Enter the Drag Dragon: Lowering the Bar for Fun, Zombie Fights and Dildo Nunchucks

By Jim Slotek

Rating: Z-plus

What price do we place on cult filmmaking? I’ve always been suspicious of the $7,000 budget Robert Rodriguez claimed for his debut film El Mariachi, certain costs being fixed in the analog era of movies.

But that was more than 30 years ago. Today, with cheap digital FX, a work of meant-to-offend high camp like Lee Gordon Demarbre’s antic Enter the Drag Dragon looks like it might have cost at least double its reported $15,000 budget.

Punch (Matt Wiwa), Fast Buck (Phil Caracas) and Jaws (Beatrice Beres) in Enter the Drag Dragon

Shot and set in Demarbre’s native Ottawa, the “drag martial arts” movie is defiantly hammy, with virtually no line of expository dialogue spoken without shouting and broad delivery.

There’s an Aztec mummy who commands a zombie army just outside the nation’s capital. We can see the Aztec mummy actor’s actual non-mummy eyes plainly behind the mask. The lead character, a drag queen detective named Punch, is played by three different actors (Sam Kellerman, Jade London and Matt Miwa), I’m guessing because they had to work around people’s day job schedules.

The conceit is Punch keeps getting hit by a car, his face restored differently each time by a cosmetic surgeon. I mean, who needs a big budget when you can just dubiously explain away continuity issues?

You’ll know whether you want to see Enter the Drag Dragon if you’ve enjoyed the work of John Waters or Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman, of The Toxic Avenger fame. Kaufman actually has a self-promoting small part in Enter the Drag Dragon, playing a creepy boss on a construction site, known only as The Foreman (he literally wears Troma logos on his clothes).

There are still indie and rep theatres that will show no-budget movies like this, wherein drag queens engage in martial arts with nunchucks made from dildos, and the filmmakers have previously made features like the “horror musical” Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

Among them: Toronto’s Fox Theatre, and several in Ontario over the next few weeks, with apparently more bookings to come across Canada.

The movie, a winner at the recent Horror Underground Film Festival, plays like it was made up on the spot every day of shooting. Punch runs his Crazy Dragon Detective Agency out of Ottawa’s real-life Mayfair theatre, a dead-duck of a cinema (at least in the film) where he lives with his best friend Jaws (Beatrice Beres), and their theatre manager friend Fast Buck (Phil Caracas), who feeds them popcorn and plays them kung fu movies.

A client (Mark Macdonald) looking for his lost dog, leads Punch and his pals to a stolen painting that’s secretly a map to a lost Aztec treasure (ahem, in the Ottawa Valley), corrupt cops, a goon squad of treasure hunters, a threatening gang of Christian gay-converters, and of course a final act battle against the Aztec mummy (Josh Grace).

Much fake blood flies, mannequin heads roll. The sheer cheapness of the gore heightens its outrageousness.

There’s a who-cares cheek to the entire project that is hard to hate, and scatological gags that aim lower as the movie goes on.

As for me, they had me at, “Never cross a cross-dresser.”

Enter the Drag Dragon. Directed by Lee Gordon Demarbre. Starring Sam Kellerman, Jade London. Matt Miwa and Beatrice Beres. Plays in Toronto at the Fox Theatre, March 4 and 9, in Kitchener at the Apollo Cinema, March 18 and 23, on March 25 at the Sudbury Indie Cinema and North Bay’s Gateway International Film Festival, and in Hamilton at the Playhouse, March 30 and 31.