For many people, especially those who troll around in the more unsavoury corners of the Internet, the first exposure to celebs like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian came from that most modern form of celebrity introduction: the sex tape.
Paris and Kim’s videoed sexcapades weren’t the first tapes to become public — in 1988 Rob Lowe was embarrassed when VHS images of him and two women popped up on the news — and they weren’t the last.
This week in Sex Tape, Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz are Jay and Annie, a married couple who try to spice things up in the bedroom by videotaping themselves. All goes well until Jay forgets to erase the tape and mistakenly stores it on the Internet. “Our sex tape has been synced to several devices,” he says, “all of which are in the possession of friends!”
Given how many actors have appeared in sex tapes it’s not surprising that several movies have used the raunchy videos as a plot point.
In Brüno, the titular Austrian fashion reporter (Sacha Baron Cohen) tries to make a name for himself in America by making a sex tape with another famous American, U.S. Congressman Ron Paul. Trouble was, Paul wasn’t in on the joke. “I was expecting an interview on Austrian economics,” said Paul. “But, by the time he started pulling his pants down, I was like ‘What is going on here?’ I ran out of the room. This interview has ended.”
The 2006 comedy Drop Box has production values not unlike that of an actual sex tape but despite its low budget it offers up the funny and often brutal story about Mindy (Rachel Sehl), a big-time bubblegum pop star (think Britney or Miley), who accidentally returns her homemade sex tape to her local video store instead of Glitter, the movie she rented. Realizing her mistake, she tries to re-rent the tape.
Clocking in at just 80 minutes, it’s a character study about a spoiled pop princess who butts heads with an unmovable force in the form of the uncooperative and inquisitive clerk (David Cormican).
Finally, Auto Focus exposes sex tapes’ dark side. Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane’s (Greg Kinnear) all-American public persona hid a secret obsession. “I’m a normal, red-blooded American man,” he says. “I like to look at naked women.” According to the film, he liked making sex tapes with women, usually without their knowledge. The movie speculates his 1978 murder may have been related to this unlawful pastime.
Some movies become cult items after audiences have had time to consider their merits, or lack thereof. Sometimes it takes years. The Phantom of the Paradise, for example, dive bombed at the box office in its original release, but found a rabid following a decade later and now there’s even a yearly convention dedicated to the film and its outlandish characters. Other movies are born for a cult audience. El Topo and Eraserhead never found mainstream success, but both films were instant hits on the underground cult circuit.
I suspect Repo! The Genetic Opera falls into the latter category.
Despite the presence of tabloid favorite Paris Hilton it’s unlikely that a musical about a mad business man who sends a hired killer to repossess human organs is ever going to beat High School Musical at the box office.
Set in the near future Repo! The Genetic Opera starts with a world plagued by an epidemic of organ failure, and I don’t mean Wurlizter. Hearts stop beating, spleens turn to mush. To the rescue is GeneCo, a biotech company specializing in synthetic organs. Like any business though, if you don’t pay up you might have an unpleasant, and in this case, deadly, encounter with the Repo Man. Running parallel to the organ replacement payment plan plot is a second story thread involving a young girl (Spy Kids’ Alexa Vega) who is searching for a cure for her rare blood disease. When she becomes involved with GeneCo’s evil owner (Paul Sorvino) and his twisted kids (Paris Hilton, Skinny Puppy singer Ogre and Bill Moseley) she learns some terrible secrets about her family and illness. The two storylines collide head-on in the film’s bloody climax—The Genetic Opera.
Repo! The Genetic Opera looks like a music video with feature film aspirations. Director Darren Lynn Bousman, best known as the helmer for Saws 2 through 4, has spared no expense in the dry ice department, flooding many scenes with enough atmospheric smoke to rival any Platinum Blonde music video. And while he creates a convincingly dystopian atmosphere on screen the look of the film too often resembles an Iron Maiden music promo. It would be interesting to see what a visionary director like Tim Burton could have done with the same material.
Bousman isn’t aided by a leaden musical score which too often sounds like the result of an unholy ménage à trois between Ywengie Malmsteen, Marilyn Manson and Kurt Weill. Actually written by Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich there are no catchy tunes and only the occasional interesting line. This is the rare musical that might have been a much better movie without the songs.
Operas are supposed to be about big ideas and passion and Repo succeeds on both counts. The story raises interesting parallels to America’s health care crisis and there are some fun over-the-top performances from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Anthony Stewart Head (his human hand puppet scene is a highlight), a spectacularly mascara-ed Sarah Brightman and Paul Goodfellas Sorvino but they are let down by a grating score that will leave no one humming as the credits roll. It’s not that I crave the ear-soothing, non-interruptive sounds of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals, but a little less atonal racket and a bit more actual score would have been nice.
The movie almost redeems itself with a wild, gory finale that literally gets the blood pumping but by that time I was lost, pining for the more tuneful days of Rocky Horror and The Phantom of the Paradise.
Usually they sound like one long breathless sentence that seems scarier than the disease the drugs are meant to prevent.
A new film, Love and Other Drugs, starring Jake Gylennhaal and Anne Hathaway as a pharmaceutical salesman and the girl he loves respectively, however, forgoes the disclaimer. In fact, in what almost seems like a 90-minute ad for Viagra, it appears that the drug’s—Vitamin V, Jake calls it—only side effect is that it works too well.
It is the rare movie that uses a real brand name drug as a plot device. Even though the odd movie like Prozac Nation dares to name names, often filmmakers use fictitious drugs to advance their stories (and avoid lawsuits from notoriously litigious Big Pharma), but even in fantasy, side effects abound.
Brain Candy, the 1996 Kids in the Hall comedy, created a cure for depression called GLeeMONEX that “makes you feel like it’s 72°F in your head all the time.” Unfortunately the pill’s patients also turn into comatose zombies.
David Cronenberg devised Ephemerol, a tranquilizer used as a morning sickness remedy for his film Scanners. Side effects? Telekinetic and telepathic abilities. Later, in Naked Lunch, Cronenberg featured the more recreational drug Bug Powder, a yellow dust formally used by exterminators, informally by people looking to find a “literary high.”
In Repo! The Genetic Opera, Paris Hilton’s character Amber Sweet was addicted to a powerful blue, glowing opiate extracted from dead bodies called Zydrate. I’ll do wild things to “your soul for one more hit of that glow,” she sings. An alternative cinematic painkiller is Novril, the pills that kept James Caan sedated in Misery.
Filmmakers don’t just fictionalize pharmaceuticals, however. Plenty of recreational drugs get the Hollywood treatment. Remember Space Coke from Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie? One snort was enough to send both Cheech and Chong literally into outer space.
A Clockwork Orange was chock-a-block with fake drugs; everything from Drencrom to the synthetic mescaline Synthemesc to Vellocet, which produced ultra-violent tendencies and sudden outbursts of Singing in the Rain.
Perhaps the strangest recreational drug from the movies is Alien Nation’s Jabroka. Aliens find it highly addictive and grow to monstrous proportions when they take it, but to humans it tastes like dish soap and has no effect.
