Director: Herb Freed
Writer: Bud Zelig
From: Cult Cinema
Tommy is a female mechanic who has to prove that her experimental stock car can beat the car of the professional team that patronizes her.
Another Marimark Production. Entitled Tomboy. Boy, do I have high hopes for this one.
I’m less than 10 minutes in and there’s a hint of Poochie here: she’s awesome at everything she does, including pick-up games of basketball and car repair. Also, everyone seems to like her and she seems happy with her life. None of this is a problem on its own, but it suggests the plot is going to revolve around her not properly conforming to expected gender norms and the happy ending will come when she gets all femmed up making her a fitting reward for whatever guy comes along liking her for who she is as the titular Tomboy.
I mean, I’m guessing.
The more interesting move, and the one I’d prefer, would be the outside forces insisting upon gender norms interfering with her life and the community ultimately rallying around her. Sort of like what happens in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (which I’ve been wanting to rewatch. There’s a nice kindness at the core of that movie despite its moments of 80’s “boys will be boys” hand-waving). In essence, I want the kind of plot we always get in nerd-focused movies: characters are happy with themselves, get bullied over what makes them unique, and then get validated for not changing while the bullies get rejected. Simple plot, but fun. Only when the protagonist is a woman, she’s not allowed to be fully vindicated. She has to change to become appropriately feminine.
Think of all those “ugly duckling” type movies. Guy asks the Plain Jane to the prom as a dare or a prank, but when she puts effort into her appearance, *gasp,* why this woman who’s been conventionally attractive but with glasses and slightly disheveled clothes has in fact been conventionally attractive all the time! How wrong we were to ever doubt that she was different from us and thus less deserving of dignity.
An implicit argument of those movies, and one of the reasons they’re not very satisfying, is that the conclusion, the revelation of the woman as beautiful by everyone’s standards, validates the villains’ position. Were the woman still ugly by their standards after the make-over, would the villains still be denounced for having treated the woman poorly? The villains’ mistake isn’t treating this person poorly because they’re different, it’s mistakenly seeing the person as being different and thus treating one of their own poorly.
Another reason the trope is boring and not what I want to see is that it’s an easily recognizable trope. I’ve seen this movie, even when I haven’t, and I want to see the other movie. Where’s the flick where the jock asks the nerd to prom and then skips prom to instead hang out with the nerd and their friends doing what they want to do? In other words, a flick that argues that their differences, their particularities, are precisely what makes them interesting and someone the jock (and jock as audience surrogate) would want to be partners with.
All of this before I’m ten minutes in, so I’ll watch and tell you how right/wrong I was.
ONE MOVIE LATER:
So, that’s a thing.
Like a lot of these Marimark productions, the movie approaches having a plot and then just doesn’t. Tommy is the titular tomboy. Her father was a decorated astronaut although that doesn’t come up at all. In fact, just about everything in the movie doesn’t really come to anything. She’s a mechanic. One of her customers is an asshole rich playboy who owns a race car company. She has a crush on his driver who has a name but who I’ll just refer to as “racecar.” Cause he sucks.
So after a lot of racecar being charmless and unlikable, they start dating and we arrive at the real plot of the movie… with thirty minutes left. Rich asshole is trying to get someone to invest in his company. Shows off his latest car, except Tommy’s driving. Investor is impressed by Tommy and learns that she’s not a professional driver but, in fact, is building her own experimental racer. Racecar patronizes her in front of the investor and she says her car could beat his. Investor wants to see the race so it happens.
One car-building montage later, it’s race day. Racecar is worried about the condition of the track and that Tommy might get hurt. The movie, even this late in the game, can’t decide if he’s the lover or the louse. They race, she wins, investor convinces asshole rich to buy her car. They’ll race it in Daytona with racecar driving (even though he just got beaten in a one-on-one by a completely untrained amateur). Will she go to Daytona with racecar? “Maybe” THE END
I mentioned a certain giddiness when watching Weekend Pass, and it was sort of the sense of preparing to flinch in anticipation of something that hasn’t arrived but you know is coming. The movie is predictable and you’re just waiting for the inevitable moment to arrive. That’s true of most these Marimark films. That’s what I mean when I call them “perfunctory.” They’re relentlessly predictable.
This was not predictable.
I mean, a lot of the beats are there: she’s dismissed because she’s a woman and then proves herself, catches the love interest’s attention through her competence then wins him over by femming up, beats the bullies by joining forces with her old friends and family. However, none of that gets into the weird gender stuff in the movie.
No, I mean weird. If you’re rolling your eyes and thinking “SJW,” fuck you. Also, even you would find it weird.
For instance, when she goes to the party, rich asshole is acting like a procurer and passing women off to the various men there. The scene honestly feels like he’s hired a bunch of sex workers to staff an orgy. Asshole takes Tommy to meet racecar while Tommy’s friend hangs out in the front room to “entertain” the guests. Tommy navigating the house is intercut with the friend stripping for everyone as well as a sequence of a woman alone in a hallway with a man taking off all his clothes. She keeps telling him if he doesn’t stop, she’s going to leave. When he’s finally naked, she laughs and hugs him.
These three scenes are happening at the same time, do not make sense, and are not referenced again.
When Tommy finds racecar, he’s in a room with a bunch of people watching a porno. When she leaves because she’s disgusted by it, he chases her down and chastises her. He’s caught in the embarrassing situation, but talks down to her because of her reaction. Then he says, “Tommy, I like you,” as if that’s an argument for anything. He likes her so she should… what? Date him despite who he is and how he treats her? They start boxing, she lands some good hits on him, and then he punches her in the face knocking her to the ground. Then they start hooking up and they’re dating.
All this is one sequence. Everything I’ve described happens in the party scene. At this point, I was just going “what?” I had the sense that I knew where the plot was going, but it made every wrong move to get there.
I mentioned before that these movies usually introduce the character who’s interested in the hero at the start and wins them over at the end. Tomboy halfway has that in the form of Harold. He shows up at the beginning as a customer of Tommy’s. He asks Tommy’s friend out, gets turned down. Then he immediately turns to Tommy and asks her out only to be turned down. He says, “But I gotta date somebody and soon!”
He disappears for the next hour of movie only to return when Tommy is in a bar feeling bad about racecar. He asks her to go home with him and she says yes. They go to her place where Tommy’s friend pops up and they send Harold home. “But I just got here.” He starts hitchhiking and immediately gets picked up by a woman who flashes her breasts at him. Lightning flashes behind him as he gets in the car and it speeds away.
Look, I watched the thing and I don’t understand what happened. All I can say is the Nice Guy™ is strong with this one.
The movie sucks. It’s confoundingly bad and the only reason I’m not lumping it in with the truly terrible ones I’ve watched like Cavegirl or Going Steady is that it’s not constantly invoking and championing sexual assault. It is a goddamn weird flick, though, and I do not recommend watching it.
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