Hoffer ties Helen and Madeline to a lineage of beloved bad women who dared to be both divinely stylish and unrepentantly ambitious.
That sentiment is echoed by one of the film’s biggest fans: Drag Race Season 5 winner Jerick Hoffer, whose drag persona, Jinkx Monsoon, embodied Streep’s acid blonde for a Death Becomes Her-themed photo shoot, and featured the film at the center of Hoffer’s biographical documentary Drag Becomes Him.
“I think it’s only multiplied exponentially since that movie was made.”Ĭampbell is also the chief creative officer of World of Wonder, a “largely gay” production company-it produces Drag Race-that places Death Becomes Her on “the short list of movies that inspire us every day.” Though they’re technically cast as villains in the film, Drag Race executive producer Tom Campbell sees them as sympathetic figures: the movie was “ahead of its time in a lot of ways, because they have these conversations about looks, and what we’re willing to do to our bodies for beauty,” he told Vanity Fair. It’s no wonder that they break the rules of nature by taking a seductive serum to become flawless goddesses of glamor and youth. These are women-an aspiring writer and a fading actress-who are ignored by the world unless they are beautiful. “In our wildest dreams,” said Koepp, “the budget was about $5 million.” But once Universal sold Zemeckis on Death Becomes Her, their would-be B-movie began to blossom into something bigger, bolder, and more bizarre.įans do embrace Helen and Madeline for these very qualities. The pair imagined their project as a modest indie movie, perfect for big names of yesteryear like Ann Margaret, Tuesday Weld, and Dean Stockwell. “It felt like no risk whatsoever, because we both had nothing but credit-card debt to our names. “It was meant to be Night of the Living Dead, if George Cukor had directed it,” Koepp told Vanity Fair via e-mail. But this deliciously deranged dark comedy eventually found redemption in the embrace of the queer community, who have insured its legacy. Despite a big budget, juicy spectacle, and A-list leads, Death Becomes Her ended up fizzling on its 1992 release. His involvement attracted Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis, and Goldie Hawn. Yet its gleefully gruesome script attracted Robert Zemeckis, who, after making Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Back to the Future trilogy, was eager to take on something more mature and daring. Centered on a pair of celebrities-vain Helen and vainer Madeline-trapped in a rivalry fueled by jealousy and black magic, this outlandish parable written by Martin Donovan and David Koepp plays like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous meets Tales from the Crypt. It is no bloodfest, but uses its visceral visual language like a scalpel, both to shock and to fascinate, but also to illuminate, in what has been called "a deconstruction of the Yakuza genre." Crisply written with sharp dialogue and fully-realized characters that you don't often see in this sort of movie, the film is minimalist gangster storytelling at its finest.That Death Becomes Her was made at all feels like a miracle.
Stylish in its use of violence, the film is an engrossing character-led action thriller of the highest order. Escaping assassination, he and several others seek refuge in a remote beach house where he is forced to confront his own existential crisis. He's correct of course, and soon finds himself on the defensive, attacked from all sides, friend and foe alike. But Murakawa harbors suspicions that there's more going on than he's been told, and fears it might be a set-up. As the movie opens he's been sent to Okinowa by his crime lord boss, a kind of soldier-for-hire rented out to another gang, in a mission to help broker peace between rival clans. Kitano plays the Yakuza enforcer Murakawa, a stoic, stone-faced machiavellian anti-hero hoping to retire from a life of killing.