DIRECTED BY: Srdjan Spasojevic

FEATURING: Srdjan Todorovic, Sergej Trifunovic, Jelena Gavrilovic, Katarina Zutic, Slobodan Bestic

PLOT: An ethical and well-intentioned ex porn star collaborates with an Eastern syndicate to
produce a series of art-house pornographic films. In the process he is unwittingly ensnared in the dark, serpentine morass of his film executives’ depraved madness.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite the colorful controversy surrounding A Serbian Film, including claims that it is torture porn and even child porn, the movie is a straightforward—if transgressive—cross-genre thriller, a skillfully blended mix of mystery, horror and suspense elements.  Adventurous viewers who choose to watch A Serbian Film should seek the uncut version.  The controversial scenes are a crucial part of the plot.

NOTE: Director Srdjan Spasojevic was confronted by the international press and informed that his movie A Serbian Film is nothing more than thinly veiled torture porn, perhaps even child pornography.  He responded by asserting that the movie is in fact “a political allegory,” intentionally resplendent with metaphors for the historical, systematic repression of the Serbian people. For example, Spasojevic tells explains that the shocking baby scene “represents us and everyone else whose innocence and youth have been stolen by those governing our lives for purposes unknown.”

Is he being serious?  Or does he believe the most effective way to point out the absurdity of detractors’ allegations and deliberate misinterpretations is to posit an equally absurd response?  A thorough consideration of this controversy is beyond the scope of this review.  The viewer should watch the movie and judge for himself.  I present my own ideas regarding what I think the film discursively accomplishes in the addendum which follows the review.  Whether Spasojevic intends the film to deliver any of these meanings is a matter of speculation.  Despite what I think are some very good points made in the film, it’s my personal belief that he primarily set out to make an offbeat, tense thriller that was shocking enough to be sure to attract attention.  He succeeded.

COMMENTS: Lurid and grim, suspenseful and exciting, A Serbian Film is a well crafted, taut thriller that doesn’t insult one’s intelligence.  Sporting a chic visual signature and structured with a non-linear, temporally shifting plot, this sensational shocker fires off images that range from bizarre and salacious to astounding and stupefying.  By applying the element of satire, A Serbian Film impels its audience to appraise the controversial predicament of contemporary mass-produced culture.  The result is provocative, visceral and shocking.

Milos (Todorovic) is an easy-going family man who used to be a successful pornographic movie actor. Needing additional income, he grudgingly accepts a mysterious offer from an enigmatic production company to star in their flagship project, a series of “high art” experimental adult films. What Milos doesn’t know, however, is that the producer, a government agent named Vukmir (Trifunovic) with obvious Russian Mafia affiliations, is quite completely insane.  Without Milos’s consent, he doses the unsuspecting actor with a futuristic cattle stimulant.

Poor Milos has no idea what is in store. The real details of the scripts are kept secret from him. Production is arranged like a sort of reality show. Multiple cinematographers with digital cameras lead and follow him in real time as directions are fed to him through a small earpiece.

The films turn out to be an avant-garde exercise in taboo extremism. Appalled by requests to violently degrade women and seduce minors, Milos finally grasps the full extent of the producer’s intentions. Deeply disturbed by the crew’s pernicious agenda, Milos possesses a progressive, but genuine moral compass. His conscience compels him to resist. Yet even the actors he works with possess a malignant bent. Behaving like miscreants some of them seem to actually enjoy being degraded.

A classic good and evil struggle ensues between Milos and Vukmir. Vukmir praises Milo’s “talent,” but wants to ferociously exploit him, to use him up, drain him dry, steal his soul and discard him like a paper cup. He schemes to eventually dispatch Milos with an end fitting for an exhausted stag goat. Milos flees, only to be recaptured, sedated, and forced to participate.

