i only make passes at guys who wear glasses

Once upon a time, I talked about prolific queer filmmaker David DeCoteau and his particular brand of direct to DVD horror movies in the aughts.  David appears to be a sweet man in real life and one can't help but respect how specific his work is (i.e. hundreds of films that feature shirtless straight boys right off the bus from Iowa willing to do anything on camera for their big break even if that means doing crunches while delivering wooden line readings to fifty-something character actresses in the same post-modern valley house film after film).

When I wrote about Decoteau before, I had never seen his best film.  I thought I was so cool by not paying him the respect he deserves.  I was stupid. 

Thanks to Shudder and Joe Bob Briggs, that's all changed.  I will now and forever bow down before David Decoteau because I finally saw Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama!

"You gonna suck 'em all up by yourself?"

Before today, I only knew Sorority Babes as the movie that Andras Jones was in before he was in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4.  I'm happy to be enlightened.  It's much more.

This is a movie about hot guys who dress like nerds.  That is my favorite trope in media.  There was a boy on NBC's Passions who was a 6'3" twin and a runway model with 4% body fat, but they'd wet his hair and make him wear glasses and we were supposed to believe he was a mega-nerd.  Nothing in the world is hotter.  This is a whole movie of that.  It's a queer director making a film in the exploitation medium, so it's a rorschach experience - the audience dictates what they want it to be. For the average straight guy, it's got tons of boobies and gratuitous sex, so it was prominently featured in the late night cable roster, but it's very much shot from the queer lens.  The camera lingers on the male form at every opportunity and, when coupled with its overall heightened tone, that makes this film a gay horror classic.

The S&M fixation of Decoteau's later works is already firmly in place here - this movie's super porny.  I actually wouldn't have been able to handle it in my pre-teen years - it would have given me a sexual heart attack.  There's a good seven minutes of paddle spanking.

I remember there was this kid named Bard in my high school who had elderly parents who were always going away for some reason.  Junior year, he started feeling pretty cute because he did a school play and lost his baby fat and he would have these pervy parties at his house where kids would pretend to get beer drunk as an excuse to hook up with each other.  This was NOT my scene.  I remember crashing once and being mortified by how gross straight people were and I never really talked to any of those people again.  I mean, there were wolf paintings and mounted swords on the wall.  I should have called the police.

This story is relevant because Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama is about a sex party gone wrong.  From what I can ascertain from what I saw of this film while occasionally looking up from my Taco Bell, it's a movie about teenage boys who get caught watching a lesbian sorority hazing and have to go on a treasure hunt in an after-hours bowling alley haunted by a little muppet demon who grants wishes.   Legendary Scream Queen Linnea Quigley plays Jerri Blank from Strangers with Candy: the early years and she makes gay besties with Andras Jones and they have a real lesbian/gay boy dynamic that assures me they'll be friends through many breakups and hairstyles to come.  Also, she steals things from corporations, which I respect.

I love this movie.  It captures that very specific and elusive mid-late 1980s Southern California vibe that I'm obsessed with (as seen in Teen Wolf, Once Bitten, Saved by the Bell, etc).  There should be Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama coloring books, promotional Pepsi tie-ins, a Universal Horror Nights maze and a Starz limited series based on the making of the film immediately.

Do you want to party?

"The events portrayed in this film are all true.  The names are real names of real people and real organizations."

Last week, while I was pawing over Children of the Corn for stills of shirtless boys making gay face, something stuck in my head.  That boy with the smeared blood on his chest looked familiar and not in the way that all tall, pale, skinny brunettes are familiarly my favorite husbands to have - rather, I could swear that I knew him from someplace!  Oh well.

I filed it away as another transcendental memory from a past life.  

I dragged myself out to see The Crazies remake last week.  I had fun with the colors and the set pieces and my gallon of Coke Zero, but that's not what important - you see, today I was at my day job, staring at Taylor Lautner's head and Taylor was wearing way too much hair gel and something suddenly clicked... The Crazies was just a flat, humorless retelling of The Return of the Living Dead (1985)!  The Return of the Living Dead prominently features that shirtless boy from the cornfields.  Either the Matrix is broken or I'm not crazy. Either way, what better excuse to revisit a legit masterpiece!

The Return of the Living Dead was among the first in a never-ending heap of films to explore what happens when the government, ubiquitous in its tinkering with biohazards in pursuit of chemical warfare, irresponsibly leaves a tank of mysterious goo behind in a small town to make flesh-eating zombies of the dead.  

Picture it:  it's the 4th of July weekend.  It's the eighties, so everyone's hair has volume, and a group of fashion forward teens in Kentucky are looking to party.  They have a car but nowhere to go! Their bestie, Freddy, is off working his new day job at the Uneeda Medical Supply Company (which just so happens to house a tank of inadvertently abandoned government-grade zombie left over from the incidents of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead).  The teens go off to wait for Freddy in the nearby cemetery where they wax poetic on the nature of life and death as teenagers are wont to do.

"Frankly, Burt, I think you acted precipitously in cutting up that corpse."

Freddy's new boss, Frank, is a hoot.  A real character. He can't wait to show Freddy the ropes of the medical supply business and his collection of top secret canister zombies.  While he may be a terrific boss, Frank is a bit clumsy in his enthusiasm. The next thing you know, the canisters are broken and our heroes are stuck dicing and incinerating military issued zombie parts in the neighboring crematorium. 

If that weren't enough, the smoke from those government canisters has unleashed a noxious gas into the air that gets caught in the rain and seeps into the ground in the cemetery causing the dead to rise from their graves in the same graveyard where our heroes are having their all night rager. No big.

 The Crazies has the same ending as Return of the Living Dead, but The Crazies doesn't have the '80s nor does it have scream queen Linnea Quigley doing a completely naked dance on a tombstone while her friends hold up flares and blare music from a boombox.

Dan O'Bannon was very smart and profoundly dissatisfied with convention.  He had worked with John Carpenter out of film school and considered everyone he came up with a sell out - as a result, he left nothing on the floor here.  This movie has the spark of someone who's pissed off about a lot of things.  The Return of the Living Dead is unabashedly a horror film while also managing to be a legitimately funny comedy and a full-blown musical with a new-wave/surf rock soundtrack that still bangs.  From its fashion to its nihilism, this movie is punk.

I first saw this film on late-night TV when I lived in Gloucester, MA.  We had one of those duplex condos with late-80s glass sliding doors that went out to the yard.  Entirely because of this film, I refused to go downstairs after dark because I didn't want to have to live out that moment where I saw a zombie walk across the backyard.  So watch this movie with the windows open because it's only right you should have that experience too.