There is an uneasy space in cinema where homages to bad 70s movies sit. The cliches of stilted dialogue, dodgy camera angles, arthouse pretentiousness and grainy visuals can hardly be celebrated without employing them. And doing so feels like double dipping back into a garbage can we were all glad to empty. Todd Verow enthusiastically digs deep into the dirt with the self aware title of Goodbye Seventies. We have a feeling it will be uttered with the same relief that we will all be saying Goodbye 2020.
Bradford Christianson (Chris Rehmann) is the aspiring Broadway dancer who slips on a pile of puke while mounting the stairs to an underground gay club in 1970s New York. He is too badly injured to Showgirls his way to the top and forced to find an alternate profession. He and his partner in crime Vinnie (Ken Kaissar) decide that they can make a living by replacing the Swedish arthouse movies that gave a veil of avant garde respectability to the adult cinemas with some proper man on man entertainment. After persuading the venue owners to give their movies a chance they turn out to be a huge success. Or at least a reasonable source of income to provide drugs to Bradford and the performers he recruits from his nightly exploits in underground sex clubs. Success is short lived as addiction and the looming spectre of AIDS works its way through his community and career.
There is no dividing line between a bad movie and a satire of a bad movie in this work. The stilted lines are spoken as if being read, followed by awkward pauses and then attempts to show the emotion that the lines were supposed to evoke. Deliberate or not, it’s hard to tell. But it’s so consistent that it is impossible to believe it isn’t. It seems Todd Verow wants us to know exactly what it feels like to watch badly acted trash.
An authentic bow-chicka-wow porny pulp fusion sound track has a wonderful and almost hypnotic authenticity . Thank you Colin Owens. Visually the movie employs the same techniques as the 70s movie it builds itself around. Grainy, odd angled, and amateurish but in the most committed way.
It’s a long 90 minutes to maintain the veneer of dodgy underground adult entertainment. While the consistent authenticity is admirable for the first time we were thirsty for a little vajazzling.
(P.S. GOODBYE SEVENTIES is streaming by OUT ON FILM Atlanta’s Queer Virtual Film Festival and Porn Film Festival in Berlin)
Review by ANDREW HEBDENQueerguru Contributing Editor ANDREW HEBDEN is a MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES graduate spending his career between London, Beijing and NYC as an expert in media and social trends. As part of the expanding minimalist FIRE movement he recently returned to the UK and lives in Soho. He devotes as much time as possible to the movies, theatre and the gym. His favorite thing is to try something (anything) new every day.
