Revenge and corndogs
The movie’s opening is an extreme closeup of a man’s mouth as he spouts, “I would sell a Black man a boat, quicker than a cat can lick his ass, and that’s the way I feel about it now.
I was brought up that way. We didn’t know any prejudice. We were all just brothers together and that’s the way I feel about it now.”
Then the title of the film, The Corndog Man, flashes on the screen. The man spouting caustic banter into a phone is the appropriately named Ace Barker, a good-old-boy boat salesman in his late 60s. While Barker wheels and deals on the phone, his co-workers at Triple K Marine make in-person sales, engage in a bathroom peeping game and nosh on, you guessed it, corndogs.
Make no mistake. This is an odd movie. Made 23 years ago, it’s kind of hard to find a physical copy these days. It’s a little creepy. And it certainly doesn’t come up in cocktail party conversation. But it may be the best independent movie made in Charleston — that you’ve never seen.
Over the course of the movie’s 83 minutes, Barker endures harassment from one old-school caller in particular which slowly unveils an ugly tale of historical blindspots, Southern hypocrisy and vengeance.
Shot in the late 1990s in suburban backyards, local bars, parking lots and a then-devastated Park Circle, which doubled as the fictional town of Bougherville (population 2,007). The Corndog crew included Trident Tech film staff, students and local talent — such as Theatre 99’s Timmy Finch and Greg Tavares.
The Corndog Man cruised the film festival circuit, including the esteemed Sundance Film Festival. While the film was praised for its economic storytelling on what was an equally economic budget, the film never truly entered the public consciousness and quietly wound up on VHS in 1999. Even many within the film industry never saw it, despite the recognizable veteran character actor Noble Willingham as the lead.
Paul Brown, owner of the Terrace Theater, recalled seeing the film being peddled on the filmfest circuit as he himself was pushing a film of his own.
“It was on the indie circuit as I produced Sole Survivor,” he recalled. “I remember seeing it out there but never actually getting to see it.”
Back in the days of Armageddon, X-Files and Chumbawamba, it was still rare for a movie — studio or indie — to be shot in Charleston. Everyone knew about “this Corndog movie” being shot in town. But to this day, any mention of Andrew Shea’s film is generally met with quizzical looks. It has floated under the film radar, available only as a standard definition streaming option with a minuscule fanbase.
Telling everyone about the film
Charleston writer and historian Harlan Greene hopes to change that. To some, The Corndog Man may seem like a trivial, grimy and sweaty exploitation piece. Greene sees much more.
So many films had been done in Charleston, but they were slick and commercial and pretty thin,” he said in a recent interview. “But this one was earnest and passionate and had guts. It had something to say and it said it in a way that carried a powerful emotional kick.
“Another irony — here was this ‘little film’ that was so much more living and powerful than all the other ‘big films’ that had been shot here — but no one seemed to have ever heard of it. In examining injustice, the film seems to have somehow courted that same fate. Ever since I’ve seen it, I’ve been touting it to everyone I know.”
Greene’s discovery and ultimate fandom of the movie took a roundabout path. After he received funding a few years ago to start documenting local LGBTQ life, Greene set out to start doing oral histories, collecting manuscript and ephemeral materials.
“I had grown up out here, worked in archives my whole life, and suddenly was goosed into realizing that no archive had ever set out to collect materials on the community,” he said. “I remembered [actor] Bryan Seabrook from my bar days — he appeared as Africa, a very outspoken, very elegant African American drag queen who was an icon of sorts.
“Photographer Greg Day had taken dramatic images of Bryan/Africa that enshrined her that way. She had died by this time, and so I could not interview her — but when I interviewed others, many people had stories about Africa. I was interviewing Tom Lamme, who had worked at many of the bars in Charleston, and he said, ‘You know she was in two movies — and for one she received screen credit.’
“Tom told me the name of the movie, and I looked it up. I sat down to watch it with no great expectations. When it was over and I lifted my jaw off the floor, I knew I had to find out more.”
