Only now does it occur to me... THE GUN IN BETTY LOU'S HANDBAG (1992)

Only now does it occur to me... that there's a good movie, perhaps even a great movie, trapped within this deeply uneven film. 

The premise: Betty Lou, a suburban librarian (Penelope Ann Miller in a BLOSSOM hat),

lives her life in a perpetual state of invisibility; no one in her domestic or professional life will listen to a single word she has to say. She stiltedly passes through her existence with a paralyzing self-consciousness that no one around her even cares enough to notice. It's bleak!

 

 After a mobster on the run (an early role for Stanley Tucci) is murdered at a local motel,

 

Betty Lou stumbles upon the murder weapon while walking her dog and, after being condescended to, decides on the spur of the moment to confess to the murder.

 

It's a powerful premise for what is ostensibly a comedy––a woman feels so imprisoned by her social erasure that she would prefer life in an actual prison, because outrageous transgression (especially at the dawn of the scandal-thirsty '90s) is the only thing that makes her worthy of attention. In this respect, parts of the first act of Grace Cary Bickley's screenplay have shades of THE BELL JAR or THE YELLOW WALLPAPER.

In jail, Betty Lou meets hardened criminal Cathy Moriarty (RAGING BULL, KINDERGARTEN COP), who basically steals the movie with a tough-as-nails, Gena Rowlands-inflected performance. 

 

Betty Lou gets the idea for a makeover to match her new personality (also, to regain the attentions of her police detective husband), in which she gets a haircut and basically SINGLE WHITE FEMALEs her best friend, who is played by Julianne Moore.

 

 
Note Julianne Moore's dismay

But this is a '90s studio comedy, and it's still sort of serviceable because we're not actually expecting Sylvia Plath, but even as the shenanigans pile up, we also have a tone problem. It fails to pick one, and/or to stick with it, a classic symptom of studio script tampering.

Enter: the mobsters––the ones who were hunting Stanley Tucci. They begin to receive heaping amounts of screen-time. They're led by genius character actor William Forsythe (EXTREME PREJUDICE, THE ROCK, RAISING ARIZONA), who has clearly not been informed that he's in a comedy.

 

He delivers this legitimately terrifying performance as a sadistic New Orleans kingpin prone to Joe Pesci-style outbursts of violence. As in this scene, where he makes like he's going to feed Catherine Keener an oyster

in front of her husband, played by... Meat Loaf (!?) 

 and then slashes her cheek open with the blade.

 

What in the world is this doing in this movie? The same movie where a dog gets a wacky reaction shot, or there's an extended montage of Julianne Moore doing drunken solo dancing on a couch.

 

 
Penelope Ann Miller, too, is confused

There was a tendency during this era to give a mobster subplot in a comedy an outsized amount of real estate (THE MASK, MAN OF THE HOUSE, BLANK CHECK, THE PICK-UP ARTIST, THREE MEN AND A BABY, HOUSE GUEST, GETTING EVEN WITH DAD, VICE VERSA, JUNGLE 2 JUNGLE, the list goes on), but here it's at the expense of a resonant premise. This is probably the sort of movie they should actually do a remake of––to explore the existential thesis in a way that doesn't involve too much zany comedy or incongruous violence.

Anyway, the incongruous violence does give us a strange bit of trivia: William Forsythe at one point murders his consigliere Xander Berkeley just to prove to onlookers that he's a Man Not To Be Trifled With. He does this by sliding his knife into his ear when he least expects it. 

  

 
Alfre Woodard, playing Betty Lou's kidnapped lawyer, also clearly did not know she was in a comedy, and her horrified reaction would be no different in a serious gangster drama

This marks two movies made within a two-year span (James Cameron's TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY being the other) where Xander Berkeley's character is killed by someone casually sliding a blade into his head while he's going about his business, unawares.

