strippers

Bonus Features: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1957’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, finds Jayne Mansfield at the height of her manic bimbo superpowers.  Mansfield already strutted her outrageous proportions & bubbly-ditz persona to great comedic effect in her first collaboration with Looney Tunes legend Frank Tashlin, 1956’s The Girl Can’t Help It, but she wasn’t allowed to step outside her usual cultural designation as the Great Value™ Marilyn Monroe in that picture.  In Rock Hunter, Mansfield finally strayed far enough outside Marilyn’s looming shadow to pioneer her own territory in high-femme comedic vamping. Mansfield is pure bimbo mayhem in Rock Hunter, turning every inhale of breath into an orgasmic squeal and every costume change into a mind-blowing reveal.  Instead of playing an exaggeration of Monroe, she’s playing an exaggeration of herself – complete with verbal, metatextual references to her Girl Can’t Help It stardom.  It’s like watching a pro wrestler get assigned a go-nowhere, bad-vibes gimmick and then somehow win over the crowd by playing it as a ludicrous self-caricature.  It’s the film where she out-Marilyned Marilyn to such an absurd extreme that the comparison is obliterated entirely. 

No viewing of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is complete without also having seen its rock ‘n roll sister film The Girl Can’t Help It, but if you’ve already graduated from The Frank Tashlin School of Jayne Mansfield Studies, there’s still plenty more of Mansfield’s career left to explore.  Mansfield has a few dozen credits to her name on IMDb, ranging from dead-serious noirs to ribald slapstick comedies.  None that I have seen can compete with the sublime silliness of her collaborations with Tashlin, but there’s still more to Mansfield’s screen persona than those two consecutive roles.  So, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to bask in more of her weaponized bimbo glamour.

The Wayward Bus (1957)

In 1957’s The Wayward Bus, Mansfield plays a famous stripper on the run, dodging unwanted nudie magazine notoriety on a bumpy bus trip down to a Mexican hideout.  That makes the film sound a lot lighter & sillier than it is in practice, which is evident as soon as the title card announces its literary prestige as “John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus,” a serious drama for serious adults.  Mansfield stars opposite several character actors running away from their problems on the titular Sweetheart bus (including a young Joan Collins as the bus driver’s violently alcoholic wife), but much of the drama revolves around how difficult it is for her fellow passengers to avert their eyes from her striking figure.  It’s both the only movie I’ve seen where Jayne Mansfield was actually asked to Act, and the only one where her outrageous silhouette was treated as a liability instead of a superpower.  A sordid little stage drama set in motion by the magic of rear protection in the bus’s windows, The Wayward Bus suffered a long line of production delays that eventually made room for Mansfield in the cast after cycling through bigger-name actors like Marlon Brando, Gene Tierney, Joanne Woodward, Robert Mitchum, and Shelley Winters, despite being a relatively standard-issue studio picture.  That delay was a blessing in giving Mansfield some space to test out her dramatic chops, but also a curse in that it pushed its release to one year after Monroe’s similar roadside noir Bus Stop – to which it was inevitably, unfavorably compared in the press.

Too Hot to Handle (1960)

Mansfield also plays a jaded, troubled stripper in 1960’s Too Hot to Handle (alternately titled Playgirl After Dark), but she’s not asked to be as dramatically vulnerable here.  Her character has graduated from stripper to stripper-manager at the seedy nightclub The Pink Flamingo, run by her doomed gangster boyfriend (and Christopher Lee as the gangster’s disturbingly young, handsome, mustachioed right-hand man).  In genre terms, this film finds Mansfield working in the sex comedy realm that made her famous, but its British sensibilities afford it more of a dry martini-soaked sarcasm than what you’ll find in Tashlin’s sugar-addled farces.  With underplayed zingers like “That’s a very nice dress you’ve nearly got on,” it’s not a knee-slapper so much as it’s a muted chuckler, and so Mansfield gets a chance to tone down her absurd femme-caricature persona to a smokier, more detached register.  Even if not consistently hilarious, it’s shocking that this day-drunk British noir bothers to be as wryly funny as it is, since its main attraction is obviously the opportunity to watch Jayne Mansfield model outrageously tight, see-through outfits while puffing on the world’s longest cigarette holder.  Self-billed as an “expose of sexy, sordid Soho, England’s greatest shame,” the film relies heavily on her physical presence to attract an audience, going as far as to rile up censors with completely transparent gowns that got it harshly edited in America.  The fact that it manages to land a few one-liners on top of that drunken burlesque act is just lagniappe.

Promises! Promises! (1963)

It turns out see-through gowns are not enough to keep your horndog audience coming back forever.  Eventually, you’ve got to take off the gowns entirely.  While Mansfield reached her highest artistic peaks in her Frank Tashlin collaborations, she might be better known for her starring role in the mainstream nudie cutie Promises! Promises!, which delivered on its Playboy-publicized promise to become the first sound-era Hollywood film to feature a nude female star.  In the very first scene of Promises! Promises!, Mansfield is introduced taking a bubble bath, making sure to rise above the suds just enough to give the audience a full look at her outrageous, unclothed figure.  In the next, she disrobes of that pretense, going shamelessly topless as if Russ Meyer were leering behind the camera.  Unfortunately, the rest of the picture does not have the magic Russ Meyer touch.  You might wonder what this cornball sex comedy is going to do with its remaining 70 minutes after it gets Mansfield’s publicity-stunt nude scenes out of the way in the first 4.  The answer, apparently, is shamelessly repeat those same images in clunky dream sequences to milk them for all their worth.  The schticky German psychologists, sissy hairdressers, and stock footage of cruise ship shuffleboard players that pad out the rest of this farce are desperate & dire, and the only genuine fun to be found in the entire picture is in Mansfield’s two brief, breathy musical numbers.  Still, being the first actress to go nude in a mainstream, post-Hays Code Hollywood is a major distinction Mansfield could claim that her professional superior Marilyn Monroe could not (if not only because Monroe’s own attempt at that ground-breaking achievement, Something’s Got to Give, was derailed by the star’s tragic death). Unfortunately, that only helps relieve some of the sting of Marilyn’s own boat-ride farce Gentlemen Prefer Blondes being one of the most beloved comedies of all time while Promises! Promises! is mostly just a giant pile of ship.

-Brandon Ledet

Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023)

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Ten years ago, my friend Alicia and I walked into the Cinemark at Citiplace in Baton Rouge with a lot of excited middle-aged women to see Magic Mike, the then-new film directed by beloved (by us anyway) BR film icon Steven Soderbergh. Magic Mike had largely been marketed as an upbeat romcom about a hot dude raising money to start his own business by working as a male stripper. In the trailer, which starts out pretending that the film is about Channing Tatum as a cop before revealing his true profession, there’s a very 2012 needle-drop of Rihanna’s “We Found Love” and some romantic tension with romantic lead Cody Horn that would lead you to assume that you’re in for a much different kind of film than the one that hit theaters lo these many years ago. The advertising focused on star power — not so much of Tatum himself but of his taut body and the promise of a tantalizing thrill ride that still featured a traditional “Guy wants more from life, girl wants him but doesn’t know if she can handle his past” plot structure. You know, like a Nicholas Sparks adaptation but with a lot more dry humping.