No spoiler
Without giving away spoilers, Greene sees Willingham’s Barker as a man who is caught in a trap he himself built and, ultimately, can only be with those he ostensibly despises. For Greene, the film is a whodunit that escalates into a morality play that feels more relevant today than when it was originally released.
“We’ve always been stalked by the demon of racism in the South, hiding behind the skirts of politeness,” Greene said. “Homophobia is certainly an issue, transphobia even more escalatingly so. And today they have been weaponized in a way that no one dreamed about (or had nightmares about) 20 years ago.”
When asked about the representation of racism, transphobia and homophobia in the film, Greene said, “It’s a booby trap to discuss these things these days in some ways. But art is a way of doing it, and in talking about art, which this film is, we need freedom to speak. There are no stereotypes here — because the characters are human, flawed, good and bad and literally, we are them. So many of these actors are Charlestonians. So many scenes were filmed here.
“While we may think we are more elegant, more polite and more civilized than what’s in this film, we as a society are prone to the movie’s themes. So there’s no reason to chastise or get on soapboxes about representation in this film. There’s a cisgender white man portraying a cisgender white man. There’s a trans African American portraying a trans African American. And who cares who wrote the script or directed it? The actors inhabit it and if it’s painful to watch, so is reading or watching the news. But the film offers us something the horrors of the day do not — it’s art, and it delivers catharsis.”
Kevin Young, a longtime City Paper freelance writer, specializes in films.
Four more films you might not know
While the local movie industry has had its share of hits, it’s also had its share of misses.
A few of those misses could also be categorized as underrated or even cult classics. Here are four flicks shot in the Charleston area you need to know about:
Swamp Thing
Wes Craven, the man who gave us Scream and A Nightmare On Elm Street, took time in 1982 between scaring the bejesus out of audiences to make a monster superhero flick. In Swamp Thing, botanist Alec Holland (Ray Wise) is trying to create a new life when a horrible accident turns into a half-man/half-plant. With special government agent Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeau) at his side, they fight off a mad scientist Anton Arcane (Louis Jourdan) and his henchmen in sections of Magnolia Plantation and Gardens.
Philadelphia Experiment
The same year Michael Paré was in Walter Hill’s Streets Of Fire he starred alongside Nancy Allen in this 1984 sci-fi flick directed by Stewart Raffill, the man who would go on to direct such cinematic oddities as Mac and Me and Tammy and the T-Rex. In the film, it’s 1943 and Paré’s David Herdeg and another sailor, Jim Parker (Bobby Di Cicco), find themselves in the future — 1984 — when an experiment on the USS Eldridge (aka the USS Laffey on exhibit at Patriots Point) goes awry. What follows is a race against time to eradicate that experiment which could create a worldwide catastrophe.
The Boyfriend School
The Charleston area was mired in late 1980s starpower thanks to Malcolm Mowbray’s 1990 production (Don’t Tell Her It’s Me). A Police Academy graduate (Steve Guttenberg) plays Gus, a cancer survivor pining for a woman who used to cavort with Lost Boys’ (Jami Gertz) with a little help from his sister, a Cheers bartender (Shelley Long) and a little hindrance from a Twin Peaks resident (Kyle MacLachlan). The shots of Charleston scenery on James Island, Sullivan’s Island and the old Cooper River Bridge are to die for. But even more memorable is the long-ass mullet Gus dons when he remakes himself as a motorcycle-riding bad boy from New Zealand.
Deadly Pursuits
Do you like Tori Spelling? Sure, we all do. Not many people remember this 1996 TV movie about student Tim Faulkner (Patrick Muldoon) who returns home from college to find that his mom and sister have been killed. With his missing father being the chief suspect, Tim sets out to prove his innocence. He gets help from a quirky girl named Meredith (Spelling) who he meets on the way to a town that looks suspiciously like downtown Charleston. Under the classic definition, it is not a good movie. Best scene involves Meredith attempting a sexy dance to a saxophonist on what looks like Meeting Street.
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