Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis!

Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis (1997) directed by John Henderson, screenplay by Craig Strachan

The title of this film alone is worth the price of admission, so any degree of entertainment after that is just a delightful bonus. I stumbled into this movie after I had started working on a character also named Mavis Davis (a detective, not a singer like this Mavis) so my initial interest was tangential, but my curiosity was rewarded with a comedy that is (surprisingly enough) actually funny. (Also, any comedy which references Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia can't be that bad, right? I mean, The Brady Bunch was a great satire of The Wild Bunch, after all.)

Here’s the setup: Marty Starr (Rik Mayall) is a record producer with a failing business (I know, I know, it’s almost a redundant plot point these days), behind in alimony to his ex-wife Cynthia (Jaclyn Mendoza) and deeply in debt to a certain Mr. Rathbone (Danny Aiello). A stroke of desperate inspiration later and he’s on his way to attempting to kill his big star Marla Dorland (Jane Horrocks) to boost her record sales and get him solvent again. Hilarity ensues.

Now, the thing about comedy is that you could take a decent premise and turn it into an absolute pile of crap. (Add Will Ferrell and shake thoroughly.) Taking a chance on comedy is a lot like drinking something from an unmarked black bottle: You might get a swig of a tasty beverage, or you might end up with a mouthful of carbonated possum piss—and you have no way of guaranteeing that you’ll get one or the other. And the worst thing is that there’s no such thing as a comedy so bad that you find yourself laughing at it. You can have a ridiculously poorly made comedy, but if its funny then it’s funny. A bad comedy is usually one that in some way compromises the comedy or pulls its punches or, conversely, tries too desperately to get a laugh, as if the expected audience is a mentally challenged tortoise. (Yeah, I'm looking at you Scary Movie IV.)

The reason I mention all that is that I have imagined how Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis would be remade as a big studio romantic comedy and how awful it would be. My biggest fear is that it’s already been done and that it starred Hugh Grant and Ben Stiller.
At any rate, what’s so damn funny about this film?

First, (and maybe funniest?) is the idea that a record producer could turn a profit. Nothing dates this film more than the lack of complaints about online piracy and mp3s. It lends the whole thing a quaint period air that may have been a bit old-fashioned even in 1997. Another anachronism of note is a moment when two thugs are talking about chips and pommes frittes in an hommage to Pulp Fiction. The thing about that moment is that it resonates as a pop culture reference, but I also have to wonder how many real thugs have found themselves trying to be more like Jules and Vincent Vega. So is this scene about filmmakers referencing a movie or life imitating art?

Then there’s Rik Mayall. I guess I might be one of 3 people on this continent who might remember Rik Mayall from Drop Dead Fred (1991), and I guess even my memory of that movie is a bit hazy (think of it as Beetlejuice's poor cousin from Arkansas), but he’s funny. Granted, I did find myself imagining what Simon Pegg would do in his place, but that’s not to detract from Mayall’s performance. (It’s more about the hair than the performance, per se.) In fact, one of the reasons this film works for me is that the character of Marty Starr is an asshole and that he doesn’t have a moral conversion that makes him nice at the end. In the end, he’s still an asshole, he’s just an asshole who no longer wants to kill Marla Dorland. (Maybe Ben Stiller really has been in a remake of this movie.)

And of course there’s Jane Horrocks. I can’t say enough about Jane Horrocks. She's a marvelous singer (underused here) and can take a character that shifts from shallow pampered (and slightly loopy) Marla Dorland back in time to the hopelessly unfashionable Mavis Davis and then forward to a couple of moments of genuine sympathy. You can really see why Marty has no problem wanting to kill her for most of the film and you can really understand why he wants to save her by the end of the film.
She can play deliciously venomous, vapid or sweet and make all of them seem like the real thing.

Also, there’s Belize. It’s often overlooked as a means of getting a cheap laugh in Central America, but it’s there and should be used more often.
And one of the funnier bits is the way Marla Dorland’s tour keeps getting renamed in dedication to the additional members of her entourage who have been bumped off in the bungled attempts to kill her. (This reaches its heights when Marla Dorlan’s lapdog is assassinated.)


Sorry for the spoiler there, but yes, Marla Dorlan’s dog is assassinated. Clint the assassin (Marc Warren, aka Pvt. Albert Blithe from Band of Brothers) is one of the best parts of this film. He manages to combine excellent marksmanship with complete bungling.
And I don’t know who Danny Aiello owed money to, but if this is how he paid it off, then it was worth it. The scene where Rathbone and Marty observe Rathbone’s son Paul (Paul Keating) working on an atrocious song is especially priceless.

I guess the thing that gives this comedy its edge is that the protagonist manages to engineer the deaths of several people (and the dog) and get away with it. I have to admit that it’s perversely satisfying to see a comedy that gets away with that kind of moral ambiguity. Sure, you can say that Marty Starr undergoes a kind of rebirth of humanity that sends him in the line of fire to save Marla’s life, but this doesn’t change the fact that he really has no comeuppance for the collateral damage caused by the one murder he commits and the two people (and a dog) who are killed accidentally by Clint in the effort to kill Marla. Even at the end Marty smiles at the camera as Clint puts his laser sight on Marty’s ex Cynthia. There’s something refreshing about a comedy that doesn’t feel the need to fix the ethics and morals of its characters and re-establish the right and proper order.

In a way, an ending like this calls into question the idea that a morally perfect and ethically just world is the “normal” order that is to be restored at the end of a comedy. As light-hearted as this film is, it does posit a world where the wicked and grasping ultimately prosper and where the most you can hope from humanity is a little bit of warmth and love in the midst of it all. But the great thing about Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis is that you don’t have to think about anything deep to enjoy it, but you don’t have to feel guilty for enjoying it either.

Special Features
Behind the Scenes
This behind the scenes documentary is so un-slick that it’s worth seeing because at least it isn’t the overly packaged Entertainment Tonight “behind the scenes” style crapfest but a much more homely second cousin of such things.