Tag Archives: Gay/Queer

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KUNG FU CONTRA AS BONECAS [KUNG FU AGAINST THE DOLLS] (1975)

AKA Bruce Lee versus Gay Power

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DIRECTED BY: Adriano Stuart

FEATURING: Adriano Stuart, Maurício do Valle, Helena Ramos, Edgard Franco, Nadir Fernandes

PLOT: When Chang, a wandering warrior of mixed origin who is well-versed in the skills and philosophies of kung fu, returns home to find that his family has been murdered by a gang of outrageous bandits, he vows to seek vengeance.

Kung Fu Contra As Bonecas [AKA Bruce Lee vs. Gay Power] ()

COMMENTS: No one associated with the making of this film ever called it Bruce Lee vs. Gay Power. This is important, because that extraordinary title seems to be at the heart of its lingering reputation. If some enterprising videocassette huckster hadn’t decided to employ some savvy attention-getting branding, combining an extreme example of Bruceploitation with a thematically unexpected opponent, then Kung Fu contra As Bonecas might never have made it out of Brazil. As it is, I’ve had to take a crash course in Brazilian history and film trends just to wrap my head around exactly what’s going on here, to say nothing of stoking a passing familiarity with poorly aged 1970s American television. Even with that, I have my doubts as to whether I’ve gotten it all. It is often said of art that if you have to explain what your piece means, then it has failed. Kung Fu contra As Bonecas has this problem to the nth power. 

Let’s start with the part that was closest to my wheelhouse. The movie is, in large part, an outright spoof of the David Carradine vehicle “Kung Fu,” the popular American TV series in which a distinctly non-Asian itinerant warrior made his way across the Old West confronting various forms of oppression and bigotry. (Depending upon who is telling the story, the real Bruce Lee either devised the premise for “Kung Fu” and had it stolen by unscrupulous producers, or was first in line for the lead role but was bypassed by studio execs who couldn’t fathom making an Asian actor the star of a prime-time TV series.)

Playing the lead role himself in a ludicrous oversized jet-black wig, Adriano Stuart deliberately mocks “Kung Fu”’s conventions, with flashbacks that directly parody the hero’s education in some dark monastery, turning the show’s innocent boy into a privileged young man in a graduation cap and gown and bearing the sobriquet “mosquito” (in place of the series’ “grasshopper”). He is instructed in the ways of Zen calm, which he consistently fails to maintain. In case that’s not obvious enough, this Chang sports a pink tank top featuring a glittery illustration of Carradine’s character hovering above the words “KUNG FU,” a garment that one suspects he picked up in a Hot Topic. It’s either unrestrained commitment to the bit or desperate flailing to make sure everyone gets the joke. 

Chang’s enemies are the cangaceiros, outlaws who brutalize the region, engaging in robbery, rape, and murder. Scenes in which the gang terrorizes innocents almost seem to be aping Sergio Leone, depicting their violence graphically and unblinkingly and setting a serious contrast to the ridiculous hero. However, the feminine habits Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KUNG FU CONTRA AS BONECAS [KUNG FU AGAINST THE DOLLS] (1975)

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: PINK NARCISSUS (1971)

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“Narcissus now had reached his sixteenth year
And seemed both man and boy; and many a youth
And many a girl desired him, but hard pride
Ruled in that delicate frame, and never a youth
And never a girl could touch his haughty heart.”

— Ovid, Metamorphoses

DIRECTED BY: James Bidgood

FEATURING: Bobby Kendall

PLOT: A modern-day Narcissus, alone in a New York City apartment, imagines himself as characters in a series of homoerotic fantasies while gazing upon his own reflection in a mirror.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: There’s nothing particularly weird about a teenage boy imagining himself as a matador bedecked in gold embroidery with red silk cape, but when the camera pulls back to reveal the “bull” in this corrida—a biker who looks like he rode right out of an illustration by Tom of Finland—we enter another level of surreal and sensual fantasy.

COMMENTS: In this silent modern-day retelling of the myth of Narcissus, first-time director and cinematographer James Bidgood creates an otherworldly dreamscape with a nightmarish edge. A young hustler falls into a series of sexual reveries in his bedroom while the lewd antics of a darkly Expressionist city parade outside his window. Mirrors take the place of the original’s pond, and as his dreams become increasingly self-obsessed, the lines between the worlds on either side of the glass blur, leading to a phantasmagoric conclusion.

