It’s Finally Here: Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains on DVD

Posted in Feminism, Films, Music, Retrovirus, Reviews |

“I don’t put out.”

The bus-driving Rastafarian Lawn Boy has seen The Stains on TV and signs them up for the tour (and even gives them their own Suzi Quatro-esque cat suits). When one of The Metal Corpses ODs, Corinne uses the death and its media coverage to promote herself. The Stains and The Looters continue the tour, and the media promotion and fan fervor surrounding the Stains grows to a fever pitch. Billy tries to get the band’s sleazy manager to replace The Stains (“Girls can’t play rock and roll”) but he soon sees that Corinne is the next big thing. When Corinne finds out his plans, she teaches her band The Looters’ song, which they play in front of the audience, Corinne even miming Billy’s stage moves. The media hype continues and soon The Stains are headlining the tour with audiences growing as the band moves from playing a bar, to a mall, to an arena, where the red-black-and-white-clad audience looks like a weird combination of punk rock and a fascist rally. All the tickets have sold out. Has Corinne “sold out” too?

While the movie never made any money and perhaps soured Adler on directing (it was his last time in the director’s chair) it made an enormous impression on a lot of creative people, both known and unknown. Prominent names from the Riot Grrl movement are among the film’s fans. It was a Riot Grrl film before the genre title existed (not that female musicians hadn’t rocked and rolled before the nineties reared their grungy head). Both admirers as well as detractors of that scene, and certain women from it, seem find parallels to themselves within this movie. The film encourages girls to pick up an instrument and empower themselves.

Laura Dern as Jessica

When Laura Dern mentions in the DVD commentary track that perhaps the film influenced The White Stripes (both the color combinations and the line, “you’re just two white stripes”), Diane Lane dismisses the notion. But it does publicly raise an interesting question that was already on the minds of some devotees. The two main songs in this film were as memorable as any song from a mainstream musical. Many people were still singing it years after they saw the film. Even Steve Jones’ 90s band Neurotic Outsiders played it during their tours, and audience members loved it.

Yet with all of the adulation, there was always one sticking point: the film’s ending. It was interesting to find out via the special features that the movie’s music video-style “Hollywood ending” (which looks like it had a higher budget than the rest of the movie), was made and tacked on a year after the film’s wrap and the debut of MTV. The DVD also has a photo gallery and two commentary tracks. Having watched both it seems that the movie made a deeper impression on the fans than it did on anyone involved with the film. The commentary by Adler is worth watching, but he seems very removed from the project. Laura Dern and Diane Lane’s track is really entertaining and they have fun reminiscing, but neither really delves into the feminist empowerment messages or the warning against “selling out.” Nor do they mention that minor character Lawn Boy is really the film’s heart and conscience. Ironically, the hysterical Fee Waybill’s washed up, dinosaur rock character gives us perhaps the film’s most important message, “If you’re not yourself, you’re nobody.”

Additional Resources:

Buy the movie on Rhino.com here.

Check out this Fabulous Stains MySpace fan page.

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