Despite all that, I’m convinced my mom has superpowers. How else could she have experienced all that she did in the last year (cancer and divorce) and still be standing? I know that if I had experienced even half of what she did, I’d have probably collapsed in a heap, unable to take one more step. But somehow she trudged on, using her superpowers to stay upright and to even get herself to a better place than she was six months ago. While that might not be as hip as flight or invisibility, it’s still pretty damn impressive.

Know what else is impressive? She worked for over 20 years as a waitress, scraping by on less-than-minimum wage and crappy tips, and still managed to support my younger brother and me. And we never wanted for things. We had clothes, we had food, we even had toys we didn’t need.

When she’d had enough of that life, she went back to college (she’d had to drop out of art school when she got pregnant with me) and got a bachelor’s degree, which she put to good use as a community counselor helping at-risk kids. She got sidelined for a while and had to put her career on hold, but she tried to stay positive, even when it was incredibly tough on her.

Then the cancer popped up. But guess what? She beat it. She’s been in remission for almost a year.

And even though the divorce was the worst kind of surprise, she didn’t let it stop her either.

She’s eyeing grad school in the fall. I’ll bet she beats that too.

Even after all that, you might not believe my mom has superpowers. Maybe you just think she’s a really tough woman, determined to stay strong and not let life’s stumbles pull her feet out from under her. To you I’d say: you don’t think that’s a superpower?

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

In the town of New Lovington, few things are bigger than the Valentine’s Day dance “Sweetheart Queen” and Elizabeth (a fresh-from-rehab Rebecca Gillis) is determined to capture the crown for herself. Thus begins director George Kornfeld’s Sweetheart Queen, a long-forgotten entry in the slasher sub-genre.

Elizabeth campaigns endlessly, papering the hallways with posters asking for fellow students’ votes. With only a few weeks until the dance, Elizabeth is barely trailing rival Amanda (an extended cameo from genre veteran Heather Ann Williams), so she turns up the heat, staging impromptu pep rallies and handing out homemade heart-shaped cookies and lollipops to any student she passes.

Amanda counters by throwing a huge party at her family’s camp house, inviting more than half the students at school. Elizabeth goes to confront Amanda and the two engage in an argument, revealing in the process that they used to be best friends. After a sudden, cruel prank leaves Elizabeth covered in red paint, she stumbles off into the woods crying, fearing her chances at the crown have evaporated. Kornfeld and longtime cinematographer Dick Buckner are at their best in this sequence, filming in close-up the horrible glee covering the faces of Elizabeth’s tormentors as she’s doused in blood-red paint. The look in her eyes as she staggers off is a look of defeat.

When Elizabeth arrives at school Monday morning, she knows everyone’s going to be talking about her, and she knows she has no chance at the crown. But there’s other gossip that has everyone else enthralled: Amanda went gone missing shortly after her party.

The first half-hour of the movie doesn’t play out like a slasher. There are no gruesome murders, no killer POV shots, and no gratuitous nudity. But that is all part of Kornfeld’s plan. He and screenwriter Matthew Mourad force the audience to drop their guard and become invested in Elizabeth’s quest for the Sweetheart Queen crown. Once they’re in for the ride, he can open up the throttle a bit and speed things up.

Police detectives interview anyone present at Amanda’s party. They’re particularly interested in the fight she and Elizabeth had, questioning Elizabeth at length. It’s during this interrogation that we learn that Elizabeth and Amanda stopped being friends because Amanda stole away Elizabeth’s boyfriend Hector years earlier, just before Hector fell asleep at the wheel and drove his car into Heart’s Gorge, dying instantly. The police suspect a connection, but there’s no hard evidence.

After her interrogation, Elizabeth is all but ready to give up her dream, but her principal (Victor Crewes, of Veterans Day and Cluck of the Irish fame) insists that she continue campaigning, adding, “It’s what your mother would have wanted.” For the entire film, Elizabeth has been desperate to win the title and with that line, we soon learn why. During a haze-filled flashback sequence, we see that when Elizabeth’s mother Mary (Jennifer Crawley) attended New Lovington High, she too was crowned Sweetheart Queen, but the title was stripped after it was discovered she was involved in an affair with her science teacher Mr. Richmond. When Mary announced that she was pregnant with Richmond’s child, the reluctant father disappeared, leaving Mary all alone to raise Elizabeth. Elizabeth wants to grab the title to make her recently-deceased mother proud and hopefully restore her legacy. It’s never quite clear how she intends to do this, but she believes it so strongly, the audience has no choice but to believe it as well.

Amanda’s lifeless corpse is soon discovered washed up on the beach, her heart ripped out. In its place is a small card that reads: “She didn’t have the heart to be queen.” This sequence is beautifully shot, very somber and eerie, as a woman walking her dog discovers the body. Very quickly, however, the film devolves into slasher clichés, as a mysterious figure follows and kills each of the other Sweetheart Queen contenders. This section of the film feels disconnected from all that came before, especially the beautiful scene just preceding it, and is rumored to have been shoehorned in by producers to up the body count for fans of the genre.  In fact, the killer POV motif is never used except in these sequences and while it’s fun to see, it seems like pandering. Kornfeld and Mourad were telling a simple personal story that didn’t have to rely on the higher body counts of cheaper films, but apparently producers felt otherwise.

As the film rushes to the climax, it’s revealed that all of the things that have happened to and around Elizabeth were the result of one deranged soul, intent on making sure all Elizabeth’s dreams come true. There are plentiful (but subtle) clues dropped throughout the film, so the ending feels somewhat obvious, and there is still a little twist up the film’s sleeve that is almost impossible to see coming.

Rebecca Gillis tackles the character of Elizabeth head-on, making her far more sympathetic than she would be with a different actress in the role. After Gillis’s starring turn in the supernatural horror flick Labor Day, the actress spiraled into an addiction to prescription painkillers. She was kicked off several film projects and was said to be responsible for the breakup of former co-star Roy Clark’s marriage. After Gillis crashed her car into a bank, demanding money and assaulting a teller, she was ordered to attend rehab. The six month program healed her psyche and she attempted to heal her career by hiring a new agent and booking Sweetheart Queen. Despite her hard life up to that point, Gillis still had her girl-next-door looks and easily passed for a perky 17-year-old, despite being on the cusp of 25. Her later relapse and subsequent imprisonment put an end to a promising career far too soon.

Sweetheart Queen opened to middling reviews and poor box office, and Liberty Pictures, the studio that financed the film, quickly shuffled it off to video where it died a quiet death. Director George Kornfeld, at the time a commercial director with dreams of Hollywood superstardom, never made another studio film. He ended his career in Pasadena shooting low-budget action flicks and pornography. This is too bad, because Kornfeld had a good eye and executed some well-thought shots. Despite the studio-insisted additions, Sweetheart Queen is a forgotten flick that deserves to be remembered, if only for today.

Fans of election humor and cancelled-then-resurrected comedy show Arrested Development should head over to Arrested Decision 2012, a tumblr which posts images of Arrested Development dialogue over images from the campaign. It’s very funny. I made them an image and submitted it. If they never post it, I’m at least posting it here, for my few followers’ enjoyment:

Hopefully you guys get that joke.

Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, at least we can all agree on this: it’s over. At least until next week when the Republicans and Democrats start planning their candidates for 2016.

As part of the Movember festivities, I’ve created a Facebook Cover Photo celebrating Movember. Feel free to open the full size file (by clicking on it) and download it for use on your Facebook page.

And I also made one for your twitter feed as well.