Now at the mercy of the sinister syndicate, a sexy, diabolical biochemist keeps Milos subdued with cocktails of powerful, mind-altering narcotics. When the armed crew of jack-booted production technicians is ready to film, she injects her brainchild livestock aphrodisiac into Milos with reckless abandon. In large amounts the potion turns a subject into a bellicose, crazed rapist, easily incited to violence. The producers don’t just want a sexual performance from Milos. They want brute-force physical aggression, and the formula renders even the most abject perversion irresistible to him.

The bovine sex stimulant compels Milos to confront the most grim, primal dimensions of biological programming run amok. He finds himself helplessly driven to desperately gratify himself by committing horrifying, depraved atrocities of sexual barbarism. Plunged into a bedlam of psychotic excess, Milos is trapped on the other side of the looking glass. There is no salvation for him. The filmmakers have powerful government and organized crime associations. They’ve thought of everything and covered every angle. Milos must find a way to deliver himself, but how? Subjected to violence and sexual assaults alongside the films’ other subjects, will Milos manage to achieve deliverance before he is ravaged of his last vestiges of humanity?

As Milos plunges into a nightmare of lust and death, some of the sex acts that A Serbian Film depicts are appalling. They are supposed to be sickly pornographic in the fictitious concept of a film within a film. The images are not, however, prurient from the audience’s perspective. Presented through Milos’s point of view as an unwilling participant, copulation is filmed in such a way as to reveal little explicit nudity other than some quick shots of heaving breasts. Rather, the frames are composed in a manner that tricks the audience’s sense of perception. This is a cornerstone of theater and magic; people see what they think they are being shown, or what they want to see.

A Serbian Film contains violence that is controversial because it is sexually related, but the piece brandishes less mayhem than many action movies, and remember, it is a work of horror. Moreover, unlike many action and splatter films, the violence is not a gratuitous exhibition. It furthers the plot and the terror.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 “In its histrionic dream logic, the movie says as much about Eastern Europe as Twilight does about the Pacific Northwest. Frankly, you’d be better off self-abusing.”–Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York (contemporaneous)

A Serbian Film – sanitized trailer

—————————————————

ADDENDUM:

A Serbian Film Is Socially Apposite and Cinematically Significant

It is tempting to deliberately misconstrue A Serbian Film, but it would be a miscalculation to dismiss this effort for being symptomatic of the controversy that it addresses. Granted, the filmmakers’ primary objective was to create a provocative thriller, an effort at which they impressively succeeded. The film is unique however, not only in its portrayal of a porn star as a sympathetically conscionable character, but in it’s exposition of audience malleability.

Notably, the picture conveys a grim social observation about the runaway train effect of ever-increasingly deviant pornography. This idea doesn’t break new ground. It’s not one that hasn’t been considered independently of A Serbian Film. What makes A Serbian Film so cogent is that it adds a chilling dimension to the contention. When an increasingly fiendish and jaded audience demands snuff movies, who will answer the casting call?

A Serbian Film builds credibility to set the stage for its postulation not just by being shocking, but by employing exaggeration. The movie operates on a dual plain of horror and subtle, dark satire. Some of the imagery illuminates realities so abhorrent that the element of mockery may not be immediately evident. Satire is detectable however, when sensational elements in the film are very slightly over-the-top, without being contrived.

Three concepts are played on: the misguided idea of justifying porn as art, pornographic contrivances in general, and outright perversion. In accordance with the first, Vukmir aggrandizes himself as being a break-through auteur and pornography prophet. For him, this new brand of pioneering smut is nothing short of visionary. Like Theatre of Cruelty French playwright Antonin Artaud, Vukmir conceptualizes the organic essence of theater as consisting of the coarse elements of naked emotion. Plot, storyline, and method are secondary to a surreal atmosphere conveyed with minimalist, but dreamlike sets, and a nearly psychedelic parade of alarming visual sensationalism.

