Transformed (2005)

Posted on Jul 19, 2006 under Comedy, Sci-fi |

Directed by Pamela Sutch
Written by Pamela Sutch and Matthew Jacobs
Starring
- Leigh Jacobs
- Pamela Sutch
- Matthew Jacobs
- Stephen McKay
- Michael Greico

It’s no secret: The best way to ensure some kind of financial return on a microbudget movie is to load up on the exploitative elements. Traditionally, “exploitation” means sex ‘n’ violence. But since blowing things up is often outside the limitations of a credit-card budget, and since (almost) every woman has a pair of breasts, exploitation usually relies on simple nudity for that lowest-common-denominator draw.

Pamela Sutch has carved her own little niche in do-it-yourself cinema by embracing the sexploitation ethic and… not exactly subverting it, but certainly re-nuancing it. She’s always been more than willing to write, direct, and star in microbudget features which earn their keep through female nudity, often her own. The fact that she’s in the driver’s seat insulates her somewhat from charges that the female performers in her features are being objectified or “used,” and that means that the movies produced by her Siren Tales Productions, while light-hearted nudie flicks, are worlds apart from most movies thus described (including what you find after dark on Cinemax). I previously reviewed The Gosh-Darned Mortgage (2001)… Good golly, was it almost five years ago? Anyway, I thought that it was a charming homage to the old-fashioned heroine-tied-to-the-railroad-tracks melodramas (complete with a heroic Mountie), with bare boobies tossed in with a wink and a smile.

“I don’t know why, but this issue of Camelot 3000 really speaks to me.”
(Absolutely THE geekiest caption I’ve ever used.)

All of which might have heightened my expectations for Transformed. (I know, I know; you’d think that heightened expectations would have been beaten out of me by now, leaving me a pessimistic, cynical husk of a reviewer. Trust me, I’ll get there eventually.) The premise seems perfect for a good-natured sexploitative comedy: Sex change! A man who is inadvertantly transformed into a woman! But unfortunately, the script manages to pick its way between all the most fertile ground for both humor and drama.

And although I know this movie isn’t the only one to commit the following sin, or even the most egregious offender, I’m going to make an example of it just to warn all the other microbudget filmmakers out there: NAME YOUR CHARACTERS. And I don’t just mean in the script. Make sure that each character is audibly identified for us sometime within the first five minutes after that character appears on screen. Or the first thirty minutes. Or the first hour, for crying out loud. At least with such a tight cast, I can get away with thinking of characters as “the man” or “the woman.” I don’t know what I’d do with a cast of thousands, or even dozens.

After a screen crawl that informs us of a meteor a couple of centuries back which endowed its discoverer with youth, we meet our protagonist, who shall be known until the revelation of the character’s name as “The Guy” (Matthew Jacobs). The Guy comes home from work — something involving a coverall is all we know — to be berated by his bitchy wife. (Thanks to the actress’s thick European accent, her dialogue here is all subtitled, including her profanity in her native language.) The Guy simply reads a comic book and takes the abuse silently, then moseys out to a bar where he gets good and blasted. And when he starts stumbling home, he accidentally wanders into… a nefarious scheme in progress!

“And then I’ll teach you kids a thing or two about dressing fancy, by jiminy!”

Though he doesn’t know it yet. See, a local girl (Leigh Jacobs, to be known until further notice as “The Girl”) has just been abducted by a couple of henchmen and dragged to a makeshift secret lair in an abandoned building, where an evil older woman with hideous fashion sense (hereafter, “The Evil Older Woman”) plans to use a contraption made of castoff electrical parts and old plumbing fixtures to change bodies with her. Why, The Girl is young, she’s pretty (reasonably), and she’s a martial artist (a facet to her personality that functions more as an Informed Attribute*) — she’ll be the perfect host for a Mad Scientess looking for a recharge! The Evil Older Woman has even planned ahead for her financial security: She’s going to have her stock portfolio transferred into The Girl’s name. Which is “April.” Yay! One down!

And the only thing that could POSSIBLY go wrong is that The Guy, stumbling through the courtyard of the abandoned buildings, grabs hold of the jerry-rigged power line right when the transfer is supposed to take place. And ZZAP! The Guy takes on April’s physical likeness, and The Evil Older Woman suddenly becomes The Guy! (And April? Well, she takes on The Evil Older Woman’s form and promptly dies. She is then forgotten.)

