Sexy Goth Girls Take on the World (1999)

D. Otto Van De Mille
Colour

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”


Noted rock critic T.S.Eliot understood the path of the rebellious rock phenomenon. Be you Elvis Presley or The Rolling Stones or The Sex Pistols or Madonna or some sexy goth girls, you start your career as an affront to everything decent and good, but end up a respectable shadow of what you once were.  It’s a fixed and unalterable law – a rule which is true in nature, physics and life. Some processes are faster than others. Elvis was singing to an actual hound dog on The Steve Allen Show within a year of his breakthrough, and the Sexy Goth Girls were appearing in ‘Sexy Goth Girls Take on the World’ within two and a half years of the first film’s release.


Let’s begin at the beginning. The first Sexy Goth Girls film was a plucky little indie with the skimpiest of plots, that just revelled in hanging out with some really sexy goth girls. Yes, there was a murder at some point, but it wasn’t trying to be a crime drama, it was something totally different; a film that luxuriated in life, that was quirky, fun, alternative and – yes – sexy. The sequel arrived surprisingly quickly and already a change was noticeable. Suddenly murder plots were something the sexy goth girls did. In fact they were sanctioned to fight crime and help the innocent. They were super heroes now, there to save the world. It was all very strange. Clearly the sexy goth girls had lurched towards the mainstream, and the mainstream wasn’t a place that suited the sexy goth girls. So in the third film that lurch would be corrected, right? The sexy goth girls would return to the alternative, quirky style we all loved?


Well, the short answer is no. This is a film decidedly intent on the mainstream. Indeed it is knocking the mainstream over in the street and binding it with a leather muzzle and harness and making the mainstream its bitch. (Actually, no, that’s far too weird an image. It’s actually walking up to the mainstream and giving it a nice big  cuddle and saying that if you look past all that goth stuff, these girls are just as lovely as you – only a bit more sexy). This is a sexy goth girls film you could take your grandmother to see. This is a sexy goth girls film you could take your children to see. Do you have a maiden aunt and would like to show her some sexy goth girls without making her cover her eyes and issue frightened squeaks about what passes as decent entertainment these days? Well, come right this way.


Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the sexy goth girls Christmas movie.


Here’s the plot: the President of the United States (Robert Vaughan) is kidnapped by right-wing Christian fundamentalists (led by Randy Quaid) who are disturbed by the decline of morality in today’s America. Government agent Mr Lazarus (Quentin Tarantino, in what is little more than a cameo) gets his operatives, the sexy goth girls – led by Liddy D’Eath – on the case. They team up with the President’s twelve year old daughter to track down the President and rescue him using their sexy goth girl skills (which consist, as far as I can see, of black leather weapons and feminine wiles) and various adventures, escapades, and scrapes ensue. Suffice to say there is a lot of running about in dangerous looking heals. The President’s daughter is suspicious of her new companions at first, but eventually learns that the key lesson of being a sexy goth girl is (apparently) to be yourself. And by being herself she helps them rescue her father and they’re all together for Christmas. Hip-hip Hooray!


It’s hard to put into words how crushing a disappointment this film is. It’s hard to put into words how wrongheaded a film this is. It’s totally different in tone to the previous entries, with none of the slow-motion leering or perviness, but also none of the smart and sassy dialogue. Instead this is a full blown assault on the mainstream, and like all self-conscious attempts to get in good with the mainstream it aims for the lowest common denominator. It’s obvious, sentimental, silly and often quite boring. But it still in no way belongs in that sunny, bland locale they call the mainsteam. Who after all would make a family friendly film with the words ‘sexy goth girls’ in the title? Who would create a kid friendly bunch of superheroes and dress them in suspenders with their cleavages all a-go-go? (Although I suppose we’re inured to not seeing Batman and Superman as the fetishists they so obviously are when they wander around in their nice, shiny tights). Who would really imagine that ending a film with a bunch of goth girl stood in the oval office with their leader’s arm around the President’s daughter wishing the audience a very Merry Christmas was in anyway an appropriate or good idea? It’s not, instead it’s ever so weird, on many levels – and none of them good weird.


So overall this trilogy is a tale of a group of girls who were there to be sexy and perved over, to have funny and foul-mouthed conversations, to be the epitome of rebellion. They were stars for a group of fans who didn’t want to see normal types of films, who wanted to fall in love with a different type of heroine. But their decline was quick and before long that quirky, fuck you, independence had been totally blown away, and without changing their clothes or even altering their make-up, the sexy goth girls were smiling big American smiles as they appeared in anodyne crap designed supposedly for the whole family.


This film was as successful on video as the other two (sexy goth girls fans are clearly not very discerning), but – really - where did it all go wrong?