To Vukmir, the highest form of drama, the best-selling subject matter, and thus the best pornography is based on the most striking reality: the reality of horror and victimization. “The victim feels the most and suffers the best,” he proclaims to Milos. Vukmir takes Cinema of Transgression to a philosophical plain. What appears on the screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, taboo and violent pornography is reality, and reality is less than taboo and violent pornography.

Perhaps not as dramatically, real-life pornographers have clung to similar, albeit watered-down versions of these grand sorts of delusions, believing that they employ genuine craftsmanship to produce solid works of art. This has been depicted in the popular media. Examples are found in parodies of the adult film industry, such as the biographical Rated X about the notorious Mitchell brothers, and in the reality-inspired black comedy, Boogie Nights.

In addressing the notion that pornography (as opposed to explicit erotica) can be a valid medium of expression, A Serbian Film‘s aphotic send up of smut strikes some common ground with David Cronenberg‘s Videodrome. In the latter, producer Max Renn discovers a secret, pornographic BDSM torture program. It consists of a nude woman being strapped to a wrought iron grate in front of a clay wall, and savagely whipped, presumably, eventually to death by leather-hooded executioners.

Harlen, Renn’s media technician, observes that the torture show is “for perverts only.” Unable to discern any significant difference between the poetically substantial and the superficially sensational, Max fires back, “Absolutely brilliant. I mean look, there’s almost no production costs. You can’t take your eyes off it. It’s incredibly realistic. Where do they get actors who can do this?”

It’s a revealing and sardonically humorous reply, in that Max completely misses the point. The dreadful truth is that those are not actors at all, but genuine victims. Similarly, in A Serbian Film, Vukmir tries to enlighten Milos by demonstrating the cutting edge of profound drama and ready marketability, concepts which are interchangeable to him. During the screening of a film in which a brutish, incognito man delivers a baby and then rapes it, a shocked Milos runs out of the room in disgust. Vukmir roars after him that he has just seen high art, but can’t accept it. “Can it be that you don’t get it? This is a new genre, Milos! The new porn is newborn porn!” He triumphantly shouts.

A Serbian Film wryly, sublimely lampoons pornographic clichés. It not only demonstrates the artificiality of commercial pornography, but also stresses it’s superficiality. For instance, in the above scene to which Milo was just subjected, the mother revels in the rape, ecstatically savoring the penetration of her offspring as if she herself were the sexual vessel. This is an exaggeration of the phenomenon of transferred gratification, a form of male ego-stroking for the sake of audience patronization. A staple of adult films, the most common example occurs when an actress expresses as much pleasure and enjoyment in her partner’s exhibitionistic ejaculation as she would derive from her own climax. A Serbian Film satirizes the absurdity of this canon by taking it to the extreme with the new mother’s ecstasy.

Other grist for A Serbian Film‘s burlesque of triple-x entertainment include the male fantasy of the completely and enthusiastically submissive female. A throbbing Venus-like icon of instant sexual gratification, she worships at the altar of the turgid male sexual organ, and revels in abundant facefuls and mouthfuls of scalding, sanctimoniously-sprayed semen. It is an additional tenet of the pornographic representation of reality that women are merely licentious tureens. They are not to be gently made love to, but rather vigorously assaulted, and it is this axiom that the film enlarges upon so effectively. In Vukmir’s production, the assault evolves from the exaggerated, rough, comically frantic sex of garden variety porn, and explodes into a fury of genuine violence.

This leads to the central tent of A Serbian Film, which is its statement about pornography’s deleterious effect upon contemporary culture by way of the slippery slope. In the story, victim porn is the ultimate, “priciest sell.” In the movie’s setting, this is what the social climate has degenerated to.

Traditionally, many forms of perverse and deviant behavior are condemned or restricted. Society pressures its citizens to deny or suppress facets of the human condition, e.g. inappropriate primal instincts. Due to social controls, relatively few people will ever have to confront the disconcerting fact that under the right set of circumstances, they are capable of just about anything.