Since The Guy was out of sight when he boo-booed the transformation, nobody knows what went wrong with the transfer. And of course, The Guy/April is thoroughly clueless as to why he’s suddenly female. He/she goes home, but only stands speechless at the front door, then runs away and drives off in his/her truck. (Ooh, pronouns are going to be a bitch. Or a bastard.) Holed up in a crummy motel, The Guy/April does at least fulfill one requisite of the transgender body switch movie: the “I’ve got BREASTS!” scene.

“Wow. Now that I am female, I can no longer tell if this dress makes my butt look big, and will have to find a man to ask.”

Meanwhile, The Evil Older Woman/The Guy is enjoying his new body, especially its built-in martial arts skills… but since all of her former stocks have been transferred into April’s name, he’s practically broke. (Aaaagh. PRONOUN HELL.) At least we find out his, um, her former name: It’s Hilda. Two down!

Now, you might think that the focus of the movie — or certainly the comedic meat thereof — would be in The Guy’s adjustment to being female, with no clue as to the reason for the sudden switch. But there’s another whole sunplot which is going to usurp that time: Pamela Sutch shows up as “Vanessa” (Hey, no fair! she got a name right out of the gate!), the scientist who claims she invented the microchip that powers Hilda’s machine. And she wants to co-opt Hilda’s two bumbling henchmen so that they’ll retrieve the chip for her instead of looking for April.

The bumbling henchmen. You know, I really need to talk about them. And before I even get started, let me just say that I have no problem with them being bumblers. I used to think that that particular cliche was just too ridiculous for words, until I cross-referenced it with all the real-life news stories of would-be bank robbers who write ransom notes on the back of their pre-printed deposit slips or leave their billfold with driver’s license behind when they make their getaway… So I understand that crime is, by and large, the last resort for people who can’t hold down a position at Burger King. But these two henchmen (and I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you their names due to the fragmentary credits) are called upon to provide most of the humor in the movie, via comic relief. While the rest of the script is very bookishly written, I’m guessing that the henchmen scenes were largely ad-libbed — a jarring enough transition, even if their improv’ed performances had been funny. Unfortunately, they’re simply not given much to work with in any of the screentime the two of them are called upon to fill, and end up having to babble and repeat themselves until the next scene is ready to start.

“Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for me cl– Wait, that’s me!”

And what is The Guy/April doing with her time? Unfortunately, very little. She goes to the comic book store and is hit on, gently, by an old hairy man (hereinafter… aw, you know the drill). She agrees to go to coffee with him, and… well, that’s about it. She hangs out in her motel room and occasionally puts on a dress. She does have a moment of trauma when she enters the men’s room and realizes that the urinal is forever off-limits to her now (sniff), but that’s incredibly low-key when you consider the potential in the premise. I mean, it’s a macho guy trapped in a woman’s body! And if we had spent any additional time pre-transfer establishing The Guy as being solidly masculine (you know — scratching himself, belching in public, checking out the ladies), then the comic aftermath could practically have written itself. Instead, we’re given so few scenes of the apparent woman acting manly that we’re never really given the opportunity to believe it. I can’t really blame the performers; I remember reading in an interview with Steve Martin back around the time he did All of Me (1984) that he was surprised how hard it was to act like a woman was inhabiting his body. But part of the reason he managed to pull it off, and milk the comedic cream from the performance, is that the movie about gender-switching was, first and foremost, about gender-switching.

And that, really, is the problem with this movie: The scenes that needed to be here are pushed out by the scenes that didn’t need to be here. Vanessa’s search for a young stripper into which to transfer once she gets the chip are fun, sure, I guess, but I would much rather have seen how The Guy/April deals with shaving unfamiliar body parts. Hilda/The Guy’s kung fu fight with one of the henchmen (twice!) is nice eye candy, but I would much rather have seen The Guy/April deal with the queasy feeling that construction workers are checking out her ass. The two unrelated scenes in which The Guy/April encounters women on the verge of giving birth are… well, they’re bewildering, and I have no idea what they were meant to accomplish. I would much rather see how The Guy/April’s and The Hairy Old Man’s relationship progresses to the point that The Guy/April’s ready to accept her femininity and enter into a relationship with him. Because as far as we can tell from what we get to see, that must have been a helluva cup of coffee he bought her.

Old Hairy Man — with a brick!

(You know, a couple of the name revelations come so far into the movie that I’m not even going to end up covering them in my recap, so I’ll just tell you: The Guy is “Alan,” and The Hairy Old Man is “Carl.” Fair enough?)

There are plenty of good ideas here, but the best ones are all so understated as to be only implied. The script that Sutch filmed was really only the brainstorming sketch for a different, much better movie. I wish they had waited and filmed that one.