Coming out of the same studio that gave us RuPaul's Drag Race, and stacked with a whole crew of former contestants, Stop! That! Train! plays like RuPaul basically taking a bow for the entire franchise she's built. It's not really a gay film in the traditional sense, but with so many drag stars from Ru's shows popping up alongside a few cameos from well known out gay actors, I figured it earns a spot on this blog anyway. The whole thing is completely over the top, packed with GenZ slang, loud flashy visuals, and humor that's constantly winking at you knowing how ridiculous it is. Going in you'd assume it's meant to be a laugh riot, and a lot of critics online seem to be eating it up, but I just couldn't get into it at all. I've never really been someone who vibes with campy silly stuff like this, so honestly my reaction doesn't surprise me one bit. The setup follows Tess and DeeDee, two low level stewardesses who sneak onto the fancy Glamazonian E...
Valentino is a porn star and Gary is a hustler and they are a couple, though it's far from exclusive. Valentino is also seeing Mary, , a fiery waitress with a curious inability to respect her customers. This love triangle is all well and good, until Valentino is stricken with an unnamed disease (read AIDS). At the same time Mary finds she is pregnant, so now the three must work through hard times together.
It's a premise that certainly holds the potential for an honest examination of how AIDS affects both its victims and their friends, ut the director instead fills the screen with garishness - in an effort, one suspects, to shock viewers that aren't familiar with this sort of lifestyle. This means we're treated to sequences in which transvestites parade around in bizarre outfits and interminable jaunts to loud clubs, with quieter moments of Valentino dealing with the disease few and far between. It sounds quite provocative, but it never quite develops three-way erotic charge it should have, for the balance is tipped heavily toward Valentino and Gary. Once Valentino starts to die of AIDS, and the film becomes awash with earnest sentiment--sentiment that isn't quite earned, for it's hard to care a whole lot about these self-involved characters. For the most part, the actors don't fill in the cracks. They try their best to keep up with all the hijinks, but despite their best efforts, none of them are able to create characters worth caring about. It's an overall quite a boring film. It is good to see the now famous faces do an indie film like this. I bet even Salma Hayek forgot she did a film like this. (1.5/10)
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