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Five More Overlooked Indie Gems From The Early ’90s

Totally F***** Up Photo: @ 1993 Strand Releasing

There were just too many independent films from the ‘90s I wanted to cover after publishing my list from last month, so here are five more overlooked indie gems from that era that deserve some of the spotlight. If you’re keeping track, the directors we’ve covered so far include Hal Hartley, Philip Ridley, Julie Dash, Nick Gomez, and Beth B. In this list, I wanted to dive even deeper into a couple of key films from the Queer New Wave of that period, as well as influential works by a vet of the Roger Corman school, another who emerged from working with Wim Wenders, and a writer/director you might know more for his acting roles in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, or Ti West’s The House of the Devil.

Let’s deep dive right back into the era of the independents with a true crime story that inspired films by Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Fleischer, and Barbet Schroeder, but often skirted the queer relationship at the core of a diabolical murder.

Swoon

A man in ceremonial dress stares pensively in classic 90s independent film Swoon
Swoon Photo @ 1992 Fine Line Features

Swoon depicts the very real and horrendous crime committed by the infamous Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two affluent University of Chicago students who kidnapped and murdered a 14-year-old boy in May of 1924. But while the film’s scenes involving the murder realistically detail the violent nature of these men, Kalin’s approach from the opening scenes is one that highlights theatrical artifice. In the opening scenes, for instance, we are treated to a sort of floating display of the costumes and physicality of the period through gliding tableaus pulled across the frame. It’s this fascinating, resourceful, and wonderfully cheap mix of the underground performance spaces from that time emerging in the theatrical frame that makes Swoon such a lively affair.

Director Tom Kalin came out of the AIDS activist art collective Gran Fury and the ACT UP movement of the 1980s, ushering in a new decade with an entirely fresh approach to queer cinema. Swoon fits neatly into the pantheon of highly influential queer cinema of that period, somewhere between Todd Haynes’ Poison, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, and (the filmmaker I have queued up next) Greg Araki’s The Living End. All these filmmakers were pulling together textual threads of queer literary and media history. Haynes was reimagining Andre Gide, Van Sant was casting gay hustlers in Chimes at Midnight, and Araki was making films that were aggressively political extensions of Andy Warhol. Kalin, like Araki, was also highly influenced by Warhol, and the hand-made “factory”-like aspects of Swoon are another highly attractive, almost tactile aspect of the film. It has the feeling of something “constructed”, in the best possible way.

Kalin’s theatricality (unlike Hitchcock’s very different single-take theatricality in 1948’s Rope) is one that foregrounds the aspects of queer culture and gender fluidity, but Kalin also puts the aspect of desire front and center in the central characters themselves, captured in all their sinister and sensual dimensions beautifully by Craig Chester (Leopold) and Daniel Schlachet (Loeb).

While the leads in Swoon are not marquee names, the performances by Chester and Schlachet are perfectly cast and are rather brave. Swoon wants to confront these characters as villains, as lovers, and create a space for their desire in a time that had no space for them. In this way, it’s an activist film of the queer canon but without ever announcing itself as such. Kalin doesn’t attempt to provide an answer as to why two young men would commit such a horrific crime, but does what so much true crime never does, which is to take the characters seriously, and dare to present them with an illuminating, artistic flourish.

Totally F***** Up

Duval on the phone next to a classic Jesus & Mary Chain poster in 90s independent classic Totally Fucked Up
Totally F***** Up Photo @ 1993 Strand Releasing

It’s time to get even more ’90s with this truly “Po-Mo” collage by Greg Araki, complete with an appropriately unmarketable title. You might be interested in Totally F***** Up if you want to begin a journey through what is known as Araki’s “Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy”—followed by The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997)—but as its own highly distilled expression of gay ‘90s slacker-ism, it stands on its own. Are there better Greg Araki movies? Sure, quite a few at this point, but maybe none more definitively 90s than TFU. But, be warned, this is mostly for gays who listen to This Mortal Coil and don’t care about Joan Crawford or Bette Midler, and write down phone numbers on the back of a pink copy of Andre Bazin’s “What is Cinema?” You know who you are.