Pulling out the stops can produce a cumulative, or domino effect. Like domesticated pets becoming feral without human supervision, a dramatic example can be found in the curious case of the 16th Century Scottish Sawney Beane clan. Having isolated themselves from society, the Beanes became inbred and mad, turning into genetic mutants, living off highway robbery and pickling and eating their victims.

The idea of a cumulative effect applies as well to viewers becoming jaded by progressively far-fetched prurience. As the Randy Marsh character laments about his addiction to Internet porn in the irreverent animated comedy South Park, “I need the Internet to jack off. I got used to being able to see anything at the click of a button, you know? Once you jack off to Japanese girls puking in each other’s mouths you can’t exactly go back to Playboy!”

Given that so much commercial porn seems to cater to the gross-out factor at the very bottom of the medulla oblongata’s intellectual barrel, it’s understandable that Randy has become hardened, so to speak. Indeed, if the bizarre, runaway nature of society’s perversions as reflected in everything from crush erotica and felching, to plushophilia and the sexual aspects of furry fandom is any indicator of what can happen when people are allowed to freely indulge unfettered in their kinky twists, then A Serbian Film posits a provocative proposition. If there is no mechanism in place to limit widespread, commercial indulgence in perversion, will sexual deviance compound on itself until the demand for crush videos and Japanese girls puking gives way to cravings for snuff movies and baby rape?

Can we take a cue from history? There is nothing new about barbarous savagery and violent sexual perversion. They have been around for a long time. For instance, during looting and pillaging of those they conquered, Attila’s Huns would engage in a form of monstrous gang-bang in which numerous soldiers would dismount from their horses and fall upon a single woman. The first three men occupied her primary orifices, the additional rapists would cut their own in her body cavity.^[1]

In ancient Rome, bestiarii trained all nature of wild beasts, from horses to lions to giraffes, to rape immobilized girls for a leering public. Author Daniel P. Mannix describes a scene in which a prostitute and her pimp were tricked into performing an exhibition of lovemaking positions in the arena, and just when the crowd was growing bored of watching, a wild bear was released to rip the couple apart and devour them mid-coitus. This delighted the audience who considered the stunt to be a very good joke.^[2]

Historians attribute the origins of the eventual Roman Colosseum spectacle to a boxing style, gladiatorial match staged between three pairs of slaves in 246 BC. Arranged by Marcus and Decimus Junius Brutus Scaeva to honor the memory of their deceased father, the event drew a large crowd to the Forum Boarium in Rome. One thing led to another and centuries later, the Roman mob was showing up regularly at the Colosseum to behold an astounding width and breadth of atrocities.

This is an oversimplification of course. The factors giving rise to the nature of the games in the Colosseum are varied and complex. It is nevertheless illustrative of the notion of the runaway train phenomenon that occurs when an audience is cultivated around, and continually bolstered with aberrant debauchery and violence.

Obviously perversion unraveling to its extremes is nothing new, but its mass production and global distribution are relatively recent developments. Avenues of modern exposition now include Internet sites that deliver video satiation at the touch of a button. One can “jack off,” as Randy Marsh so elegantly phrased it, to anything from coprophelia and foot fetishes to bestiality and child pornography.

This form of electronic dispensation makes paper and ink publishing of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days Of Sodom seem as antiquated as waiting for a town crier to shout breaking news. It is this high tech and widespread commercial marketing of outrageous deviance that A Serbian Film addresses. The movie impels a consideration of the domino effect of an increasing demand for perversion in concert with unprecedented, broad dissemination. It does so with a striking and engaging bearing that abstains from being preachy.

This makes A Serbian Film as thought-provoking as it is horrifying. That’s important because perhaps we should consider the consequences of a commercial brutality industry. Going back to the Max Renn Videodrome quote above, if the runaway train of cultural degradation should in fact, give way to another era of Colosseum-style cruelty, “where will we find the actors who can do this?”

