On Tubi, I watched Outrageous!, a 1977 Canadian comedy-drama written and directed by Richard Brenner. The film was adapted from "Making It," a short story by Canadian writer Margaret Gibson from her 1976 collection The Butterfly Ward, and she and star Craig Russell had been roommates in real life, which the story was based on.
The story is about Robin (Russell) a hairdresser and aspiring drag queen, and his best friend, a schizophrenic woman named Liza (Hollis McLaren). Robin does costumes and makeup for local drag performers, and wants to perform himself, but is too shy and insecure to take his career further. He specializes in doing performances of divas like Carol Channing, Judy Garland, Mae West, and Ethel Merman, as well as a show playing Joan Crawford and Bette Davis characters. He is mocked by his closeted hair salon boss for being slightly chubby, and saying that the women won't want to have their hair done by gay men, and a customer yells at Robin for making her look like the Elizabeth Taylor version of Cleopatra, because he wanted to give more glamour to the local women in their Toronto neighborhood.
Liza was released from the institution in which she was being held, and kept on a strict schedule of several prescription pills to take, including a lot of Valium. She has hallucinations of the "Bonecrusher" lying on top of her, and Robin will help her by miming with her to push the weight of the delusion off of her. They become roommates, and Liza meets with a social worker, who advises her to not become pregnant, seeing Liza as too mentally fragile to handle being a mother. But she has various flings with men, mostly cab drivers, and eventually becomes pregnant, and wants to keep the baby, against her social worker and her mother's wishes. Her mother will blame Robin for Liza trying to be more independent, and calling him by homophobic slurs. The friends are also trying to make it to New York City so that Robin can perform in Manhattan clubs and Liza can be on her own more.
The film feels very much of its time, with a title that makes the film feel more silly than it really is, and I liked it more as a historical curiosity, a film focused on gay characters and drag culture with people who, though they live in Toronto, feel like they're in a small town with everyone in each other's business. I really liked the friendship between Robin and Liza, and how Robin is pushed to have more confidence in himself as a drag performer, and Liza is pushed to be more independent and not defined by her schizophrenia. The film felt very inspiring to be weird and one's authentic self, and not letting mental health issues keep them from living their lives.
I especially liked the finale, where Liza is confiding in Robin, and they have both talked about having had depression, and she feels dead inside, and he says, "You're Liza. You'll never be normal, but you're special. And you can have a hell of a good time. You know, there's only one thing. You're mad as a hatter, darling. But that's all right, because so am I. I've never known anyone who wasn't worth knowing who wasn't a positive fruitcake. We're all mad. You and me, are here to love and look after each other. You're not dead. You just have a healthy case of craziness."
Sadly, the director Richard Brenner and the star Craig Russell would succumb to AIDS both in 1990, so the film does feel like a capsule of gay life pre-AIDS in the late 1970s. The film had a sequel in 1987 titled Too Outrageous!, and a stage musical was produced in Canada in 2000.
I really liked the film a lot, enjoying the quirky gem of the central friendship and the queer issues explored in the film, and am glad I checked it out.
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