Super Slutty Movies: "The Smokers" (2000)
Who doesn’t want to watch a reverse-rape satire directed by a long-time porno auteur?
By: Toxicka Shock
ToxickaShock@gmail.com@ToxickaShock on Twitter
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It was the gap between AOL and social media, the gap between land lines and cell phones, the gap between Game Boy Color and the Xbox. The entirety of the year 2000 felt like one seismic shift in technology and cultural tastes, and as such, there were a LOT of instantly dated relics that got left behind in the dustbin of mass media.
“The Smokers” is a movie that reeks of 2000 iffiness. It’s a movie that tries to tilt its head towards the future, but it’s also a film that feels hopelessly tied to its time. On a conceptual level, looking back on the flick 22 years later it’s mind-numbing that it was financed in the first place, let alone actually produced. But considering the prevailing social tastes at that time, I suppose you have to give it a microscopic amount of credit for at least trying to address sex and gender issues that wouldn’t be commonplace in American movies for another 15 or so years.
Of course, there’s no way around it. “The Smokers” is not a good movie and even two decades later its premise feels tasteless and tactless. Despite the big names associated with the movie, the whole thing feels like a half-cooked idea that ran out of steam (and funding) with 30 minutes of runtime left, with a final act so uneven and a tonal shift so abrupt that it feels like an entirely different film than what the preceding 60 minutes seemed to lead to.
It’s hard to categorize “The Smokers” into a single genre. It’s a movie that seems to fall into the high school black comedy vein, a’la “Heathers” and “Jawbreaker,” but it’s a movie that gets a lot more melodramatic and serious in the final 30 minutes. Even the comedic elements of the movie tend to bounce around wildly, at times feeling like a relatively staid late 1990s teen comedy and at others a very provocative, almost transgressive sex satire. It’s a movie that suffers from a very severe case of identity crisis, and that seems all but unavoidable considering the crux of the plot - long story short, “The Smokers” is a stoner comedy anchored around female-on-male rape as some sort of women’s empowerment parody.
Yeah, it’s not the most appetizing premise for a comedy, I think we can all agree. But as unsavory as the concept may be, its execution is much worse; ultimately, this is one relentlessly crude straight-to-video offering that assumes a particularly virulent misogynistic streak the more it tries to tout “girl power” in its gloriously wrongheaded fashion.
The core of the film is pretty standard material. There’s a boarding school in Wisconsin and a clique of four female students spend their afternoons getting high and talking about how badly they want to get laid. Interestingly enough, the primary character is played by Dominique Swain of “Lolita” infamy - although this time around, she gets to play a slightly *less* insistent jail bait caricature. Also involved in the shenanigans is the vastly underrated Busy Phillips, who sets the plot into motion after she gets stranded on the side of the road after a one-night stand with some rich dude in a limo.
She’s tired of just being “a girl” and not having the same sort of sexual power over men. So after a couple of bong rips, she decides it would be a great idea if she and her gal pals started wearing leather bondage gear, donning Halloween masks and GANG RAPING random frat boys at gun point.
Of course, the first encounter is played strictly for laughs, with the victim blinded, bound and sexually assaulted on top of a mound of corn cobs. Granted, our antagonists at least have the good graces to roll a condom on their victim before committing a sex crime - lest this already overreaching and incapable movie find a way to toss in an abortion subplot in there while it’s at it.
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| Well, at least the makeup in the movie is cool. |
Perhaps you can see the self-defeating pointlessness of the rape culture inversion plot dynamic here. Even when it comes times to paint the female leads of the movie as the aggressors, they’re never really posited as “serious” threats capable of doing egregious harm to their victims. Instead of coming off as empowered through whatever perverse mental gymnastics the script wants audiences to employ, the female leads in the movie just come of as sad, misguided and hopelessly impotent, a gaggle of unconfident broads too unsure and inefficient to really do any considerable damage. Indeed, for all the “girl power” self-championing the movie does, the story itself boils down to a predictably *anti-feminist* screed that might as well scream “see, it IS all penis envy” at ear-splitting volume.
That’s evident when Busy’s character reconnects with the aforementioned rich old guy and gets brutally raped on the hood of his limo - complete with ominous, droning music in the background to let the audience know, rather condescendingly, that this is the “bad” kind of rape we should all be opposed to. There’s even enough time to sneak in some patently early 2000s homophobia into the script, as one character makes a painfully unfunny AIDS joke upon learning that a male she desires is in fact sleeping with another man.
