Girls Against Boys

Writer-director Austin Chick throws in echoes of Abel Ferrara's feminist grindhouse classic "Ms. 45," but the provocation feels hollow and the stylish direction - filled with pensive slo-mo - just slows things down.

This female revenge thriller starts out promisingly, but squanders its girl-power capital quicker than you can say "Rihanna."

LaLiberte is the best thing about Girls Against Boys. She has an unforced coolness, even when Chick sticks her with sub-Quentin Tarantino business, like having a conversation about the nutritional value of Captain Crunch, or singing along to not one, but two Donovan songs.

Essentially a horror movie in which the source of the horror shifts from capital-M men to crazed lesbianism.

The obligatory lesbian kiss is checked off like a box on a clipboard, but the B-horror standbys that might rescue the film from self-serious tedium are nowhere to be found.

Girls Against Boys is some odd male fantasy of what female revenge might be like, sexy and enigmatically charged rather than haunting or scary or even just weird.

Men are pigs, and women are sick of it, says Girls Against Boys, a dumb, dreary, let's-get-back-at-them slasher in which pulverized genitals pass for feminist critique.