Blonde Death (Baker, 1984): Nickel Cinema, 6pm
This cult movie will be shown via VHS.Nickel Cinema introduction:
Shot on consumer-grade video and circulating for decades as a
near-mythic underground tape, Blonde Death follows the runaway odyssey
of Tammy, a teenage misfit fleeing an abusive home with two queer
outsiders who christen themselves her new family. Their improvised road
trip blends impulsive romance, petty crime, and manic self-invention,
gradually collapsing into violence as the trio drifts further from
stability. The film’s messy exuberance is threaded with a growing sense
of doom, capturing the volatility of youth pushed to the margins. A
seminal artifact of queer DIY cinema, Blonde Death fuses melodrama,
punk energy, and camp excess with unexpectedly sharp social commentary.
Director James Robert Baker — better known for his incendiary fiction —
uses the limitations of shot-on-video production to amplify the film’s
immediacy and emotional rawness. The result is a rare, transgressive
work whose jagged form reflects the precarity, rebellion, and
desperation of its characters, standing at the intersection of outsider
art and queer counterculture.
Screen Slate review:
If
an angry gay anarchist reimagined Badlands for
the 80s, what might we expect of its impressionable yet fiercely
loyal protagonist? Would her family move to Orange County to start a
Christian ministry? Could her relationship with her bad-to-the-bone
boytoy be complicated by the release of his prison bunkmate? Might
the musical refrain of Carl Orff's "Gassenhauer" be
replaced by The Angry Samoans' "My Old Man's a Fatso"? And
what if the whole thing was shot on video for $2,000? These questions
are answered in Blonde
Death (1984),
which deserves a place alongside Bill Gunn's Personal
Problems as
a recently revived shot-on-video feature worthy of serious
consideration within the cinematic canon. Its director, James Robert
Baker – credited here as "James Dillinger" – is best
known for his transgressive gay fiction like Boy
Wonder (1985)
and Tim
and Pete (1993),
the latter about rekindled former lovers on a death trip to
assassinate the American New Right. Around the time of Blonde
Death's
production, Baker was an award-winning yet unproduced UCLA
screenwriting grad, and this, his only feature, was realized under
the auspices of Hollywood-based media arts center and video gallery
EZTV. The result is a tightly structured, character-driven satire
buoyed by pitch-perfect casting of unknown actors, including Sara Lee
Wade as Tammy "the teenage timebomb," who narrates in an
earnest voiceover with a singsong southern drawl. Tammy's parents
espouse strict Christian values, but her potentially closeted father
has a spanking fetish, and her stepmother, we learn, is scheming to
murder him with poison Tang to inherit money to open a new church
with her lover. When both are out of town, Tammy is aggressively
courted by a one-eyed lesbian, but she instead falls into the thralls
of a hunky home invader, with whom she plots to rob Disneyland to
start a new life. (The eventual heist is shot guerrilla style within
the Magic Kingdom.) But their plans receive a mixed blessing with the
arrival of Tammy's new squeeze's prison lover, who is embraced as a
third partner—but may be a homicidal maniac. Blonde
Death is
rich with cultural clutter: doomsday churches, singing
televangelists, pill-popping, Mickey Mouse, and knotty sexual
confusion. But Baker is uniquely talented at tying satire back to his
characters, weaving a consistently engaging tapestry of transgressive
societal commentary. And alongside the affinities with John Waters's
oeuvre, Mudhoney,
and Baby
Doll, Blonde
Death feels
equally of a piece with the Abject Art of fellow Angelenos Paul
McCarthy and Mike Kelley, or Bruce & Norman Yonemoto's
videographic deconstructions of Hollywood mythmaking and melodrama.
The result resists easy placement within the continuum of independent
80s cinema or video art; and while it seems like a tragic and unfair
twist of fate that Baker's feature filmmaking career never took
flight, such an outsider position seems to befit this perverse,
uncompromising, and deeply felt work.
Jon Dieringer
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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