Last Friday evening, a friend sent this text, “Going to see this tonight at a Burlesque Club called Le Chat Noir. Right up your alley.” with the link to the trailer I knew she was right before it was halfway through and I needed to watch this movie! Luckily, it is streaming on Amazon Prime and The Statesboro Psychotronic Film Society gave it a watch the next day.
The movie starts with a kick - punk bands fighting in a club, drugs, a totally over the top orgy, and a mind bending trip into the Hinterlands. So many things were going on in the first 30 minutes of the film, it was fun to parse out where they came from and who (or what) influenced the filmmakers.
While the visual style often brought David Lynch to mind, the constant searching into the nature of religious experience and exploration of reality through pharmaceuticals was pure Philip K. Dick! What is reality? Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away! Or reality is as reliable as a soap bubble.
The tough-as-nails female protagonist with a punk rock aesthetic, hacking and slashing her way through a hostile and confusing world coupled with a shit ton of nudity and weird psychedelics felt like The Soska Sisters' and Lloyd Kaufman's remake of Liquid Sky might look like.
Filmed in Columbia, South Carolina for less than $15,000, The Theta Girl packs a lot of goodies into its 98 minute run time. The use of natural light and color is extremely well shot and the hallucinations (and there are a lot of them) are trippy and original. The soundtrack was excellent, I assume much of it was courtesy of Columbia’s local punk scene.
After a really great first act, the middle and ending began to meander with filler scenes that seemed to pad out the run time, and the final third fell apart with a confusing, but quite lovely, ending. Did we just witness some sort of multidimensional, apocalyptic battle? Are God and Satan the same thing and an alien? Not sure. Luckily, there was plenty of blood, guts and other things to keep our attention.
I'm very impressed with the movie and will watch it again! The screening my friend went to was followed by a Q&A with the writer and the director, who admitted they owed a large debt to their psychedelic experiences.
Overall, The Theta Girl was an impressive, low-budget effort that I will certainly watch again!
I hope the director and the scriptwriter are working on a new project and they get it out there soon! Check out the trailer below, it is totally worth watching.
[IMDB] [Red Band Trailer]
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