1. G.L. Simons, Simon’s Book Of World Sexual Records (Random House:1982)
2. Daniel P. Mannix, Those About To Die (Ballantine: 1974)

DIRECTED BY: Steve Ballot

FEATURING: Frank Meyer

PLOT: Frank, a mentally challenged old man with a speech impediment, kills various people he

meets as he searches for true love from a woman with large breasts.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: As an authentic piece of goombah outsider art, The Bride of Frank is actually weird, but it’s also bad. And I mean real bad, not “entertaining” bad.

COMMENTS: The movie begins with a toothless old man tricking a five year-old girl into getting into his big rig, trying to get her to kiss him, then crushing her head under the wheel of his truck after she calls him a “dirty bum.” If that scenario sounds like can’t miss comedy gold to you, then you’re The Bride of Frank‘s target audience. All others will want to observe that “beware” rating. That opening scene of child molestation played for laughs does have the virtue of driving away most of the audience before the film can even get started; anyone who continues on past that point can’t pretend to be surprised by the senseless killing, simulated defecation, and sexual perversion that follows. Tonally, the opening, which makes us want to destroy Frank with fire, is a huge problem because it’s out of character with the way the rest of the movie wants to portray him—as a hideous-looking but childlike outcast, a la Frankenstein’s monster, who only kills bad people after they insult and reject him. To wit: Frank decapitates a nerd and relieves himself inside the corpse after being insulted at his birthday party, rips the face off a transvestite who tricks him into a sexual encounter, tears the eye out of a 300 pound exotic dancer and violates her corpse because she’s a tease, and so on. Yawn. Are we jaded yet? More conventional comic relief comes from the poetically obscene homoerotic/homophobic repartee between two of Frank’s coworkers, which is slightly amusing, but nothing you haven’t heard before if you’ve ever worked with Jersey teamsters on a loading dock. Frank, the weatherbeaten, dim, ex-homeless killer whose speech impediment is so thick he’s often subtitled, is played by real-life ex-homeless man Frank Meyer. Frank is like John Waters regular Edith Massey, except he’s not in on the joke. He’s not acting, he’s simply repeating lines as best he can as they’re fed to him one at a time by the director. Except for the serial killing part, this is Frank’s real character, including shots of his real living quarters and his real pet stray cats. So if you’re laughing at the way he mumbles out his scatological threats, you’re not laughing at a performance, but at a real person. (In real life, Frank Morgan is actually a skid row hero, a survivor who’s played the bad hand life dealt him as well as he possibly could). If you can stomach Pink Flamingos levels of bad taste, at least Frank‘s not boring; even though it has no narrative plan and looks entirely improvised, there’s always something going on. There’s even a talented person in the movie: one of the blind dates who answers Frank’s personals ad is an opera diva who sings “you’re not a man of society, you’re not a man of wealth/I think that you should be condemned by the Board of Health”—while juggling! She’s so classy, Frank doesn’t even gouge out her eyes. Another high point is a nightmare sequence that features Frank and his mothers’ heads bounding around on their solarized bodies; it has a crude MS-Paint-meets-el-cheapo-VHS-editing-suite charm. Still, the film’s minor amusements don’t make up for its moral and aesthetic bankruptcy—these guys just aren’t smart and witty enough to pull off transgressive. They genuinely think fake feces made out of peanuts and brownie batter constitutes side-splitting prop comedy; the movie’s not even nihilism, unless you’d call it naïve nihilism. If Beavis and Butthead grew up and filmed a tribute to John Waters, The Bride of Frank would be the result.