The film completely implodes in the final act, with one of our heroines accidentally shooting and killing a male victim mid-rape. Without giving away too much of the threadbare story, the plot twist creates a rift between the weed-lovin’ dormitory dwellers, which in turn sets up a virtually out of nowhere denouement involving a raging inferno that seems less like a deus ex machina than it does a way for the screenwriter to mercy kill the entire production. And on top of all of that, they actually have the chutzpah to tack a HAPPY ending on this thing; because as we all know, just because you did a little bit of gang-raping in your teenage years doesn’t mean you have to feel guilty about it for the rest of your life.
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| in case you were wondering what girls are doing in the bathroom for such long periods of time, obviously, they're covering up a rape-related homicide. |
Perhaps the most surprising thing about “The Smokers” is that it was directed by a woman. Although the titles give the credit to “Christina Peters,” the real auteur behind the camera was an individual named Kat Slater, who has spent the bulk of her career - you guessed it - shooting unabashed pornography with such lurid monikers as 2004’s”Cum Swappers 4” and no less than 12 different movies with the words “Young Sluts” in their titles. Peters also wrote the screenplay for “The Smokers,” so it makes the end product all the more befuddling and perplexing. Here’s a filmmaker who had the opportunity to cut through the trappings and tropes of pornography and make a genuinely pro-feminist cult classic that deconstructed the harsh, openly misogynistic worldviews rampant in “male gaze” raunch-feasts like “Tomcats” and “Saving Silverman” - yet the final result is a movie that feels like a dime a dozen teen comedy with its potential satirical edges blunted to the dullness of a butter knife. Clearly, somebody got cold feet about the material, and the finished film feels like it betrays virtually everything Peters seemed to have wanted to do with the concept.
To say that “The Smokers” as a whole is a vast disappointment is perhaps being too kind to the material. Still, as bad as the movie may be I suppose we can at least try to champion it a little bit for taking a lot of chances. As hard as it may be to believe, back in 2000 the whole marijuana shtick was still considered controversial, to the point that mainstream movie studios were afraid to even market stoner flicks like “Half Baked” as the pot homages they truly were. And it’s very, very rare even today to see stoner comedies that by and large revolve around a female cast, so I guess we can celebrate “The Smokers” for going against the grain there.
At the time the film started making the video store rounds the term “rape culture” was hardly en vogue in U.S. society. Indeed, mainstream films were reluctant to even address rape as a serious social problem, let alone delve into the lifelong traumas such inhumanities create. Rather than depict rapes as heinous crimes that produce incurable psychological ailments, they were more likely to be used as cheap plot devices - i.e., a female character is *about* to get raped, that is until the male hero of the film shows up and saves her from assault. It’s a trope that runs the gamut from “Robocop” to “Back to the Future,” and “The Smokers” at least attempts to comment on just how tasteless and insulting the melodramatization of the “rape rescue” motif is ... albeit by completely killing its own message by depicting female-on-male rape as something not only hilarious, but in a perverse way a fulfillment of misogynistic male fantasies.
The topic of “rape” in cinema is a difficult one. There have been scores of essays written about whether or not films like “A Clockwork Orange” or “I Spit On Your Grave” are endorsements or condemnations of feminism, and frankly, a movie as irrelevant as “The Smokers” probably isn’t worthy of a thorough academic deconstruction. That said, perhaps the one redemptive quality of “The Smokers” is that, whether by design or happenstance, it does manage to put a spotlight on Hollywood’s hypocrisy when it comes to the thematics of sexual assault.
I was going to say that there’s no way the inverse of the “The Smokers” could be made, until I realized that there actually ARE scores of movies out there that not only belittle the crime of male-on-female rape but to a certain extent celebrate it. “Revenge of the Nerds,” “Sixteen Candles” and “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” are all films that trivialize, play down and attempt to normalize rape as social occurrences, usually with the faux moral reasoning of “well, since she was drunk or on drugs, it was *her* fault.” As bad a film as “The Smokers” may be, it’s never a movie that celebrates the actions of its anti-heroines, nor does it ever seek to justify what they do throughout the film as reasonable or harmless.
For all of its flaws, “The Smokers” never depicts its characters as “empowered” by their actions. And that’s something that should always be the case when it comes to depictions of rape in movies, irrespective of the genre or underlying gender politics.
XOXO, TOXICKA
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