I’ve missed doing Worst of Netflix, but I’ve had a bear of a
time finding the right movies to use for it. It’s a delicate balance: you have
to find movies that aren’t very good, but that tried to be good, and are also eventful enough that you can
actually write about them. I had high hopes for the homoerotic Japanese samurai
drama Taboo, but most of the movie
was aching glances and bland intrigue, all with the grainy color of a 1970s BBC
drawing-room sitcom with a title like “Her Majesty’s Loyal Breeches.” The Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust
knew it was terrible and loved it.
You can’t really make fun of a movie
in which a haunted dildo fights a haunted gingerbread man. Horror of the Blood Monsters was actually too bad to review,
although God willing they’ll bring back MST3K and do that old dog up right.
With commentary, it would be funny, but written it would just be “And then for
some reason we’re looking at stock footage of baboons through a red filter…”
over and over again. Jefftowne, a
Troma documentary (yes) about an alcoholic with Down syndrome who sexually harasses
women, was too depressing to review; ditto I
Think We’re Alone Now, a documentary about two dangerously obsessive
Tiffany fans. (I do, however, totally recommend that you watch I Think We’re Alone Now, especially the
special features.)
Thank God for The
Corndog Man.
I have a special history with this movie. My freshman year of
college, I spent a lot of time with “Sue,” a girl who ultimately had a The Da Vinci Code-themed nervous
breakdown in which she realized that she was a direct blood descendent of
Jesus, despite being almost as much of an overbred WASP as I am, and needed to
have a baby with her friend’s boyfriend, also a descendent of Jesus, in order
to… something. She had a conversation with the color green, according to the
hospital orderly. Anyway, before all this happened, Sue was good friends with
The Prisons, a trio of guys from Maryland who had gone to jail their first
night at college. This group of people was a lot of fun, and actually came up
with the best idea for liquor marketing I’ve ever heard: “Russe face.” Crown
Russe is a brand of plastic-bottle, college-cheap booze that makes Scotch, gin,
and vodka. They insisted everyone who came around them take a shot of the
Scotch, because “everyone has a Russe face!” Madison Avenue couldn’t have done
better.
Another of their obsessions was The Corndog Man.
Sue: “Oh, God. Chris. Oh, God. It was awful. Ugh. There’s
all this… ugh.”
Me: “I WANT TO SEE IT.”
Sue: “I’ll watch it with you, just not… yet. I need to heal.
It’s very… much.”
Prison Joe: “Hey, Sue! I’M THE CORNDOG MAN!”
Sue: “Oh God.”
(vomits in trash can.)
I finally saw it, and it was. Very. And now I’ve watched it again for you. I feel compelled to
say that The Corndog Man isn’t
objectively bad, really. It very much
is what it is, like mayonnaise-based fruit salad or Star Wars. You’re either into it or not.
The first line of the movie is “I’ll sell a colored man a
boat faster than a cat can lick its ass,” and you better believe I’m embroidering that on a sampler. We then cut to a “new
guy in town montage,” in which a man in dingo boots rents a room, hooks up his
phone, and unpacks a couple of photographs. His car has Florida tags that read
C DOG MAN. He then calls Buford, the boat salesman of colored man/cat ass fame,
to ask about buying a boat. Gradually, we become aware that ninety percent of
the movie will be increasingly ominous phone calls between these two men.
Summarizing a phone conversation is about as boring as
retelling a dream, so I’ll give you the high points. C DOG MAN calls Buford
over, and over, and over again, harassing him to the point of lunacy. Buford
lives on a houseboat with a long-haired white guinea pig and drinks a lot. He
also has a black transsexual girlfriend about twenty-five years his junior who
calls him “Daddy” and has the best line in the movie: Buford gets falling-down
drunk and tries to piss against a wall, causing the girlfriend to shout “You
are in front of a lady!” Alcoholism, star-crossed romance, whatever: just don’t
let women see you urinate. Later, Buford and the girlfriend pull over by the
side of the road to dance in the light of the car headlights; Buford projectile
vomits, causing the girlfriend to fling up her hands in an
oh-it’s-one-of-those-nights-God-damn-I’m-wasting-my-life
gesture and walk off.
C DOG MAN continues. He tells everyone about the black
girlfriend, sinks the houseboat, and one night when Buford is insensibly drunk
paints him in blackface and sets his unconscious body in front of the store
where he works. There’s also an odd little scene where C DOG MAN tricks Buford
into smashing up a pink Cadillac with a hammer, and all the while calls Buford
a dozen or more times a day.
I won’t go into details in case you want to watch it, but as
you may have guessed, C DOG MAN is deliberately driving Buford mad in revenge
for Something Terrible That Happened Long Ago. Ain’t that always the way in
movies about the South? We don’t get good satellite reception, so we spend all
our time doing Terrible Things so that we can entertain ourselves by waiting
for them to come to light – and, of course, discovering Terrible Things other
people did and bringing them to light.
Oh, and you never find out what the corndog thing is about.
Either that or it’s too subtle for me.
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