If The Bride of Frank looks like it was made by a bunch of amateurs fooling around making a gory horror movie on the loading dock after work, well, that’s pretty much what happened. You have to give this to Steve Ballot: against all odds he realized his dream and actually made a movie. The Bride of Frank played a few underground film festivals, but Ballot refused a distribution deal from Troma, comparing their proposed contract to an offer of sodomy. He printed a few copies on VHS and word got out in the underground, where the movie was bootlegged and passed around enough among trash aficionados to convince Sub Rosa to take a chance on releasing it on DVD. This disc is packed with a freakish amount of extras for those who can’t get enough Frank, including audio commentary, outtakes, a thirty minute (!) alternate ending, and even a featurette on “Buttersound,” the faux-surround sound used on the soundtrack. It’s the Criterion edition release of amateur sleaze movies.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If Fellini had grown up in New Jersey and only had fifteen bucks to make a movie, The Bride of Frank might very well be the one he made… oh, and if he had been really insane too!”–Alternative Cinema Magazine

(This movie was nominated for review by Jason, who correctly predicted it “should be in the beware section I think.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: David Lynch

FEATURING:  Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Moira Kelly, Chris Isaak, Keifer Sutherland, Kyle MacLachlan

PLOT: This prequel to the events of the cult TV show explores the sordid story behind homecoming queen/secret bad girl Laura Palmer’s last days before her brutal murder.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: In terms of its chances of making the List, Fire Walk with Me‘s pluses and minuses are the same: the fact that it’s so intimately entwined with the TV series it sprang from. That makes it a good candidate to represent a franchise that has blessed us with some of the most memorably weird moving images of all time. The downsides are that this feature film makes no sense whatsoever to anyone who’s not thoroughly familiar with the minutiae of the “Twin Peaks” universe; further, much of what goes on in its 135 minute running time feels like housecleaning, tying up numerous loose ends from the canceled series.

COMMENTS: Early on in Fire Walk with Me a woman in a red fright wig walks in front of three FBI agents, makes funny faces and hand gestures, spins around, and leaves without saying a word. Typical Lynchian randomness, right? Not so fast; one of the agents later explains to the other that every article of clothing the woman wore, every gesture she made, held a secret meaning. After his superior decodes the entire piece of performance art for him, the junior G-man mentions that the lady was also wearing a blue rose. The more experienced agent compliments his powers of observation, but informs him “I can’t tell you about that.” In a meta-symbolic sense, this sequence explains what the viewer can expect from Lynch’s film: many seemingly abstruse images will have a coded meaning in the story, but something will still remain hidden that the director can’t tell you about. Whether he will refuse to explain it, or whether he doesn’t know himself, is left ambiguous. Fire Walk with Me proves muddled in more than it’s symbolism; it’s also more than a bit of a mess in structure and purpose. It’s set in Twin Peaks’ familiar universe, but the tone is far darker and weirder than the TV show. The project is also constantly pulled in two different directions due to its conflicting desires to tell a compelling story about a doomed high school girl that’s capable of standing on its own, and its obligation to please fans of the canceled TV show by tying up loose ends, however insignificant they might be. And although there is a touching story at the film’s core and beautiful imagery scattered throughout, I’m afraid that the production errs too much on the side of providing “Twin Peaks” fanservice, with multiple dream sequences each trying to outweird the previous, scenes that serve no other purpose but to address passing inconsistencies from the TV series, and the shoehorning in of beloved characters who logically should play no part in Laura’s story. The overlong and unwanted 30 minute prologue, with two new FBI agents investigating the Teresa Banks murder which occurred a year before “Twin Peaks” proper begins, is a prime example of the movie’s confused approach. So is the presence of Kyle MacLachlan as Agent Cooper, whose role has been retrofitted from the series canon so that he now has a precognitive spiritual connection to Laura (and thus can appear in this movie). These complaints aren’t meant to suggest Fire Walk with Me is a bad movie. It would be impossible to please everyone with a “Twin Peaks” prequel, so Lynch deliberately chose to appeal to the show’s hardest core “dream sequence” breed of fans rather than making something that would be accessible to newcomers or more casual fans. Fair enough. In terms of quality, Walk with Me is miles above the troughs of “Twin Peaks”s second season, although it never reaches the majestic heights of the show’s magical first season. This feature gives Lynch the opportunity to spotlight luminous Sheryl Lee, the iconic and tragic girl “full of secrets” who (being dead) was necessarily sidelined during most of the series’ run. Lynch goes full bore for his hallucinations, especially a senseless bit with David Bowie (trying out a Texas accent!) joining a cast of dwarves, kids in plaster masks and other Dark Lodge weirdos. But the quietly strange moments impress more: Laura’s boozy last dance in a bluesy pleasure pit lit with red strobe lights, Leland picturing Laura and Donna in their underwear, a Renaissance angel fading off a painting. The homecoming queen’s painful final moments are harrowing, but Lynch does grant the abused girl a coda of surrealistic grace. All in all, as a wrap up to the “Twin Peaks” phenomenon, Walk with Me is frequently brilliant and sometimes frustrating, just like the series that birthed it. Much is explained, and perhaps over-explained, in terms of Lynch’s peculiar interior mythology (garmonbozia?). Much is left as a blue rose (“Judy,” says the monkey?) Those who treasure David as a teller of psycho-riddles to be solved will appreciate Walk with Me‘s puzzles, but there’s still wiggle room left for those of us who appreciate Lynch as the diviner of ineffable mysteries.

