Read more about Erica’s First Shit! & her creative partners of TINAC (This is Not a Cult)

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Hyperreal Film Club Review:

Austin's Still Worth Fighting For:

Erica's First Holy Shit

By JAMES SCOTT JANUARY 9, 2023

Sometimes I love Austin; sometimes I hate it. That’s the experience everyone has in this city of dreams and inflated rent; incredible creativity and tech bros; Celia Isreal and Kirk Watson. Erica’s First Holy Shit encapsulates this juxtaposition while also remaining specific to its star, Erica Nix aka the queer workout queen aka former mayoral candidate aka the person I sat next to when first watching the film. 

A little background: I work for the Austin Chronicle, the local alt-weekly. I’ve been writing about the This Is Not A Cult team – Nix, Sawyer Stolz, Jeremy Von Stilb, and Jessica Gardner – since the first version of what eventually became EFHS took place poolside at Austin Motel. At the time titled “This Is Not A Cult: An Erica Nix Aquatic Odyssey,” much of the in-person performance piece’s bones remain intact within the cinematic experience. However, what elements have been added create a film that strikes at the heart of why I, and so many others, love Austin despite its flaws.

From its aquatic inception, this project has been about self-actualization. Not a big surprise to anyone who has a passing acquaintance with Nix, who has spoken often about a complicated relationship with wellness culture. In fact, the film’s inciting incident is because of an acid trip gone wrong in self-care bathtub soak. Austin as a city serves as many people’s growth spurt—a place where you find yourself or something like you. But is that a you that you like? At what point does this “you” become a brand, a mask to pull on when difficult situations make genuine identity impossible to maintain?

Nix and the team behind the film have been frank about how much of the script reflects their lived experiences, like divorce, virtue-signaling fears, and pandemic Zoom orgies. What struck me was how much I related to the struggle to find stability in strangeness. Austin is weird, sure, but it’s also an expensive Texas city that offers little to its many creative citizens in the way of relief. At many points in my Austin inhabitance, staying true to what I want and what my community needs is at odds with what will pay my rent every month. Yet, I found that EFHS, in its narrative quest to solve this incompatibility, does so through spotlighting what truly makes ATX a place worth saving: the people.

Throughout the film, familiar faces shine in various roles: as American-Gladiator style fighters, as a Lush salesperson, as the actual Devil. Their presence alongside Nix’s journey is not unlike how community surrounds us in our own journeys. Of course, the secret sauce of the film’s players is their queerness—the beautiful camp inherent to ATX’s queer scene both current and past. Sitting in that theatre in August among an entire audience of fellow queerdo weirdos, I clapped and laughed alongside them at the sight of our community, celebrated. These people—the cast, the audience, the entire scene—are what make Austin. 

When Nix invited me to the screening, I was excited. For a while, I’d been anticipating this love letter to weird Austin and that’s exactly what I saw onscreen. But Erica’s First Holy Shit doesn’t ask you to love Austin, though, and doesn’t ask that you look away from its flaws. At the core of the film is the message the Austin is still worth fighting for. And after seeing how much heart and soul the This Is Not A Cult crew poured into that message, I have to say I agree.

aGLIFF Review:

Erica's First Holy Shit

Austin's alternative fitness superstar hits the big screen

BY RICHARD WHITTAKER, 1:00PM, WED. AUG. 31, 2022

What is Erica's First Holy Shit? Aside from being the debut feature from the eccentric, vivacious, and sex positive Erica Nix it is, as Satan describes it, "a psycho-sexual journey of self-discovery" for the very famous (Austin-specific) workout and fitness guru.

This could have been the year's strangest campaign commercial (if Nix hadn't announced at the film's first aGLIFF screening that she's canceling her run for mayor of Austin), and quite possibly have produced the year's most convoluted finance filings. After all, the denouement involves Nix deciding that it's her turn to run for, and loose, political office.

But, like any journey of self-discovery, it's not about the destination but the trip, and that's what Nix takes courtesy of a very unusual facial mask. Even before that she's been part of a Zoom yoga session that escalates into a hilarious and wild online orgy, with spandex and hot dogs as far as the eye can see. It's an opening that establishes the absurdity and self-aware silliness of everything Nix does - and she admits that wildness as she turns to the camera and giddily gambols through the fourth wall and into a series of encounters. There are figures both cosmic (God, the aforementioned Devil, and Austin's own gutter-slut scum queen Christeene as Mother Nature) and stars of the more terrestrial version (how could the homegrown queen of connecting with your body not talk about GOOP?) on her way to some kind of revelation.

Erica's First Holy Shit! continues the tradition of deeply introspective and very Austin movies. But unlike, say, Slacker or Tower, where filmmakers tried to translate an aspect of life in the ATX for outsiders, Nix's raunchy-sweet monologue is often aimed directly at Austin audiences, people who'll remember Leslie without the brief primer that Nix provides. It's a conversation about a particular kind of Austin, the Austin of the late '90 and early 2000s, of a particular kind of weird Austin that's died - and Nix's internal conversation about her role in both protecting it and killing it.

That said, there's more than enough sheer Day-Glo gleeful silliness and saucy visual creativity to keep viewers outside of the ATX engaged. Nix's disarming ability to make her unique mid-pandemic midlife crisis - about relationships, jobs, destiny, her city - accessible and engaging. That vivacity blossoms into the visual style, a dizzy mix of John Waters, Liam Kyle Sullivan, and the handmade avant-garde flair of early Sesame Street. It's a suitable mixture for a film with a serious message about never taking yourself too seriously.