with a short cartoon clip about a couples-counselor superhero named Super Myrtle.

I don't even have the words to describe how terribly, terribly wrong this is.

On the positive side, the concept of the movie is good; it's just the execution that's bad. And there's an asian-american lesbian in the group, which is a rarity for a lesbian film. Not that either of these even begin to make up for all the other problems with the movie, but hey, I'm trying here.

The one thing Bar Girls does have going for it is that it's SO bad it's almost required viewing for movie-going lesbian and bisexual women. Because you won't truly be able to appreciate how far lesbian movies have come if you don't know the depths from which we've climbed.