Billed as “Another Homo Movie from Greg Araki in 15 Random Celluloid Fragments,” TFU has little in the way of plot, but the central character of Andy (James Duval), who defines himself by the film’s title in an opening video that recalls Andy Warhol’s “screen tests,” is a compelling enough depressive to hold the film together. Duval shows up in quite a few Araki films, including each film in the “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy,” and has a uniquely classical quality on screen that marks each film. His ultimate romance with a dude who’s maybe a bit too “Ministry” for his more “Jesus and Mary Chain”-centric musical tastes is where the film develops a bit of a story, which Araki is sure to mark through an intertitle that reads: “Start Narrative Here.” Other intertitles include the title of each fragment, usually marked by some playfully reconfigured pop reference of the time like “The Young and the Hopeless” or “To Live and Fry in LA.”

That last reference to a William Friedkin neo-noir from the ‘80s may seem a bit too on the nose given the recent tragic fires burning across Los Angeles, but the remarkable thing about the oh-so-‘90s TFU is ultimately how current it all feels. While the style of the film may not be exactly in vogue, and while Araki is not exactly at the height of his powers while making TFU, the bare bones pastiche of video and 16mm connects to an urgency about the state of gay teens in America that couldn’t feel more vital. The first title card in TFU reminds us that the teen suicide rate is 30% gay, a statistic that seemed subversive as the opening salvo of a film in 1993 but now seems hopelessly unreduced and lost amidst a sea of uncaring media bubbles set adrift. Araki always challenged through his films the uncaring politics that did nothing to for those affected by the AIDS epidemic (see his film prior to this, The Living End, involving two renegade lovers with AIDS), and toward the end of TFU there’s even a scene between Andy and his boyfriend that feels totally of the moment in regard to climate change. Andy looks up at the sky, totally high, and utters: “Whole planet’s a goner. I give it five years max.” I think 2025 hears you, Andy.

Gas Food Lodging

Fairuza Balk and Jacob Vargas sitting on the couch in Gas Food Lodging
Fairuza Balk and Jacob Vargas in Gas Food Lodging Photo: @ 1992 Cineville

Speaking of films that have an undeniably ‘90s quality, Alison Anders’ Gas Food Lodging features a cameo by Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis, who also scored the film. For those who know…that’s pretty ‘90s. Anders is a director who would likely characterize herself, first and foremost, as a music lover. She would go on to have a minor hit with Grace of My Heart, starring Illeana Douglas as a late-‘50s songwriter making her way to the famous Brill Building, but Anders’ love of music and adeptness at weaving a story through music was wholly evident in one of her earliest features (and my personal favorite of hers) the Wim Wenders-esque Gas Food Lodging.

Anders worked as a production assistant on one of the great Wim Wenders films, Paris, Texas. While there’s something of a connecting thread between the feel of the two films, Paris, Texas featured a perspective on the American landscape from an outsider more familiar with John Ford films than the actual landscape itself, whereas Gas Food Lodging has the feeling of someone who has lived in the tumbleweed-swept streets of a truck stop town like the film’s central location, Laramie, New Mexico.

Gas Food Lodging not only has an intimacy with its location, but with the three women at the center of the film: Fairuza Balk and Ione Skye as sisters Shade and Trudi, and the largely unsung actor Brooke Adams as their mother Nora (seriously, she’s a treasure—see Days of Heaven, the ‘70s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone). Aside from Mascis (not exactly a natural actor), the collection of men caught in these women’s collective orbit constitutes an equally strong cast of supporting actors, including an incredibly charming turn by Jacob Vargas as Shade’s romantic interest, Javier, and a perfectly grizzled turn by James Brolin as Shade and Trudi’s estranged pops, John.

Balk’s Shade is at the center of the film, an out-of-time cinephile obsessed with the films of a mostly forgotten Mexican actor, Elvia Rivero. As she manages her first forays into romance, the tensions between her older sister and their mother get more heated as they negotiate their own romantic entanglements. While the film is filled with somewhat familiar meet-cutes and dramatic beats, the specificity of the “nothing more than an exit” setting and the characters really feel separate from the romantic dramas and comedies that preceded the independent era. And, of course, the score is very cool.

One False Move

Billy Bob Thornton slyly checks out Cynda Williams in One False Move
One False Move Photo @ 1992 IRS Media

A lot of notable directors came out of the “Roger Corman school of directing” in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, but that machine wasn’t exactly producing Coppola or Spielberg-level auteurs by the late-1980s or ’90s. Even more reason to make note of a Corman school alum who did emerge from that less fruitful period with the excellent 1992 crime picture One False Move, Carl Franklin. Franklin honed his directing chops on a few Corman flicks that didn’t exactly signal great things ahead: the David Carradine/Jason Priestly vehicle Nowhere to Run; an intensely cheap war movie sequel curiously titled Eye of the Eagle 2: Inside the Enemy; and something called Full Fathom Five (probably not great, but it does feature the most committed actor of low budget features in movie history, Michael Moriarty).

