"Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?", or "Mother, Why Am I Watching A Lesbian Orgy!?"
Every once in a while, I become extremely obsessed with something. I have always been this way and there is no way around it. Call it brain damage, call it inability to multitask. I usually tell people that I have an extremely addictive personality, and this is the most obvious example of said statement. There are things that have come into my life and stayed there forever, while there are some others that have come and gone—multiple times, even. Whether one or the other, when I am the victim of one of these hyperfixation episodes, I can barely talk about anything else.
This time, it all started a couple of months ago, when I gathered my two best friends in order to watch one of my favorite movies about one of the best movies in the entire planet: The Disaster Artist (2017), starring James and Dave Franco and directed by James Franco himself. Tommy Wiseau, Greg Sestero and The Room are an entirely different conversation, but if you don’t know what I’m talking about, please do yourself a favor and stop reading to quickly google the best worst movie in the history of cinema. You won’t regret it.
But anyways, let me go back to how I started watching The Disaster Artist and ended up watching a vampire lesbian orgy.
Though I was familiar with James Franco’s work and I fell in love with this particular movie ever since it came out, something happened that day I played The Disaster Artist for my friends that made me unable to stop thinking about him ever since—helped by one of my best friend’s admiration of this man’s incredible attractiveness. The thing with James Franco, and what most definitely separates him from the rest of the pretty boys from Hollywood, is that he is a man who has done it all.
He might be conventionally handsome, but he is also a weirdo. He’s been in blockbusters, indie movies, movies he has directed and produced himself. He can play the love interest, the dumbass or the villain. He is an actor, an Academy Award host and nominee, a producer, a director, a writer, a painter, a musician, a professor and a doctor. Next to Seth Rogen, he almost started World War III with a dumb movie about murdering Kim Jong-un. He admitted that he sleeps about three hours per night and that he doesn’t even make it to bed because he doesn’t see the point in it, and you can always find him reading several books at the same time while shooting a movie—while also reportedly writing a book.
He is a Renaissance man like I have never seen one in my life, but sometimes, whether because we can’t keep up with the way his mind works or because he is not afraid of anything, he does the most questionable things. And though I knew this already—I mean, most of us have watched Spring Breakers or any of the Rogen-Franco-McBride-Robinson-Baruchel-Hill movies—it wasn’t until I sat down to watch the entirety of his filmography that I learned the extent of this remark.
In case you don’t know what I was talking about earlier: here are (from left to right) James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel and Danny McBride. This picture is taken from This Is The End (2013), one of the funniest movies I have ever watched in my entire life. This team of actors have done several movies together and, particularly those with James Franco and Seth Rogen, they are absolutely insane and incredibly hilarious.
Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? (2016) is the remake of a 1996 Lifetime movie of the same title. For those of you not familiar with this TV movie starring Tori Spelling and based on the novel by Claire R. Jacobs, Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? (1996) tells the story of Laurel, a girl obsessed with her manipulative boyfriend, Kevin. Seeing how toxic and violent he progressively gets, Laurel’s mother decides to intervene to save her daughter from the danger she thinks she is in.
Tori Spelling and Ivan Sergei in the 1996 movie adaptation of Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?
This newer version of the movie, directed by Melanie Aitkenhead and written by James Franco—who reportedly took inspiration from Will Farrell’s Lifetime movie A Deadly Adoption—and Amber Coney, tries to be both an adaptation and a parody. It introduces us to Leah, who is in a relationship with Pearl—who happens to be a “nightwalker”, also known as a vampire. Leah’s mother, played by Tori Spelling herself here, sees the danger in the relationship and, the same way we can see in the original movie, tries to save her daughter from it. Of course, I wouldn’t be talking about a lesbian vampire orgy if it wasn’t because Pearl isn’t the only vampire included in the movie, and you will end up watching a female-lead theatre adaptation of Macbeth that includes unnecessarily sexual scenes with a bunch of girls—while James Franco, who plays the teacher in charge of the theatre group, watches the entire thing and even adds a cheeky I did not direct that.
Don’t get me wrong: I quite liked this movie. Not because I’m a fan of lesbian orgies, but because it makes you unable to look away. Even when you see all those questionable things that take place in the movie—because the bad acting and the lesbian scenes are not the only thing that would make you ask yourself what the hell are you watching— Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? is still good enough for you to enjoy the entire thing. Ironically though, it is the fact that it is too good that could make it a failure to the expert eye. Perhaps it would be a better movie if the plot was worse, if the characters were even more of a parody than they are—precisely what makes Tommy Wiseau’s The Room the immortal piece of cinematic history that it is.
Mother, May I…? tries too hard to have some deeper meaning, to introduce the queer history discourse through lectures I would never imagine in an actual university—and I am saying this as a Culture and Literature graduate; I would’ve been more enthusiastic about my lectures if there was some professor telling me Dracula was gay as hell. You can most definitely tell that James Franco’s indescribable way of seeing things is behind this remake of the story, but unlike other projects of his, this one does not quite make it as a movie that will give everyone delight.
James Franco behind the scenes, while filming the surreal university lectures about monsters and sexuality.
However, I repeat: I liked this movie. I wouldn’t be writing all this nonsense if I hadn’t liked it. Even when I am mesmerized by a movie only because of its shock value, I don’t bother unless I enjoy the experience. Yes, of course it helps that I get to see James Franco addressing his gay agenda and that I am a little bit too passionate when it comes to vampires, but I genuinely think you should give this movie a try. The production value is quite good, especially considering this is a Lifetime movie, and this is way different from most TV movies. And I don’t know about you, but I like to spice up my spooky vibes from time to time.
Was I looking for an excuse to write about James Franco? Maybe. Was I considering a review about This Is The End but realized that maybe this wasn’t the time and place to do so—though I am still thinking about it? Most definitely.
But if “lesbian vampire orgy” doesn’t make you even a little bit curious…
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