After noticing that the star of this film is a drag queen than you start to wonder what else this story has to offer and that's where the main problem of this satiric effort lies. Story is set in the 1960's (I think so, anyway) where we see a faded former singing star named Angela Arden (Charles Busch) and she wants to divorce her husband Sol Sussman (Philip Baker Hall) who's a has-been Hollywood producer. Their children are virginal Edith (Natasha Lyonne) who loves her father but hates her mother and homosexual pothead Lance (Stark Sands) who has the opposite feelings towards his parents.
*****SPOILER ALERT***** Sol won't give Angela a divorce so she decides to kill him by dipping a suppository in arsenic and inserting it! Sol dies and the authorities consider it just a heart attack but Edith and Lance start to think that their mother was up to it. The local gigolo Tony Parker (Jason Priestley) is bisexual and has slept with both Edith and Lance and he starts to investigate the death of Sol but when the maid Bootsie Carp (Frances Conroy) pops up dead than it seems just a matter of time to find proof that Angela is behind things. After drugging Angela with LSD she admits not only to Sol's death but also the circumstances involving her twin sister Barbara.
This is directed by Mark Rucker who makes his debut and though he has to somehow get around the minuscule budget the films weakness has nothing to do with the production values. The script is a campy send-up of the older melodrama's from both the 50's and 60's and as I watched this several films came to mind like "Peyton Place", "Valley of the Dolls", "Sunset Boulevard", "Straight Jacket", and many of Douglas Sirk's efforts. The main joke in the film is Busch in drag resembling Joan Crawford but with the characters last name of Arden I couldn't help but think of actress Eve Arden whom Busch also resembles. But that part of the films humor wears out so quickly that everything else seems thrown in to try and fill out the script to a near 90 minutes and the ridiculous ending doesn't help either. The film has many in-jokes and the characters all display silly behavior but even die hard camp lovers will find this effort (at best) a tedious offering.
*****SPOILER ALERT***** Sol won't give Angela a divorce so she decides to kill him by dipping a suppository in arsenic and inserting it! Sol dies and the authorities consider it just a heart attack but Edith and Lance start to think that their mother was up to it. The local gigolo Tony Parker (Jason Priestley) is bisexual and has slept with both Edith and Lance and he starts to investigate the death of Sol but when the maid Bootsie Carp (Frances Conroy) pops up dead than it seems just a matter of time to find proof that Angela is behind things. After drugging Angela with LSD she admits not only to Sol's death but also the circumstances involving her twin sister Barbara.
This is directed by Mark Rucker who makes his debut and though he has to somehow get around the minuscule budget the films weakness has nothing to do with the production values. The script is a campy send-up of the older melodrama's from both the 50's and 60's and as I watched this several films came to mind like "Peyton Place", "Valley of the Dolls", "Sunset Boulevard", "Straight Jacket", and many of Douglas Sirk's efforts. The main joke in the film is Busch in drag resembling Joan Crawford but with the characters last name of Arden I couldn't help but think of actress Eve Arden whom Busch also resembles. But that part of the films humor wears out so quickly that everything else seems thrown in to try and fill out the script to a near 90 minutes and the ridiculous ending doesn't help either. The film has many in-jokes and the characters all display silly behavior but even die hard camp lovers will find this effort (at best) a tedious offering.