DRUG MULE
A film review by Will FitzHugh
Copyright 1997 Will FitzHugh
This film starts out as the thematic sequel to the 1995 film festival hit 'Flesh Suitcase'. In that film, two men swallow balloons full of heroin in order to smuggle it from Malaysia to the States. The majority of the movie takes place in a hotel as the men wait for the balloons to re-emerge. One of the men is a first-timer and the plot unfolds as the more experienced one relates stories and advice from past runs. The hotel is populated with go-go girls, an apocalypse-obsessed religious freak and the eccentric manager and his dog, all of whom get swept up in the plot. Eventually, a balloon comes up missing and the drug's owners show up, looking for someone to blame. The movie succeeds on most fronts with a blend of black humor, sharp dialog, competant acting and nearly ridiculous plot details. The violent conclusion is a bit disjointed, but the film is a welcome, personalized look at the pawns in the worldwide drug trade.
The follow-up, 'Drug Mule', pushs the suspension of disbelief even further. The two drug runners, this time a man and a woman, use a donkey as their 'flesh suitcase', loading the beast's digestive tract up with well-wrapped heroin. Once over the border Mexican border into Arizona, the two hole up at a ranch to wait for the results of their scheme. As in 'Flesh Suitcase', the details of the plot are exposed in a series of flashbacks as the veteran woman and the neophyte man pass the time. This doesn't last long, however.
The plot starts to twist unrecognizably as the donkey turns out to be more than it appears. William S. Burroughs' 'The Place of Dead Roads' seems to be an inspiration as the ranch soon becomes populated with the ghosts of indians and gunfighters and competing spys from unnamed and possibly extraterrestrial sources. The donkey (or whatever), now able to talk, shrink to half its original size and mentally control anybody past puberty, has assimilated the heroin and sets up a pre-teen drug empire at the ranch to feed his massive habit.
The beast uses the two runners as bait to get their bosses under his control and soon pushes his influence worldwide. There are some darkly comic scenes of children negotiating with American and Middle Eastern drug kingpins. The plot trys to stay on course as the two original characters try to escape the beast and get back to reality, but they (and us) are in way too deep. The movie goes nearly out of control in a wigged-out space opera across the solar system as the beast and his army of prepubescent psychotics fight it out against the real intergalactic government power (the Leptoids), an organization that claims that the CIA and KGB are its 'tiniest, most insignificant field offices'. Good, twisted design (David Lynch would have been proud, even scared) makes up for a small budget (think 'Doctor Who' if designed by Francis Bacon and H. R. Giger as a boy).
'Drug Mule' lasts for almost three hours and I had a splitting headache after I saw it. Don't let that deter you, though. Do what you have to do prepare yourself; it probably won't help, but take a few painkillers before you sit down. The plot and characters, the main building blocks for most movies, become secondary to the overriding vision and horror of the scenario. This film is the most powerful piece of modern cinema since, well, since there has been modern cinema. To properly view this movie, it should be viewed through a telescope while being projected on the dark side of the moon with the soundtrack being spliced directly into your otic nerves. No shit.
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