It is a truth universally acknowledged that any fan film project that gets written up on Den of Geek and feminist blog The F Word in the same week is bound to be doing something interesting. And The Girls on Film project does prove that made-up aphorism right.

This group of three film-makers takes well-known film scenes starring male actors and reproduces them shot-for-shot with female actors. It's a very simple idea that produces startling and fascinating results. Although this is a fan project and budgets must be tight, clever staging and some inspired direction result in scenes that are great fun to watch. There's even a reworked Star Trek scene, but its pure JJ Abrams – no wobbly sets here.

The Bechdel test offers a simple way of looking at how a film treats its female characters. To pass the test, a film should have at least two female characters who have names and talk to each other about something other than men. Of course, these gender-flipped clips all pass this test with flying colours. With meaty, male roles in their possession, the women in each clip have long, interesting conversations. But it's depressing how many real films fail this pretty basic test. I'm sure the original versions of the movies that have been given the Girls on Film treatment – Star Trek, Fight Club and The Town – don't come close.

Women are underrepresented on- and off-screen in the sausage-fest that is the film industry. The lazy thinking goes that male audience members can only identify with another man, but ever-helpful women will do the extra work required to identify with someone of the opposite sex. I think this is simply untrue; women put up with the fact that they have to do a certain amount of empathising with a male lead character to enjoy most films, but women are crying out for more films with female protagonists. So much so that the rare films that do feature women often do astoundingly well: Twilight, Sex and the City and Mamma Mia are films that drew a huge female audience –and perplexed some – but I'd offer that the big reason why these movies were hits was simply because they featured central female characters who actually got to do things.

The Girls on Film project also raises a more subtle point. Do we need more films about what is typically seen as "female", or do we just need to relax more about which roles women can play? What is most astonishing about these gender-switched scenes is how well they work. The Girls on Film deliberately choose the most blokey, testosterone-fuelled movies – the man-sweat soaked story telling that one might assume just wouldn't fly with women in the lead roles – and remakes them, straight-faced, serious and intense. And they work just as well. Watching the awesome Fight Club clip, I quickly forget I was watching anything other than a scene from a movie. Anyone would think that men and women actually had a lot in common.