Like the love child of "Absolutely Fabulous" and every novel Jacqueline Susann's ever written, "Girls Will Be Girls" is an 80-minute festival of campy trash, hilarious one-liners, and bitchy, catty women. The only catch this time is that the women are all played by men.
Evie (Jack Plotnick) is a washed-up B-movie actress who is decidedly not aging gracefully. She lives with Coco (Clinton Leupp), her more grounded friend who functions mainly as Evie's maid and abuse magnet. Into their lives walks their new roommate Varla (Jeffery Roberson), an aspiring starlet whose late mother Marla (also Roberson in flashbacks) was also Evie's most hated acting rival. All of them have dreams, of course. Evie's dreams involve drinking as many martinis as she can and then having plenty of sex with anyone available. Coco still pines for the hunky abortion doctor that operated on her many years ago. Varla hopes to become the actress that her mother couldn't while dealing with the advances of Evie's gorgeous but microscopically-endowed son Stevie (Ron Mathews). Of course, there are hidden motives galore, and more than one mean-spirited one-liner.
The gimmick of this film, that all the women are played by men, is never as overstated as you may think. After all, the characters are all female, and they are treated in the story as if they are female. It's only slightly different than young boys performing the female roles in Shakespeare's plays. The camp value of the movie focuses not on the drag spectacle, but on the unrelenting melodrama and silliness of the plot, taking the elements of ridiculous films like "Valley Of The Dolls" and upping them to a level so ludicrous, they can only be considered comedy. That the framework of the film makes all of these developments seem perfectly natural and realistic is a credit to director and writer Richard Day.
The actors are all quite game and in on the absurdity of their surroundings. Plotnick is quite humorous, dropping the most mean-spirited one-liners you'll ever laugh at, and the clips of Evie performing in the 60's stinker "Asteroid" resemble nothing less than Morgan Fairchild on quaaludes. Leupp reprises the role of Coco from his scene-stealing moments in the movie "Trick", and he imbues the character both with a humorous sense of bad luck and an immediately sympathetic personality. Roberson is not quite as spectacular as his co-stars, but he gives the naive, trusting Varla a great heart and a hilarious scene involving opera and cheese in a can. Even Mathews is great, all melodramatic soap hunk and hair product.
While the movie receives high marks for style, including efficient and effective set design and a very nice score, it's a very loud movie in the sense that every scene is turned up to 11. While this works most of the time, even at the film's short running time, it tends to strain. The ending veers sharply away from comedy into deep melodramatic territory, and even though it is diffused quite handily, the film almost drowns in TV-movie-of-the-week sap before the mood lightens again. Also, some may find the hostile attitudes of some of the characters, mainly Evie and to a degree Coco, to be too off-putting for comfort. Evie, especially, is one of the most unsympathetic characters you'll meet in a film this year.
Regardless, the film is hilarious and immensely entertaining. A high recommendation for anyone who likes divas, camp, or catty fun. And don't forget to bring the cheese. 8 out of 10.
