Goth (2003)

December 17, 2003

by Nathan Shumate

Written and directed by Brad Sykes
Starring
- Phoebe Dollar
- Laura Reilly
- Dave Stann
- Larry Sprock
- Todd Livingston
Produced by David S. Sterling

If you peruse the reviews around here, you may figure out that there are certain genres I don’t do:

“Urban” dramas (in quotations because I still can’t bring myself to treat the word as a synonym for “inner-city African-American”)
Sundance-wanna-be “dead grandmother” movies
just about anything that had to be financed by a national film board or other cultural sentinel (Dead Alive being a happy exception)

And I may just have to add goth movies to that list. I just went on my rant about goth culture a couple of weeks ago (you can read it all here), so I’ll just give you the short version: The dead-serious whiny self-importance of the whole goth shtick annoys me like a groin rash.

When your movie starts out this close to the crapper…

I will say this: Goth is a much better movie than Hollywood Vampyr. And it’s probably the best movie, in terms of structure and story mechanics and those other things I always harp on, that I’ve seen from writer/director Brad Sykes. (His other movies that I’ve seen were Zombie Chronicles, which was more a couple of vignettes than an actual motion picture, and Death Factory, which was an unfortunately unambitious amalgam of tired slasher cliches.) However, it plays to that same pompous goth self-importance and pretends to some kind of Deep Meaning To It All that’s got all the depth of Saran Wrap.

Chrissy (Laura Reilly) and Boone (Dave Stann) are a nice young goth couple who seem, aside from their habit of dressing like the Addams’ Family’s hired help, like well-adjusted people. Perhaps the worst you can accuse them of is truly sucktacular taste in music, as that’s what draws them to this particular goth club on this particularly fateful night. (And then I’m forced to sit through two numbers by the band, just to prove that the first one wasn’t uncharacteristically bad.)

Then Chrissy meets another club patron, a tattoo-bedecked, spooky-eyed girl named Goth (Phoebe Dollar). Chew on that a moment: This girl’s so goth, she named herself Goth. This may be the worst case of cinematic nomenclature since Endgame featured Al Yamanouchi as a ninja named “Ninja.” Plus, it leads to bizarre blackclad versions of the “Who’s On First?” routine: “I’m Goth.” “So are we.” “No — that’s my name. Goth.” Only, let me clarify, this is not meant to be humorous. Humor has no place among these goths, even a goth named Goth.

“These goths were just dissing your Trash album.”

Goth invites Chrissy and Boone out back to sample her nifty new drug called “white light,” which is just so great that it knocks them both out. When they come to, they’re inside Goth’s van, all decked out in Halloween skull decorations, rumbling around the city streets. With a consistent psycho giggle, Goth explains that she’s brought them on a field trip “so you can see what goths really do while posers are safe in their beds.” And what is a “real” goth? Why Goth should know — after all, it’s her name! So over Boone’s objections (“Naw, I wear black lipstick to express my respect for tolerance!”), she lays out the three rules of the true goth:

Embrace the darkness.
Kill your fear.
Live for death.

(She fails to list “Take yourself way the hell too seriously.” I guess that’s more in the unwritten-rule category.)

And just to prove it (what? you know, the nebulous “it”), she pulls over, waylays a drunk clubgoer off the street, and rapes him at knifepoint. Aha! The superiority of your philosophy is so much clearer to me now!

All this, and you want a caption too?

And since she thinks that Chrissy and Boone still don’t get it (you know, “it”! I’m not explaining this every time!), she takes them to a quote-unquote “massage parlor,” beats up their security goon (bet he didn’t tell the guys about that), drags all the girls away from their johns, and then forces Boone to have sex with one of the working girls in front of Chrissy. (Just to make matters more surreal, out of all of the girls, Boone chooses the fat ugly one.)

Up until now, Chrissy’s been kind of going along with it all, for no apparent reason except that she’s a milksop. (Boone has been whinily protesting Goth’s adventures, but it’s pretty clear that he’s the sidekick, and Chrissy’s the protagonist.) But now… ooh, seeing Boone get it on with a hooker right in front of her spurs her to action: She turns her face away. No wonder such a dynamic character is our protagonist. And then, back in the van, she gives Boone the cold shoulder. Because, you know, it’s his fault that a crazed goth (named Goth) forced him to screw a hooker at knifepoint. And as her revenge, Chrissy has a lesbian episode with Goth.

But wait — after they all do some more drugs, Goth leaves the van, and Boone tries to get Chrissy to escape, and this is where the big twist comes in. Ready?

Well, that’s one way of acting out your Spider-Man fantasy…

All through, we’ve been seeing little flashbacks to a pre-goth Chrissy, hanging out with her sister Sara (Ashley Waite). It seems that Sara was murdered outside a goth club a couple of years ago, and Chrissy’s been searching for the killer ever since. Her one clue was that, right before she died, Sara whispered the word “goth” — and just tonight, Chrissy had a brainstorm: Sara didn’t mean the killer was a goth, she’s the goth named Goth!

I just spent ten minutes trying to come up with the next paragraph to adequately explain my stunned reaction to probably one of the stupidest plot twists of all time. The closest I can come is this: You know how, when a movie starts to annoy you, you start to think of all the things you’d rather be doing? Right at the point of this shocking revelation, I paused the DVD to go and floss.

Yeah, anyway. Recounting the rest of the movie seems pretty pointless, but in a nutshell, Chrissy is playing along with Goth only because she thinks Goth’s her sister’s killer, and her plan is to… um.. lull her into a false sense of security and then stab her or something. (One might think that there would have been ample opportunity during the lesbian tryst…) But while waiting for her perfect moment, Chrissy lets Goth kill another couple of people, and then gets roped into agreeing to kill someone herself or else Goth will kill them. And Goth keeps adding subparagraphs to her goth rules, like real goths should have killed someone before now. (I swear, if I never hear the sentence “And I thought you were goth!” again, it’ll be too soon.)

“Let me outta this movie!”

In the end, it comes across as the wanna-be-vampire version of The Hitcher, with the psycho trying to teach the unwilling acolyte some incomprehensible lesson about the futility of it all. But rather than being driven by the psycho’s devious intelligence and relentlessness, Goth‘s plot is kept in motion by our mewsome twosome’s inability to stand up for themselves or have a coherent plan.

I have several more screeners from Brain Damage Films on my shelf, but as far as I can see this is the last of the goth-themed movies they’ve sent to me. Thank goodness. If any more show up in my mailbox, I’ll just have to inform them that all they’re doing is enlarging my coaster collection.