Series co-creator Mark Frost did not have a role in writing Walk with Me‘s script. Some fans—those who responded mostly to the comic quirkiness of the characters and the show’s absurdly overwrought melodramatics—found Lynch’s solo permutation of “Peaks” too dismal and out of tune with the tone of the rest of the series. According to interviews included on the DVD, some of the film’s cast shared the same opinion; others defended the movie passionately against the movie’s tepid critical response.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…will inevitably attract die-hard fans, but will be too weird and not very meaningful to general audiences. Ultimately, this feels like David Lynch treading water before moving on to new terrain.”–Todd McCarthy, Variety (contemporaneous)

Ai no Mukidashi

“Nothing is more important than love.”–Shion Sono on the theme of Love Exposure

DIRECTED BY: Shion Sono

FEATURING: Takahiro Nishijima, Hikari Mitsushima, Sakura Andô, Atsurô Watabe, Makiko Watanabe

PLOT: Yu Honda, the son of a Catholic priest, falls in with a gang of upskirt photographers in an attempt to generate sins he can confess to his father. One day, while dressed in drag after losing a bet, he falls in love with Yoko, a man-hating schoolgirl who believes him to be a woman. He strives to woo her despite the mistaken identity, but a mysterious girl named Koike and a brainwashing cult seem intent on preventing Yu from ever winning Yoko’s heart.

BACKGROUND:

• Sono’s original cut of the film was six hours long. At the request of producers he cut it down to two hours but felt the result was incoherent; the current four-hour run time is a compromise.
• Sono reportedly wrote the part of upskirt photography guru “Master Lloyd” with Lloyd Kaufman in mind.
• “Miss Scorpion” was a recurring character from a 1970s Japanese women-in-prison film series.
• Despite winning awards at multiple Asian film festivals as well as a FIRPESCI international film critics awards, Love Exposure‘s long running time made it anathema to theatrical distributors. The movie finally saw a very limited run in U.S. and Canadian theaters in 2011.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Some will doubtlessly be impressed by the bloody castration scene, but a less shocking image marks the centerpiece of Love Exposure: “the miracle,” the moment when the wind blows up Yoko’s skirt and reveals her alabaster underthings, giving Yu the first erection of his life. White panties—a symbol of sex masked in the color of purity—are the most important recurring image in Love Exposure, even more so than crosses and hard-ons. As Master Lloyd explains while pointing to a bronze relief image of a spreadeagled woman with a swatch of white silk covering her nether portions, “Anything you seek can be found here, in the groin.”

