The Queen of Hollywood Blvd is a 2018 crime drama about the owner of a Los Angeles strip club who finds herself in hot water over a twenty-five year old debt to the mob.
It’s the quiet moments in writer/director Orson Oblowitz‘s latest pulpy thriller that have the most resonance amid a film drenched in neon glitz and melodramatic flair. The look in a woman’s eyes, the subtle transition from one transfixing image to another … it’s things like these really give this decidedly homage-heavy story something to celebrate. It is not traditional by any sense, avoiding many of the trappings of the modern crime drama, purposefully putting its bank in a character study meant to evoke some old genre stereotypes. And for that, it mostly works, the movie an oddly captivating experience that unfolds like a cheap dime store novel you can’t help but keep reading.
On the eve of her 60th birthday, Mary (Rosemary Hochschild) sits atop a small failing empire, the owner of a Los Angeles sidestreet strip club, host to up and coming wannabe talent. While her employees offer her cheers and she makes plans to give the place a little pizazz for a party, she gets a visit from Duke (Roger Guenveur Smith), a low level crime boss who more than 20 years earlier lent Mary money to open the place and has returned to get it back, looking to take over the club. You can be sure though, Mary isn’t having it and soon finds herself in a savage game of of revenge when her grown son Otto (Oblowitz) is kidnapped.
Lots of movies feature a woman on a destructive path, many in this very genre, yet few give that role to one in their 60s (with the upcoming Jamie Lee Curtis Halloween sequel about to make it mainstream). Hochschild , who most will recognize from the television series Supergirl is the whole show here, donned in a leopard skin jacket, leather pants, thick shades, and a walking cane, taking drags off a stiletto cigarette as she doles out and receives plenty of pain. Bound to a debt she can’t pay, the threat of her son’s death catalyst in keeping her moving, she spirals into an underbelly of horrors as she calls in favors to set things straight.
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Into the mix is Grace (Ana Mulvoy Ten) an underage girl who falls into Mary’s service, a starry-eyed hopeful who quickly finds her feet stuck in the quicksand as Mary needs her help. She’s the reflection of Mary from decades prior, unsoiled and as yet untainted by the system, but soon soon to be. She’s not given much screen time but makes a strong impression, as she often does, giving the tale it’s full circle, she the bright blonde opposite of Mary we all know she will eventually become.
“We don’t have tomorrows,” Mary says at one point, one of the most impactful lines in Oblowitz’s feature film debut, rightfully putting the hard-edged fighter in the corner she’s been stuck in for years. It’s dialog like that and those softer moments mentioned before that really give The Queen of Hollywood Blvd its punch, even as the movie itself sometimes can’t get out from under its own style. Limited by its low budget, Oblowitz manages to squeeze much from what he’s given, wisely keeping this about the personalities than the action. This is underground stuff that fans of such will surely eat up with just enough violence and sporadic nudity to give it a sort of late 70s drive-in theater vibe. Recommended.