That wasn’t the movie that we got that day. Instead, Magic Mike was kind of Diet Cola Boogie Nights, which is strange considering that we already had 54. The 2012 movie is one that spends most of its first half focused on Alex Pettyfer’s newcomer character and his introduction to the world of male stripping, and his narratively inevitable fall into the sex/drugs/rock’n’roll dark side of that lifestyle, while Tatum’s Mike is very focused on finding a way to grind—pun intended—-at whatever comes his way until he manages to rise above his current economic class. There are plenty of sexy dances, but they’re shot with a bit of a remove, and so what we’re left with is a tonal mishmash of cheesy rom-com dialogue, writhing torsos, and a storyline about drugs that doesn’t moralize further than “Some people can handle them better than others.” I can’t speak for everyone, but I can say that it wasn’t what I was expecting or what I wanted, and that the deluge of Baton Rouge moms who walked out of that screening also seemed to think that something different was supposed to have happened in that multiplex that day. 

Brandon is a big fan of the first follow-up, Magic Mike XXL, which eschews the first film’s director and direction, subbing in Gregory Jacobs for Soderbergh and, as Brandon wrote, “ditching its predecessor’s despondent character study in favor of an aging-boy-band-goes-on-a-road-trip slapstick comedy.” I understand the appeal, and I don’t think it was a bad idea to make a sequel that followed through on the unfulfilled promise of the first film’s marketing and also give it a lighter, fluffier narrative, and I find Donald Glover to be a welcome addition in anything that I’m watching, but it still didn’t connect with me. The first film purposely contrasted the dour realities of living under a broken economic system and the ways that people learn to cope inside of them with the larger-than-life stagebound fantasies that the boys got to portray. In XXL, the plot gets tiny little conflict injections as infrequently as narrative requirements allow while mostly taking the form of a goofy picaresque that mostly existed to hang strip sequences upon, and while I certainly understand the appeal, I just don’t connect. 

There was a moment in the screening of Magic Mike’s Last Dance when I turned to my friend who had accompanied me and asked: “How is this the best one?” And it’s not just better than the others (in my opinion), it’s actually great. 

This time around, we’ve got a narrator, and for reasons that don’t come into focus until the end of the first act, she’s young and has a British accent, and she’s telling the story of our old friend Mike Lane to catch us up on what’s happened in the intervening years. Mike’s furniture store folded during COVID, and he broke up with the woman he was presumed to have a happy ending with at the conclusion of XXL. Now he’s back to doing gig catering work, and he still hasn’t managed to claw his way out of his economic situation. While bartending at a charity event hosted by Maxandra “Max” Mendoza (Salma Hayek), who is recently separated from her media empire heir husband due to his infidelity, Mike is recognized by one of Max’s lawyers, who also happened to be one of the sorority girls from the party in the first film. To cheer up her boss, she recommends that Max invite Mike to give her a private dance, which he does after very little convincing. When the two wake up together the next morning, Max offers Mike a mysterious job, but he has to fly with her to London immediately. Once there, he meets her daughter—and our narrator—Zadie (Jemelia George) and their butler Victor (Ayub Khan Din), neither of whom approve of what Max is up to or, by extension, Mike’s presence. 

Max tasks Mike with a challenge: she owns a theater that was in her husband’s family for generations, and she’ll give him $60,000 for one month’s work of “redeveloping” the play that is currently being performed there. It’s a dreary-looking love triangle Victorian-era period piece called Isabel Ascendant that is considered old-fashioned and misogynistic even in-universe, and Max wants Mike to use his supposed knowledge of how to give women what they want to turn the play into an erotic, hip-thrusting masterpiece. This means firing the play’s director and, as a quirk of actors’ union labor laws, keeping on the actress playing the titular Isabel, Hannah (Juliette Motamed), who turns out to be as free of spirit as Isabel was repressed. With only three weeks until the curtain rises, Max and Mike have to recruit sexy dancers from all over Europe to fill out the ensemble while also dodging the various obstacles thrown in their way by Max’s soon-to-be-ex-husband. 

When I texted Brandon about doing coverage for this movie after I walked out of the theater, I was shocked to learn from him that it has such mixed reviews, but I think I have to chalk that up to … let’s politely call it “demographics.” Magic Mike wasn’t what it purported to be, sure, but it also wasn’t much of a fantasy either. Cody Horn is a gorgeous woman, but she’s not one with whom the presumed target audience of this kind of movie can readily identify. She’s hot, she looks great in her bikini, and she’s effortlessly cool. The same could be said of Amber Heard in XXL, and in neither movie is there ever any doubt about how the film will end and thus there are no stakes in those relationships, rendering them flat. Salma Hayek is also a gorgeous woman, and although she doesn’t look it, she’s 56, a full 14 years older than Tatum, and here she’s playing a woman with an ungodly amount of capital. I’m sure it’s not very common for someone’s wildest dreams to be about their partner cheating with their assistant, but there’s a lot to be said for the power fantasy of being a powerful older woman who can hire a maturing stud to create the ultimate sexy stage experience. Last Dance understands that better than the other two, and even though we know that the show will eventually have to go on, even if Max is rolling around in her overstuffed down comforters in a state of depression because it seems like her ex-husband has “won.” It’s called “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.” We know there’s going to be a big sexy revue at the end (and boy howdy is there). 

There’s a lot to really enjoy here. No one is more surprised than I am at how much I was won over by the ongoing subplot of Zadie and Victor. It would be so easy that it would almost be cheating to have Victor secretly be in love with his employer like something out of a Merchant-Ivory production, but there’s none of that nonsense here. I normally find precocious children to be grating and cloying in these movies, but it’s actually rather fun to watch Zadie have to occasionally step up and parent her mother as she goes through hard times, and for Victor to act in an unofficial grandfatherly capacity to get her back up to snuff. It’s not the stuff of Man Booker prizes—Zadie gets her mother out of the house and to the theatre for the finale of the film by finally addressing her as “Mum” instead of using her first name, which is a device that’s older than the hills—but it’s engaging in a way that I wasn’t really expecting for the third trip to this particular well. Hannah’s emceeing of the event is a hell of a lot of fun, and Motamed is a magnetic presence who leaves an impression on the viewer, standing out in a parade of male flesh that could easily wash her out of the mind completely, but she remains firmly rooted. 

In another way of fulfilling the fantasy, we the audience get to sit in on and attend the auditions for the revamped Isabel Ascendant and see all of the dancers get selected for their various individual talents: breakdancing, contortion, modern dance, ballet, and, of course, good ol’ fashioned stripping. It’s a fun montage, but also because it’s a montage, we never have to learn any names or have to try and keep track of them and their individual narratives as we were expected to in the previous films. As Peter, Bjorn, and John sang so long ago, “Flesh is flesh,” and that’s all that there is to it. All we need to worry about is having a good time, and although I’m sure that theatre reeked just as much of creatine farts as the back of the van in XXL, there’s something very classy and fun about it. As promised, the film does end with Magic Mike’s last dance, and it’s truly stunning, a demonstration that as much as mainstream critics like to tease Tatum, he is an amazing dancer who’s lithe and fluid in a way that belies his athletic build and his himbo public persona. The stakes are never too high or too low in the narrative, and the film rides that sweet spot for all that it’s worth, ensuring that this series goes out on a high note. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Zola (2021)

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As a terminally online movie nerd who has been relying on borrowed public-library DVDs instead of theatrical distribution to keep up with new releases all pandemic, it’s a minor miracle when I can enter a movie unbiased & unspoiled.  By the time I get to most buzzy releases, I’ve already heard every possible take on its faults & merits, with plenty of plot & stylistic details filled in as supporting evidence.  I was fortunate, then, to watch Janicza Bravo’s Zola without any clear roadmap to where it was headed.  As it was adapted from one of the most notorious Twitter threads of all time (with the co-writing help of its real-life subject & Tweeter, @zolamoon), I should likely be embarrassed that I had no idea where the film’s road-trip-to-Hell story would lead me, but instead I’m grateful.  While the hype around @zolamoon’s tweets was sensational, the conversation surrounding their movie adaptation has been much more subdued, which means the film-obsessed corners of the internet where I lurk left me mostly blind to where it was going.  All I really knew is that Zola lived to tweet about the journey, which did little to lighten the tension of the distinctly Floridian nightmare she survived.

