I think it was Simone de Beauvoir who said that we will know feminism has achieved its aim precisely when women are allowed to be as deranged, incompetent, and generally mediocre as men without it reflecting on their sex as a whole. And from that perspective, perhaps those women who doggedly pursue lives of self-obsessed madness are to be celebrated for their role in inching us ever closer to that world.
To say that Deuandra T. Brown is merely one of those women would be to do her a disservice. She is a multi-hyphenate artistic lunatic — a filmmaker, writer, model, singer, actor, and dancer. Regarding her cinematic output, the easy reach is to call her the female Neil Breen. But need we compare a woman genius to a man? Can we not simply appreciate it on its own merits?
Today I want to talk about White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye, Deaundra’s most recent film. It is a sequel to the film Diamond Cobra vs The White Fox, which told the tale of an ancient Egyptian woman whose sister stole her true love.
Furious, the spurned woman sought out the aid of a witch/pirate, who granted her a necklace that transformed her into a big snake.
Centuries later, the Diamond Cobra and White Fox necklaces were found by two long-lost twins, Diamond and Targella. One of them was possessed by the ancient Egyptian snake lady, so we’re kind of doing a Yu-Gi-Oh! only instead of playing children’s card games, the Egyptian ghost starts killing people by spitting snakes at them.
The sisters meet, have a Birdman or Dragon Ball Z beam battle depending on your generational point of reference, and laser blast a cop investigating them into space.
Then they merge into one person, like Dragon Ball Z or Steven Universe depending on your generational point of reference, and a goblin man on a huge iPad says that the curse has been broken.
I have not seen Diamond Cobra vs The White Fox. I only know all of this because the first ten minutes of White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye is footage from the first movie. Now we’re all caught up, and all questions about snake women, laser battles, and iPad goblins have been resolved. Onto the sequel!
Deuandra T. Brown loves smash cuts, and every one of them hits like an After Effects energy beam to the face. We have so much to get through, but let’s just take this in for a minute. Papyrus. Inexplicable colon. ZEPTUNE. What is clearly a fucking spaceship and not a planet. Beautiful. Wonderful.
That’s Targella Diamond, the fusion of Targella and Diamond. I don’t know why she looks like she just got out of bed to try and catch a bat that flew into her house. I don’t know why it’s ten years and six months later. I don’t know why we cut to a bald man wearing accent lashes hanging out with some aliens who start nuking earth. Maybe that recap should have been twenty minutes long.
Targella Diamond wanders around this spaceship, and then this happens.
I called her the female Neil Breen earlier, but I think Deuandra T. Brown might actually be closer to Jodorowsky. We’re on some The Holy Mountain shit right now.
A big snake who is also the Golden Eye Queen tells Targella Diamond to find all of the pieces of the Golden Eye jewelry in order to break the curse, which was broken when Targella and Diamond merged in the last movie. Maybe this is a second, different curse?
Earth looks different than I remember.
Meet Travis. He’s played by a guy named Maxxx Payan, who is inexplicably not a porn actor despite having the name, facial hair, and build of a guy whose top credit should absolutely be Stepsister Suckfest 6. He’s at a rave in Arizona, where he meets the eyepatch woman from the first movie. She has now transformed into a young woman whose role in the plot appears to be doling out pieces of Golden Eye jewelry at random to various people, inevitably bringing them great misfortune.
Travis asks her “who may I say I’m speaking to today” like he’s calling her about her long-distance service rather than trying to crush ancient Egyptian pirate pussy. But she’s into it. Where will the night take them? Well, we— SMASH CUT to Jade, 30s, rideshare driver, on the phone with her brother.
Their mom went missing and Harlem is working with the Russian mafia to get answers. SMASH CUT to New York City.
Film is the art of the cut. Inserts, reverse shots, close-ups — these are the basic building blocks of filmmaking. Some artists cut far too little. James Nguyen, the creator of Birdemic, is notorious for his long establishing shots of cars arriving and parking at their destinations. If Nguyen is one end of the spectrum of cinematic excess, Deaundra T. Brown is at the other. Cuts across time and space just happen every few seconds and if you’re lucky you get a Papyrus title card telling you where and when you are. The effect is one of disorientation, confusion, and anxiety. You could achieve the same experience White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye‘s editing produces by smoking PCP then running into your therapist at the grocery store.
