CHUGGA CHUGGA CHOO CHOO
Main Cast: RuPaul, Jujubee, Ginger Minj
Director: Adam Shankman
I hurried down to the nightclub, El Pavo Real, in order to meet Michael, the mysterious gentleman who told me he could rescue me from my current predicament of being unable to cross the border from Mexico back to the United States due to Border Patrol being unconvinced of whom I am, despite my presentation of a generous file of press clippings and publicity shots. When I arrived, I found that El Pavo Real is a rather special club, catering to a segment of society that enjoys all of the excesses of glamor. I have no difficulties with drag queens. they are some of my best customers, ordering three or four haut couture Glamorpuss gowns at a time. What I had not expected was the large sign outside the front of the club reading Esta noche! Concurso de dobles de Vicki Lester! I wasn’t completely sure what it meant until I took a picture and after getting a bit confused with the paso doble, it announced that there was to be a Vicki Lester look-alike contest that very evening.
I was most flattered. I had not been asked to judge a look-alike contest since that unfortunate night in Fresno some years ago when Magdelena Montezuma entered the one at the Cockpit and won with a horrid fat suit and an even worse rendition of Malaguena. I entered the club, made my way to the stage and announced into the microphone, “Hello everybody, this is Mrs. Norman Maine.” Well, the boys were just flabbergasted and wasted no time in taking care of me. Michael came over and told me that his plan for getting me out of the country involved my actually competing in the contest rather than judging. I’m not sure how entering my own look alike contest is supposed to spirit me across international borders but he was most persuasive. Some of the boys promised to come up with an award winning gown worthy of my fame and went off to work magic with their sewing machines.
As it was some hours before show time and I had nothing else to do, I decided to watch the film the club was showing on their big screen TV. As it was a drag club, what else would be playing but a film starring a number of prominent drag queens entitled Stop! That! Train!, a send up of disaster movies with attitude, fabulous wigs, and C list personalities. Stuck as I was, I asked the bartender to make me a pitcher of mojitos and settled in to enjoy. After all, who doesn’t love a drag performer, being sucked out the window of a fast moving train?
Stop! That! Train! apes the style of the Zucker brothers of Airplane! and The Naked Gun fame. Throw as many gags as possible on the screen as fast as possible and hope some of them stick. While many of them don’t work or cause a wince, enough of them land well enough that I found myself laughing out loud far more than I thought I should. The basic premise is that train hostesses DeeDee (Jujubee) and Tess (Ginger Minj), not as svelte and glamorous as the other graduates of Train Hostess Academy, find themselves working at the cut rate Stank Rail. One day, fate intervenes and they find themselves on board the fabled Glamazonian Express, the ultimate in coast to coast train luxury, although confined to coach where they are belittled by the First Class Glamazons (Brooke Lynn Heights, Symone, Marcia Marcia Marcia (credited as Marty Lauer)). However, unbeknownst to those on board, the train is hurtling towards disaster as the route is taking it straight through a rare Stormaganza. Donna Dusk (Rachel Bloom), a train controller, figures this out but is having a hard time convincing her colleagues that disaster is brewing. Eventually President Gagwell (RuPaul) gets involved as everyone tries to prevent disaster.
The film is full of cameos, presumably friends of the director (Adam Shankman of Hairspray fame). Passengers include Nicole Richie as a workaholic returning her mother for a funeral, Sarah Michelle Gellar (spoofing herself) as a famous actress no one quite recognizes, Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a businessman bothered by a child, Joel McHale, and Jerry O’Connell. Even Charo turns up as a Train Traffic Controller. The major non-drag lead, playing the not so straight man is Brian Jordan Alvarez from the TV series English Teacher as half of the engineering team.
The film has a fatal flaw. Airplane! became a classic because, at its spine, it was based on a serious disaster film, Zero Hour! and it has sequences, characters, and plot elements directly lifted from the source material. This allowed the parody to have a certain level of gravitas to help hold all of the silliness together. If Stop! That! Train! has a progenitor, it’s The Big Bus, a seventies spoof disaster film best remembered for Stockard Channing nearly drowning in a giant pool of soda pop. And as most educated people know, you should never try to spoof a spoof. It simply falls apart. This film doesn’t completely fall apart but it isn’t what it could have been had they used something like The Poseidon Adventure as its filmic DNA.
What does work are the two central performances from Jujubee and Ginger Minj. The two are natural together, have great comic timing, and provide a level of heart that excuses all of the silliness whirling around them and keeps everything grounded. These two characters need another film together, hopefully with a better writer. Some of the actual jokes aren’t bad and the drag characters deliver them with all of the attitude one would expect, especially RuPaul and the First Class Glamazonians.
Stop! That! Train! is likely to be left out of the Oscar race this year (but should also be spared Razzies – except maybe Charo who should have been hysterically charming, but isn’t). It’s not a bad way to spend an hour and a half, especially if you find yourself waiting for someone to make you a pair of petit pants in a Tiajuana drag club.
Carry on coffin, multiple tornadoes, the miracle of birth, Sarah Michelle Gellar face punch, gratuitous misogyny, deliberate cheap visual effects, rousing dance number, rapidly falling poll numbers
Originally from Seattle Washington, land of mist, coffee and flying salmon, Mrs. Norman Maine sprang to life, full grown like Athena, from Andy’s head during a difficult period of life shortly after his relocation to Alabama.
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