When
Julie Brown wrote and co-directed this Showtime Original spoof of tabloid
staples Tonya Harding and Lorena Bobbitt, it had a ripped-from-the-headlines
feel to it. Watching it now, with some
distance from the real events, it probably plays better than it did when it was
first released. Recently, Harding’s life
was dramatized in I, Tonya, and Bobbitt became the subject of an Amazon Prime
documentary. What’s fascinating is that
Brown’s treatment of the events may seem crass, but they aren’t too far removed
from what really happened. (At least in
the Harding segment.) I guess truth
really is stranger than fiction sometimes.
Tonya: The Battle of Wounded Knee (**) tells the
story of a white trash ice skater named Tonya Hardly (Brown) who is tired of
perpetually being a runner-up. With her
dumbass boyfriend and nitwit friend, they conspire to take out the competition,
Nancy Cardigan (Khrystyne Haje from Head of the Class). Predictably, things don’t go as planned.
It’s
been a while since I saw I, Tonya, but I swear there are some scenes in that
movie that are identical to this one.
Sure, there are plenty of groan-inducing jokes, and at least one funny
sight gag (Tonya using her ice skate to cut a pizza). It’s just that it’s more fun to watch the
“real” bits of the story creeping through the obvious jokes and comedic set
pieces. Brown is an actress I’ve always
admired, even if her shtick is kind of thin, but she commits totally to the
role and is fun to watch.
Next,
Richard (Vamp) Wenk directs He Never Gave Me Orgasm: The Lenora Babbitt Story (**). It finds Babbitt having a lunch meeting with an
agent (Sam McMurray) to help jumpstart her career. While eating, she relates the events that led
her to severing her husband’s member.
The
tone is a lot more over the top than the first segment. The big joke here is that whenever “Lenora”
walks by a man, they instinctively cross their legs. In fact, the whole thing is essentially one
long dick joke, and it wasn’t particularly funny to begin with. The best Dick in the movie is Dick Miller,
who plays the detective who leads the hunt for the lost member. We also get bits by Priscilla Barnes and
Vicki Lawrence (as herself), which compensate for the rest of the film’s… err…
shortcomings.
Overall,
this is about what you’d expect from a Made for Showtime National Lampoon’s
movie from the ‘90s. In fact, it plays
more like an overlong Mad Magazine parody than anything. Fans of Brown will enjoy seeing her gamely
portraying two broad characterizations of tabloid queens, but that’s about
where the fun stops.
Wenk
later went on to write the modern classics The Expendables 2 and The Equalizer.
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