Upon entering the apartment, awash in a warm pink glow, and decorated with multiple photographs of himself, Narcissus (Kendall) gradually strips off his tight white clothes. As he ripples his shirt before a wall of mirrors, it transforms into a red cape and a motorcycle engine revs, its handlebars cleverly framed as the bull’s two horns (aimed at the bull-fighter’s shapely rear end). A bathhouse hook-up intercuts this vision where Narcissus and the biker end up in a tub frothing with soap bubbles, the action occasionally interrupted by blank white frames.

For a first film by an amateur film maker, Pink Narcissus displays an impressive command of cinematic techniques. The inner life of the protagonist, in which he travels through time and around the world, when juxtaposed with extreme close-ups of his body—slow shots of fingers being licked, swelling nipples, belly button tickled with a blade of grass—underscore his absorption into solipsistic desires. When he gazes into the mirror, the camera flips to the perspective of his own reflection gazing back at him. Often shot from below, Kendall strides through the film with the camera staring up at his monumental form. Sometimes half-dressed, sometimes nude, the angle emphasizes his youthful and muscular physique but also the character’s revelry in his own power as he wields his physical attractions like a lure and a weapon.

In Classical Rome, he takes on the roles of both a cruel emperor and a powerless prisoner whom the emperor condemns. In an Orientalist tableau, he’s both a harem boy and a stern bearded sultan. A dancer draped with semi-sheer silk and strands of pearls performs for them in an extended sequence of images variously distorted, stretched and abstracted. The choreography, in which the movements of male anatomy form flowing patterns in the gauzy silk, recalls the Serpentine dances of Loie Fuller. The frames dissolve between the dancer’s body, close-ups of the pearls and Narcissus grasping the beaded strands in his hand. As the harem boy Narcissus enjoys the performance, but the sultan demands the dancer’s execution. Carried out with shocking rapidity, this death sentence marks the film’s most potently violent and sexual moment.

Unabashedly gay and erotic, daringly so for having been made in the pre-Stonewall era, Pink Narcissus take its stylistic cues from ’60s pinup art. Bidgood was a photographer for the men’s health and fitness magazines which featured coded gay imagery at the time. He once explained in an interview that when he grew bored with the typical images of beefcake models wearing g-strings, “I thought there should be something more.”

With his astute eye for composition and color, he began to design richly decorated tableau for his photographs, beginning with underwater scenes inspired by Esther Williams films and the glamour of Old Hollywood. Pink Narcissus blossomed out of a photoshoot for a Valentine’s Day issue of The Young Physique magazine. Bidgood created the pink-hued bedroom interior with the heart-shaped swan headboard for the cover in his own tiny NYC apartment. As the shoot with model Bobby Kendall progressed, a story began to take shape and Bidgood started to film the scenes. Over the course of seven years, he painstakingly crafted this journey into a mythic realm highly charged with sensuality yet strikingly beautiful, an example of DIY film making like no other.

Note: The executor of Bidgood’s estate has said that Blu-ray and VOD releases of Pink Narcissus are planned for Summer 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a fragile antique, a passive, tackily decorated surreal fantasy out of that pre‐Gay‐Activist era when homosexuals hid in closets and read novels about sensitive young men who committed suicide because they could not go on.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

 

CAPSULE: LOVE LIES BLEEDING (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Rose Glass

FEATURING: , Katy O’Brian, , Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco,

PLOT: In a small Southwestern city, Lou (Stewart) manages a gym and generally keeps her head down, keeping an eye on her sister, Beth (Malone) and her abusive husband, JJ (Franco), while keeping distance from her dad, Lou Sr. (Harris), a major player in the local crime scene. When Lou meets Jackie, who’s temporarily working for her dad while saving money for a body building competition in Vegas, sparks fly, setting off a conflagration which threatens to burn everything to the ground.

 

Still from love lies bleeding (2024)

COMMENTS: It’s reductive to call Love Lies Bleeding just a queer neo-noir, but that is basically what it is. It hits all the right noir notes: shady characters mired in shady dealings for questionable reasons. The setting (New Mexico, 1989) brings the “neo” to the noir, along with the fact that the star-crossed protagonists are a lesbian couple instead of the usual heterosexual pairing. And at first glance, it seems that, interesting and entertaining as it is—performances are good all around, as well as Glass’ direction—there’s nothing truly “weird” about this, at least not in the way we at 366 Weird Movies define the term.

