Tomboy

Plot synopsis:
Laure is a 10-year-old girl whose family moves to a new address in Paris. One day Laure sees a group of boys playing outside the window and goes to play with them, but they disappear quickly. Instead, Laure meets Lisa, a neighborhood girl. Lisa assumes that Laure is a boy and asks for his name. After a moment's thought Laure introduces herself as Mikäel. Lisa then introduces Mikäel to the rest of the neighborhood children stating that "he" is the new kid in the apartment complex. A bath scene in the film reveals that Mikäel has a vulva, and a following scene confirms that her mother addresses her and her sister as "girls." Mikäel becomes friends with Lisa and the boys and tries to hide her genitalia to appear like a boy (make it seem that she has a penis). At one point this leads Mikäel to pee her pants, which originally makes her embarrassed, but is soon forgotten. As they all play, Lisa and Mikäel develop crushes on each other and after swimming one day, Lisa kisses her. At this point, Mikäel also seems to be accepted into the group of boys.
One day, when Lisa comes by the apartment to look for Mikäel she runs into Mikäel's younger five-year-old sister, Jeanne instead, thereby revealing to Jeanne how Mikäel is presenting herself to her friends as a boy. At first Jeanne is upset, but when Mikäel promises to take her with her on all her outings for the rest of the summer she quickly becomes happy to have a "big brother" which she says is "way better" than having a big sister. She also helps Mikäel cut her hair and keeps her secret from their parents. Although her mom is supportive of Mikäel being tomboy (for example, by painting her room blue), she also seems to want her to display more culturally-defined "female" behaviors (for example, being thrilled when one day, while playing, Lisa puts makeup on Mikäel's face).
Then, after a fight with one of the boys, the boy and his mother come to Mikäel's door to get her in trouble. Mikäel's mother pretends to know that Mikäel is her "son", but afterwards she gets angry with her for telling everyone that she was a boy. After this incident, Mikäel's mother forces her to wear a blue girl's dress and makes her go over to the apartment of the boy she hit. Jeanne is visibly upset by this and tries to help Mikäel. Mikäel's mother is also clearly upset and sad about the situation. She confesses to Mikäel that she is forcing her to reveal that she is a girl to protect him. Mikäel's mom also makes her go to Lisa's apartment. When Lisa sees Mikäel in a dress, she runs off without a word.
Mikäel also runs away to the woods. After a time alone, she takes off the blue dress, leaving her in a boyish tanktop. Walking away from the discarded dress, Mikäel sees the other children in the distance. She can hear them talking about him and speculating if she is really a girl. When they spot her, they chase her and surround him saying they're going to see if she's really a girl. Lisa stands up to them and tells them to leave her alone. Once she is called disgusting for kissing a girl, however, Lisa reluctantly "checks" and confirms Mikäel's genitalia. They leave Mikäel alone in the woods in despair.
Later, we see Mikäel in her house with her mom, younger sister and new-born baby brother, not wanting to go outside. But, when she sees Lisa standing waiting outside her window she goes out to meet her. She asks her quietly what her name is. She says she is called Laure. She starts to smile. This final scene suggests hope for at least a friendship between her and Lisa.

Tags: cult, romantic

Review:
How can you not love Betsy Russell?.
This irresistible female-empowerment exploitation comedy stars the adorable, sexy as hell Ms. Russell as Tomasina "Tommy" Boyd, a young lady who'd much rather tinker with cars and play sports than do so-called "girly" things.
She worships studly race car driver Randy Starr (Gerard Christopher), whom she is able to meet through Ernie Leeds, Jr.
When the confident Randy isn't able to take her seriously, she sets out to prove that anything he can do, she can do just as well, if not better."Tomboy" creates some pretty good vibes for a pleasant 91 minutes.
A big part of the appeal is Russell, one of the iconic 80s hotties who'd also made her mark in movies like "Private School", "Avenging Angel", and "Cheerleader Camp", and who's recently made a comeback in some of the "Saw" sequels.
The movie itself is silly and clumsy at times, but ultimately upbeat entertainment.
Voyeurs will be pleased with the amount of breast shots on display, and can take delight in a goofy, erotic commercial performed by Tommy's friend Seville (Kristi Somers, "Hell Comes to Frogtown").
The soundtrack provides tons of cheesy goodness.The direction by Herb Freed, who'd previously done the horror pictures "Haunts", "Beyond Evil", and "Graduation Day", may not be inspired but it gets the job done, as do the performances by an engaging cast.
Fans of 80s movies will note the appearances by such people as Cynthia Thompson (the female lead in "Cavegirl", Dennis Hayden (one of the terrorists in "Die Hard"), and trash flick favourite Michelle Bauer, in an uncredited bit.This kind of thing may not be Shakespeare, but it sure hits the spot for people just looking to have a good time.Seven out of 10..
