To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar  (1995)

Genre(s): Anti-Heroes, Buddies, Gender Bending, Road Trip, War Between the Sexes

Cast: Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, John Leguizamo, Stockard Channing, Blythe Danner, Melinda Dillon, Arliss Howard, Jason London, Christopher Penn; CAMEO(S): Julie Newmar, Robin Williams; DIRECTED BY: Beeban Kidron; WRITTEN BY: Douglas Carter Beane; MUSIC BY: Rachel Portman. PRODUCER: Amblin Entertainment, Universal Pictures.

Review: Hot on the high heels of "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," comes the sanitized for your protection Yankee version. And its all about hanging on to your dreams and how we're all the same inside, with politically correct gay drag queens doing the sermonizing. Yes, this is the feel-good drag road movie for the 90s. Den mother Vida (Swayze), tough beauty queen Noxeema (Snipes), and hot-blooded Chi Chi (Leguizamo doing his best Rosie Perez) head to Hollywood in a 1967 Cadillac convertible that inconveniently breaks down in a tiny Nebraska town. The "girls" work their magic, and presumably the people of this uncultured, anachronistic backwater will never be the same. One-dimensional characters, flat direction, and inconsistent script undercut exceptional efforts by Swayze and Leguizamo.