This is not the first movie I’ve seen that was directly adapted from a series of tweets.  2013’s Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy. is a Thai coming-of-age drama adapted from 410 consecutive tweets on an anonymous teen girl’s Twitter account, credited to @marylonely.  It’s a playfully experimental work that allows the jarring tonal shifts of reading a Twitter feed from bottom-to-top to dictate its moment-to-moment whims.  Zola is the darksided mirrorworld version of that much lighter, kinder film – finding a chaotic terror & humor in life’s sequential randomness.  By definition, Zola is a purely episodic journey, following each “And then this happened, and then this happened” anecdote of its online source material like the twisty tracks on a rollercoaster – with no hopes of the deranged carnies in charge letting you off.  A part-time waitress & dancer in Detroit, Zola is seduced into a road trip to working a few Florida strip clubs with the promise of easy money & friendship.  The second she becomes a backseat passenger in her obnoxious, shady “friend’s” SUV, she realizes she’s in the hands of unhinged strangers with no choice but to see the journey through, hoping they return her to Detroit in one piece.  Each new strip club & hotel room she’s dragged through along the way springs horrific funhouses surprises at her, and she does her best to remain visibly calm, unphased by their sinister absurdism.  It was the scariest movie experience I had in the entirety of October, when I was mostly watching movies about supernatural ghouls & goblins.

Speaking of funhouses, Janicza Bravo has fun adding a layer of fairy tale artifice to this darkly funny nightmare, setting its pre-strip show dress-up sequences in a fantastic mirror realm scored by angelic harp strings.  We’re swept off our feet by Zola’s new, chaotic stripper friend right alongside her, intoxicated by the promise of wealth & adventure.  There’s a music video sheen to the pop art setting & fast-fashion costuming that can put you under the Wicked Stephanie’s spell if you’re not careful.  Once that spell is broken, you’re forever tied to her, cursed to stare at blank hotel room walls while listening to her turn tricks you didn’t consent to witnessing in an endless parade of gnarled Floridian dicks.  Mica Levi’s usual tension-generator scoring is made even more upsettingly arrhythmic with the intrusion of gum-chewing & Twitter notifications, making sure the vibes remain just as poisonous as they are sickly sweet.  The movie is only 85 minutes long, including its end credits, but by the time it’s over you feel as if you’ve been trapped in its hellish mirrorworld for a thousand eternities – in desperate need of a scalding-hot shower. 

I’m not sure why Zola was so breezily discussed & forgotten among online movie nerds when it was released this summer.  Maybe its social media source material or its episodic nature made it appear unsubstantial by default.  Maybe its online discourse cycle had already exhausted itself before the movie was even announced, back when the original Twitter thread was a must-read.  Whatever the reason, I’m grateful that I got to engage with the movie as a fresh, volatile cultural object months after its initial run – a rare treat these days.

-Brandon Ledet

Getting Go: The Go Doc Project (2013)

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The third film in my recent exploration of Tubi’s LGBTQIA+ section (following Is It Just Me? and Go Go Crazy) Getting Go, the Go Doc Project also features go-go dancing as a key part of its narrative makeup. It shares more than a few other similarities with Is It Just Me? as well, although it’s a much better film.

Our primary lead, known only as “Doc” (Tanner Cohen) is a country mouse close to finishing up his college education in New York. He has a vlog in which he talks about his life and, oddly, masturbates for the pleasure of his followers; he’s not a camboy and doesn’t seem to get any real pleasure from his exhibitionism, but as long as he’s laying his life bare for his 35ish viewers, he might as well go all the way. He’s looking for love but mostly experiencing infatuation, and the latest object of his affection is a popular go-go dancer identified only as “Go” (Matthew Camp). While drunk one night, Doc emails Go and tells him that he’s working on his final project before graduation, a documentary, and Doc wants to make it about him. Although he’s embarrassed when he recovers from his blackout and checks his outbox, Doc is pleasantly surprised to receive a response from Go, who agrees to the arrangement after very little convincing (and a promise of a 5% cut of any profits). Doc borrows a camera from a friend and starts shooting almost immediately, capturing an intimate slice of life that grows into something more as the two men start to fall for each other.

If Matthew Camp’s name sounds familiar to you, there are multiple reasons why this might be the case. It could be because you like porn (and no shame here), or because you’re familiar with his fashion brand, Daddy Couture, or from the British reality show Slag Wars. Or perhaps you heard about the recent arson of his Poughkeepsie home just a couple of months ago. Among gay porn performers, his penetration of the mainstream is possibly the deepest since Jeff Stryker appeared in Zombie 4: After Death, or that time Colby Keller showed up on EastSiders and High Maintenance. As the co-host of podcast Happie Campers, Camp shows that he’s more than just a pretty face and a hardbody, as the show aims to destigmatize sex work alongside recapitulating stories about “whirlwind[s] of lube, strip teases, and lots of nipple play” as well as “intellectual conversations about owning your sexuality.”

The last of these is an important element in Getting Go in more ways than one. Doc, for all of his book learning, is old fashioned and often ignorant. When Go asks him what his thesis for his documentary is, Doc declares that he intends to demonstrate that the ultimate goal of queer liberation must be assimilation, an idea to which Doc immediately (and rightfully) objects. Like Blaine in Is It Just Me?, what Doc wants is safe, solid monogamy, and there’s no shame in wanting that for oneself (like I said before, I do), but that doesn’t mean that any one person gets to decide that for anyone else. I was surprised to hear Go actually call Doc’s point of view “colonial,” given that films in this genre (and, as previously stated, on Tubi of all places) rarely exist in an intersectional space that even alludes to oppression as systemic and institutional. Go tells Doc that his way of thinking, that envisions a future of Polo-and-khakis normies as the end goal of the Gay Agenda, “castrates queer culture and humanity at large.”

This is foreshadowed early on, even before the two meet, when Doc finds a photo of Go online and edits it; in time lapse, he not only removes Go’s jock strap and photoshops a dick onto him, but he also airbrushes out all of the little “imperfections,” like moles and scars. For Doc, Go is nothing more than an image for his spank bank, at least at first. As the two get to know each other better and grow closer, Go challenges Doc’s preconceptions about what “love” has to look like, what it has to call itself and how it declares its presence, or what forms it can take. It’s hard for Doc to expand his internal schemas, but Go breaks through his barriers and Doc has his first time going all the way—on camera, no less—and it’s tender and sweet. Once this milestone passes, one half-expects the standard rom com plot to kick in: Go finds out that Doc has been lying this whole time, there’s an emotional confrontation, they break up, they spend some time apart, and then they get back together to live ambiguously ever after. That’s not what happens here. Instead, Doc walks in on Go with a trick, and the two argue about Go’s work, which Doc has largely ignored is sex work. Go comforts him and admits he always knew Doc’s true intentions but that he actually liked Doc from the start, so he went along with the documentary lie to spend time with him. This argument results in the two of them not seeing each other for a while, but they reunite before Doc moves out to Iowa to follow the next step on his academic journey, amicable ever after.

