Joe Bob's Drive-In: Weregrrl

You wouldn't think something like Lesbian Vampires could become a mundane high-concept cliché, but if you watch as many movies as I do, you've seen about all the neck-chomping bisexuality you can handle in one lifetime.

I don't know when this started exactly – I guess around 1998 -- but it seems to emanate from New Jersey in especially virulent forms. There are actresses who have made a dozen films and never played anything BUT a Lesbian Vampire.

So it shouldn't be THAT surprising, I guess, that husband-wife filmmakers Amy Lynn Best and Mike Watt out of Pittsburgh set out to do the ultimate Lesbian Vampire sendup, disguised as a Lesbian Vampire movie (are you following his?), with what Amy describes as a noble goal:

"We want guys to take it back to the video store and slam it down on the counter! This was garbage!"

I think you call that counter-intuitive marketing. It's called "Were-Grrl," and the idea was to sell it as a softcore lesbo fang-o-rama, then cut away during the sex scenes, depriving the intended adolescent audience of its naïve assumptions about the nature of Sapphic love. To make up for it, her plan was to then dazzle the audience with snappy Howard Hawks dialogue, a la "His Girl Friday." They do cut away during the sex scenes, but the dialogue is more Howard Cosell than Howard Hawks -- rapid and monotonic, so you can't always find the punch line.

It's one of those five-day wonders, cute in conception but sadly lacking in art direction (a carnival scene seems to have maybe four extras to simulate the crowd) as well as the lead vampiress role, played by Jasi Cotton Lanier with classic deadpan blank-stare emoting. (Who knows, perhaps this was parodic, since most of the made-in-New-Jersey prototypes have used the same zombie Method-acting.)

It's the old familiar story of the topless-dancer-turned- paralegal who moves into a new apartment and strikes up a sexually ambiguous acquaintance with her pushy goofball of a drooling neighbor, played by Francis Veltri. His hamhanded attempt to seduce her involves taking her on a date to a "bazaar" (I guess that's a carnival with only four people) where they give 20 bucks to a gypsy fortune teller who wears a dark veil (because she's played by the director?).

"A great misfortune is about to befall you!" predicts the gypsy, and of course, in any B movie, all predictions must come true, so as soon as our heroine walks out of the gypsy tent, she's mashed on the lips by an enormous lesbian of the career long-haul truck-driving sort, and apparently this activates the vampire curse that attacks when you sleep during a full moon. The interesting thing about the curse is that it doesn't just change your body, it changes your whole wardrobe, sometimes several times in the same evening. And it gives you an insatiable desire to troll seedy lesbian bars and go home with oversexed girls who will nag you in the morning.

We're basically talking a girly-girl who gets possessed by the Plaid-Shirt Earth-Shoe Demon, becoming progressively more butch as the movie wears on, until she discovers a cure that involves lavender bubble baths, champagne spritzers and immediate marriage, leading to an ambiguous conclusion that somehow hinges on the mysterious bartender at the lesbian bar -- The Dirty Dirty Gertrude Stein -- where the local homo-vixens hang. The bartender is played by cult movie queen Debbie Rochon with her usual aplomb, but the script never quite breaks through to the satirical level it aspires to.

Winner of the coveted "Deadly B" at the Festival of the Macabre in Latrobe, Pennsylvania (where else?), "Were-Grrl" is a close-but-no-cigar spoof of some of the most obscure movies on the planet. The problem is, it's hard to make fun of something that's already a parody of itself.

Let's look at those drive-in totals:

No breasts. ("This was garbage!") No apparent dead bodies. One pratfall, with high-heel flipping. Soundtrack that alternates between rock-concert decibels and scratchy whispers. One fairly disgusting plot-turning lesbo smackaroonie. Bonus interview-in-bed with the three lead actresses, in which the star compares filmic lesbianism to the real thing. Gratuitous howling coyotes. Inexplicable flashbacks about war zones and circuses. Chunky-shoe Fu.

Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Jasi Cotton Lanier, as the stressed-out femme turned butch, for saying "I didn't even become a PRETTY lesbian?"; Debbie Rochon, for spending most of the movie cleaning a beer mug but somehow making it work; and Amy Lynn Best, for directing, producing and playing the gypsy who has attitude about gypsy stereotyping.

Two stars. Joe Bob says check it out.

"Were-Grrl" Web site: happycloudpictures.com.

(To reach Joe Bob, go to joebobbriggs.com or email him at [email protected]. Snail-mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas, 75221.)