MULE SKINNER BLUES [ 1/2]
Truth is stranger than fiction. Running time: 93 minutes. Not rated (violence). At Cinema Village, 12th Street, between Fifth Avenue and University Place.
————-
THE boisterous and daft documentary “Mule Skinner Blues,” about a motley crew of trailer park denizens banding together to make a schlocky horror movie, is very funny.
It’s also heartbreakingly sad, but, thanks to the deft touch of New York filmmaker Stephen Earnhart – who admirably resists the temptation to mock his subjects – there’s an uplifting thread of optimism running through it, too.
If all this sounds contradictory, that’s because “Mule Skinner Blues” practically defies categorization.
While shooting a music video in Jacksonville, Fla., Earnhart (a former Miramax exec) met the documentary’s star, Beanie Andrews, who appeared as an extra.
Andrews, a recovering alcoholic and incurable showman, had a lifelong dream to make a horror movie in which he rises from the murky swamps behind the local junkyard in a gorilla suit.
Earnhart’s camera follows Andrews as he rallies the inhabitants of Buckaroo Trailer Park, each of whom leaps upon his film idea as an outlet for self-expression and a tilt at stardom.
David Lynch could not make these characters up.
Larry Parrot, a janitor with a new mail-order bride, bangs out horror stories after dark on his Smith Corona typewriter and, together, he and Andrew come up with a script for “Turn About Is Fair Play,” about – yes! – a dead-musician-turned-gorilla searching a swamp for his severed arm.
Miss Jeannie, a septuagenarian yodeler; Annabelle Lea, a costume designer who keeps the corpse of her bulldog in a backyard freezer; and two heavy-drinking guitar players, Steve Walker and Ricky Lix, all get involved.
Of course, the resulting film makes Ed Wood look like Martin Scorsese, but when it finally has a cut-rate local premiere, we realize that Beanie has – for 15 minutes at least – succeeded in making his friends feel on top of the world.
There’s much that is intentionally and unintentionally surreal in this documentary – bizarre psychedelic fantasy sequences and odd revelations from the characters – but at its heart, it is about a bunch of disadvantaged folk who dared to pursue a dream.