However, as an A24 release, it’s at least atypical: it ain’t no Bound, for sure. For one thing, the setting allows for Glass and co-writer Weronika Tofilska to make some cultural commentary. There’s a solid background of violence always hovering about, and Lou Sr.’s club/shooting range is always packed with people eagerly exercising their Second Amendment rights, evoking specters of the wild west. There’s also the gym rat culture: intimidating motivational slogans and steroid use, which is a major plot point in the story.

The weird elements aren’t exactly subtle, but they are startling and metaphorical: a massive ravine in the landscape that reads as rather vaginal and several instances of ‘roid rage. At the bodybuidling competition, Jackie vomits up a full-grown Lou. The climatic confrontation between Jackie, Lou, and Lou Sr. has been called “the most A24 ending of A24 endings.” It works well, as long as it’s not taken literally, and it doesn’t detract from the denouement, which isn’t afraid to put the worm in the apple, as noir endings go. It may not be “weird” in the full sense, but there’s enough weird to notice in this hot, queer neo-noir.

Still 2 from Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

Currently streaming on several platforms like Max, Hulu, and Sling, the film is also on a Region-free Blu-ray with a commentary by Glass and Tofilska, two featurettes—“In the Land of Guns and Muscles” and “Sex, Steroids and Codependency”—and an image gallery. A 4K UHD will be available in January 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… an exciting, instant classic that will hopefully usher in a new era of unapologetically weird lesbian cinema.”–Jourdain Searles, Autostraddle (contemporaneous)

CAPSULE: ENTER THE DRAG DRAGON (2023)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Beatrice Beres, Sam Kellerman, Jade London, Samnang Tep, Mark MacDonald, Phil Caracas, Natalia Moreno

PLOT: A kung fu proficient drag-queen detective investigates a missing dog, which leads to a hidden treasure, an Aztec mummy, and zombies.

Still from enter the drag dragon (2023)

COMMENTS: In a movie so silly that the lead is played consecutively by three different actors—Crunch gets a drag makeover and a whole new look each time she awakens in the hospital after a trauma—it’s hard for even the anti-wokest viewer to take offense. (The film’s disclaimer that it was shot on land stolen from the Algonquin and Kanein’keha:ka Nations may raise some colonist ire, though).

Detective Crunch and roller-skating delivery girl/hot cis chick Jaws live in an abandoned (and haunted) movie theater owned by Fast Buck, where they screen old kung fu flicks 24/7 for training purposes. They are opposed by F.I.S.T. (Fearsome International Spies and Thieves), a cabal of ersatz Bond henchmen led by Gorch. There’s also an ancient Aztec mummy to deal with. The story may traffic in occasional immorality, but not amorality; it’s irreverent, but too goofy and harmless to be offensive, and it’s surprisingly chaste when it comes to sex. The heroes are loyal and determined, and the villains all reap the rewards of their infamy. Take off the drag, lose the dildo wipes, and tone down the gore and nudity, and it’s a wholesome adventure the Hays Office would gladly pass. (Instead, the poster informs us, it was “rated X by an all straight jury.”)

This is, if you haven’t guessed yet, an extremely silly movie. There’s lots of Z-movie gore—the kind where zombies pretend to yank intestines out of their victim as the actor plays dead, or people get telescopes slammed through their eye sockets. There are a handful of cheesy kung fu battles, which actually look like the choreography has been slowed down rather than sped up. There are minor cult cameos from ,  and from pal . We also get musical numbers, poison bosoms, laser hula hoops, a character named Dick Toes, and lots and lots of deliberately lame jokes, many involving dildos or kicks to the nuts. The location manager found some really keen outdoor locations to exploit, with mossy cliffs, waterfalls, and shallow caves, and our heroes even get a skydiving scene (in drag, of course). No one in the large cast can really act, or shows much interest in trying to. In other words, Lee Demarbre (best known for 2001’s similarly campy and transgressive-adjacent Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter) throws everything he can think of at the screen without breaking the bank, having a blast in the process. The results are in the vein, but with less mean-spiritedness or jagged satire. It’s woke trash, to be sure, though perhaps not as woke as it pretends to be. Drag Dragon does fully deliver the trash, however, just like a drag queen delivers a nunchuck dildo upside a bad guy’s head.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…high camp where comparisons to the work of John Waters are apt, especially when logic is dropped for gags and the performances have an awkward stiltedness to them.”–Addison Wylie, Wylie Writes (contemporaneous)