The Travolta/Cage Project Bonus #1 Grand Isle
Oddly enough this is also the cover image of Nicolas Cage’s poor-selling album of lullabies for babies.
Welcome, friends, to the very first bonus entry in the Travolta/Cage Project. At Travolta/Cage and the Travolta/Cage Project we are lovingly, obsessively exploring the complete filmographies of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in chronological order, beginning with 1976’s Carrie and 1983’s Valley Girl.
But these enterprising gents are anything but retired. On the contrary, they seem to be cranking out movies at such a rapid clip you’d think they have a plethora of castles in Europe to pay for and/or a sinister space alien cult to help finance or something.
Cage in particular has been a busy little beaver. On December 2nd he returns, in a manner not unlike a pig to shit, to the grubby, low-budget, low-stakes world of sordid, Cinemax-ready erotic thrillers with the exquisitely bonkers, wonderfully terrible drama Grand Isle while on January 24th, a mere month and a half later, he will be headlining the infinitely the more promising Richard Stanley-directed H.P Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space with Tommy Chong.
Of course if everything goes according to plan, Clint and I will tackle Grand Isle four or five years from now when we hit the masterpieces of late 2019 within the chronology of the project but Clint and I figured it might be fun to jump the gun a little and cover Grand Isle as a patron-only episode of Travolta/Cage and bonus Travolta/Cage Project column.
I’m glad we made that choice because Grand Isle is exactly what I hoped it would be and a wonderful companion piece to The Poison Rose, the obscure, more or less direct-to-video late-period John Travolta vehicle that inspired this column in the first place.
Like The Poison Rose is deep-fried Southern nonsense, a shameless wallow in sordid Southern Gothic that finds Cage looking like shit on a stick and drawling like he’s got a mouth full of crunchy peanut butter and Tobasco sauce as Walter, an alcoholic, probably impotent former Marine who never got over getting sent home with shrapnel with his leg when he could have either died nobly with his entire platoon or saved everyone’s life a few weeks later.
Walter’s whole vibe is “deranged, rage-filled lunatic who is probably a serial killer, and also wants you to either kill or fuck his wife, or possibly combine the two.” He embodies a stereotype that was once ubiquitous in American entertainment: the emotionally shattered Vietnam veteran whose body survived Nam but whose soul and spirit did not.
#RedboxReady
Cage as Walter boozily, hammily and enjoyably embodies another archetype as well. He’s a real Big Daddy type, a deranged Southern man who drinks excessively because he cannot satisfy the erotic needs of his hot-to-trot, honey-dripping Southern belle of a wife who goes out looking for a younger, more virile young stud who can please her.
Yes, Grand Isle is some real Cinemax/Red Shoe Diaries/Zandalee 2000 softcore silliness about Buddy (Luke Benward), a strapping young hunk and new father who enters the ominous existences of a married couple overflowing with dark, sexy, murderous secrets on their 15th wedding anniversary when he agrees to fix a fence for Walter and his hot to trot sexpot wife Fancy.
Fancy is such a pure Southern belle that she makes mint Juleps using her great grand-mother’s recipe and, tells Buddy she needs to “slip into something more comfortable” and sexy in what is perhaps the only non-ironic usage of that phrase in the history of American entertainment.
Grand Isle is never more than a few erotically charged moments away from devolving or evolving into a full-on porn movie of the cuckolding variety. From the first moment Walter sets eyes on Buddy he makes it clear that along with fixing the fence he’s probably going to have to fuck Buddy’s wife as well—and good, and hard, like she deserves—possibly with him sitting in the corner watching, masturbating and sobbing gently.
In Grand Isle Walter has zero sexual interest in his wife, whose wardrobe seemingly consists entirely of lingerie and high heels and who spends her days seducing handymen, paperboys or anybody who passes by.
Bald with greasy long hair and a Yosemite Sam mustache, chomping a cigar in one of many subtle indications of his character’s villainous nature, Cage looks like he hasn’t had a good meal or a good night’s sleep in decades. He looks like the kind of sleaze bag who passes out every night in front of the television, surrounded by ashes and empty bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, thinking about Nam and his myriad sexual inadequacies.
