The Viva Voce Virus

The Viva Voce Virus (VVV) is a 2007 British film that is part mystery, part fantasy, part buddy movie and all glamorous. VVV is a deft satire on the hypocrisy that surrounds sexuality in the film industry. The supporting cast includes drag queens, diabolical flim directors, a faded starlet and a voodoo doll. The film has a 50s B-movie atmosphere and polari subtitles.

Festival Screenings
Plot synopsis

At Gay Andy's Resort and Hotel, the only drinks served are tall, blue and multi-fruit encrusted. The only appropriate morningwear is a pastel-coloured terrycloth bathrobe. All the men cross their legs at the knee. The only tunes are showtunes. This is a 1970s B-movie, complete with lo-fi special effects. Crash! Into this world tumble manly hunks Burt and Buddy, survivors of a car smash-up that has left them stranded, to their horror, in these all-gay environs. There's only one solution: these straight-as-a-die men are going to have to pass until they can escape.

Meanwhile, light years away in the vast reaches of turquoise space, a parallel universe exists - our own, year 2005. Ronnie is an actress who has just got her first big break - a leading role in a lesbian vampire B-movie. But Ronnie holds a secret close to her heart: she dates girls in real life, too. Despite her good luck in nabbing the role, Ronnie's life in general sucks: things aren't too enlightened on set; the assistant director Clark is a homophobic asshole; Ronnie's girlfriend Madeleine is exasperated with Ronnie's semi-closeted behaviour and, worst of all, bits of another disturbing world - Gay Andy's - are starting to leak into Ronnie's real life. Ronnie gets spooked, and in a frustrated moment constructs a voodoo doll in order to enact a petty revenge on Clark. Things go very, very wrong - Clark remains healthy, but her own life crumbles even further.

A latter-day Nancy Drew, Ronnie tracks down the magic shop where she bought her voodoo doll and complains that it never worked properly, and that very odd things are occurring in both her working and personal life. The creepy shop workers deny all knowledge of ever selling her a voodoo doll, and refer her to a mysterious temp agency that provided the worker who sold her the doll in the first place. When Ronnie finally arrives at the location for the recently liquidated Swizzlestick Temp Agency, she discovers an abandoned laboratory, and evidence that an ageing 1950s B-movie actress - Gloria LaFonche, also director of infamous 1970s camp classic Gay Andy’s 2 - was involved in manufacturing the malevolent blue Viva Voce Virus, a disease that seems to have its roots in Hollywood's yesteryear, a disease spread by the heterosexual screen kiss, a disease that makes screen actors shut up about their same-sex love affairs while trumpeting their heterosexual romances. When Ronnie starts to investigate why, the search leads her back to the mysterious Gloria LaFonche again - and possibly even to Ronnie’s current acting role in her own modern film. By now the parallel worlds are freely blending, and Ronnie's sense of reality is truly threatened when she finds herself in the übercamp world of Gay Andy's! preparing for a showdown between herself and Gloria LaFonche; between herself and Buddy and Burt; between herself and the Hollywood practice of closeting gay and lesbian actors; between herself and the malevolent blue Viva Voce Virus; between herself and camp stereotypes and between herself and... herself.

Quotes

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu