By 1985, Crown International had stopped pretending its films were headed for the drive-in. The real audience was already renting Hot Dog The Movie and rewinding Hardbodies – and Crown, still wearing its ‘70s muscle car leathers, tried to keep pace.
Betsy Russell plays Tomasina “Tomboy” Boyd (see what they did there?), a mechanic, racer, the centre of gravity in a film that thinks it knows its audience. She’s solid. She plays it straight even when the script has other ideas. Russell clearly had the presence to carry a better film. And so did future Superboy Gerard Christopher for that matter. Tomboy is a chassis for half-assembled pinup logic, leftover racing tropes, and plotlines that exist mostly to introduce the next nude scene.
What makes it interesting is that it sells itself as empowerment: a woman outdriving, outwitting, out-charming the men around her. Sure, it never misses a chance to flash some skin, but under the hood, there’s an engine running on career-girl fuel. There’s a splash of feminism in the tank. Whether the filmmakers understood it or just needed a plot device is another matter. It’s a hook: girl-power on the poster, but nothing on the line that would lose the muscle car and wet t-shirt crowd. Crown didn’t buy into it. They just saw Flashdance make money and tried to reverse-engineer it with what they had handy.
Tomboy doesn’t revise Crown’s formula. It just applies a coat of aerobics and empowerment semi-gloss. Or maybe this is empowerment as exploitation. Could they have gone that deep? Probably not.
Still, this a fun artifact from a time when things were changing lanes, and Crown was clinging to the rear bumper.