Enter the Drag Dragon
It’s hard times at the Mayfair Theatre, Ottowa’s dedicated but dilapidated arthouse cinema with a regular audience of two, both of them employees, projectionist Fast Buck’s programming seldom stretching beyond kung-fu flicks on rotation and convinced the venue is haunted, Jaws and Crunch are forced to make ends meet as business partners across a number of other ventures, among them food delivey and the Crazy Dragon Detective Agency.
Crunch encountering handsome but forlorn Sebastian, searching the streets for his lost dog Jackie, the somewhat desperate drag queen demands that he be given the case, opening the door to a wider and stranger investigation involving a stolen painting called The Lost Empire, purported to actually be a map to a lost Aztec treasure and guarded by zombies which haunt the nearby forests, and confrontations with Christian conservationist group NAG, Never Again Gay.
Crossing boundaries of genre and gender and more than a few red lines of taste and decorum along the way, Enter the Drag Dragon is directed by Lee Gordon Demarbre from a script by Mark Pollesel, a low-budget mashup of high heels, big hair and bloody murder down by the river and righteous rage against the heteronormative presumption as bigots and the patriarchy take it full in the face from a set of truly personalised nunchucks.
An unconventional film cannot be expected to have anything so drab as a conventional cast, with the role of Crunch rotating through Sam Kellerman, Jade London and Matt Miwa, each bringing different facets to the self-assured glamour of the chameleon character, with Beatrice Beres, Phil Caracas, Mark MacDonald and Natalia Morena as Jaws, Fast Buck, Sebastian and Gorch, scheming leader of the Fearsome International Spies and Thieves cartel, also after the painting, with cameos from The Room’s Greg Sestero and Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman.
The cases of the missing dog and the missing map an ouroboros, the snake which consumes itself, inevitably they are connected by the tangle of torn internal organs dragged by the undead army from the bodies of their victims, be they crooked cops, exploitive contractors, vengeful burlesque dancers or their bicycle stealing redneck boyfriends, the cast up for anything that is asked of them in scenes which would make John Waters cheer.
A rolling car crash of makeovers and mismatched performances, to say that Enter the Drag Dragon is scattershot is to downplay the oddball parade of scenes cut together with little regard to coherent plot yet making a virtue of its Frankenstein pedigree, bizarrely entertaining as it reinvents itself with gay abandon and refusing to bend to the expectations of the mundane, a fiercely unique film neither subtle nor graceful which will be adored by the niche audience of the similarly minded.
Enter the Drag Dragon will be available on the Arrow platform from Friday 20th December