A rare two-shot. Most of the movie is filmed with single actors centered in front of a green screen. Here we get an actual location, which I initially thought was a hotel room until I noticed the coin-operated bleach and fabric softener dispensers on the left. What is this impossible space? Are we in the backrooms? At least there are some context clues here — we know the guy on the right is a detective, on account of his badge and magnifying glass sitting next to his laptop.
“I can’t find your missing brother and dad,” he tells this woman, Riley. “The case happened in Arizona. It’s outside of my zone, he replies” My man, you’re a cop. Cops have jurisdictions. Sonic the Hedgehog has “zones.”
Riley asks him again and he completely changes his mind. We’re up to eight characters now, but let’s meet some more. Southland Tales had seventeen major players. I think Deuandra can beat that. It’s time for a White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye character lightning round!
Here’s Jennifer and Raspberry. The former is a news anchor, which we learn when she says “I gotta go report the news.” Her last name? It’s normal.
Later, Jennifer Townhall shows up on TV to deliver exposition wearing her dead friend Raspberry’s fur coat.
Dead? Yes. Raspberry is murdered by Harlem, who is Jade’s brother. Remember her?
Harlem killed Raspberry on the orders of Alexei, the Russian mobster he’s working for in order to get answers about his mother’s disappearance. For this deed, Harlem learns that his mom was caught up with the “Donnie Barbeque gang.”
My favorite thing about Alexei is that he has a sticker on his phone that says “MILF Hunter.” It’s little details like that which transform otherwise stock roles like “Russian mob boss” into living, breathing characters. Like, maybe he wanted his wife dead because she wasn’t MILFy enough.
While all of this is happening on earth, Jade and Harlem’s mother and Riley’s father are being held captive on the Planet: ZEPTUNE by an alien named Azulon. He looks like this.
He wants the Golden Eye ring, or maybe the bracelet or earrings or necklace, because Deaundra T. Brown read one screenwriting tip about MacGuffins and decided that if one MacGuffin is good, then four should be given congratulatory oral sex. It’s unclear why Azulon thinks that holding these people hostage will help him get the jewelry. It’s like he forget a step between “torture earthlings with diamond magic” and “get ancient artifact.”
It’s also unclear why he wants it. I’m not sure even he knows. I think he just looked around and saw everyone else chasing after some gaudy ancient Egyptian accessories and decided that’s just what people do. And I can only assume that this scene, in which the editor has conspicuously left the green screen backdrop in the movie, is a clever reference to the hollowness of Azulon’s life, defined solely by what society tells him he should value.
That’s twelve characters so far. We are barely halfway through the cast.
So: Targella Diamond goes to Travis’s concert and fucks him afterwards.
I was shocked to realize that this is the only instance in the film in which the director/writer/star sleeps with one of the many characters who look like ketamine dealers. She does get to perv on another guy in the shower at one point, though.
That’s Ahsan, a member of the Moroccan mafia who kills Alexei to get the Golden Eye ring from him. Targella Diamond does not fuck him, but rather turns into a big snake and bites him to death. I kind of appreciate that — it takes restraint to say yes, my twin-souled ancient Egyptian space heroine bangs the emaciated guitarist/weed dealer who sings “Smooth” by Santana Featuring Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 to himself alone in his sad kitchen, but not the jacked North African dreamboat. Or maybe there just wasn’t enough time for two sex scenes — we’ve got more characters to introduce!
Dice, everybody! He’s a techwear doofus who works for Alexei. Here’s his sister!
She gets the Golden Eye Necklace from a beautiful stranger in Egypt, which looks like the shattered ruins from the end of a Dark Souls game where the world is collapsing in on itself.
Alas, she’s killed by Honey Q, who is, of course, the niece of Donnie Barbeque.
Well, not by Honey Q, but on her orders. She’s actually executed by Honey Q’s goon, Dream.
Honey wants the Golden Eye earrings, because they are “with magic” and are worth “over a billion dollars.” On the basis of a dream she had about them, she sends out two other goons to raid Travis’s house to recover them. Travis is dead or in space now because Azulon blasted him with his eye lasers after he tried to explain that he had a one night stand with Targella. In response, Azulon literally says “what is this ‘one night stand’ you speak of?” It feels like he’s making fun of the movie and it’s so unbelievably stupid that for a moment I thought maybe Deaundra T. Brown was a long-term performance art project by the world’s greatest fabulist.
