My Father Is Coming

The best thing about this no-budget feature, in which a struggling young New York City actress receives an unwelcome visit from her uptight Bavarian father, is that it certainly doesn't follow any conventional formulas. Anything can happen in such a small, homemade movie, and it hardly matters when, in this case, nothing really does. The anxiety over dad's visit disappears the moment he arrives; he's too busy flirting with flaky porno star/sex therapist Annie Sprinkle to bother with his wayward daughter, even after he catches her in bed with another woman. The lack of any dramatic conflict makes watching the film an almost negligible experience; it disappears from memory almost before it disappears from the screen. But for all its shortcomings (iffy acting, non-existent production values, and a plot which never develops into anything more than an outline) the film was still a worthwhile antidote to all the overpriced, over-hyped blockbusters in release at the same time.

A German immigrant's father is coming to visit her in New York. She told him she was an actress and is married. In reality she's unemployed and still not sure of her sexual orientation. So she gets a gay best friend to play her husband. Her father arrives and things barrel out of control.

I caught this back in 1991 at a Gay & Lesbian Film Festival and have never forgotten it. I wasn't expecting much but I was pleasurably surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It was shot on a VERY low budget and looked pretty bad but the story and characters were very interesting and it had twists and turns that I didn't see coming. The acting was dead on target too--not one bad performance here. I also found the protagonist's sexual awakening to be realistic and well done. We also had one of the producers at our screening and she told us how hard it was to make this--some actors dropped out of the movie at the last minute and they had to scramble to find replacements. Still it turned out beautifully.

Good luck finding a print of this one, but if you get a chance it's well worthing viewing. I give it a 9.