Made to be Monsters: ‘Lunatics: A Love Story’

Overcoming monstrous perception, and transphobia as portrayed by Bruce Campbell.

Welcome back to ‘Made To Be Monsters’, the series where I talk in-depth about my favorite films and why I think they’re secretly about the transsexual/queer experience. Remember: I am not trying to argue for the genuine, intended text of these films, and this is all in good fun.

With Medium’s new list feature, you can find all previous and future entries into the series here!

At last, a film I am almost certain that nobody saw coming for this particular series. Released in 1991, Josh Becker’s Lunatics: A Love Story didn’t see a DVD release until early 2019. And even then, only in Australia. There are several cheap VHS-rips floating around on YouTube, but those are such a low quality that they don’t really do the movie justice. Unless you’re a super-fan of Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi productions, you’ve probably never even heard of this before now. It’s a tragically obscure little indie film, made after the first two Evil Dead’s and prior to the continued success that many of them would find on television with Xena’s premiere in 1995.

Ted Raimi, little brother to Sam, has only ever starred in two movies, and this is one of them. Here, he plays Hank Stone, a…