Film

‘Sharkboy and Lavagirl’ Was An Acid Trip, Not A Kid’s Movie, And I Can’t Believe It’s Real

Ahead of the release of 'Sharkboy and Lavagirl 2', we looked back at the brain-melting original.

by Joseph Earp  20 November 2020
Sharkboy and Lavagirl

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Today, the world was introduced to the trailer for We Can Be Heroes, the stand-alone sequel to The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D, in a Freddy Krueger-esque twist akin to believing you have woken up from a nightmare, sopping with sweat, only to discover that you’re still trapped in sleep.

Yep, it might have been 15 long years since director Robert Rodriguez’s acid trip was sold and marketed to children, but that doesn’t mean we’re free of the thing. Indeed, if anything, We Can Be Heroes seems even more bug-nuts than the wonderful, loping horror that spawned it.

The film’s distinctive visual style — early PS2 graphics mixed with an ancient curse — is still on full display, as is the reeking, stoned dad humour. The trailer’s only a mere 43 seconds long, and it still contains more puddles of oozing human detritus than a cryogenics lab with broken air con on a long Summer’s day.

This is clearly Rodriguez’s formula for the Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl universe — find the exact intersection between a 12-hour long Teletubbies binge and a night of cheese dreams, and set up broken, hallucinogenic camp there.

Which isn’t a problem. If anything, it’s the opposite. After all, it’s precisely Rodriguez’s utter inability to understand what children want to see onscreen that makes his work as profound and important as it is.

The First Sharkboy and Lavagirl Is A Curse We Will Never Free Ourselves Of

Sharkboy and Lavagirl wasn’t Rodriguez’s first stab at “children’s entertainment”. Breaking onto the scene with ultra-violent genre pictures like Desperado and The Faculty, in 2001 he switched gears and unleashed Spy Kids on the world.

Best known now as our introduction to Daryl “Megan Trainor’s Boyfriend” Sabara, the film was a shockingly camp work of fevered intensity, stuffed with walking thumbs and an Alan Cumming performance turned all the way up to 11.

Yet somehow, despite having the thickened, depraved vibe of a snuff film, Spy Kids was a massive success. And so, over the next three years, Rodriguez continued to cook the brains of America’s children in a stew of spotty CGI effects and amateur-dramatic acting, eventually building up to the Sylvester Stallone-starring Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, which we must never speak of, lest we want to spend the next few weeks sitting in a corner, blubbering to ourselves.

And then, 2005 hit, and Rodriguez released two masterpieces, Sin City and Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D. One was a dark and disturbing look at people pushed to the edge in an alien landscape, filled with screaming nightmares. The other was Sin City.

As intense as the Spy Kids movies had been, Sharkboy and Lavagirl made them look like warm-up rounds. Based on an idea by Racer Rodriguez, the director’s son, the film is an excuse to stumble down blurry, LSD-addled wormholes. There’s no plot to speak of, really — the McGuffin that our young heroes must pursue is vague enough that Rodriguez can spend most of his time expanding the lore of Planet Drool, the film’s deranged setting.

In that way, Sharkboy and Lavagirl feels like watching two red cordial-addled deviant youngsters playing an imaginary game with one another, making up rules as they go. One moment, there’l be an Ice Princess. The next, there’ll be armies of broken CGI sharks. There are plughounds, and evil autocrats, and volcanoes, and these wild flourishes of the imagination pass by so quickly you’ve barely had time to register them before Rodriguez has moved on.

As soon as one corner of the plot becomes impossibly complicated, Rodriguez turns his battered car in the opposite direction, and starts blasting towards a different horizon. Conflicts don’t get resolved. They get abandoned.

And then, somehow, inexplicably, it’s over. Sharkboy and Lavagirl isn’t a film that you watch. It’s something that happens to you. It’s only a normal and acceptable part of our cultural canon because we’ve agreed to call it that. But Sharkboy and Lavagirl isn’t a work of art. It’s an alien artefact come spinning shockingly into our orbit.

The World Needs This Bugnuts Shit

All that explains why it’s quite so surprising that Rodriguez has been given the money to return to the franchise at all. After all, mainstream Hollywood has gone in the opposite direction of Rodriguez. Movies aren’t colourful or sickly or unhinged anymore. They’re carefully brand controlled.

Take, for instance, modern superhero cinema. Sharkboy and Lavagirl resembles a comic book, what with its oversized, cartoonish heroes and constantly escalating series of threats. But it doesn’t resemble a comic book movie — at least not as they’re made anymore. The Marvel movies are as far from Rodriguez’s addled, sugar-cranked world as it is possible to imagine, a stately adult drama compared to the fairy floss jank of Sharkboy.

Indeed, when Rodriguez tried to adapt himself to the state of modern filmmaking with one of his most recent films, Alita: Battle Angel, he couldn’t make himself normal enough to pull it off — Alita is more Spy Kids than Avengers: Endgame, suffused with buckets of dog’s blood and a plot that walks itself in enjoyably aimless circles.

Alita is a masterpiece, of course. But there was always the worry that its less than blockbuster financial performance could have been a sign that Hollywood no longer has a place for visionaries like Rodriguez.

So sure, We Can Be Heroes feels like a remnant from some distant past. But it’s a welcome return. In an entertainment culture that has become sickly and stale with endless repeats and reboots, it’s joyous to imagine that someone gave a cowboy hat-wearing Willy Wonka like Robert Rodriguez comically large bags of Netflix money, and told him to go for his life. Now, let’s just hope that We Can Be Heroes traumatises as many impressionable children as its predecessor.

Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.