About 30 years ago, I played the role of Pong Ping, the Chinese cook in a Western parody my theatre group did called Deadwood Dick.
In hindsight, I’m a little embarrassed that I played a role in yellowface. At the time I was bothered by something else, though it took me a while to figure out what. Then it came to me that while the show was a Western parody, the Pong Ping character was written perfectly straight. He spoke in broken English, cringed from the blackhearted, brutal villain, and had a doglike devotion to the virginal white lead. In short, a Chinese cook that would have fit into a real Western just easily—the equivalent of having a shuffling darkie character in a parody of a 1930s movie, but played exactly like a 1930s movie.
Since then, I’ve noticed other comedies that seem to think they’re parodies when they’re actually playing things straight. Case in point, one of this week’s time-travel (actually parallel world) films, DEEP IN THE VALLEY (2008).
The movie is an unfunny raunchy comedy about two loser buds. One works in a dead-end job and has a porn addiction; the other is trying to make something of himself but he’s shackled with that beloved figure of guy comedy writers, the Bitchy Girlfriend From Hell. But everything changes when they’re magically transported into a parallel world where the world works just like porn movies (for the record this appears to be “world inside a movie” rather than a real parallel world so it no more qualifies than Teen Beach Movie did).
I think there’s actually almost an idea there. For example, how do plumbers or pizza deliveries make a profit when they always wind up taking payment in sex? I’m not saying that would be good, but it would be more imaginative than anything in this pornoverse, which plays things perfectly straight (sorry). Women stand around discussing how they love taking showers together or big-chested sorority girls hold a fund-raiser car wash and get their clothes very, very wet … and that’s not actually funny (nor so sexy I’d have kept watching if it hadn’t been for the book).
At the same time, the movie doesn’t resemble real porn anywhere near enough. That’s a big mistake, because a parody of anything needs to look reasonably close to the source material. One of the things that frustrated me about Last Action Hero is that while some elements fit an action-movie world (every woman is incredibly hot, all phone numbers start with 555-) others (animated cartoon characters, Police Academy-type shticks) didn’t fit at all.
In Deep in the Valley, the main plot is that a male cop is hunting the guys down with the intent of getting to know them intimately and nonconsensually. While I’m not a porn expert, I find it hard to believe het male porn includes guy-on-guy rape (they’d have done better to stick to the female dominatrix cop as the hunter). And because this is a mainstream movie and not porn, for all the talk they never get beyond a hard R rating; there doesn’t even seem to be that much sex going on off-camera. It’s closer to a parody of a softcore sex comedy like H.O.T.S. or The Swinging Cheerleaders than something X-rated.
File this one in the “another ninety minutes of my life I’ll never get back” category.
