Nicolas Cage's Hilariously Overwrought Sleazefest Zandalee Wants to Shake You Naked And Eat You Alive

As I have documented exhaustively in this column, when Nicolas Cage was a young film actor he wasn’t just unusually handsome: he was pure sex, a stud, a hunk, all pouty sensuality, raw magnetism, swaggering charisma and brute force. 

The young Cage was impossibly gorgeous, with smoldering bedroom eyes, high cheekbones, perfect teeth and the body of a Geek God. Cage’s first ten years as a television and film actor represented his remarkable yet oddly forgotten sexy decade, beginning with his oddly mesmerizing turn as the requisite beefcake in the 1981 “Laugh In for kids” failed pilot The Best of Times and ending with the staggeringly misconceived 1991 erotic drama Zandalee, where the future Oscar winner is so perversely, overwhelmingly, surreally unattractive in every conceivable sense that his hideousness has to be a choice. A bizarre, nonsensical, perverse choice, but a choice all the same. 

It’s as if Cage came to work every morning and asked the make-up and costume people to make him as physically repulsive as possible for inexplicable reasons and they happily acquiesced. That would be perverse under most circumstances, but it is utterly bewildering in a movie whose plot hinges on Cage’s character being sexually irresistible. 

In Zandalee, Cage’s youthful beauty is completely obscure by a hideous mustache/soul patch combo that makes that gorgeous face of his look like a blurry Guy Fawkes mask. Cage’s hair, meanwhile, looks disconcertingly like that of Tommy Wiseau’s wild mane in The Room. But it goes beyond that: Cage seems to have lost all muscle definition for the role. His skin is a sickly junkie’s pallor, zombie white and unwell. Even his wardrobe of black jeans and tee shirts make him look like a Salvation Army Johnny Cash. In earlier films, Cage seemed physically imposing, tall as well as ripped but his love interest and chief romantic rival here are both so tall that they make him look puny by comparison.  

In Zandalee, Cage comes off as a strangely perfect cross between The Room’s Johnny and Mark. Cage’s unstoppable fuck beast and perennial threat to bourgeoisie propriety has Johnny’s name, seemingly dyed jet black mane of hair, sometimes pulled inelegantly into a ponytail, incredible fucking ability and vaguely Cajun sensibility. But he’s also fucking his good friend’s wife, leading that bosom buddy to commit suicide rather than live with the knowledge of his soulmate’s infidelity. 

It almost feels like Wiseau watched Zandalee, half-forgot about it, then accidentally wrote The Room as a weird quasi-remake without realizing it. Wiseau famously realized his cinematic vision with a cast of complete unknowns but Zandalee is so preposterously, inexplicably star-studded that it almost feels as if there was a dynamite script for the film they showed the cast to get them onboard, then filmed something else entirely.

Watching the opening credits for Zandalee, I found myself thinking that any movie with this insane of a cast could not possibly be as abysmal as I remembered. Cage is joined here by Judge Reinhold, Joe Pantoliano, Steve Buscemi, Aaron Neville, Marisa Tomei, Ian Ambercrombie, Viveca Lindfors and Gremlins’ Zach Galligan but it’s worth noting that the biggest and most important role in the film, the title role, went not to any of these familiar faces and veterans of film, television and the legitimate stage but rather to Erika Anderson, a model with a handful of TV and film appearances to her name. 

Anderson goes on a voyage of sexual self-discovery as Zandalee, a sensual woman who fell in love with Thierry Martin (Judge Reinhold, cast tragically and hilariously against type), a sad caricature of an effete Southern fop because he was a gifted poet (despite ample evidence to the contrary in the form of the limp-dick quasi-lyricism of his dialogue) only to watch in sadness as he sold his creative soul for a cushy position with his daddy’s business and traded in poetry for business and romance for impotence. 

Then one boozy, bleary bachelor party Thierry’s childhood buddy Johnny (Cage) comes swaggering back into his life looking like he hasn’t showered in years and reeks of crotch-rot and cheap whiskey. He’s a fabulously talented painter we’re informed, although the ugly, globby eye sores he calls paintings tell a much different tale. 

Late in the film, when Johnny is hopped up on blow and cheap hooch, a big shot art dealer played by Zach Galligan compliments one of Johnny’s terrible paintings and he flies into a rage because it’s an older one and does not reflect his currently genius sufficiently, screaming in that Elvis gone Cajun roar of his, “In 75 years you’re going to be fucking dead, and I’ll be up there standing next to PICASSO AND VINCENT!”

It’s cute that this self-destructive no-hoper feels like he’s on a first name basis with Vincent Van Gogh but judging by what we see he’ll be selling his paintings to local chain hotels in bulk instead of hanging them in art galleries. Johnny is a Holiday Inn level talent but the movie laughably treats him like the hot-blooded personification of La Vie Boheme. 

Johnny lays down his life philosophy when he drawls passionately, “I don’t care who you are, Donald Trump, who the hell, without creativity, without life, then you are truly unable to go straight up the devil’s ass, look him right in the face, smile and survive.” 