It’s shocking how much better this film is than either of the other two hosted-by-Tubi flicks I recently saw. It’s not a masterpiece, but like Go himself, it’s happy to be a different animal altogether, surprisingly thoughtful and ahead of its time. It doesn’t use the conventional trappings that one would expect for what is, at its core, a romance, and the choice to do it both in handheld and as a documentary not only makes sense financially but allows a clean break from the tired tropes of that genre. That documentary style also allows for the lines between fiction and reality to blur. In one scene, Go explains the meanings of several parts of his sleeve tattoo (which are of course Camp’s actual tattoos) so as he elaborates on what they represent to him, it’s almost if we’re seeing Camp here, not Go. I’d also wager that Go’s apartment is also Camp’s real place; there’s a messy verisimilitude to it, and given that Camp’s recently burned house was once the home and gathering place of Church of Satan member Joe “Netherworld” Mendillo, you know he’s into some spooky stuff, which would explain the amount of Nightmare Before Christmas merchandise scattered around. Neither Camp nor Cohen had ever played the lead in anything before or since Getting Go, and they both give mixed-to-good performances that are very strong in places and for large sections but occasionally slightly off-center; luckily, the faux documentary format covers these small sins.

The soundtrack is fantastic; that’s good news as this is a montage-heavy movie, which is its largest detraction. There are a bunch of great, frenetic electronic tracks from 3 Teens Kill 4 and s/he, as well as multiple songs from both Big Boys and The Irrepressibles, and that energy helps propel you through a lot of Go dancing and the two leads walking aimlessly around New York. If you have a tendency to space out, you’re going to have a hard time staying focused. As an example, towards the end of the movie, Patrick Wolf’s “Overture” (which clocks in at 4:43) plays in its entirety over a montage of Doc and Go making out in various places around NYC. So if this sounds like your kind of movie and you like music videos in the middle of your sex-positive lately-coming-of-age romance, you’re in for a treat.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Go Go Crazy (2011)

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In my Is It Just Me? review, I talked about TLA, Breaking Glass, and their domination of the 2005ish-2016ish era of gay cinema. TLA Releasing, at least, managed to put out the occasional queer prestige piece (like Mysterious Skin and, to a lesser extent, Latter Days, both of which came out in 2004 and helped pave the way for TLA to reach a larger audience), but Breaking Glass can’t make the same claim. If you go to the IMDb list of their films, no matter how you organize it—user ratings, popularity, number of votes, box office—you’ll be hard pressed to find a single release on the first page that you recognize, with the possible exceptions of Breaking Through and Cropsey (which isn’t even gay), and even then, I doubt it. As such, it should come as no surprise if you’ve never heard of Go Go Crazy, a mockumentary about five Pittsburgh go-go dancers who are competing for the top slot and a $1000 prize.

We’ve got Vinnie T (Nick Kenkel), who dreams of one day becoming a professional karaoke star and who has styled himself after the participants of Jersey Shore, which, as all of us in 2021 know, is a reference that has withstood the test of time. We’ve also got ex-Amish pretty boy Chase (Paul Cereghino), a fatphobic, unabashedly racist dillweed with a Travolta-in-Grease pomp; there’s Connor (Ryan Windish), a Speedo-stuffing straight bartender at the Trocadero, the bar where the competition is being held; Kiernon (Michael Cusumano), an Eastern European ballet dancer who dreams of creating a dance production out of a traumatic bear attack that he suffered; and finally there’s Broadway hopeful Ken (Eric Spear), who plays the Pollyanna of the group and has no other personality traits. Judging the competition are Weinsteinian bar owner Hank (Rick Crom), Celine Dion impersonator “embodier” Tina Perkins (Christina Bianco), and the previous year’s winner Blake Goldenrod (actual gay porn star Jake Steel); the event is hosted by green-wigged drag queen Hedda Lettuce (billed as herself), and rounding out the cast is stagehand Simon (Derek St. Pierre), who is “dating” (read: being taken advantage of by) Chase.

A go-go mockumentary isn’t a bad idea, especially given the time of the movie’s release. By 2011, The Office was in its sixth season and both Parks and Recreation and Modern Family were in their second or third; the format was reaching heights of popularity that were previously undreamt of. What the film is most clearly attempting (and failing) to imitate, however, is 2000’s Best in Show, or perhaps a lighter, softer version of 1999’s Drop Dead Gorgeous, as indicated by the outlandishness of the character types present in the former and the local competition setting of the latter. Both films were cult touchstones for young queer cinephiles, and their legacy (if not their quality) is on full display here. The problem is that there are no characters who are engaging. Sure, Kirstie Alley’s overzealous stage mom character in Gorgeous isn’t “likable” in the traditional sense, and there are a lot of bitchy queens popping off all over Show, but they’re fun. The characters in Go Go Crazy are neither. The LGBTQIA+ community has long been one that embraces wit and witticisms as a core part of the social space, but it’s also well-known that there are those for whom simply being mean is treated as a replacement for having a personality, especially among those who equate camp bitchiness with comedy but don’t really understand the artistry behind a well-crafted and delivered bon mot, as opposed to face value racism and unclever pettiness.

It’s a kind of mean streak without cleverness that is a throughline in Go Go Crazy. We’re clearly supposed to love to hate Chase, but in reality, we just hate him. That’s not to say that there isn’t the occasional joke that not only lands but works, but they are few and far between. The comedy of an American who doesn’t understand the difference between the state of Georgia and the nation of the same name (or who has never heard of the latter), from which Kiernon hails, is always good for a wry smile if nothing else. Too often, though, the film’s attempts to squeeze comedy out of the kind of pranks that were cliché in the 1980s, like putting itching powder in a competitor’s jock strap* or greasing up the pole before a rival’s dance to prevent them from finishing their routine, fall flat on their face. This is a relic of a film, a pseudo-raunchy sex comedy that’s actually fairly tame outside of its references to Hank’s sexual-predation-as-business-practice, which is itself treated glibly by the narrative in a way that is wouldn’t be now (and shouldn’t have been then). Go Go Crazy gets by solely on the physiques of its cast, which was already a weak draw in 2011 and is even less so now, when pornography has become widespread and available to just about everyone on a device that they keep in their pockets. Worse still, the version on Tubi has some really notable technical issues, including multiple instances of audio errors where it’s clear that the actor had micing problems, and where ADR should have been used if they weren’t going to do another take. I’m not sure if this is a Tubi problem or if it’s present in other releases (like the DVD), but it’s very noticeable and lends the production an amateurish feeling, which is shocking given that late director Fred M. Caruso’s previous film, The Big Gay Musical, had better, more professional production value.

Even as a piece of queer cinema history, it’s not that valuable. Like a TLA release, the eye-candy cast of this one is, unsurprisingly, made up of cast members that lack a headshot on IMDb. Even if you feel like taking a trip back through time, this is one to avoid.

