The tough go shopping (4/27/01)
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Psycho Beach Party. [Robert Lee King, 2000. Written by Charles Busch (from his play).]
A crowd of funloving surfer guys and girls have their evening at the drivein interrupted by a brutal murder in their midst! the work, it soons becomes apparent, of a mad serial killer determined to exterminate the physically imperfect [how perfectly Californian.] Suspicion at one time or another falls upon all of the principals, who include multiply-personalitied aspiring surfer Chicklet, her sister the geek girl intellectual [who didn’t see who done it because she was concentrating on the subtext of the film], their Fifties Mom [“A slumber party is an invitation to sexual intercourse...you have no idea how repugnant it can be to have a man’s sweaty thing poking at you”], the Swedish exchange student, the surfing guru who lives in a shack at the end of the beach and speaks only in rhymes, the sharptongued bitch in a wheelchair, the surfer with prophetic balls, and the B-movie starlet taking a sabbatical among her fans while she studies the script for
The Rat-Faced Girl From Mars. Meanwhile it’s sun, sand, and surf [at least on the backprojection screen] among a gang of carefree party dudes who quote Dostoevsky and model lingerie for one another [sheesh] on the way to a grand beachparty dancenumber finale [shades of Twyla Tharp] and a terminal confrontation, where else, at the drivein. [Maybe this is only a setup for the Caligari frame-reveal, but let’s not get metaphysical.] If only they’d all stayed home to pickle beets and practice the oboe.
Though I’m still wondering where I might pick up that recipe for jalapeno pancakes with peach sauce, the best gag of all might be that the lady detective is played by the writer himself in drag. As somebody says, Boy, there sure are a lot of twisted souls out there.
The DVD includes a video by Los Straitjackets.
____________Heads will roll (4/20/01)
