Tag Archives: Yiva Maria Thompson

Queer Films You Should Watch: Dyke Hard

When swedish director Bitte Andersson originally set out to make fake trailers of films that she wanted mainstream moviemakers to produce films geared toward communities other than white, straight men.

After struggling for a year just to end up with a two-minute trailer, she thought ‘why not mesh them all together into one giant genre-bending film.

The result is a twisted, fantastic mess of comedy, superheroes, musicals and B-movie sci-fi. Not complex enough?

Hell no. It’s a simple story. Dyke Hard, formed as a band of outcasts, has touched bottom after a flash of success and one hit song, Payback, and now the washed-up band is deserted by Riff (Lina Kurttila), its nasty lead singer with a Courtney Love mop of hair. Riff pledges revenge, fueling a villainous sub-plot

Dyke_hard_banner.cb404b7247562ecd4051f9bea319642e

As the group journeys across Sweden to a battle of the bands, Dyke Hard exploits every gag in the book – vain resentful bitchy lead, bartenders who long to be prison guards, absurd efforts to curse in American accents, a lesbian glory hole at a petrol station in the hinterlands, and a house haunted by Morgana, a lesbian zombie (Yiva Maria Thompson), and that’s before the last 500 kilometers of road.

maxresdefault (20)

After police catch the band with the body of Morgana, the group ends up in prison, on death row, the venue for a grand production number in orange jump sits – the new pink? – led by a cigar-chomping warden (Anitha Nygards) doing her twist on Helga, She–Wolf of the SS.

Andersson, who designed costumes and wrote many of the film’s songs, also appears in cameos, one of which shows her head being smashed to a bloody pulp. Scenes like that, not usual in such fare, should help the farce cross over to a young VOD crowd beyond the LGBT core.

Dyke Hard is an explosion of colour and uninhibited joy, matching Andersson’s vision of creating an empowering movie that makes viewers feel downright great about themselves.