*Bizarrely, this was also a plot point in Is It Just Me?, as a petty revenge ploy by Blaine against Cameron when he thought Cameron had hooked up with Xander, just in case you forgot that Blaine is a terrible person.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Is It Just Me? (2010)

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When I went on my writing retreat a few months back, I didn’t come straight home after my internet-free cabin sojourn. For what was supposed to be two nights but ended up being only one, I made my way to the outlying areas near San Marcos to a separate isolated location, and that place did have internet, and a Roku TV, which I had never encountered before. I found my way to the Tubi app and was shocked by the width and breadth of its LGBTQIA content, although while scrolling through the trailers that the app featured, I realized why: 70% of them were releases from either TLA Releasing or Breaking Glass*, which both had major runs in the post-Brokeback pre-Trump era of independent filmmaking, churning out gay flicks at a rate faster than Blumhouse can pump out installments of Into the Dark. Most of them … are bad. I imagine they’re also very cheap to license, especially if you’re looking to fill out a free streaming service. Releases from these distributors are rarely just bad movies, they’re bad art— not in the sense that they’re bad at being art, but in the sense that it’s a true, pure, intense look into the soul of the writers and directors (in this genre/time period, they are often one and the same), poorly made. These films are inscribed by limitations on their quality in every way, from material to performance to equipment. Most YouTubers now have better hardware than a lot of TLA releases from that time, and it shows. Sometimes, however, they manage to break through and somehow manage to be better than the sum of their parts.

I didn’t end up watching any of those movies in the hills outside of San Marcos. I happened to be driving through (and having to kill time while also following strict COVID protocol) on the day when Texas State was having their graduation. I had hoped to set up somewhere on or along the riverwalk to get some more writing done or finish reading Alias Grace, but all of the picnic tables were covered in plastic wrap to discourage congregation. After walking around the park for a while, I drove around aimlessly, seeing lots of young graduates and their families (following less strict COVID protocols) and ending up on-campus accidentally, where people who now seem impossibly young to me were leaving their dorms and loading up their cars to go home for Christmas. In that cabin just a few short hours later, I couldn’t bring myself to watch dated, ugly movies from the time when I was that same age, a time that was such a short season ago but which was nonetheless a completely different world, one without marriage equality or queer intersectionality or that extra decade of distance from the AIDS crisis. But knowing that they were out there meant that, eventually, I would be drawn back to them, moth to flame.

I recently watched three such films chosen at random. As luck would have it, the first one was a Breaking Glass film and the second was a TLA release, with the third actually coming from Wolfe Releasing, which is cut from the same cloth but seems to have a … let’s say “classier” output. All three also contained go-go dancing/dancers prominently and extensively, which was not something I sought out as a thematic throughline, but that encapsulates this era in gay cinema better than the previous two paragraphs did, doesn’t it? (Not better than the footnote, though.) The first of these, from Breaking Glass, captures what I think of when I think about their other distributions: a lead actor aiming for deadpan and missing, landing in the realm of dull surprise; a gay twist on one of the nine basic well-worn romcom templates (in this case Cyrano de Bergerac); a cast consisting mostly of actors with only two other credits and no headshot on IMDb; and one older gay delivering withering barbs and alluding to youthfully sleeping with Tennessee Williams. You know, a tale as old as time.

Is it Just Me? opens with our hero protagonist waxing fauxlosophical in his Carrie Bradshaw-esque lifestyle article/voice over about wanting more out of life than sexual liberation, although he doesn’t phrase it that way. Meet Blaine (Nicholas Downs), who writes pseudonymously as the “Invisible Man” for USA ToGay, his pen name reflecting how he feels in the gay community of L.A. Part of what makes him feel invisible is that he shares his living space with super hunky Cameron (Adam Huss), a go-go dancer who’s forever hooking up with someone, and against whom Blaine compares himself and falls short. “Is it just me,” Blaine asks his readers, “or am I the only one in this town who’s interested in more than what’s behind a man’s zipper?” Blaine has a meet cute with handsome, guitar-playing Texan Xander (David Loren) at a local cafe, and the two coincidentally start chatting online shortly thereafter, then graduate to spending hours talking on the phone. Xander reveals that, improbably, he actually reads Blaine’s column and, even more impossibly, he likes it. When Xander shares his photo after the two get to know each other better virtually, Blaine is delighted by the serendipity of the situation, until he realizes that Cameron had left himself logged into the dating site when Blaine got online, so Xander thinks Blaine is Cameron. Whoops.

This is actually a cute premise, and I wish that I could say that the movie pulls it off, but it doesn’t quite pass muster. Downs’s credits list a lot of lead performances in short films and web series and bit roles in well-known properties (I feel like, if you’re reading this site, you know exactly what I mean when I say that he’s has the credit “Bellman” on NCIS: Los Angeles and a lot of credits in the exact same vein; you know what I’m talking about). The one that stood out to me most was a short entitled Orion Slave Girls Must Die!!!, obviously about Star Trek; I watched the trailer for that and he’s not giving the same flat performance in those clips as he is in Is it Just Me? In this, he delivers every line in an inflectionless monotone, and it seems to be a deliberate character choice, but—no disrespect to the actor—it doesn’t work. When a man in a bar flirtatiously asks Blaine what his sign is and he replies “Exit” and leaves, he doesn’t seem witty or sharp; he seems like a dick. Contributing to this is Blaine’s actions and attitudes regarding his desire for a monogamous, traditional relationship; that’s a perfectly fine goal and there’s nothing wrong with wanting that (I certainly do), but Blaine expresses his frustration with his lack of a solid relationship through slut-shaming his roommate and other queer folks who are still sowing their wild oats. Consider this exchange:

Antonio: “I totally wanna write for USA ToGay. I’m working on this sample column called ‘Circuit News.’ It’s important news for, you know, circuit people in the crowd.”
Blaine: “That’s a great idea. Another guide to where you can find cheap, empty, unfulfilled, drug-induced sex.”

Blaine: “That’s a great idea. Another guide to where you can find cheap, empty, unfulfilled, drug-induced sex.”

Blaine. Dude. Just keep that shit to yourself.

Gay romances of this era always have a lady best friend for the lead, and this one is no different. I honestly can’t tell if Michelle (Michelle Laurent) is intentionally comically toxic or just utterly superfluous. Her only role in the film is to give Blaine bad advice while they’re jogging. If it’s intentionally bad because she likes drama, that’s actually pretty funny, but if the script is simply defaulting to having her give bad advice because she’s not actually allowed to affect the course of the plot, that’s less funny. Her role as Blaine’s friend and confidant is duplicated in Cameron, who’s surprisingly helpful, thoughtful, and generously patient with Blaine’s nonsense, especially given that Blaine’s internal monologue regarding Cameron is dismissive and, frankly, mean. At one point, Michelle tells Blaine explicitly that “Cameron is [his] roommate; he’s not [his] friend,” but Cameron is a better friend to Blaine than (a) Michelle is or (b) Blaine deserves.

Blaine drafts a reluctant Cameron into pretending to be him, and vice versa, in order to meet Xander IRL for the first time. Cameron warns Blaine that this is doomed to failure, but Blaine is for some reason convinced that wacky sitcom hijinx will have a better outcome than just being honest about the mix-up, because this is a romcom and there wouldn’t be a plot if there wasn’t unnecessary farce. Cameron-as-Blaine does his level best to be friendly with Xander while gently pushing him towards Blaine-as-Cameron, but the miscommunication takes another twist when Blaine overhears Cameron-as-Blaine helping a vomiting-drunk Xander navigate their apartment’s bathroom in ambiguous, offscreen dialogue that mirrors the noises Cameron makes when he’s fucking. Now Blaine thinks that Cameron broke his trust too, and when Michelle hears about it she eats that shit up with a spoon because she’s messy.