When a half-interested, half-bored Zandalee mutters off-handedly that it must be interesting having nude models traipsing through his studio all the time, Johnny replies, “Yes it is, darling! When that big red snatch is coming right up against your face like a freight train it’s pretty hard to paint, I tell you what.”

Zandalee should be utterly repulsed by this junkie-looking creep lewdly discussing the “big red snatch” of the women who pose for him. Instead she’s intrigued. Turned on. Driven into an erotic tizzy by Johnny’s crude locker room talk and other unfortunate Trump-like propensities. 

For example, Zandalee tells the psychotically aggressive Johnny that she fell for Thierry and married him because he was a poet, and Johnny grabs her by the pussy and sneers, isn’t this poetry? But it isn’t. It’s not poetry at all. It’s just a seriously gross dude digitally penetrating a woman who should run the hell away. 

I have spent much of the column gushing about the young, dynamic, sexually virile Cage as a handsome, charming, singularly charismatic movie star whose talent and magnetism are undeniable. Then he made a movie ostensibly rooted in his sexiness and sense of danger and in it he’s crude, repulsive, rapey, sexist, self-absorbed, narcissistic, unappealing, competitive in really ugly, petty, destructive ways and an all-around unbearable asshole. To put things in presidential terms, he went from being Obama to being Trump. 

Johnny isn’t about to let Zandalee’s marital status get in the way of a passionate sexual affair so he propositions her relentlessly, infamously informing her, “We’re inevitable! I want to shake you naked and eat you alive, Zandalee!” 

Of course today the word “inevitable” has a different cinematic connotation today. Hearing Cage vamp his way through the most embarrassing dialogue in a film with plenty of formidable contenders I couldn’t help but think of Tony Stark zinging Thanos by responding to his famous line, “I’m inevitable” not with “And I’m Iron Man!” but rather with  “I want to shake you naked and eat you alive, Thanos.” 

Different film. Better film. 

Zandalee should run the hell away from Johnny, on the basis of his body odor alone. Instead she finds herself cosplaying Kim Basinger to Nicolas Cage’s grubby Mickey Rourke wannabe in a very poor man’s 9 1/2 Weeks set in a theme park New Orleans positively dripping with hothouse atmosphere and lurid, feverish self-parody. 

See, N’awlins is not like other places. There’s nowhere quite like it. The people talk with a musicality and dance when they walk. It marches to the beat of a Zydeco band. There’s a feeling in the air, an irrepressible spirit. A lot of horse shit and cliches, in other words.

Cool press photo of my favorite early 90s alt-rock band, Zandalee in the Morning

Zandalee did not mark the beginning of Cage’s love affair with New Orleans. A recent Cage vehicle with a genuine claim to art, the previous year’s Wild at Heart, was partially set in New Orleans. But Zandalee marked the first of many egregiously terrible movies Cage would film there over the years, including Sonny, his Cajun-fried directorial debut and a spiritual cousin to Zandalee in its ripe awfulness. Cage would make one of his best late-period  vehicles there in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a cracked masterpiece that’s great as well as insane in ways that don’t feverishly blur the lines between good and bad so much as they render them meaningless.

Thierry eventually figures out that his childhood chum is having very uncomfortable-looking sex with his wife in the rain, and on the washer while he waits in the next room, and also in a church and in his studio (they fuck in a lot of places) and goes more than a little nutty with rage and jealousy and psycho-sexual confusion. 

Zandalee ends in a flurry of characteristically overwrought tragedy, with Thierry taking his own life in shame and the title character fatally taking a bullet for Johnny in what can only be described as a real waste. Granted, Zandalee’s no prize but on the list of dudes worth dying for Johnny ranks near the very bottom, just below Kevin Federline and Frank Stallone. 

Thanks to gloriously insane, inexplicable choices like Zandalee, Cage would rise to glory and infamy in the decades ahead as the king of bad movies. Cage is a trash culture titan. His spectacular disasters are as much a part of his legend as his triumphs. 

There are lots of people who make bad movies. But no one makes bad movies quite like Cage. That includes Travolta and while Zandalee is fucking garbage it’s fucking garbage in a way that I will remember until the day I die because it is so scuzzy and distinctive and trashy and wrong. 

Early in the film, a sassy convict out hauling trash played by a thick accented Steve Buscemi warns our doe-eyed heroine, “Remember: nothing’s as good as they say it is! Nothing! Not even me and I do something awful pretty good!” before cackling maniacally. 

Zandalee does something awful pretty damned good even if it eventually crosses over into being just plain terrible.

Check out my newest literary endeavor, The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or, for just 25 dollars, you can get a hardcover “Joy of Positivity” edition signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 100) copy with a hand-written recommendation from me within its pages. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind collectible!

Or you can buy The Joy of Trash from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that? 

Check out my new Substack at https://nathanrabin.substack.com/

And we would love it if you would pledge to the site’s Patreon as well. https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace