Girls Against Boys

After being sexually assaulted, a young cocktail waitress goes on a rampage of vengeance in which no man is safe.

Even if a screening is sold out, tickets are often available 30 minutes before the start of the film at the box office at each venue.


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  • Director-Screenwriter Austin Chick
  • Producer Clay Floren, Aimee Shieh
  • With Danielle Panabaker, Nicole LaLiberte, Liam Aiken
  • USA 2012
  • 92 mins
  • Sales K5 International

When her affair with a married man comes to a crashing halt, cocktail waitress Shae hits the town with brash colleague Lu, in an attempt to drink and dance her troubles away. The girls end up at an apartment belonging to a bunch of young guys, but events take an horrific turn when Shae is sexually assaulted. After the police fail to take her seriously, an emotionally distraught Shae, egged on by her unbalanced comrade, goes on a rampage of vengeance in which no man is safe. The vigilante justice genre is a familiar one in horror cinema, with films like Ferrara’s Ms.45 or Zarchi’s notorious I Spit on Your Grave attracting as many positive interpretations as they do claims of foul misogyny. Like his forerunners, Austin Chick does not hold back with his gleefully (im)moral tale. Thoughtful polemic or reckless exploitation? That’s for you to decide.
Michael Blyth

Director statement

Girls Against Boys is a coming of age story – albeit a dark and rather twisted one – about a young woman who comes to realise that the world isn’t what she thought. Shae starts the movie as a girl who wants desperately to be seen as a woman. She is transformed by her experiences with Terry, Simon, the police, and with Lu, and by the end of her ordeal she wishes she could return to a place of innocence. But it’s too late. She’s become hardened. She’s been transformed into Lu, and if you look at Girls Against Boys as an allegory you could say Lu may have just been the birth of some kind of twisted alter ego. There were a few years where I spent a lot of time in and around the fashion industry, and Shae’s journey in this film was partly inspired by what I observed in that world. But it’s not unique to that world. It’s the journey of lots of young women. So I think what I was going for in the first part of the film was more naturalism than realism. In some ways, Girls Against Boys is much darker, much more misanthropic than your typical horror film, because it’s more morally ambiguous. It’s about the nature of relationships between men and women today and just how fucked up those relationships can be. In this sense Girls Against Boys may be more of a dramatic thriller than a horror film per se, even though it goes to some horrific places. Grounding it in a kind of heightened naturalism makes the violence that much more horrifying, but this is as it should be. Violence is horrific.
Austin Chick

Director biography

Born in New Hampshire in 1971, but largely raised in New York, he was educated at Sarah Lawrence College, specialising in literature and psychology then, in 1998, graduated from SUNY Purchase Film School, having studied cinematography. He broke out as a maker of commercially exploitable personal films with his 2002 debut XX/XY. The film, about a college ménage-a‐trois that spirals out of control, forcing the lovers to face its long term consequences, and starring a young Mark Ruffalo, was a hit at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. Industry opportunities, often as a ‘fresh eyes’ writer for a number of studio and independent projects, followed; culminating in a co‐producing credit on Sidney Lumet’s final film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead – an experience he says whet his appetite for genre cinema. In 2008 Chick returned to Sundance with August, from a screenplay by Howard Rodman, telling the story of two brothers fighting to keep their start‐up company afloat on Wall Street in 2001, a month before the 9/11 attacks, and starring Josh Hartnett, Adam Scott, Naomie Harris, Rip Torn and David Bowie. Girls Against Boys is his third feature, the second he has written and, quite possibly, the second feature, following XX/XY, in what he has called a ‘Battle of the Sexes’ trilogy.

Filmography

2002 XX/XY
2008 August
2012 Girls Against Boys