 

I was going to make an entire Only now does it occur to me post based around this obscure fact, but the unharvested potential of THE GUN IN BETTY LOU'S HANDBAG inspired me to say a little more. Go ahead, Hollywood, remake this thing: perhaps with more pathos and fewer mafiosos.

Only now does it occur to me... MR. WRONG (1996)

Only now does it occur to me... could MR. WRONG, a screwball anti-romantic comedy and notorious box office bomb starring Ellen DeGeneres in her only live-action-feature leading role (to date), directed by longtime John Carpenter crony Nick Castle, and co-written by sci-fi/horror legend Richard Matheson's son Chris and THE MORNING SHOW's showrunner Kerry Ehrin... be as bad as they say? 

The answer: sort of!



This, a project of such aforementioned and bizarre pedigree, is ultimately a delivery system for a series of wacky situations and horrified expressions in the vein of Jerry Lewis (with a messy pixie cut).

 It begins with a Saul Bass-inspired credits sequence



 and ends with a gunfight in Mexico and a ride into the sunset.

In between, a number of events take place. 

Ellen's character Martha is a television producer for a local San Diego morning show

starring Robert Goulet (of Broadway and BEETLEJUICE fame), 

 
 

which seems to weirdly prefigure Ellen's own rise and fall as a daytime TV star as well as co-writer Kerry Ehrin's own involvement with Apple TV's THE MORNING SHOW.

Ellen's character, who is styled exactly as she appears on her own popular sitcom ELLEN (1994-1998), is struggling to find "Mr. Right." 

And that there is a reference to BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE inserted by co-writer Chris Matheson, who also wrote all three BILL AND TED films.


She is aided in her quest by a Best Friend™(the likeable Ellen Cleghorne, of ARMAGEDDON and COYOTE UGLY)

 

who, because it was the 1990s, is contractually obligated to eat Lite yogurt throughout and provide generic encouragement.

Despite her own assistant (John Livingstone, of THE NET and EDTV) clearly being the screenplay's idea of her "perfect match hiding in plain sight," 


Here he is, asking her out to go see Richard Burton in BLUEBEARD (1972), an ignominious film I have reviewed on this very site.

Ellen still goes on the prowl and has an accidental meet-cute with Bill Pullman (who would soon wipe his involvement with this project from the cultural memory with the near-immediate one-two punch of INDEPENDENCE DAY and LOST HIGHWAY).

 

Pullman is depicted as a suave, cowboy-poet who's the heir to an enormous fortune. He seems perfect, at least until she discovers that, wait... he's... Mr. Wrong!

  

The warning signs are not subtle, and the comedy is played as broad as a barn door. There are more understated Pepé le Pew-centric episodes of THE LOONEY TUNES. First, he takes her to a convenience store to shoplift Blatz beers, crushing the empties on his forehead and flinging them from his convertible at bystanders.

 
I fail to understand how this is a red flag tho

Next, he love-bombs her with a bounty of unwanted gifts and comes to her window in the night dressed, inexplicably, as a clown on stilts.

 

This is probably the closest the film comes to overtly referencing HALLOWEEN. As I'm sure you all know, MR. WRONG's director (Nick Castle) played behind-the-mask Michael Myers in 1978's HALLOWEEN. He was also the co-writer of Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.

Just when she thinks it can't get any worse, Ellen is also stalked by Pullman's ex Inga––a zany character played by two-time Oscar nominee Joan Cusack.

 

She probably gets about ten minutes of screentime, but she acquits herself with trashy élan.

This leads Ellen to hire a private eye (fellow Oscar nominee Dean Stockwell of BLUE VELVET, QUANTUM LEAP, and DUNE fame) who uncovers that Inga was involved in a plot to assassinate Stevie Nicks

 

 

which feels like a bizarrely specific detail for this screenplay to concoct. Dean Stockwell also, mostly acquits himself. He, Cusack, and Ellen Cleghorne might be the only ones who do.

