Drag That Barge

By John Skow

OUTRAGEOUS!

Directed and Written by Richard Benner

Liza, pursued by demons, scuttles through Toronto's streets in nightgown, robe and clogs. She is a skinny, funny little thing who looks about ten years old, though she is twice that. She jaywalks so endearingly that when we learn she is on the lam from a mental hospital, we are firmly on her side. No one that cute could be crazy.

She reaches the apartment of her male friend Robin (Craig Russell), and Robin isn't so sure. Liza (Hollis McLaren) hears bells not audible to most people and battles periodically with an evil spirit "from the other place," called the Bonecrusher. Wouldn't she be better off with the nasty shrinks and their mind-killing shock treatments? Certainly not. After all, she has sympathetic friends like Martin (Allan Moyle), a local crazy; and the doctors, as one of Robin's friends says, "gotta spoil all the special people." So Liza moves in.

Robin is rather special himself. He is a cheerful, buttery fellow who is a hairdresser and, sure enough, a homosexual. He has his own problem: Should he come all the way out of the closet and parade at his favorite gay bar as Tallulah? Or Carol Channing? Or (sigh) Bette Davis? He is a dumpy man trying absurdly and wistfully to turn himself into a dumpy woman. Will thousands sneer?

Glittery-eyed fans of Anita Bryant may be excused at this point, but this very odd couple -- the frail female nut and the overweight drag queen -- really are lovable in their devotion to each other. As Robin blissfully makes up, Liza happily makes out -- in the next room, with a cab driver. Soon Robin is over flowing onstage before an audience of cheering leather boys, and Liza is pregnant. Wretched excess continues as Robin heads for New York City to do his impersonations on the Great Gay Way. Liza, of course, is in labor. He is a smash. But her baby is born dead.

Inside each of us is a frozen eclair waiting to be microwaved, and this ridiculous flick, filmed on the cheap by Film Consortium of Canada Inc., does the job well. Hollis McLaren is winsomely demented. When Actor Russell puts on his show, the masquerades are expert and funny enough to let straights see the bent world in a way that will not threaten most of them. Normal householders walk out of the theater snuffling happily after his exit line. Liza, who has fled to Manhattan following the stillbirth, is acting like a zombie. She says she is dead in side. "You are not dead!" says Robin, as the music rises. "You're alive and sick and living in New York just like 8 million others." The little splashes at this point are tears; the big one is sentimentality, hitting bottom.

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