Xander has his own sounding board in Ernie (single serving sci-fi vet Bruce Gray from Cube 2: Hypercube), an elderly gay man, long-widowed but scared to re-enter the dating scene. Ernie has a popcorn machine in his movie den and I covet it. He generally wanders into a scene to cut the dramatic tension, and every time he exits the screen it’s accompanied by a line about his dog shitting in the house. He delivers little nuggets of wisdom like “Listen: writers [like Blaine] — when they’re alone, they’re prophetic; when they’re with people, they’re pathetic. They’re just too in their heads.” He’s really as superfluous as Michelle, but if we didn’t cut to them from time to time, the threadbare nature of this plot would be even more exposed.

Obviously, Xander eventually realizes that he’s been lied to (from the credits of a slasher movie in which Cameron played a camp counselor, no less) and confronts Blaine, feeling betrayed and angry. But then he decides to give it a chance anyway and writes a song for Blaine, Blaine (and I cannot stress this enough — impossibly) gets a job offer from the L.A. Times as a columnist, and Ernie gains the courage to start dating again. Everyone lives happily ever after, I guess.

There are cute moments scattered throughout this film, but on the whole it’s desperately lacking in critical areas. Not every narrative needs to have a main character that we empathize with or even understand, as long as we can form some kind of emotional attachment with them, but Blaine is a character that defies any attempts at empathy by virtue of being a complete dick. I don’t want to blame Downs as an actor without seeing more of his work, but although Blaine’s bon mots seem like they would work really well on the page, as delivered here, it just doesn’t work. Loren’s Texan accent is inconsistent and distracting, but Xander is so likable (if naïve) in comparison to Blaine’s bitter, jaded little pill that it’s a relief when he’s on screen. The MVP here, however, is Huss, who not only never skips chest day, he turns up the charm to distract you from some of the film’s larger, more glaring issues.

Although this happened to be the first of this loose non-trilogy that I saw and thus in a very literal sense it was my first choice, in a larger sense, this wouldn’t be my first choice. It’s a prime example of the TLA brand when it comes to its politics, style, and structure, but with the least effective love story of the lot. Even when Blaine is supposed to be hitting it off with Xander (like discovering that they like the same obscure band), he feels more like a gatekeeper than a keeper because of his monotone delivery. I’ve seen worse—a lot worse—but I still can’t recommend it.

*No one ever seems to talk about this, probably because no one cares but me, but these two completely eclipsed Ariztical Entertainment, didn’t they? Ariztical’s bread and butter were a sex comedy franchise that had pretty severe sequelitis and vanity projects like Ben and Arthur (edited, produced, written, directed, scored by, and starring Sam Mraovich), but I can’t remember the last time I saw that logo in front of anything. Their website still has a New Releases section that lists a movie that came out in January, but their homepage is also full of broken Quicktime plug-ins, so take from that what you will. The catalog page for Eating Out 3 has still-visible deadlinks to the film’s Blogger, Facebook, and MySpace pages, as well as a suspended Twitter account. A lot of their films are unsearchable on JustWatch, and as much as I’m interested in seeing their adaptation of Other Voices, Other Rooms, I can’t justify paying $18 for it, especially since it could end up being in a file format that won’t play on anything I own. All TLA had to do was release their own so-so sex comedy and Ariztical basically disappeared from the marketplace. At least Eating Out will always have longevity and legacy over Another Gay Movie with regards to sequels (Another Gay Sequel featured Perez Hilton as himself and was DOA). At least we’ll always have The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Exotic Ones (1968)

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I don’t know how useful this review of the 1968 creature feature The Exotic Ones (aka The Monster and the Stripper) will be to anyone reading it, since the film is very precisely my exact personal brand of trash. This locally-set novelty attempts to combine the Roger Corman rubber-suit monster movie with the post-Russ Meyer nudie cutie into one perfect swinging-60s trash pile. It has so much fun establishing a nonstop party atmosphere on its French Quarter strip club set that it goes to Matt Farley levels of effort to delay the inevitable disruption of its horrific monster – almost a full hour into its 90-minure runtime. This movie has nothing on its boozy, lingerie-clad mind beyond ogling as many burlesque performers as it can before it must sober up and deliver the horror genre payoffs promised on its poster. It’s a sloppy, horny, locally flavored party film with no clear themes or purpose beyond the cheap, simple pleasures of Bourbon Street hedonism; it’s also my new best friend.

Bourbon Street mafia types abduct a swamp-dwelling sasquatch known as The Swamp Thing from the Louisiana bayous (played by rockabilly musician Sleepy La Beef) and force him to perform onstage as part of a cheap strip club act. In color! You can pretty much guess how the story plays out once the “monster” (a shirtless, hairy oaf with vague caveman features) is displayed for the public, assuming you’ve seen any monster-in-captivity movie released since 1933’s King Kong. The Exotic Ones delays those tedious plot concerns for as long as it can manage, though, saving the entirety of its creature feature narrative for its final half hour. Everything that precedes that third-act genre shift is just a parade of go-go dancers, burlesque performers, and various other salacious sideshow acts. Some slight attention is paid to fabricating a rivalry between the club’s newest act (a shy R&B singer who’s reluctant to strip for tips) and its long-established queen bee (a daredevil stripper with flaming titty tassels and drag queen eyebrows), but it doesn’t amount to much. You can guess which one the monster falls in love with once he arrives to the scene, can’t you? And which one taunts him into a rage? You’ve pretty much already seen this movie, outside the specific quirks of its strip routines, and the producers wisely pack the screen with as large of a variety of them as possible to keep you alert & entertained.

The Exotic Ones very quickly won me over as a fan with its opening newsreel-style introduction to New Orleans as a city – a rapid-fire montage that was clearly inspired by Russ Meyer’s strip club “documentary” Mondo Topless. Machine gun-paced cuts of strippers & French Quarter storefronts assault the audience as a beat-reporter narrator invites us onto “a street they call Bourbon” in a city that’s “sleepy by day, psychedelic by night.” It’s not exactly hyperbole when he describes Mardi Gras as “a time of reckless abandonment,” but the monologue is still deliciously overwritten & tonally chaotic – harshly juxtaposing a “Get a load of this filth!” moralism with tantalizing shots of naked, gyrating flesh. I personally loved seeing local 1960s sleaze-joints documented with the same reverent, drooling eye that was typically reserved for notorious prostitution hotspots like Amsterdam’s “Red Light District” or New York City’s 42nd Street porno theater strip. I don’t know that a New Orleans-specific remake of Mondo Topless disguised as a dirt-cheap monster movie is exactly the movie most audiences needed in their lives, but it is exactly the one I needed in mine.

Judging by most genre nerds’ boredom with the Ed Wood-penned Orgy of the Dead (a film I’m personally fond of, to my discredit), this movie’s 5% monster mayhem, 95% strip routines mixture will likely not win over everyone. The go-go strip routines and the surprisingly gory violence are both far more enthusiastically wild & erratic than those in Orgy, but you must already be on the hook for that genre imbalance for the formula to work on you. It seems that even the film’s own producers—June & Ron Ormond—weren’t entirely sold on the artistic merits of this kind of amoral hedonism. Shortly after The Exotic Ones‘s release (and a life-threatening plane crash) the couple shifted into making fire & brimstone Christian propaganda meant to scare audiences away from the temptations of Hell. Oh well. I personally could have watched a hundred Bourbon Street monster movies in this same vein, but no party lasts forever – not even the “reckless abandonment” of Mardi Gras.

