Drool

An miserable downtrodden wife who lives in the middle of nowhere, ignored by her children, and abused by her aggressive slob of her husband, suddenly acquires a girl friend when a black cosmetics rep. moves in next door. The friend is banned from visiting cos this is the South after all (!) but when she does come over the very next day she ends up making out with the wife and gets caught by hubby when he comes home.  He has a violent outburst and in a struggle the wife kills him.  And the rest of the movie is taken up with a car journey when the entire family, with dead husband in the trunk, are driven for a few days to n.b.f.’s employers house to dispose of the body and at the same time find true happiness for them all.

This dark comedy from filmmaker Nancy Kissim is very light on laugh with its clichéd situations and an implausible plot.  The sad part is that every character is a total stereotype …. not just mum and dad, but the teenage daughter who is completely stroppy through-out until the end when she inexplicably turns into this sweet girl.  The worse (for me) however were the roles of the two black women (new best friend & boss), which were played so over the top that I found them totally offensive.  I know that others saw this all differently than me, and actually enjoyed the piece.

I think the movie was ostensibly set in this decade BUT with such a storyline and these attitudes you could easily be forgiven you had stepped into time warp when maybe we would have settled for movies as poor as this.  I’m neither a lesbian nor a Southerner but if I were either I think I would be even more annoyed by this movie than I already am.