With the (partly still useful) streaming Internet and a blessed plethora of campy Bay Area vintage cult movie nights at local theaters, it’s tough these days to find undiscovered “midnight” gems that can still make an audience’s jaw drop at their pure cinematic preposterousness. Once you’ve seen one Plan 9 from Outer Space… well, then you’ve seen Plan 9 from Outer Space.
But Media Meltdown‘s monthly Movie Madhouse, every third Sunday at Cinema SF’s 4 Star Theater, still manages to hit giddy new heights of WTF, mostly by reaching beyond the tarnished silver screen.
“We discovered a magic formula that we launched last year, which is largely us scouring our many different channels for films and shows that have never played theaters, or were extremely limited runs,” says Piranha Psychotronica, one half of the Media Meltdown production team. The night has seen everything from “extremely low budget Canadian cross-dressing vampire movie” Draghoula to Lizzie Borden’s classic 1983 radical intersectional feminist dystopian docudrama Born in Flames.
“We’ve played an early DVD game, where we actually stopped the DVD when it asked something, and the audience voted on which narrative choice to make,” chimes in Piranha’s partner Kafka X. “We did a big mega-edit porn parody film series, where we took out most of the hardcore sex, but kept all of the plot, which was just very surreal,” they laughed.
On 4/20, the pair hosted a dialog-free French nature documentary called Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe. “It’s just bugs,” says Kafka. “An hour and a half of bugs, but it is so watchable. These bugs get up to so many hijinks, and it is really the perfect stoner movie. Even when we just showed the trailer last month, people were losing their minds. We love the classic stoner movies like Smiley Face and Cheech and Chong, but they can be really stressful! These bugs just draw you in.”
(The next Movie Madhouse, on May 18, is an interactive “Choose Their Fate” screening of Final Destination 3: Thrill Ride Edition. Media Meltdown is also reviving the beloved Underground Short Film Festival this November, which midnight movie maven Peaches Christ and others ran from 2003 to 2015.)
But we’re here on Zoom to talk space, specifically Select Thine Own Journey… in Space! (Thu/1-May 10, Oasis SF), which applies the pair’s penchant for choosing one’s own adventure to a wild, cosmos-saving quest—in drag, of course.
“Interactive games and role-playing adventures are definitely among our favorite things,” says Piranha. “We both love Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder, and of course there’s the Choose Your Own Adventure books, and we’re totally sci-fi/fantasy nerds. For this show, you’ll find influences from Star Wars, “Star Trek,” The Matrix, RoboCop, Tron, even Never Ending Story. We’re just pulling from everything. It’s a magical mishmash world, but there are some Big Decisions the audience must make.
“We’ve done Select Thine Own Adventure shows before, with different topics. We had the first one all ready to go when the pandemic hit, and it was delayed for a couple years. Then it was supposed to be in Sketchfest 2022, but the second wave of COVID came—we thought the show was cursed. But every time it got canceled, we re-envisioned it entirely, and it just kept getting bigger. So finally, we debuted the show in Sketchfest 2023, and have done it twice now at Oasis as well. So this is our fourth run.”
Previous “Select” shows have been wizardly tweaks of the Tolkien-esque magickal fantasy adventures they adore. This time around, however, they’re going all-in on the sci-fi end, following a spaceship crew as it faces dastardly enemies and participatory challenges, with Kafka playing an “omniscient hacker” who stops the action with the help of a “sign wench” robot, aka signbot, when the audience must decide the course of the cosmic narrative. Each of the six “episodes” features a different local drag celebrity protagonist—Snaxx, Nicki Jizz, Lisa Frankenstein, Mudd the Two Spirit, Kai Kai Bee Michaels, Coco Buttah—and of course incredible costumes and hilarious special effects.
“There’s usually three to four different endings,” says Piranha, who writes the scripts. “And in act one, there’s always at least one big, dramatic choice that seems innocuous at the time, but will immediately eliminate an entire array of possibilities. It introduces the chaos of a game show to the action. But of course, that can be chaos for the performers as well, many of whom are just stepping in for that night. I basically give them a half page of notes, and away we go.”
“There’s a big overarching theme this year of artificial intelligence and capitalism,” says Kafka.
“We’ve also got a RoboCop-esque character in a police patrol unit who goes by the name PP69. And you also meet PP420 at a later point in the show,” says Piranha.
“It’s a very highbrow show,” Kafka laughs.
Piranha has worked in theater since they were young—in college, they met Peaches Christ and joined her stage team, later working with the Thrill Peddlers troupe as well before moving on to work with D’Arcy Drollinger and Oasis. When Piranha and technical/fabrication wiz Kafka first teamed up (they’re married now) they soon selected their own journey together of putting on drag events, including the wild 2018 “Nicolas Cage versus Jeff Goldblum: A Drag Show” at the Stud, which sent up the conventional “pop girlie vs. pop girlie” nights that have taken over drag clubs. They also both hopped online as soon as the pandemic hit and hosted the first streaming drag shows, using Kafka’s tech know-how.
Media Meltdown has more big plans for the future. “We’re hoping to bring ‘Select Thine Own Journey’ to the silver screen, in its own movie form, with the actual DVD technology where the action stops and the audience yells out what they want to happen next,” Kafka says.
Piranha adds, “I’m a huge fan of classic San Francisco drag film Vegas in Space—what if that met Lord of the Rings, to create this glittering fantasy world full of San Francisco’s gorgeous drag creatures. We have so many funny and talented drag folk here who deserve a better star turn.”
SELECT THINE OWN JOURNEY… IN SPACE! Thu/1-May 10, Oasis, SF. More info here.