-Brandon Ledet

JLo: All-American Hustler

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It’s almost undeniable that the most All-American event on the cultural calendar is the Super Bowl: a championship football game adored for its TV ads, its excessive snack food rituals, and its pop music spectacle intermission. There’s a reason why so much emphasis is placed on who will sing the National Anthem that kicks off the game every year (and how well they did or didn’t perform); the event is just as much a celebration of American culture as it is a championship football game. I’ve gradually stopped watching football over the years as pro wrestling, the Oscars, and RuPaul’s Drag Race have replaced it as my competitive sports events of choice, but even I still tune in for the Super Bowl Halftime Show most years due to my overriding interest in pop culture at large. This year was a great one! Whoever booked the game’s intermission entertainment made great use of its Miami venue by featuring Latinx entertainers like Shakira & Bad Bunny, representing an often-overlooked facet of the American cultural fabric that’s been especially politically charged under the xenophobic reign of the Trump Presidency. The centerpiece of this celebratory Latinx protest display was a pop music medley from singer-dancer-movie-star Jennifer Lopez, whose section of the show took the biggest, most direct political jabs of the event – while also conjuring Lopez’s most recent onscreen persona as a modern marvel of Cinema in particular.

The reason I’m talking about football & pop music on a movie blog is that JLo’s Halftime Show performance was greatly influenced by her recent movie-stealing role in the film Hustlers. Adapted from a New York Magazine article chronicling a real-life series of crimes, the film is a post-2008 Financial Crisis period piece about a ring of strip club employees who drugged & fleeced their wealthy Wall Street clientele for tens of thousands of dollars. Told in a flashback style directly borrowed from GoodFellas, the film is ostensibly aligned with the POV of its top-billed narrator character, played by Constance Wu. In practice, Wu is the lead performer in name only. As soon as Jennifer Lopez saunters onto the screen to perform a strip routine to Fiona Apple’s “Criminal,” the movie is entirely her show. Both the audience & Wu herself are fixated on the spectacle of the almighty JLo as she shows us the ropes – first on the gymnastic basics of working a stripper pole, then on the basics of fraudulently running up transactions on an unconscious client’s credit card. Some of Wu’s fixation on JLo’s Stripper Queen persona is explained to be a result of her character’s Mommy Issues (a refreshing change of course from cinema’s usual Daddy Issues fixation among macho narrators), but that almost feels like overkill. It’s self-evident; no explanation necessary. Even much-advertised cameo roles from major pop music personalities like Lizzo & Cardi B do little to distract from JLo’s nuclear charisma. She just casually walks away with the entire movie tucked into her overpriced designer handbag, never breaking a sweat.

Early in Hustlers, Constance Wu’s narrator pontificates that “This whole country is a strip club,” drawing a parallel between her industry’s sexual hustling to the “stolen money” of Wall Street’s own daily hustles. Nothing could better illustrate America’s function as the world’s largest strip club than JLo performing from atop a stripper pole at the Super Bowl Halftime Show. Bringing her newfound exotic dancer skills from the Hustlers set to that All-American pop music venue was a brilliant maneuver, as she then had an entire nation gawking at her in awe the way Wu & Hustlers‘s (much smaller) audience had already been on the hook. And what did she do with this amplified, captivated audience? She redirected our eyeballs to Latinx children posing in cages on the football field, peeling back the pop culture escapism of Super Bowl spectacle to refresh our horror with ICE’s abuses in the ongoing refugee border crisis. JLo even emerged from one of her many onstage costume changes during her short set in a fur coat/body suit combo outfit that directly recalled her Hustlers costuming, except redesigned to resemble the American flag. In the movie, she welcomes Constance Wu into the warmth of her coat, purring “Climb into my fur.” On the stage, she opens her All-American fur in the same fashion, only to reveal that it’s a Puerto Rican flag on its reverse side – further emphasizing the Latinx prominence in America’s DNA that’s often dismissed by the country’s falsely “patriotic” right-wing goblins. This whole country is a strip club, and it was wonderful to see it get so flagrantly hustled by a performer who’s been in her prime for decades, with no signs of slowing down.

The only way Jo’s Halftime Show performance could have been more blatantly political is if she had ripped a picture of Donald Trump in half, à la Sinead O’Connor on SNL (although the political effectiveness of either performance is up for debate). The only way it could have been more directly tied to her movie-stealing, Oscars-snubbed persona in Hustlers is if she had looked directly into the camera to ask the entire country, “Doesn’t money make you horny?” You can even see her Hustlers persona echoed in how easily she steals the show from Shakira, who’s just as capable of a singer & dancer as Constance Wu is an actor. Shakira is both a sex bomb & a total goofball, positively lighting up that Super Bowl stage with her spectacular hip gyrations, her to-the-camera tongue-wagging, and her comically over-the-top song selections (like choosing to open with the werewolf anthem “She-Wolf”). As the first & longest sustained performer on that stage, Shakira should technically be positioned as the central star of the Halftime Show, with Lopez slotted as a special guest star. Instead, as with in Hustlers, JLo’s blinding charisma easily overpowers Shakira’s own formidable presence – emerging as the de facto star of the show. If the Super Bowl is going to stand as an annual distillation of American culture, it’s only appropriate that the event acknowledge the country’s Latinx contingent through artists like Shakira & JLo as well as the hedonistic exploitation & excess detailed in Hustlers – both of which are American as fuck. It’s your patriotic duty to give it a watch even if you care way more about movies & pop music than you care about football:

-Brandon Ledet

Jezebel (2019)

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I first heard of the new memoir drama Jezebel when the writer-director-star of the film, Numa Perrier, was interviewed on an episode of the Switchblade Sisters podcast this summer, discussing how the deeply personal project came to be. It’s near-impossible to resist the film’s premise as “a true story” wherein Perrier looks back to her teen years in the late 1990s, when her older sister roped her into being a camgirl in the early days of online sex work. The context & conflict of that premise is only made more intriguing by the fact that Perrier performs in the film herself as that older sister character, making the project as personal & intimate of an account as possible. What surprised me most about the film when it screened at the New Orleans Film Fest after months of anticipation was how sweet & delicate it was willing to be with its subject despite its creator’s obvious closeness to its emotionally raw context. Perrier doesn’t shy away from the exploitation or desperation that fueled her sex work as a cash-strapped, near-homeless teen, but she’s equally honest about the joy, power, and self-discovery that line of work opened up to her at the time, making for a strikingly complex picture of an authentic, lived experience.

Thematically, Jezebel falls somewhere between the poverty-line desperation of The Florida Project and the tense online sex work fantasy realms of Cam, but it’s not nearly as aggressive as either of those predecessors in terms of style or sensibility. Mostly, we follow the fictional Tiffany (who performs under the titular stage name Jezebel) as she ping-pongs between two suffocating, cramped locales: an extended-stay hotel room in Vegas and a nearby office space that’s been converted into an online pleasure dome. She has zero privacy in either her work or home life, where her “alone time” & her professional sex acts are quietly under surveillance by authority figures in just the other room. Understandably, a lot of the emotional drama is centered on her relationship with her older sister, who’s ultimately doing the best she can to equip the youngster with a self-sustaining skill (one the sister picked up herself over years of working dial-up hotlines). What’s more striking than that increasingly tense relationship, however, is Tiffany’s relationship with her own body & inner desires. The circumstances of how she got roped into sex work are far short of ideal, but she quickly comes to enjoy the freedom, power, confidence and expanding sexual passions the profession offers her – in a relatively low-stakes form of sexual labor she’s careful not to escalate. That conflict between desperation & autonomy rages throughout the movie, but it is mostly contained under a wryly humorous, surprisingly sweet surface.

