FrightFest review – Drag
Two unnamed women – bartender ‘Fuckup’ (Lizzy Caplan) and her more responsible sister (Lucy DeVito) – drive out to an isolated house in the woods, which Fuckup has told her sister belongs to a rich guy who owes her money. Against her better instincts, the sister has agreed to be lookout while Fuckup burglarises the home … only she gets a message from inside the house that Fuckup has fallen in the bathtub while reaching to steal expensive shampoo and put her back out. The shorter sister – DeVito is the daughter of Danny DeVito (one of the producers here) and Rhea Perlman, and is tiny – has to drag her tall, ungainly sibling out of the house in 45 minutes before the homeowner (John Stamos) gets home … but in the event the guy, an artist specialising in Picasso-like portraits of women with noses where their ears should be (setting up a jaw-dropping reveal later), gets home early with a hot date (Christine Ko) he’s hooked on an ap. Hiding wherever they can, the sisters realise that the seemingly genial host has a very very dark side … and the sensible sister realises, as she probably expected, that her criminally-inclined sister has misled her on several key aspects of this caper.
Written and directed by Raviv Ullman and Greg Yagolnitzer, Drag is a shaggy dog story in the tradition of The People Under the Stairs, Livide, The Collector, Don’t Breathe and Bad Samaritan in which regular housebreakers come across far worse criminality and are forced to become almost heroic. Only this adds a conflict between the sisters, who have different approaches to life and wildly varying instincts about what to do when things get very very bad … DeVito’s sign-off line to Caplan is priceless, and a perfect summation of the mix of horror, humour and the unexpected the film manages throughout. In the early stages, the film relies on physical discomfort – Caplin, a livewire performer, is convincingly frustrated by her inability to move even slightly without acute pain – and makes a protruding nail in a hardwood floor into a major peril. Then the owner gets home and things escalate in an alarming manner, taking in appalling grue and absolutely inspired used of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s song catalogue on the soundtrack — especially ‘Look Out (There’s a Monster Coming)’ and the classic ‘Death Cab for Cutie’.
One of my favourite films of this year’s line-up.
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