Before our screening of The Theta Girl, screenwriter David Axe took the microphone and informed us that he and director Christopher Bickel promised each other that if nothing else, their film could not be boring. To accomplish that, they vowed that, “Every five script pages there had to be boobs, a stabbing, or an act of sacrilege.”
I didn’t actually clock it, but an atrocity every five minutes seems about right. The Theta Girl is a defiant explosion of punk vitriol, proud of its ugliness, of its dirt-cheap aesthetic, and of its lo-fi cosmology. And while much of The Theta Girl has the sound and visual quality of the porn your friend’s parents shot themselves, Axe and Bickel tip you just enough winks with their script and direction to let you know that none of this is an accident. They knew exactly what movie they wanted to make, and they went after it with everything they had.
Like an Alex Cox script directed by Bill Lustig, The Theta Girl is a so-called “existenploitation” film that counterbalances its grimiest leanings with a metaphysical streak. The result is…well, it’s something all right.
The girl in question is Gayce (Victoria Elizabeth Donofrio), who makes her living slinging a popular new hallucinogenic known as ‘Theta’, using her profile and access to the designer drug to drive interest in her friends’ all-girl punk outfit, “The Truth Foundation.” The opening credits roll over images of Gayce walking through the city at night, every alley filled with some new deviance, some fresh threat. It’s an ugly world, one you can understand people feeling the need to transcend. For that, there’s Theta.
Theta’s not just any other high, though. As Gayce extolls to her supplier, Derek (Darelle D. Dove), Theta is “where humanity is going.” An early scene finds a club full of users entering a group hallucination of/visitation to an astral plane inhabited by a…thing, known only as The Entity. Gayce is on first name terms with this…thing, sharing a dream of a world torn down and remade.
But this idyllic world of down-and-dirty punk shows and downer-dirtier orgies (yup, that happens) is shattered when a group of Westboro Baptist-type Jesus freaks get dosed with Theta and respond, uh, poorly, let us say. Soon Gayce and Derek are in a race to put an end to the onslaught of carnage and chaos that is tearing apart their network of friends.
For connoisseurs of low-budget schlock, The Theta Girl certainly does not skimp on the red stuff. More than one individual has their entrails ripped out and used to craft arcane symbology, as you do. Axe and Bickel are smart enough to know how to pace out their brutality, changing things up enough that you never feel worn out or bored as the massacres accrue. In general, the low budget is an endearing feature. In its wildest moments, you can feel the same sort of creativity and mania of young Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, cobbling together action and horror out of not-much-at-all.
As a director, Bickel shows some real flair with his threadbare budget, nicely ramping up tension in certain moments, while using choice moments of humor to keep the mood up. And while most interior scenes in the film have a suffocating, dingy quality (that orgy scene made me really anxious to get home and shower), there are exterior shots that are occasionally breathtaking. One late in the game shot features Gayce framed in silhouette against a sunset over a graveyard, a near-astonishing visual deep breath before the grand climax.
With her silent movie eyes and pale face ensconced in a fur coat, Donofrio’s Gayce cuts a distinctive figure through the film. Both she and Dove’s Derek appear to have been reverse-engineered from their eventual comic book continuation. As choppy as some of the acting can be at times, Donofrio and Dove strike some sincere chords together and they make a strong couple as they move through the film together. Dove in particular manages to find something very human and sincere in Derek, grounding the film’s wildest moments in something honest and real. This is crucial, ’cause The Theta Girl goes to some extreme, wonderfully berserk places.
Just maybe not berserk enough. Now, I want to be clear that this next thing is just a personal gripe, but I’m honestly tired of supernatural-flavored movies that draw their main tension from ‘Is the supernatural thing real?’ The Theta Girl is especially vexing because the first half of the film tips its hand so hard towards the supernatural that I was honestly kind of thrown when Gayce started screaming at everybody that The Entity and the astral visions were not real. When that question, is or isn’t it real, began to dominate the film, I was disappointed. Especially so because the sequences under the influence of Theta are the best in the film, with a casual surrealism that can’t help but invoke the recent work David Lynch did on Twin Peaks, but with a healthy dose of self-puncturing humor.
The existential ponderings that form the backbone of The Theta Girl’s back-half are interesting in and of themselves, but as drama it just results in characters screaming belief systems at each other. And I’m not even sure how the virulent atheistic streak that Gayce displays as the film wears on tracks with the character in the first half who made those pronouncements about Theta being “where humanity is going” and opening doors into new realms, especially in the wake of a bunch of blatantly supernatural craziness happening around her. It’d be like if one of the priests in The Exorcist stopped believing in exorcisms and demons, mid-exorcism.
Ultimately it feels like The Theta Girl leaves its best ideas only half-explored, in favor of pontifications that, while intriguing in their own way, don’t interest me as much as a viewer.
I have no idea how The Theta Girl will play for you if you watch it at home, in the day, by yourself. But with a rowdy and enthusiastic audience late at night, it worked like gangbusters, drawing laughs and groans and cheers in all the right places. The Theta Girl is the sort of film that is held together only by Karo syrup, lube, and a bunch of passionate artists pouring their everything into it, and the results are messy and gross and unstable, and I have a feeling that no one involved would have it any other way.