While it’s nowhere near as deliberately horrifying as the chat sessions in Cam, Jezebel does a great job of distinguishing both the dangers & escapist fantasies inherent to working as a camgirl. The flood of unfiltered, hedonistic comments from anonymous men online are an overwhelming menace here, something Tiffany is especially vulnerable to as the only black girl working at her jobsite. There’s also just something horrific about how devastatingly young she looks as a 19-year-old babe in the woods who’s treating this incrementally risky line of work as a self-discovery playground. Watching her learn to wield power over her clients (one of them voiced by eternal sleazebucket Brett Gelman) or developing an internal sexual persona of her own, you can tell that working as a camgirl has overall been a genuine good in her life, but it’s impossible to lose sight of the fact that you’re watching a vulnerable child navigate potentially dangerous waters that are gradually rising above her head.

Perrier’s experience in the field is fascinating for the period-specific details of how early webcam lag, lack of audio, and chatroom etiquette informed the first wave of camgirl artistry (which mostly amounted to pantomimed sex acts instead of The Real Thing). Where Jezebel really shines, though, is in how the complexity of larger themes like familial politics, racial othering, financial power dynamics, and self-discovery are effortlessly, subtly weaved into a story that could have so easily been played for flashy shock value. Few things about this scenario are easy or fair, but Perrier finds plenty of room to convey a full inner life for her semi-fictional teenage surrogate, including touching bouts of joy, tenderness, and self-fulfillment despite the subject’s potential for pure exploitation and despair.

-Brandon Ledet

Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls (1989)

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Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls is my favorite kind of unnecessary horror sequel. Since the first film in Katt Shea’s unashamed sleaze franchise is a self-contained murder mystery mostly comprised of 15(!!!) strip routines and a few gruesome murders, no one was exactly salivating for a follow-up – at least not for narrative reasons. The only reason the sequel was made in the first place (besides the surprise financial success of its predecessor) is that Roger Corman had a strip club set leftover from an unrelated production for a few days before it was going to be dismantled. Having wrapped filming her previous picture Dance of the Damned on a Saturday and rushed unprepared into filming this movie on the leftover set with no script the following Monday, Shea found herself working in the Corman machine at its most budget-efficient but most creatively restrained. She used the few days of strip club access to film as many dance routines as she could, then retroactively churned out a screenplay to tie them together in the following weeks. The result is total madness, a disjointed sense of reality that transforms the original serial-killer-of-strippers formula of Stripped to Kill into something much more surreal & directly from the id. It’s the same madhouse horror sequel approach as films like Slumber Party Massacre 2, Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2, and Poltergeist III: avoiding rote repetition of its predecessor by completely letting go of reality and indulging in an over-the-top free-for-all of nightmare logic. The fact that it was written in a rush after it already started filming only adds to its surrealist pleasures, like how the best SNL skits are the nonsensical ones written in a 3 a.m. state of delirium.

Live Girls opens with its best scene. A frightened stripper in 80s hairspray & lingerie dances in frightened flight as a room full of mysterious nightmare figures reach out to handle & harm her. Ominous winds roar on the soundtrack as if we had accidentally stumbled into David Lynch’s wet dreams. The dance routine itself is less akin to the straightforward LA strip club acts of the previous film than it is to the interpretive dance madness of The Red Shoes or any Kate Bush music video you can conjure (especially the one where Bush pays homage to The Red Shoes). As early as that opening, it’s clear that Live Girls has abandoned the gritty real-world crime drama of Stripped to Kill for a logically looser MTV aesthetic, caring little for how plausible its strip routines & murder spree play onscreen as long as they’re “cool.” The dance numbers are less frequent here (they were rushed to accommodate a soon-to-disappear set, after all), but they’re also more memorably bizarre. A tag-team lion tamer act, a fire-breathing routine with a flaming stripper pole, and an oddly juvenile ballerina number feel just as detached from reality as the frequent dream-sequence murders that are expressed in full-on interpretive dance. Although the MTV nightmare logic of the opening sequence does persist throughout, though, the film never quite matches the Kate Bush striptease madness of its opening, which concludes with a masked killer taking out their first stripper victim with a razor blade kiss. The howling winds of this opening nightmare do return in subsequent stripper-killing dreams, but none are quite as delirious or deranged as the first. Still, I was too immediately enamored for my mood to drop too significantly as the movie calmed down to stage a proper murder mystery.

Besides adding some heightened surrealism to its never-ending parade of strip routines, the dream logic conceit of Live Girls also improves on the Stripped to Kill formula by obscuring the misogyny of its stripper-killing violence. In this sequel, the kills are staged in the context of a stripper’s half-remembered dreams as she mentally unravels. Amidst the dream sequences of interpretive dance, a masked killer with a razor blade secured in their mouth slices stripper victims on the face & neck with a deadly kiss and our frazzled protagonist wakes with a mouth full of blood & no recollection of the hours since she blacked out. The ultimate reveal of the killer’s identity is unfortunately just as politically #problematic here as it was at the conclusion of the previous film. The difference is that the kills leading up to it aren’t nearly as brutally misogynistic. I respect the unembarrassed sleaze of Stripped to Kill in concept, but the way that film alternates between gawking at women’s bodies as sexual objects and then gawking at those same bodies being mangled and torn apart left me a little queasy at times. Here, both the sex and the violence are less reminiscent of real-world misogyny and play more like a horny teenager’s nightmare than a proper thriller. Disembodied hands reach through a series of glory holes on a shiny zebra-striped wall to grab a stripper as she’s tormented by the howling wind. Occultist strippers with face-obscuring masks & robes dance erratic circles around a victim before they’re kissed to death at the business end of a fog machine. Both Stripped to Kill films end on a morally offensive queerphobic twist, but only the first is truly morally grotesque long before it gets there. This follow up is loopy & goofy in all the places where its predecessor is grimy & gruesome, endearingly so. The neon lights & hairspray-fried mops of curls didn’t change between the two films, but the worlds they decorate feel like they belong to entirely separate realms – the real & the unreal, the grotesque & the delirious.

In its most surreal moments, Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls is like a psychedelic, Kate Bush-inspired porno where the performers took too many hallucinogens and accidentally slipped into interpretative dance when the script said they should bone. At its worst it’s low-energy Skinemax sleaze, which can be charming in its own way. In either instance, it’s way more entertaining & bizarre than the first Stripped to Kill film, despite their shared penchant for poorly aged, queerphobic conclusions. Even if the final twist spoils the fun, you do have to admire the distinct delirium of the picture, which it shares with other rushed-through-production Corman classics like Blood Bath, Bucket of Blood, and Little Shop of Horrors. This addition to that haphazard canon of barely coherent projects that somehow lucked into cult status is a little more adherent to the bare flesh & neon lighting of MTV-era sleaze than its cohorts, but it fits right in among the best of ‘em all the same.

-Brandon Ledet