An unexpected casualty of Questionable Taste Theatre is going through YouTube for any relevant clips, and then getting lost in a maze of hilarious music videos. Or, worse, someone’s funky fetish video collection. (If your usename contains “padded cell” and you have a bunch of clips of women in straightjackets, please, never contact me, okay?)

SO. No video clips of today’s film, The Linguini Incident, and almost no pictures, because this movie is so rare that I am the only person who remembers it was ever made.

What this movie has: Roseanna Arquette as a failed escape artist, David Bowie as a bartender on the run from the law, Eszter Balint as a defensive-lingerie designer, and Marlee Matlin as a cashier with a pretzel hairdo and a silver lame uniform.

“The simple plan is, no one in this room is going to have sex with anyone else in this room. We’ll be platonic… like our parents.”

The Linguini Incident is technically the story of child-prodigy-turned-humungous flop Lucy “the Magnificent”, who used to be an amazing escape artist and now works as a waitress by day and nearly hangs herself regularly by night, and her quest for love, friendship, and a successful stunt. In reality it’s an awesome surrealist fable with bras.

Check out that blazer, guys. That’s enough blazer for, like, six people.

The restaurant is Dali’s, a sendup of every snotty restaurant ever, where the breadsticks are freeform and the employees are really, really badly dressed. Their newest hire is the British Monty, who’s so hot he makes the silver lame look good.

He’s also a charmer, and by “a charmer” I mean “desperate for a green card”; he proposes to Marlee Matlin (she wants $10k, HA!); he blackmails Lucy, and when Lucy dithers, he enlists the help of her friend Vivian.

Her friend Vivian? IS AWESOME. She’s a designer working on “defensive lingerie”; imagine bras with switchblades in them, for when men don’t know when to quit. Because she’s not blind, she also sets her eye on Monty, and when it becomes clear that Monty’s attentions are being lavished only on restaurant employees, Lucy sets a moratorium on the kissyface. Vivian utters the immortal line, “The simple plan is, no one in this room is going to have sex with anyone else in this room. We’ll be platonic… like our parents.”

That plan lasts about two seconds, until Lucy and Monty make out in the walk-in freezer, at which point he says breathlessly, “My God, you look beautiful. Almost…Ukrainian.”

The love triangle is pretty hilarious, since David Bowie seems totally happy to make out with anyone for the duration of the movie, and the girls like each other too much to actually get pissed about it, so there’s one or two moments of, “Well, I ALSO think he’s hot!” followed by, “Let’s go up on the roof and get wasted,” which is the best way to handle a love triangle, I’ve found.

Sex just wasn’t the same without Vivian to unlock them afterwards.

There’s a whole heist plot that involves Vivian, a hat with a veil, a huge restaurant coffer, a bra with swtichblades in it, and a DELIGHTED Marlee Matlin, who totally breaks character whenever Vivian shows up for a robbery, gleefully shoving money into the bag. The restaurant gets more and more famous, Monty gets more and more desperate for a green card, and at the end there’s a big caper, of course.

I seriously love this movie. I bought a VHS copy off eBay in, like, 1999, for something like 40 bucks. (For the young people, $40 in 1999 is like $2,000 today.) And every time it looks like it’s going to be serious/heartwarming, it goes INSANE instead. And yet, you still really hope that everything turns out okay for those crazy kids.

Some of the lines in this movie remain among my favorite movie lines of all time, either because of the context or because it’s just hilarious.

[Monty finds Lucy tied up in her apartment mid-botched-escape, being sniffed by her pet magician's rabbit.]
Monty: OH GOD!…I thought that rabbit was eating your head.

Dude, WHAT? AWESOME.

I would go on and on about Vivian (Balint really steals this movie), but we’ll just go with the last lines. Please note, the crazy kids get together, make a breakfast date for the next day, and then Lucy and Vivian ride their bikes home together. Only in a crazy film would a woman not abandon her friends the moment she had a boyfriend!

So, they’re biking away into the dawn.

Lucy: We should go to the park this weekend and watch all the children shooting squirrels with their BB guns.
Vivian: True. We don’t appreciate nature, enough.

How could you NOT LOVE THIS MOVIE? Well, maybe if you like actually-good movies you wouldn’t love this movie. But then you would be joyless and mean. How can you hate a movie that spends two hours being like, “We could just…here, you guys do something cute! Funny lines! Capers! Houdini’s wife! Bitchy restaurant owners! Iman! Kissing! Bras! WHEEE!”

N’awww, those crazy kids!