Stop! That! Train! Is The Ridiculously Camp Queer Comedy We Need Right Now

Drag Race favourites Ginger Minj and Jujubee speak to The Star Observer about leading RuPaul’s gloriously ridiculous disaster comedy Stop! That! Train!  The healing power of collective queer joy and laughing together with your chosen family.

There are disaster movies, there are drag movies, and then there is Stop! That! Train!

A 95-minute collision of runaway train peril, unapologetic camp stupidity and enough familiar queer faces to fill several carriages.

Let’s be honest, the film isn’t winning any awards, and it’s not trying to; instead, it offers an hour and a half of silly, camp escapism, in a time when we need it most.

‘We’re more than lipstick and wigs’: Ginger Minj and Jujubee board Stop! That! Train!

Directed by Hairspray filmmaker Adam Shankman, the comedy stars Ginger Minj and Jujubee as Tess and DeeDee, best friends and train stewardesses who abandon the dreary Stank Rail for the glamorous Glamazonian Express. When a catastrophic “Stormaganza” puts the high-speed train on a collision course with Florida, they must team up with its snobbish first class attendants and RuPaul’s President Judy Gagwell to save the day.

For Jujubee, the film is a long-awaited first.

“This is something that I’ve always wanted to do. This is my first movie,” she tells The Star Observer. While there was pressure on the Drag Race star initially, the strength of the screenplay allowed her to trust the process. “It wasn’t that hard to make it funny, because it was already funny. And to work with Ginger onscreen is a treat.”

Ginger Minj initially assumed she had been offered another small role, similar to her appearance in World of Wonder’s The Bitch Who Stole Christmas. The scale of the job only became clear when she and Jujubee sat down with Shankman to read the script.

“We went, ‘Oh, we’re the stars. We’re the characters of the movie,’” she recalls. “Then it went from being fun to feeling like a lot of responsibility.”

That responsibility required the pair to resist every instinct honed in a Drag Race acting challenge. On their first day, Shankman told them that although the film’s world was crazy, Tess and DeeDee themselves were in a drama.

“On our very first day Adam Shankman said, “Look, this world is crazy and the people in it are even crazier, but Tess and DeeDee are in a drama. You have to play the stakes so that everything else works” she recalled.

“We’re so used to being on those particular sound stages doing Drag Race acting challenges, which are about being so big and so over the top, it was a little adjustment at the beginning,” Ginger says. Shankman’s recurring direction was simple: “Hey, Lucy, Ethel—pull it back.”

That grounded approach is central to the film’s queer power. Shankman’s guiding principle, according to the production notes, was that “the joke is not that they’re drag queens. I want the joke to be the movie.” Instead, Tess and DeeDee are allowed to be funny, flawed and “brutally human” and ultimately the heroes of this camp, queer comedy. While these two might be the grounded pair, it doesn’t stop everyone else around them from serving jokes that range from outright silliness to completely stupid.

The film draws from Airplane!, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno and the gleeful excess of Mel Brooks. Its cast stretches far beyond the Drag Race family, with appearances from Sarah Michelle Gellar, Lisa Rinna, Nicole Richie, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Joel McHale, Charo and Daniel Franzese as well as many familiar Drag Race faces including Brooke Lynn Hytes, Latrice Royale, Marcia Marcia Marcia, Monét X Change and Symone.

The cameos come as thick and fast as the out-of-control train our stars are fighting to save, with plenty of slapstick one-liners and jokes that are just so dumb you can’t help but laugh out loud. In particular, the recurring Sarah Michelle Gellar gag gets funnier as the film progresses.

Jujubee names Rinna as a highlight after finding herself seated beside the Real Housewives icon in the makeup chair. “She is so funny, and she is so for our community,” she says. “Having an ally like her, she’s such an icon, it was one of the coolest experiences.”

Ginger’s standout was comedian Drew Droege, who could take “the most mundane lines in the world” and deliver them 50 different ways. “Each and every single one hits so well. He was so, so, so, so, so funny in every single take.” Ginger isn’t wrong; every line Droege drops is cackle-worthy and we’re here for it.

Somehow, Shankman and his team assembled the sprawling cast and shot the film in just 19 days. Ginger and Jujubee were there every day, while many celebrity guests had only one day to complete their cameos.

“Everybody wanted to be there to work, to make queer art and to show how talented us queens are,” Jujubee says. “We’re more than just lipstick wearers and wig wearers, sweetie. We’re actresses.”

While Ginger and JuJuBee have long been touted as “favourites” of the legend that is RuPaul, they reveal their involvement in the film came through the production team, not at the personal request of the queen herself.

“I am not good Judies with RuPaul. I mean, I love her. I don’t necessarily know that she’s good Judies with any of the girls” Ginger reveals.

“Just because I think Ru—she’s such a pop-culture nerd. Her favourite thing to do is go home, be by herself, and watch interviews from 1973 with all of these different artists. Then she wants to come to set and talk about it with the girls who are there,” she says.

“We definitely have great experiences working together, but I just think she’s more of a private person, which I appreciate, because I tend to be that way once I’m home as well. But I got the phone call from Adam Shankman to do this, and I think Juju had been talking with Adam as well.”

“I got an email on my MySpace account from RuPaul,” Jujubee deadpans. “Ru and I are still friends on MySpace… She’s my Top One, honey.”

Beneath the one-liners, Stop! That! Train! makes a sincere argument for communal queer joy.

In an era of mounting attacks on drag and LGBTQIA+ rights, Shankman describes a universe with RuPaul as US president as “the right kind of anarchy.”

Ginger sees laughter itself as part of the film’s purpose. “I think this type of comedy found its footing years ago, and then it kind of fell by the wayside” she says. “I think this movie is proof that people still want that: we want to get together in a group and we want to laugh.”

“I think there’s something really healing about that. It’s something that brings us all together, because we all share that. We all share laughter.”

Whilst you may be able to stream the film online already, her advice is to resist waiting for streaming. “Get a group of people together and go watch this in a movie theatre, because there’s nothing like it” she says.

For a film powered by a Stormaganza, a scorpion attack, two musical numbers and a president named Judy Gagwell, that may be the most serious message onboard: queer joy is bigger and louder when the whole community turns up.

Stop! That! Train! opens in Australian cinemas on August 13.