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One time I was walking through a somewhat disreputable part of Amsterdam with my girlfriend and her ten year old daughter. No, I wasn't corrupting children. It was in the middle of the day, and the area was filled with families. Avoiding the sex trade in Amsterdam is not as easy as you might think. The X-rated stuff is integrated into the warp and woof of the city. At any rate, the clubs have sex shows around the clock, and they post barkers outside to hawk the shows to passers-by. One particularly aggressive guy said to me, "C'mon in, buddy. Hot action. We have real fucking, not fake fucking like those other clubs." I indicated wordlessly that Linda's child was with us, and the guy said, without skipping a beat, "Hey, pal, people of all ages like REAL fucking. It's fun for the whole family." Well, if you find the family that he had in mind, this is their family movie! Even if you're a major movie buff, you've probably never heard of Barry Gifford, although he has indirectly contributed quite a bit to the movies of the 90s. David Lynch has made two of his books into the films Lost Highway and Wild at Heart. Gifford wrote some noir novels about the sleazy underbelly of border life, with names like: "Wild at Heart", "Baby Cat-Face", and "59 Degrees and Raining". The books all include the same basic cast of characters, mostly featuring a couple called The Sailor and Lula, so any movie about those characters (including Perdita Durango herself) is most likely based on all the books in one way or another. David Lynch stuck closest to "Wild at Heart" in his eponymous 1990 film, while the Perdita Durango movie is closest to "59 Degrees and Raining", the story which elevates Perdita from a background character to the focus of her own story. This film may share some characters and a pedigree with Lynch's Wild at Heart, but it is not stylish surrealism like a Lynch movie, nor is it smart tongue-in-cheek satire like Pulp Fiction, nor a creatively sociopathic romp into social criticism like A Clockwork Orange. Instead, it is a farcical, over-the-top gore-fest in the modern equivalent of Grand Guignol. The most similar movie I can name is Natural Born Killers. Rosie Perez plays Perdita Durango in this film (Isabella Rossellini played the part in Wild at Heart), as a cynical hooker who finally meets her love match in the form of a voodoo priest, bank robber and grave robber all rolled into one, a guy who does a hokey Santeria act where he hacks up dead bodies and finishes by ripping out the body's heart. Most women are scared of him, as well they might be, but not ol' Perdita. She knows he's a con man, and suggests that his act is way too tame, and that he could make it more authentic and peppy with live human sacrifice. To this end, they kidnap an incredibly "white bread" couple of Gringo teenagers. The chick is played by Aimee Graham (Rollergirl's sister). The long-term plan is to rip out their hearts while they are still alive (ala the Aztecs), then eat their flesh as part of the act. Perdita gets a trifle hacked off, however, when voodoo-boy decides to rehearse by eating Rollergirl's sister while she's still alive and naked, if you catch my drift. After a substantial amount of rape and other physical and mental abuse, Rollergirl's sister and her boyfriend are finally deemed ready for the human sacrifice and cannibalism, so they are stripped naked and covered with feathers in preparation for the first show. Since only one of them needs to die, Perdita and voodoo-boy have a vote to see which one, and they allow the victims to participate in the referendum. The Wonder Bread twins get really ticked off at each other and start bickering because each voted for the other to be killed. Finally, Rollergirl's sister gets chosen in the tiebreaker, the show begins, and the girl is about to get her heart cut out, when some other bad guys show up at the Santeria ceremony with machine guns and start blasting away. Perdita and Voodoo-boy and our teens manage to escape, only to get into another bloody shoot-out with some DEA guys headed up by Tony Soprano. No problem. After they escape again, they get to drive a hijacked truck of human fetuses to Vegas, where the fetuses are to be essential in testing some new cosmetics. More bad guys double cross each other, more blood spills, and ... Well, I'm sure you know that the various bad guys and Feds all have to figure it out somehow, using the Socratic method, assiduous logic, and especially automatic weapons. This film is basically an attempt to out-Tarantino the master, but it gets strangely trapped somewhere between very broad satire (ala Stone's Natural Born Killers) and a straight-out attempt to milk humor from exaggerated gore (ala the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis). The script gets funny, then it gets sentimental, and some scenes are even icily serious, as if no farce had preceded them. The movie ends, for example, with Rosie in tears, walking down a Vegas street with the sad music signaling the movie's end. Overall, the whole show is basically an anarchistic adolescent jerk-off fantasy movie designed for the young male market. The film is sometimes racist, and generally glorifies rape and violence. I guess this was meant as satire. Fun for the whole family. |
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