Twisted Tale
All About Evil, Peaches Christ's traveling circus of bloody fun, coming to Tempe
By Neil Cohen

Joshua Grannell shares a love for single screen art house theaters with the main character in his film, All About Evil, a twisted tale of a mousy librarian who will kill to save her late father’s movie house.

For years, Grannell’s drag alter ego, Peaches Christ, hosted Midnight Mass movie screenings at San Francisco’s Bridge Theater. But if Peaches Christ killed anyone in the process, she isn’t telling where she stuffed the bodies.

During the past 14 years he’s lived in San Francisco, Grannell said a dozen or so great old single screen movie theaters closed around town. “There was this paranoia and anxiety about losing ‘our churches,’” he said. “When you’re a cult movie enthusiast, these theaters are your church, it’s where you go to worship what you love. I really think communities should fight harder to save these old movie theaters.”

A one-night-only screening of All About Evil will be Sept. 17 at MADCAP Theaters in Tempe.

All About Evil isn’t Peaches Christ’s first run-in with murderous movie maven Deborah Tennis (Natasha Lyonne). Grannell directed a short film called Grindhouse, which laid out the character and plot he’d use for his first feature film.

Grannell said he came up with the story as a way to see if his audiences would appreciate a film where Peaches and her drag queen buddies weren’t front and center, and the great response helped ease his insecurities.

Now he’s is tirelessly traveling the country promoting his film. “The people who get the film really get it,” he explained, referencing 1980s films like Microwave Massacre and Chopping Mall as weird inspiration. He said he thinks filmmakers back then had more freedom than they do in today’s corporate culture.

“Getting financing for All About Evil when you’re a big giant drag queen who’s never made a feature film before is not easy,” he said during a recent telephone interview from his parents’ home in Annapolis, Md., prior to All About Evil’s gala Baltimore premiere.

“It’s very, very strange,” he explained about bringing Peaches home. “There are people from my high school coming to the American Film Institute next week to see my movie, and many of them, I don’t know if they’ve ever even seen Peaches, much less met her. I went to a very conservative Catholic high school here in Annapolis, and the hometown newspaper just ran a two page story about me. Oh my God, it’s just so surreal,” he said laughing. He said Catholic school “for better or worse, helped form Peaches Christ.”

It takes a great cast to pull off the campy, yet often horrifying, hi-jinks Grannell dreamed up. In addition to Lyonne, who plays her fame-hungry serial killer to perfection, Grannell convinced his friends Mink Stole and Cassandra Peterson (Elvira) to take full-scale roles (which Peterson never does).

Peterson “gave us the biggest gift by letting us make her do stuff she didn’t want to do. She’s frickin’ hot and she wears great, nice outfits, and we put her in crappy Old Navy clothing.”

Peterson’s biggest challenge was to keep Elvira-isms from creeping in, and Grannell is proud of the Movie Macabre host’s performance.

And how was Peaches Christ to direct? “A total bitch,” he said, laughing “It sounds convenient to say it, but it was the hardest character to direct, and I never thought about it before filming. Peaches, more than anyone, ended up on the cutting room floor.”

VITAL STATISTICS

All About Evil
9 p.m. Sept. 17
MADCAP Theaters
730 S. Mill Ave., Tempe
Tickets: $10; VIP $20
www.madcaptheatrers.com

Meet-and-greet with Mink Stole

5-7 p.m. Sept. 17 at IcePics Video Bar, 3108 E. McDowell Road, Phoenix.
Peaches Christ will join the cast of The Follies: Not Your Typical Drag Show at 10 p.m. Sept. 18 at IcePics.

Review: All About Evil

If a slasher movie can also be a love letter, then All About Evil is it.
Writer/director Joshua Grannell, aka Peaches Christ, clearly loves independent movie theaters, creative misfits and cheesy horror films from the ’70s and ’80s.

All About Evil is a worthy successor to such classics as April Fools Day, Popcorn and Chopping Mall, with plenty of inspiration from John Waters, Herchel Gordon Lewis, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and other great scream queens.

All About Evil opens with one of those classic flashback scenes, where little Debby Tennis is humiliated in front of a bunch of matinee-goers at her father’s movie palace. Twenty-five years later, Deborah’s father has died, leaving her (now played by But I’m A Cheerleader’s Natasha Lyonne) and her ancient projectionist (Jack Donner) to run the dilapidated Victoria Theater, in addition to her job as a mousy librarian.

One night, Debrorah’s wicked step-mother (Julie Caitlin Brown) shows up, demanding that she sign away her rights to the beloved art house and Deborah, in a cathartic rage, stabs her to death with a ballpoint pen. The surveillance footage accidentally gets projected to the audience of gore-hounds, who go crazy for it. A snuff movie star is born.

Soon, Deborah is trapping and killing people on film, aided and abetted by a band of cinema misfits that includes a pair of super-creepy twins. Even Evelyn, Deborah’s sweet coworker from the library (the iconic Mink Stole) isn’t safe. Only her biggest fan Steven (the adorable Thomas Dekker) is catching on to Deborah’s secret to success, putting himself and his sexy mom, Linda (Elvira herself, Cassandra Peterson), in danger.

Grannell does a great job with his first feature, even managing to inject a little bit of the fabulous Peaches into the mix. The cast is smart and game for whatever craziness Grannell has planned.

I was particularly fascinated by Peterson, who has a marvelous screen presence even out of her Elvira drag. Natasha Lyonne is wild as Deborah, fully embracing the character’s total insanity.

All About Evil will make you long for those bygone days before horror movies meant Hostel-type sadism and buckets of ultra-realistic gore. All About Evil is shocking, funny and even scary at times, but in an “only in the movies” kind of way.