Still Desperate After All These Years

In the way good punk music inspires you to form a band, David Markey's Desperate Teenage Lovedolls makes it seem easy and fun to make your own movie. Created 10 years ago for the mere cost of Super 8 film and development at Thrifty's, this obviously homemade feature's surreal, out-of-focus quality turns low budget into high art. A kind of tribute to Foxes and Russ Meyers' films, the trash classic began as a weekend lark for 19-year-old Markey (of The Year Punk Broke fame), fellow scenesters Steve and Jeff McDonald of Redd Kross, Lovedoll's singer Jennifer Schwartz and her brother Jordan. A simple story of runaway girls who go to Hollywood and start a rock band, DTL pokes fun at the decadent '70s TV culture and sleazy record industry, while glorifying juvenile delinquency and an eighth-grade party mentality. All the uncool people in the film act retarded and are continually picked on by youths traveling in packs. Besides casting his friends (Vicki Peterson, Annette Zilinskas and Dez Cadena, among others), Markey used homeless people, paying them with bottles of Nighttrain. The Lovedolls, not an actual band when the film was made, lip-sync to music performed by Redd Kross with vocals by Spock from '70s all-girl group Backstage Pass. Following the screening, expect a set full of surprises by Redd Kross and a reunion of the original Lovedolls.

- Willy Banta