Once Franklin got hold of a script by Tom Epperson and a pre-Slingblade Billy Bob Thorton, who also co-stars in the film, he was able to fully realize the character-centered crime thriller at a level that clearly surpassed the Corman fair of that era. One False Move doesn’t get much play these days, but the year it was released it topped Gene Siskel’s “Best of 1992” list (and made #2 on Ebert’s!). What made One False Move so special was the unique parallel storytelling involving two equally compelling character trios. First, you have the violent criminals whose story opens the film—the volatile Ray (Billy Bob Thorton) and his sadistic yet stoic ex-prison-mate Pluto (Michael Beach), as well as Ray’s girlfriend Fantasia (Cynda Williams). The plight of Fantasia is increasingly at the center of the picture as the trio move closer to the rural Alabama location, where two FBI agents (Earl Billings and Jim Metzler) lay in wait for the criminal’s arrival with a small-town sheriff nicknamed “Hurricane” (played to the hilt by Bill Paxton—also no stranger to Corman films, having made his film debut in the Johnathan Demme-directed Crazy Mama). The FBI agents and Hurricane constitute the second trio of characters, and their relationship has far more dramatic arc than you might expect, all told with the terse economy often associated with the best film noir.

Whether or not One False Move is technically a “film noir” is less relevant than the way the film operates as a suspenseful thriller and a potent movie about the teeming racial dynamics in the south. Epperson and Thornton weave those tensions into the script so effortlessly that they never have to announce what the film ultimately reveals about the racial dynamics of that time. Franklin, who would go on to direct Denzel Washington in Devil in a Blue Dress, translates that dynamic from the page to the screen via a small budget that plays like a larger Hollywood release.

What Happened Was…

Noonan and Silas share a glass of wine in What Happened Was...
Tom Noonan and Karen Silas in What Happened Was… Photos: @ 1994 Oscilloscope Laboratories

Maybe my favorite of all the films on this list, Tom Noonan’s feature debut What Happened Was… is a chamber drama that never leaves the apartment of Jackie, played by one of the most underappreciated actors of this independent period, Karen Silas. Jackie has invited her co-worker Michael over for a dinner date, and the entirety of the film takes place over the course of that dinner date, even though Michael, played by writer/director Tom Noonan, is too removed and self-involved to even realize it as such.

Both Silas and Noonan have a screen presence that is highly compelling and curiously specific. They’re both striking actors, but in a way usually associated with character actors rather than star leads. The dynamic of What Happened Was… involves a sort of anti-chemistry that seems so naturalistic in the execution that you wonder how the actors even got to it. It’s a two-hander high wire act of a performance that goes to some unexpectedly revealing emotional places by the end of the date. And it never feels like a play translated to the stage, because it’s not (unlike the film from “part one” of this list, Two Small Bodies). Noonan’s film may be theatrical by the design of its single location and small cast, but What Happened Was… is a decidedly cinematic affair. In particular, once we get to the “story within the story,” a tale written by Jackie that she shares with Michael in her bedroom, the camera begins to frame Michael in some ways that eerily express the subtly shifting emotional tone of the evening.

Noonan maintains this odd intellectual distance and superiority, always tempered by glimmers of a deep insecurity. If you know Noonan as a performer, his voice has an indelible control and soft resonance that plays perfectly in roles that are hiding some deep inadequacies or violent tendencies. Silas is how we gain entry to the film though, as it’s her apartment and her we see anxiously preparing for her date’s arrival. Even in these opening scenes where she’s alone, before anything is said, her performance is compelling. Silas has a different sort of control than Noonan in her physicality, and a forthright cadence that’s equally perfect for the film. It’s fascinating to watch her in films from this same period, like Hal Hartley’s Simple Men, and witness how adept she is at navigating entirely different directorial demands. With Hartley, Silas was perfectly engaged with his Bresson-influenced style, whereas with Noonan she switches to a deeply psychological style so effectively that I don’t think I’ve ever come out of the film with the same overall impressions. Two actors, one apartment, one dinner date, one night, but as complex and emotionally dense as any film from this period.

Written by Jason J Hedrick

Author of ECSTATIC Screen Notes, co-founder of the "Cult-O-Rama" film series in Pittsburgh, sometimes educator, sometimes playwright. Lives in the dark.

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