This movie was one of the best the 80's had to offer as far as wacky teen comedies and at age 15 I thought the excessive skin was right on.
I don't think the acting was supposed to be good.
It's just like all the other teen movies we love so much by the likes of John Hughes and Savage Steve Holland to name a couple.
When I watch these movies I always see someone that is currently acting on a popular drama or in some of today's biggest hit movies and it's a blast to see them as pimply little teenagers.
Despite her masculine sounding name and a love of traditionally male pursuits (fixing cars, basketball, baseball, driving like a maniac), there's nothing remotely butch about Tommy Boyd (Betsy Russell) when it comes to her physique: under the baseball cap and greasy overalls, there is an absolute babe waiting to get out, as stock car driver Randy Starr (Gerard Christopher) discovers when he invites Tommy (short for Tomasina) to pay him a visit at the mansion of his millionaire sponsor Ernie Leeds Jr (Eric Douglas).A typically silly 80s romantic sex comedy, Tomboy is predictable, poorly acted and badly directed nonsense, but the oodles of cheap titillation courtesy of the awesomely sexy Russell (and Kristi Somers as her equally hot best friend, dancer Seville Ritz), a naff 'battle of the sexes' story-line, and one of the worst car races in movie history (Tommy's vehicle being equipped with a daft onboard computer and rocket propulsion) help to elevate the film from utter drivel to entertaining cheeze, making it more fun than it really has any right to be..
Plot is silly, but Betsy Russell is worth it....
I've dated women like "Tommy." They're fun for a while.
Women will be jealous of Russell's red-hot looks and will nit-pick the movie's lack of plot and acting talents (who would bring a Rolls Royce to a gas station to be repaired, unless the mechanic looked like Tommy?), but for us guys, all Betsy Russell has to do is stand there and breathe.
The title song is catchy, and whoever stunt-doubled for Betsy Russell on the motorcycle knew what they were doing.
I saw "Tomboy" the first time on HBO, so the price was right, but this low-budget movie grossed over $14 million.
Fun Movie To Watch.
I do not know what people who did not like this movie were expecting, but considering when it was made and the subject matter, this movie is great.
I enjoyed the nudity, which in the context of the movie, made sense.
The acting was good to great.
The subject of a strong woman overcoming sexism to put a man in his place is a great one for this time during which a sexist misogynist is leading the country.
This movie is definitely worth taking the time to watch..
This is perhaps one of the best "worst" movies ever made.
This movie is so bad that most people who worked on it never worked again in Hollywood.
If you think a girl shooting hoops on a motorcycle is hilarious or that a race car goes faster because cardboard accessories and onboard computers, this is the movie for you.
This is one of the finest examples of the teen "sex-politation" genre in the early 80s.
It stars the the recently deceased Eric Douglas and Betsy Russell (who was the Gretta Garbo of this genre).
don't you just get sick of all those films that are just made as an excuse to put as much female flesh on display as possible?
This one is probably worst than most though: not only do you have to put up with the usual bimbos and hunks with perfect teeth but no visible trace of any acting ability, you also have to endure some painfully cliched love scenes (complete with drippy mid 80's soundtrack of course) and an end race between the female lead character and her professional race-driver boyfriend that could have been lifted straight out of Grease (I won't bother telling you the outcome, if you hadn't guessed by now you've obviously never seen one of these underdog movies before, and good luck to you).
Still we do learn a couple of interesting things from this film, one is that if you're a man (or a woman) who wants to get into the opposite sexes changing rooms, all you have to do is walk round the wall of your own changing rooms and you'll find it!
So enjoy this flick, but most of all be prepared to have a blooming good laugh....
Betsy Russell, the 80's B-film queen who provided two of the only three reasons that Private School is worth seeing (Michael Zorek is the other) is miscast as Tomasina "Tommy" Boyd, a young woman who works as a mechanic and dreams of being a stock car driver and meeting her idol Randy Starr.
She is also the tomboy of the film, who acts like a jock with her love of athletics than the usual girl things, unlike her friends.Once again, this is an 80's film, so get ready for the requisites of the best decade of the 20th century.
You'll see an aerobic style dancing display, shower scenes, a party, feathered hair, horrible fashions, music in the background almost half the time, etc.
At least it's easier to take than the cheeziness you'll see in teen-pop videos, but it's cheddar all the way.Betsy Russell, even with the Joel Polnochek hairstyle, just can't play a realistic tomboy.
