It’s Unstreamable! Where Jas Keimig and Chase Burns recommend movies and TV shows you can't watch on major streaming services in the United States. We post on Wednesdays unless we’re tired or busy. This week, we’re posting on Thursday. Hehe.
Got a recommendation? Tell us at unstreamablemovies@gmail.com.
USA, 1972, 68 minutes, Dir. Ray Harrison
There's a kind of gay tension at the beginning of All About Eve, the 1950 film starring Bette Davis, probably her most remembered film. A Joseph Mankiewicz movie (he also directed Sleuth, Guys and Dolls, Cleopatra, etc etc etc), All About Eve focuses on an aging Broadway star named Margo, played by Davis, and her young fan named Eve, who begins to mimic and maybe even steal her career and life. The duo's initial flattery quickly escalates into Showgirls-level drama—and it's no accident that Showgirls is a lot like All About Eve. It’s textbook Camp. ("Bette Davis in All About Eve" is the 21st note in Susan Sontag's famous "Notes on 'Camp'" essay.)
So it seems inevitable that All About Eve would get the Gay Girls Riding Club treatment. In the early 1960s, a group of gay men and drag queens created what they called the Gay Girls Riding Club, a club that mostly threw social events but also filmed ambitious drag spoofs of famous Hollywood movies. The group previously did a Bette Davis film in 1963, called What Really Happened to Baby Jane, and over the next decade, they became popular among California's growing underground gay scene. They threw big costume parties and even "actual equestrian outings." And in 1972, they released a 68-minute spoof of All About Eve, but instead of being about Eve, it’s about Alice, a blonde twink. The first 15 or-so minutes are sort of boring, but then a fully nude guy shows up and it starts cooking. CHASE BURNS
Come see a rare screening of All About Alice and What Really Happened to Baby Jane this Saturday at SIFF Egyptian. (Or find it on DVD in Scarecrow’s LGBT section.)
USA, 2000, 45-minute episode, Created by Gregg Araki
All 45 minutes of Gregg Araki's This Is How the World Ends are bonkers. The very Y2K pilot he made for MTV in 2000 is jam-packed with dream sequences, a whacky mom, bus crashes, witchy lesbians, sad boys, people with names like Christmas and Magenta, a Chemical Brothers rave, sexy himbos, and a whole lot of desire—in other words, it's a classic Araki project. MTV promised Araki $1.5 million to shoot the pilot, but he ended up making it for half that when the funding couldn't come through. Unfortunately for me, MTV decided to pass on the surreal and horny teen series, relegating the pilot to drift around the internet.
Still, This Is How the World Ends is a look into Araki's brain at the time. Fresh off the release of the also unstreamable Splendor, this pilot reminds me a lot of Nowhere in that it's a queer and bizarre send-up of the kinds of original programming MTV aired back then. (Araki has referred to the episode as “Twin Peaks for MTV,” and David Lynch-collaborator Michael J. Anderson makes a wild cameo in the show.) Much of the plotline actually reappears in his 2010 Queer Palm-winning Kaboom, translated to a college setting. Eventually, Araki made a TV series for Starz called Now Apocalypse, which only got picked up for one season. Someone please get this man an HBO deal! JAS KEIMIG
The first and only episode of This Is How the World Ends is available on YouTube (which normally wouldn’t count as Unstreamable* but it’s the only way you can watch it).
*The fine print: Unstreamable means we couldn’t find it on Netflix, Hulu, Shudder, Disney+, or any of the other hundreds of streaming services available in the United States. We also couldn’t find it available for rent or purchase through platforms like Prime Video or iTunes. We don’t consider films on sites that interrupt with commercial breaks, like Tubi, to be streamable. Tubi is like Neu Cable. And yes, we know you can find many things online illegally, but we don’t consider user-generated videos, like unauthorized YouTube uploads, to be streamable.
