Girls Will Be Girls
When a man puts on a woman's clothes but retains the essential characteristics of his being a man, he's called a cross-dresser. When he puts on the same clothes, then lip-synchs and camps it up, he's a drag queen.
When the boys in ''Girls Will Be Girls'' do the same, it's a nasty and mean-spirited act that leads to an unprecedented exercise in derangement. Not even John Waters in his Divine days was as caustic.
Written and directed by Richard Day, the film is a vicious movie-of-the-week/soap-opera farce that asks us to enjoy watching three high-maintenance showbiz ladies trying to live under the same Los Angeles roof without killing one another -- although murder is never out of the question.
Evie Harris (Jack Plotnick), a beached film actress and diseased alcoholic, is clamoring for some kind of comeback. With his severe face, blond hair, and tan, rubbery skin, Plotnick suggests nothing less than an underfunded science experiment whose goal was to turn Florence Henderson into Phyllis Diller. Nothing about Evie is real -- dentures, wigs, even a glass eye.
Her housemate Coco (Clinton Leupp), looks like Allison Janney and is desperate to have a baby. Evie places an ad for a third tenant and winds up with Varla (Jeffery Roberson), a full-figured aspiring celebrity who's the child of Evie's archrival, Marla, the starlet who killed herself poolside at Evie's years ago.
Naturally, Evie is jealous of Varla's eventual screen success and vexed by her seduction of Evie's hunky attorney son Stevie (Ron Mathews). She spends the movie trying to humiliate her new roomie, if not by death then by mocking Varla's eating disorder and bragging about Stevie's microscopic penis. She might just be the most casually evil woman I've ever seen in a movie. Day and his fully committed cast pulverize the sometimes-cute harmlessness of gay camp. The film's abortion gags and masturbation motifs are a far cry from even the world of camp-on-fire and female impersonation in Charles Busch's comparatively more polite ''Die Mommie Die!,'' which opened last week. Busch was sending up melodrama; Day and his players are burning down a sensibility. The movie is a ''Golden Girls'' season in hell, thoroughly doing away with the niceties, euphemisms, and double entendres that made that show, most soaps, and most camp benign fun.
The material in ''Girls Will Be Girls'' is so dangerous it could pass for nuclear. (At some point, Coco accepts a marriage proposal from the doctor who'd been drugging and raping her for years, the same doctor who performed each of her abortions.) The jokes are so crass and unkind as to be unprintable, while the life lessons are left vague and hilariously pointless. The upstanding and downtrodden Coco chastises the psychotically egotistical Evie (who plans to expose Varla's life as a hooker in her comeback special) this way: ''It's not that you didn't, Evie. It's that you didn't know to.''
The performances by Plotnick, Leupp, and Roberson comprise a jarring special effect. We're looking for a line between the actors' gender and the women they play. But the seams never show. Drag comedy needs a point, and the one here is that a gentleman can be much like a lady without being remotely ladylike.
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