While nothing more than poor, there are a few good scenes, such as the silly donut commercial that Tommy's friend Seville does, a scene where Tommy eyes her Randy Starr poster and the camera pans it down to a certain area.
Also, if the makers of Gran Turismo are reading this, please put the cars featured in this movie in your next game, they rock.
And of course, the *ahem* entertainment you can have in the backseat if the movie sucks...Which it invariably will.Tomboy is one such 'delight' of a bygone era.
You may think, looking at the packaging and tagline, it's an attempt to tackle the very serious subject of a young female trying to make it in the man's world of mechanics and motor sports.Heck no.This is instead, a rather cunning subterfuge for it's REAL agenda...
It does a pretty good job of it, I suppose.
This particular one is filmed in a gym, and features our heroine literally having her top TORN off, by the aptly named Randy.I hope she got reimbursed for her damaged clothing post-coital.
Talk about your plot holes...Betsy Russell tries her best, she really does.
Lame, girl taking on a guy role exploitation movie....
1st watched 9/1/2008 - (Dir-Herb Freed): Lame, girl taking on a guy role exploitation movie starring Betsy Russell as the mechanic, race-car driving Tommy in her normal b-movie wink-at-the-camera persona, where she gets to show her body every once in a while and feel good about her looks.
But seriously, the core of the movie is about the little guy(or in this case girl) taking on the big guy conglomerate, I think.
The small-time mechanic, Tommy, creates her own car and keeps a picture of her idol stock car driver, Randy Starr in her shop.
Well, don't you know, she gets to meet him, have sex with him and challenge him to a race.
I'll leave that up to you if you wish to view the movie past the sex scene.
The movie is full of lame performances and proves to me that the perverted audience has a say in Hollywood.
The movie got made and actually made some money despite it's lameness.
If your idea of a good time at the movies is dumbing your senses and enjoying a little titillation then this movie is for you.
That is, churned out yet another entirely forgettable teen comedy, with sex and gratuitous nude scenes to draw in the crowds.
It took me a while to realise that the lead actress, Betsy Russell, is better known for playing Jigsaw's wife in the SAW franchise.
Still, Russell is a pretty poor actress, failing to invest her character with any moments of sympathy, and the rest of the cast are no better.
The humour is so lightweight that it's easy to miss it, and the racing scenes and stuff are all predictable and have been done better elsewhere.
TOMBOY really is a film to miss.Trivia fans take note: director Herb Freed is better known for helming the early '80s slasher GRADUATION DAY, which is considerably better than this film!.
Tomasina 'Tommy' Boyd (Betsy Russell) is an independent girl.
She's a mechanic and had always been a Tomboy.
Her best friend Seville Ritz is boy crazy and wants to be a famous dancer.
Tommy only has eyes for race car driver Randy Starr.
Seville needs an investor for a TV pilot and she talks Tommy into taking her to a party with Randy Starr and his rich friend Ernie Leeds Jr. Randy wins over Tommy but he won't consider her as his equal in the car.
She challenges him to a race.Betsy Russell is not the best of actresses but the rest of this cast makes her award winning by comparison.
Kristi Somers does have a fun shower scene early on.
There are a few scenes that shows the film knows that this is a cheese fest.
Betsy is as sexy as ever even when she's Tomboyed up.
This has its fun cheesy moments but it never exceeds its B-movie characteristics..
A tomboy coincidentally named Tommy Boyd is a mechanic who discovers love when she meets a race car driver.Crown International Pictures strike again is all I can say.
Tomboy is one of several such undistinguished efforts, all of which also qualified as that other 80's cinematic idea – the high concept movie.
It's one of many teen sex comedies made in that decade and it's pretty much as funny as most of them; in other words, not very funny at all.
An enjoyably dopey piece of 80's Crown International teen comedy trash.
Lovely, perky, curly-haired and highly appealing brunette 80's flash-in-the-pan B-movie starlet Betsy ("Out of Control," "Cheerleader Camp") Russell gives a winningly spunky performance as Tomasina "Tommy" Boyd, a scrappy, willful, fiercely self-reliant spitfire hoyden automobile mechanic with a humongous crush on cocky race car driving dreamboat hunk Randy Starr (handsome, dashing Gerald Christopher).
Egged on by her flighty, opportunistic aspiring actress gal pal Seville Ritz (leggy, luscious blonde looker Kristi Somers), Tommy meets Randy at a jerky rich kid's (Kirk Douglas' obnoxious youngest son Eric in an unbearably grating thespic turn) posh night party and, of course, the two fall a** over teakettle for each other.
