In Maxxie LaWow: Drag Super-shero director/co-writer Anthony Hand has created a 2D animated romp featuring a drag queen superhero, glittery dance numbers, and a Scooby-Doo style plot to catch a drag super-villain. In fact, if one combined a Scooby story with Ru Paul’s Drag Race, this film might be the result.
Shy barista Simon (Grant Hodges) finds a magical pink wig that transforms him into Maxxie LaWow, a fierce drag super-shero. This transformation comes in handy when drag villain Dyna Bolical (Terren Wooten Clarke) begins kidnapping all the local drag queens to harvest their age-defying tears.
The power-wig brings Simon’s ferocious qualities to the forefront. Maxxie is confident, strong, brash, everything Simon is missing. Yet Maxxie is what Simon has the potential to be. He becomes entangled with the underworld along with his bestie, Jae (Erika Ishii) and metamorphoses into Maxxie when super drag powers are needed. When Maxxie visits Dyna to investigate the tainted cosmetics Dyna is using to turn the elderly women in town into geriatric zombies, the two face off in the ultimate lip-sync contest that could bring the house down.
“…Simon finds a magical pink wig that transforms him into a drag super-shero…”
Maxxie LaWow: Drag Super-shero is as super-campy as it is super-powered. Jokes and one-liners are fired like sapphire bullets of pure love. There’s a film-within-the-film satire of Beaches called Jersey Dunes 2 meant to make the drag queens cry. If it feels like this film serves as an origin story, that is the intent. From the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, the future trajectory of Maxxie Lawow is set out: “We are creating a fun, fashionable, and campy world for Maxxie LaWow and her friends. Getting picked up by any streaming service or network is hard under the best of circumstances, and harder for an LGBTQ+ story.”
This film is silly glitter fun, with a serious message that drag culture is harmless camp, meant to entertain. If the festering “anti-woke” Orc hordes think drag story time is an offense to their fi-fi’s and bad for the children, wait until they get a load of this film. They are going to think that Maxxie LaWow: Drag Super-shero will warp kids’ minds, curve their spines, and win the war for the enemy, but it won’t. As Gordon Cole said in Twin Peaks: The Return, “Fix your hearts or die.”
It is absolutely harmless, fluffy, bedazzling fun. It’s an animated story told with the innocence of a Disney film about the challenges of identity when yours doesn’t fit an outdated, repressive mold. In a world where very little brings joy just now, this light confection of a film makes me happy, as will you too, if you have your mind right.
"…silly glitter fun, with a serious message..."
