If you were lucky, you maybe caught The Rubber Gun, half-asleep and well-baked, via late-night cable transmission back in the late '80s. Allan Moyle’s extraordinary debut feature was lauded upon its release in 1977 but was almost forgotten a decade or so later, as if it was a little too hot to handle. Perhaps the film had to die alongside the drug-addled Montreal counterculture it so vividly depicted. It already seemed like something from a different planet entirely, and still does, after finally getting the 2k restoration the film has long deserved. So put away your degraded VHS dub and celebrate: The Rubber Gun soon screens at the Cinematheque.

Made in the wake of Frank Vitale’s more well-known Montreal Main (1974), and including many of the same players on both sides of the camera, there is a shocking verisimilitude to The Rubber Gun and its tale of a poly-sexual gang of drug dealers trying to arrange the big connection, all while their communal lifestyle falls to addiction, paranoia, and betrayal. Leading the group is the artist Stephen Lack, playing himself, sort of, with a wit and charisma that was also MIA when he turned up four years later in David Cronenberg’s Scanners. (He would atone with a memorable cameo in the same director’s Dead Ringers in ’88. Lack is now a world-renowned artist living in New York.) 

Steve runs a group of street-smart wastrels, including angelic rentboy Pierre, his wife Pam, and their tiny daughter Rainbow (conceived, we learn, after a 300-hit acid binge in the mountains outside of Vancouver). Also present is the belligerent junkie Peter Brawley. Among some of its other details, his indignant, painfully incoherent raps leave us wondering just how much of the film’s vérité approach is actually faux. Like some of Warhol’s seedier efforts, although considerably more watchable, The Rubber Gun makes it hard to separate fiction from reality. 

Moyle places himself in the film as the character Allan “Bozo” Moyle, a McGill sociology student who gets the come-on from Steve in a bookstore. The rest of the group isn’t so taken with Bozo. Later, Pam half-jokingly suggests that Brawley should “off the WASP”. Maybe he should? Including Steve—who’s maturing out of an increasingly bummer scene—none of them know that Bozo is studying the group for his graduate thesis, a well-intentioned caper that invites disasters he can’t anticipate.

To that end, The Rubber Gun also operates as a neat little crime thriller built around a bag of dope sitting in a locker at the Windsor train station. Moyle throws in a bunch of cops who all look like Steakhouse regulars in bad suits but there’s still the whiff of real-life to their efforts. Pierre is turned informant by the porkiest of the pigs (played by Joe Mattia) in a scene that unfolds like a seduction, complete with bursting chest hair, medallion, and a tender embrace over a little baggie of powder. By the mid-’70s, when The Rubber Gun was shot in crisp, frigid 16mm by Vitale and Jim Lawrence—augmented by a delirious, cabaret-style song cycle courtesy of Lewis Furey—the hippie dream had curdled into heroin nightmare, complete with the fuzz pretending to be gay.

Allan Moyle’s sociological interests would persist: in 1980 he flopped with Times Square, a compromised but early attempt to give Generation X its first new wave blockbuster. He had better luck 10 years later with Pump Up the Volume. That film was a masterful work of teen exploitation but it took the graduate thesis to get there.

Stir, June 2025