Azulon’s got a friend slash subordinate! Her name is Topaz.
She tries to bash Targella’s head apart in Ireland, but is defeated by an ancient Egyptian laser blast.
There’s also a third, unrelated space monster in White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye, Ezul. We saw him earlier. It goes without saying, but he wants the Golden Eye jewelry. He’s bald, has fabulous lashes, and tries to kill Targella by teleporting in front of her moving vehicle, responding to her rude comments by saying “I love you too,” then blowing a kiss that’s a fireball at her. Sir, you are clearly a Kano and not a Sonya Blade.
He does this on two other occasions, in contexts that make no sense. He just shows up on someone’s laptop or in their mirror, they’re confused or frightened, and in response to nothing he says “I love you too” and explodes them. Maybe it’s an alien power word and it’s just one of those weird linguistic coincidences, like how there’s a filler term in Mandarin that sounds a lot like an English racial slur. Like a nice version of that.
Christ. We’re at nearly two thousand words and I still have a half-dozen characters to get through. Here’s a quick one.
This guy appears in a single shot and is never seen again. He symbolizes all of the strangers in our lives, the faces we see but once before they vanish again forever into the mass of humanity, forming part of the backdrop of our lives yet, impossibly, each with their own inner worlds and realities. It’s that, or this is a stock footage shot Deaundra liked enough to put in the middle of one of her expositional rap montages, which feature some pretty impressive guest verses!
Fuck. I can’t get distracted. There’s still so many more guys to talk about. There’s a whole subplot where this guy Mario is working for Honey Q but used to work for Alexei and Alexei wants him back? But then he falls in love with a cop named Maria and she makes him wear a wire to spy on Honey Q. Also he wears a Jay Kay-style giant furry hat.
Honey Q kills him when she realizes his betrayal.
Maria tearfully vows revenge.
Targella goes to Milan for basically no reason. Forgot Jodorowsky, Adam Sandler is more apt. Think about it — she’s using her self-indulgent movie as an excuse to travel around and put a bunch of her friends onscreen. I think she might just be an independently wealthy madwoman who is living her best life. Unlike Detective Morales, a CIA agent whom Targella evaporates with a laser blast.
Again, the cuts in White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye are incredible. But this, I think is my favorite one.
This is the shot introducing us to Travis’s sister. She looks like someone doing transgressive Dr. Horrible cosplay, which is maybe the meanest thing I’ve ever said. Obviously she wants the Golden Eye jewelry, which she describes as “very, very rare” like it’s a drop in an MMO instead of a one-of-a-kind amulet of the cosmic gods. Anyway, Targella kills her by making her stab herself to death when she comes looking for Travis.
She’s not the only one who can do that, either. Ezul kills Honey Q by manifesting in a cloud portal above her dining room table and forcing her to shoot herself in the head before doing the kiss of death thing to Dice.
Deaundra isn’t precious about her mind-children. Anyone can die in this movie, and nearly everyone does. Whether they’re run down by a Toyota Corolla, stabbed to death by their own hand, or immolated by a heat ray, the cast is winnowed down significantly as we near the end. This might actually be a slasher movie where the slasher is a Mary Sue reincarnation of a space queen.
Travis, Travis’s sister, Honey Q, Dice, Dice’s sister, Alexei, Ahsan, Mario, Topaz, Morales, Raspberry, and the detective are all dead. Most of the survivors meet up in Phoenix, then teleport to Zeptune. They fight.
Targella wins, of course, and gets all four pieces of the Golden Eye. She’s taken to space, where Lady Iris gives her the fifth piece — the glasses.
She transforms into Queen Golden Eye, which is also the name of the worst performer at a millennial gaming nostalgia-themed drag night.
Queen Golden Eye explodes Azulon and Ezul. Two months later, the white cop guy is prowling the stock art streets when Queen Golden Eye appears and explodes him, too.
The end. I’m not kidding. That’s the last shot of the movie. My sincere hope is that everyone had fun working on this, but in an interview for the prequel, one actor says that she didn’t even know what the plot was because there had been over seven hundred script drafts. With anyone else, I’d say she was exaggerating. But I believe in Deaundra T. Brown.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Greg Cunningham, who didn’t even need to read the article because HE LIVED IT! WHAAAAAT?