Yep, this thing is a slapstick mess. It struggles with tone, and there's zero chemistry between the leads: romantic, comedic, or otherwise. Castle does a slick enough job assembling the picture (there are a few striking Hitchcock-inspired visuals and transitions), but the entire film feels like studio execs were trying force an Ellen-sized peg into a Jim Carrey-shaped hole.

Fourteen months after the release of MR. WRONG, Ellen would go on to give her iconic "Yep, I'm gay" interview to TIME magazine. One can imagine that the ham-handed attempts to mold her into a blandly heteronormative studio asset played some role in this decision. 

"Dr. Bronner's or Dr. Strangelove?" in Slackjaw Magazine

In honor of the 60th Anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, I have a new humor piece up in Slackjaw Magazine.

Only now does it occur to me... THE BOYFRIEND SCHOOL (1990)

Only now does it occur to me... that there's an incredibly specific TWIN PEAKS homage secreted within the awkward makeover rom-com THE BOYFRIEND SCHOOL (originally released as DON'T TELL HER IT'S ME). 

First, I must explain the premise of the film, which features Steve Guttenberg playing a heavily made-up American cancer survivor who is the cartoonist of a "Ziggy"-adjacent comic strip. 

 

Unable to find love, his sister––Shelley Long, as an over-the-top Harlequin romance novelist in the mold of her "fashion plate" character from TROOP BEVERLY HILLS––

 

makes him over as a Kiwi biker named "Lobo" with a righteous mullet, somewhere between Mel Gibson's in LETHAL WEAPON, Chuck Norris' in THE HITMAN, Brian Bosworth's in STONE COLD, and Jean-Claude Van Damme's in HARD TARGET. 

 

This, obviously, works wonders on Jami Gertz (best known perhaps as "Star" from THE LOST BOYS) who falls for The Gute as hard as a character in a (leather) bodice-ripper.

 

 Perhaps it goes without saying that all of this is completely insane.

 

(Yes, the above two photos depict a scene in which legendary character actress Beth Grant (CHILD'S PLAY 2, DONNIE DARKO, THE DARK HALF, WONDERFALLS, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN) is teaching Steve Guttenberg how to "do the sex" with an anatomically-accurate dummy. Note the ZIPPY THE PINHEAD comic in the background.)

Anyway, before you become too horrified, onto the semi-obscure TWIN PEAKS reference. Now, THE BOYFRIEND SCHOOL was released on September 21, 1990: nine days before the highly anticipated premiere of TWIN PEAKS Season 2. The film features a supporting role by Agent Cooper himself, Kyle MacLachlan, as "Trout," a shady journalist and Guttenberg's rival for Jami Gertz's love. When we first meet him, he is being chased by a lawyer who believes his name to be "Mr. Renault."

Any TWIN PEAKS fan is deeply familiar with the surname, as the Renault brothers play a major role throughout the saga, and in the first season's finale––which aired four months prior––Agent Cooper was running a sting operation against Jacques Renault.

MacLachlan escapes the mysterious man, who is calling out "Mr. Renault!" throughout, and demands that his secretary bring him coffee: which, along with cherry pie, is Agent Cooper's favored vice.

The man continues calling for him as he continues to hide,

when who should appear but Mädchen Amick ("Shelly Johnson" on TWIN PEAKS) to shoot MacLachlan a knowing look.

MacLachlan proceeds to give a classically strange Agent Cooper-style speech to Jami Gertz about the importance of procreation 

before the mysterious man discovers his hiding spot

prompting MacLachlan to exclaim, "Your client is blowing smoke!"

A quasi-Lynchian rejoinder involving the most Lynchian of textures. Then the scene is over and the Renault business is never mentioned again. (MacLachlan has a few more scenes of being a sleazy jerk, prompting Jami Gertz to fall ever harder for Lobo Guttenberg.) Stumbling upon this sort of strange specificity and vintage obscurity is essentially the raison d'être of Junta Juleil's Culture Shock.