This is your typical indie coming-of-age tale about a teenager, though it’s clearly working with a very tiny budget. Set within a migrant family living in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, the movie digs into how fragile old-school traditions and expectations can be. We follow a teenage son as he goes through the process of coming out and struggles to find acceptance while dealing with homophobia, domestic abuse, and a messy love triangle that involves his own sister. Goyo is seventeen and just about to graduate from high school. Since he’s been a bit more feminine since he was a little kid, he’s always had to deal with emotional and physical transition from his dad, Ramon, who is obsessed with him being "a man." The only real love he gets is from a lady next door who actually respects him for who he is. The family lives in a Mexican community where everyone works on a grape farm, but things get shaken up when a new guy named Lucio arrives. Lucio basically seduces Goyo ...
'Cherry Pop' is the local dive bar that regularly hosts drag shows. Every now and then, there is a brand new drag queen who give their first ever drag performance and are called 'Cherry'. So, we have a new 'cheery' in the mix of the regular drag queens in the bar. We have Kitten, the MC, who is katty like you would expect, we have Zaza, the queen of queens, who is being suicidal because her muse has passed away. There are 2 experienced queens who are constantly at loggerheads and ready too rip each other apart. There is a Puerto Rican young queen, a "dumb" bimbo and a young queen, who is struggling to come out to her mother and introduce her boyfriend. None of these people are kind to the cherry, just because they never are. Things becomes worse, when the secret comes out that the cherry is actually a 100% straight man and his fiancé will be in the audience to see the show. After some initial straightphobic slurs, Cherry finally performs and mesmerizes everyone. His long cherished dream of performing for an audience is finally fulfilled.
This film has an excellent cast who are clearly no strangers to the camera, reality or otherwise. They just fit the characters. I am not big into the whole drag scene but even I can see that all these were seasoned performers. The film shows us an individual performance by each of these drag queen, and in between interludes of their constant bickering and backstage drama. My only issue was everyone's surprise and dismissal of the straight guy wanting to dress in drag and performance. I would have assumed that we are all beyond that. You can't take this film seriously. This is supposed to be seen purely as a slapstick comedy strictly for entertainment purposes. It's a comedic distraction with a colorful cast both in their deliveries and ball gowns. Another thing was the annoying voice over introducing us to every character every so few minutes got a bit annoying after sometime.
Colorful, energetic, sassy and funny at just over 70 minutes, this is no great shakes, but not bad from any perspective. You feel you have just have just spend time backstage with some awesome drag queens. (5.5/10)
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