I caught up with Doug Bradley, and asked him one question, and one question only — could he briefly run through the plot of “The Killer Tongue”? I had heard him do this twice before, and he was happy to provide a truncated version… the longer version makes no more sense, I assure you. For your reading pleasure, I share it with you.
DB: Ah yes, “La Lengua Asesina”, “The Killer Tongue”. There’s a guy and a girl, and, um, you’ll help me if I get this wrong. He’s been arrested, he’s working on a chain gang, she’s gone undercover at a convent working as a nun. Which is what you do in a convent — that’s pretty obvious, I guess. She’s got the money stashed away in the convent, is that right?
GS: I tried to explain it last night, and I couldn’t get it half right.
DB: She’s waiting for him to be released from the chain gang so they can all live happily ever after. I’m playing another convict on the chain gang called Headwig, because I wear wigs. Robert Englund is the chief screw and now, um, the girlfriend who is Mindy [Melinda Clarke, perhaps now best known for “The O.C.”]. For no good reason, she’s got a bunch of poodles with her in the convent. And the pivotal scene is them sitting around the dinner table eating soup. Mindy with her bowl of soup and five poodles sitting up at the table eating soup, and they all had different color fur. Each poodle has different color fur. Meanwhile, there’s a comet flying through space and little bits of the comet are splintering off as this thing hurtles to Earth, and of course it hits and breaks apart, with the biggest piece landing in some wasteland near the convent and the chain gang. Little bits of the convent — of the convent! — little bits of the meteor fly through the window where Mindy and the five poodles are eating their soup and a little bit of meteor lands in each bowl of soup. And when they eat the soup and ingest the bit of meteor, they turn into drag artists. A bit like “Priscilla Queen of the Desert”. Then they proceed to perform in the desert, in the style of “Priscilla Queen of the Desert”. Much to the delight of us, the people on the chain gang, one of whom happens to be having his testicles electrocuted at the time. It was Jonathan Rhys-Davies — no, Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Um, and that’s kind of the setup of the movie.
And we all escape, maybe not Robert Englund, though, but we all escape. Now myself and another convict find the main bulk of the meteor. It has the extraordinary quality that if you stand close to it, it sends you into orgasmic throes of excitement… until you touch it. And then you explode. And Robert Englund and I ended up in a confessional in the convent which was flooded at the end and we both, um… confused? That’s the barest outline of the plot. It’s much weirder than that.