The only problem is that male chauvinist Randy won't take Tommy seriously because she's a chick, so naturally the take no guff Tommy dares Randy to a high stakes souped-up auto race to win over his respect.Passably directed by seasoned trash exploitation feature hack Herb Freed (who also graced us with the grim, unsettling, arrestingly off-kilter psychological horror sleeper "Haunts" and the atrocious teen body count slasher tripe "Graduation Day") and scripted in strictly off-the-peg adolescent comedy-drama formula fashion by Ben Zelig, this typically tacky and immaterial Crown International Pictures drive-in fluff covers all the necessary junky bases to qualify as a pleasingly silly serving of pure nonsense: a sizable number of nice-looking busty babes take their shirts off at regular 15 minute intervals (besides Russell and Somers, we also have "Cavegirl" 's eminently adorable Cynthia Ann Thompson as a frequently bare-breasted bimbo and cheesy horror scream queen Michelle Bauer in a ridiculous uncredited bit part as a topless tootsie in a flashy white Corvette), a heavy-handed "you go girl!" stand-up-for-yourself feminist subtext, a generous smattering of witless lowbrow humor (Ritz's audition for a TV commercial is a racy hoot!), the best cornball motorcycle courtship scene since "Viva Kneivel!," cheap gay jokes, stupidly vulgar dialogue ("Good night, little *beep*!"), a horrible soundtrack full of generic, mechanically bouncy Top 40 hit tune soundalike songs (the incredibly awful theme number boasts the following immortal couplet: "She's a road runner/She's a tail gunner!"), an unforgettably hideous folks in tight, clingy leotards thrusting their pelvises to and fro to crappy disco music get down and boogie aerobic workout sequence ala "Flashdance," and an utterly predictable grand finale all-or-nothing climactic car race.
Scientists do studies to see why some human beings go wrong, but I would put it to a set an analysts to study how a film like 'Tomboy' ever got off the ground.
This is not just a bad movie but a dismal, pathetic one that came out in 1985 with very little fanfare, dropped out of theaters fairly quickly without many reviews and now resides on the dusty shelves on the backwalls of video stores.It resides there because 'Tomboy' is an a-typical Horny Teenager Movie more interested in removing the female starlets from their clothing then with any other entertainment value.
As these movies go you would expect it to be at least average but this one is bottom of the barrel even by these standards.The movie stars Betsy Russell as a character named Tomboy, a mechanic who can build her own car out of scraps from the local junkyard.
She's in love with an auto racing pretty boy but they are too packed into a nothing screenplay to be able to get to know each other in any real way.
How does winning a race prove that he will fall in love with her?
The movie promises to be a comedy but it siphons in a turgid love story that is glossy, pretty and inane.We know what the movie's draw is and yes, Russell does take her shirt off and I will admit that what's there borders on spectacular but why waste 90 minutes of your life getting there?
Since you are online, why not go look for one of the movie's screenshots, save yourself a trip to the video store and let the dust fall where it may..
Lots of boobs & bad acting with little humor.
Tomboy is just another entry in a sea of indistinguishable 1980's T&A films.
Bad music,bad clothes,bad hair,bad acting and lots of boobs are the requirements for 80's teen sex films and Tomboys got em all.There is something like-able about Betsy Russell but her acting in Tomboy is just awful.She is totally stiff,and her lines are delivered with no emotion and are often delivered too early or too late and don't feel natural at all.Seems like she is just repeating memorized lines like someone who's just starting acting school.There are a few cringe worthy scenes where she has no lines but has to act like she's laughing hysterically and its so fake that its painful to watch.She also emits some bizarre noises when she laughs.The race at the end is so bad,it looks like they are going about 40 mph and the cars that i guess where supposed to look bad-ass look like awful kit cars that were made in Mexico and are about to fall apart.Dumb movie with enough boob scenes to get you through 90 min but one viewing is enough.
Movie 3/10 boobs 7/10 overall 5/10.
Tommy Boyd (Betsy Russell) is an unconvincing tomboy who is carefully edited.
She was a wild friend Seville (Kristi Somers) who will do anything to endear herself to the motion picture industry.
Tommy idolizes local race driver Randy Starr (Gerard Christopher) but wants his respect too which she can gain by racing cars.On the surface, this is a lousy film.
Betsy Russell gets an "F" attempting to play a mechanic.
This film is available in at least two different 50 DVD collections of "B" movies and '80's films.
What makes this film a hit is the classic 80's nude scenes provided by both Betsy Russell and Kristi Somers.
If not for Phobe Cates, this would certainly be some of the best of 80's boy fantasy.8 stars for the nudity.Guide: F-word, sex, nudity (Betsy Russell, Kristi Somers, Rory Barish, Cynthia Ann Thompson, Michelle Bauer..no surprise...in fact she just drives onto the set, flashes and drives off.)