Walter tries to relate to the younger man as a fellow military man even though the timeline for their service makes no sense. Buddy is played by a 26 year old actor who looks 26 and is married to a high school sweetheart who looks like she’s still actually in high school, which makes it all the more jarring and bizarre that he’s supposed to have fought in the same war as 55 year old Cage.
And, since Grand Isle takes place in 1988, that means that Buddy apparently did his tours of duty back when he was a tween and young teenager.
Cage spends most of his time onscreen yelling at cutlery.
Walter calls the much younger man “Tadpole” as part of banter that’s supposed to be the playful joshing of two military men but instead comes off as the deeply homoerotic chatter.
Alas, the couple’s habit of luring outsiders into their nightmare house of death to participate in their sick psycho-sexual games is not as innocent as it initially appears.
Walter drunkenly intuits that Fancy isn’t the only person trapped inside the house that awful night who isn’t getting any when he asks the ex-Navy man he and his wife are terrorizing, “When was the last time you, uh, had, your uh, cock, suckED?” before insisting, “I can tell you wanna FUCK MY WIFE.”
Name a more iconic trio!
It’s even more apparent that HIS WIFE wants to FUCK Buddy, that she wants him to become his Fuck-Buddy, as it were. The only thing keeping Grand Isle from being a total fuck-fest, a hardcore porn movie, is the perverse absence of fucking and actual sex. If a movie could get an X rating for salacious atmosphere alone Grand Isle would be strictly for the 17 and older set but nobody gets around to actually fucking here. It’s like we got the PG-13 TV edit of a porno.
Because the situation would just not be melodramatic enough otherwise, there’s a literal storm a brewing at the start of Grand Isle, a hurricane that echoes the crazy storm of emotions and hormones among Buddy, Walter and Fancy.
Walter at one point asks Buddy to kill his wife for “20,000 dollars” that he claims will take care of all of his problems, including his sick kid. I know 1988 was a different time but holy fuck, he must have had some cheap-ass problems because that is not a lot of money.
Walter claims that he’s doing his wife a kindness, since she’s fatally ill and will perish anyway in six months but it’s safe to assume that Walter and Fancy’s motivation for doing anything is exclusively evil-based.
Cage is actively bad as a crude caricature of a rage-poisoned veteran, the kind of ham who yells of the treatment he received upon his return from Vietnam, ““They spat on us, they called us “Scumbag Filth!”
Scumbag Filth, incidentally, sounds like the name of either a character or a movie Cage might make in the direct-to-video action realm. Grand Isle is never sillier or more ridiculously over-reaching than when it ties Walter’s violent madness to his military service, like when he’s holding Buddy AND his wife hostage and shouts, “This entire system is programmed for the American youth to die so that the blubbery old Washington fat cats can stay rich!”
Yes, Grand Isle is a stupid fucking movie, so overflowing with appalling aspects that I haven’t even gotten into Kelsey Gramer’s hypnotically terrible supporting turn as a Southern lawyer with the world’s thickest drawl who mentions his strong Christian faith at least once in every sentence and ends the film imploring Walter to let his hostage go so they can “talk this oh-vah a beer!”
Oh, and it turns out that Walter and Fancy have been keeping teens in their basement and forcing them to have children against their will. These are no garden-variety villains. No, they are on a Baba Yaga/Jeffrey Epstein level of evil.
Without Cage’s sad over-acting Grand Isle is nothing. It’s a Shannon Tweed or Shannon Whirry movie of interest exclusively to onanists. But Cage’s presence elevates the material from garbage to hot garbage, from pure trash to intermittently enjoyable trash.
Even at his worst, Cage remains ferociously watchable.
Grand Isle ends with the dedication, “For my dad, Gino.” I think I can speak for Gino when I say, “Thanks but no thanks.” There was never any chance that Grand Isle would objectively be any damn good at all, only the very real possibility that Grand Isle would be so god-awful it comes all the way around to being trashy fun.
I very much enjoyed this awful fucking movie but that has everything to do with my affection for Cage and this kind of over-sexed idiocy.
It’s nice that Cage is making good to great movies Mandy and Mom and Dad these days but it’s weirdly reassuring knowing that his commitment to sleazy trash, or at least the paychecks that come with appearing in lots of sordid garbage, remains strong.
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