D.
Otto Von De Mille
Colour
It’s amazing that the Sexy Goth Girls films are so tightly
grouped together. Surely the first movie was cult, barely seen on release and
in the normal course of things taking some years for the groundswell of support
and goodwill for it (or in more brutal commercial terms, to give the impression
there were enough suckers out there willing to pay good, hard money to see a
sequel) to take the story forward. And yet a year after the original one limped
into the cinema on a broken pair of six inch high heels, here was the second
part. The Sexy Goth Girls were back and still looking sexy.
How could this be? How could this sequel have come so fast?
Well, firstly it’s still quite cheap. Noticeably the
production values are not much higher than they are on the first Sexy Goth
Girls movie. Much like ‘The Evil Dead 2’, this is a sequel/remake, but then Sam
Rami’s film looked a damn sight better than his cheap original. Here we have
the same flaws repeated all over again – the boom shows up in shot, there’s
often no real sense as to where to put the camera and the acting has not
improved one iota. However in amongst the various returning Sexy Goth Girls,
there’s one actor who – while he doesn’t improve the quality of the
performances by a single atom – does explain how exactly this film got made.
Step forward the big Q himself, Mr Quentin Tarantino.
I talked in my write-up of the first film of the debt it had to Quentin. Indeed the only thing that stopped it being a fetishists
wet-dream (oh, all that naked young flesh, all that leather) was the
Tarantino-esque ear for dialogue and love for the minutiae of culture and life.
Clearly Quentin thought so too, as here he is in the key role of Mr Lucifer – a
friend to the Sexy Goth Girls. It must have been a great thrill for Von De
Mille (I’ve hunted online to see whether that is actually his real name, it’s
inconclusive so far but my money is on probably not) when Quentin agreed to
come on board. It was a blessing, an anointment that the first film did things
right. But he’s also the biggest symbol of where this film is going wrong.
The aesthetic of the first movie remains, the whole Russ
Meyer look of things. So we get Liddy D’Eath (very much the star here, rather
than just one of the ensemble) in tight black shorts and a sheer top covering a
studded bra. We get other girls with their cleavages crammed into the kind of leather
bodices likely to suffocate, a group of girls bending over a pool table while
shooting the breeze (and badly shooting pool), and two girls interrupted
entwined together in what looks like a heavy canoodling session (or a money
shot). Again it’s all very pervy, all very seedy. But what held together the
first film – the very Quentin-ness of it – is more muted here. That’s odd as
surely that was the thing Quentin liked and approved of the first time around,
but here all that is much more in passing. Instead the murder plot that was an
afterthought crammed into the end of the first film, is front and centre and
the motor of the thing. As such it becomes a completely different animal, a thriller,
with most of the cast in tight clothes and ripped suspenders with the
occasional flash of great dialogue. It’s like the presence of the media star
Quentin Tarantino (rather than director, Quentin Tarantino) gave Von De Mille
the opportunity to aim at the mainstream, and he wasn’t going to pass it up.
And the mainstream likes murder plots, not weird little pervy films which nevertheless
revel in bizarre but hilarious dialogue.
And ironically there’s no bigger sign of this change of
focus than the role Quentin is playing. He is Charlie to their Angels, Mother
to their Emma Peel. He’s the one who tells them what’s happening, suggests what
they should do, makes sure they have the equipment to do it. But hang on a
second, aren’t goths a subculture? They’re not part of the mainstream, are
they? Certainly they’re not part of some quasi-government agency tasked with
fighting crime. In the first film they were just girls hanging out, but here
they are almost super-heroes. Worse, they are officially approved super-heroes:
Sexy Goth Girls who have the right licenses and papers. It’s all so depressing.
As if Marlon Brando had shown up in ‘The Wild Ones’ with his Hells Angels
licence stamped and counter-stamped.
It’s odd that someone would make a film with the phrase “Sexy
Goth Girls” in the title and aim for the mainstream, but that’s what’s
happening here.
And it will just get worse, as we’ll see next time.
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