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Although there is some crazy stylization—slo-mo bullets following a schoolgirl through Tokyo and a dysfunctional family posing with a giant cross in the desert—what makes Love Exposure‘s mad heart tick is the plot that piles crazy on top of crazy. Any story that incorporates Catholic guilt, ninja panty-peeking photographers, kung fu and samurai sequences, mistaken identity subplots, and teenage cult kingpins, plays it all as a romantic comedy, and has to run for twice the length of an average movie just to fit in everything the director wants to say, is bound to be a little weird.

Trailer for Love Exposure

COMMENTS:  For four hours Love Exposure bounces back and forth between poles of purity and perversion, suggesting both the fetishistic perversity of organized religion and the purity of the dedicated pervert’s devotion.  Despite all the panty shots, cross dressing, rape, hints of incest, and sexual power politics, the movie is at bottom a deceptively conventional love story. Yu seeks a pure love—a hard-on from the heart—and he perseveres, keeping faithful to his virginal ideal “Maria” while traveling through a pornographic world.

He finds his great love in Yoko, who, ironically, hates all men, thanks to the abuse heaped on her by her father. She thinks herself a lesbian, and thinks Yu a contemptible “hentai” (pervert).  These lovers would be star-crossed enough even if not for a case of mistaken identity of Shakespearean proportions and the manipulations of Koike, a mini-skirted teenage supervillainess who wants to keep the pair apart for her own purposes. Add kidnapping, brainwashing, and extortion to the plot as the unscrupulous Koike attempts to break Yu’s spirit and sanity, and a happy ending for these lovers seems impossible.

This is the setup for one of the strangest and most twisted love triangles imaginable. Koike is attracted to Yu, although not necessarily in a sexual way—rather, she’s fascinated by his “original sin,” and has an obsession with destroying him. Koike isn’t attracted to Yoko, but pretends to be just to get under Yu’s skin. Yoko isn’t attracted to Yu or Koike, but instead pines for “Miss Scorpion,” a character who doesn’t actually exist. It’s quite the high school soap opera mess. Furthermore, each of these damaged characters suffers from a bad relationship with their father (the movie has more daddy issues than the Saturday night lineup at your local gentleman’s club). Yu, who is naturally gentle and kind, manufactures sins so that he can confess them to his stern priest father. Koike and Yoko each come from abusive families. Koike’s father made her apologize to God for having an “obscene body” while whipping her; in contrast to the brutal revenge she takes on her tormentor, runaway Yoko’s habit of kung fu-ing random men she meets on the street because she hates all males (other than Kurt Cobain and Jesus) is a mild quirk. When you put three characters this messed up in the same school, and mix in hormonal desires and religious politics, the results are bound to be explosive.

Although Koike and Yoko’s histories are extensively explored in the marathon running time, Love Exposure is clearly Yu’s story. In Yu’s mind, Yoko represents his Maria, the Virgin Mary; he promised his dying mother he would marry a woman just like the Madonna. Yoko makes for an unlikely Mary, but as the story develops Yu becomes an even more improbably sort of Jesus of the Perverts. (The theological symbolism suggests hints of metaphorical mother-son incest, to be followed by threats of statutory brother-sister incest when Yu’s father announces plans to adopt Yoko). When Yu apprentices under Master Lloyd, the prophet of panty porn explains to him that upskirt photography is “a holy act” and that “any act of holiness will be punished by the people. Just like Jesus was punished.” The torments to follow for Yu surely constitute punishment; as a proud pervert, he’s considered an outcast, and rejected even by his beloved Maria. He acquires three dimwitted disciples, who not coincidentally end up eventually betraying him to the Pharisees of the Zero Church. He’s designated the “King of Perverts” by a porn conglomerate, but resists the temptation to “poke,” reserving his chastity and preserving his paradoxical position as the virgin hentai. Another plot convolution finds him dressed as a priest at a convention of degenerates, absolving perverts’ sins before a giant golden phallus. Yu turns perversion into a holy vocation, and, putting aside for a moment that the main part of that vocation is to invade the sanctity of a woman’s skirt with his prying camera lens, he is a holy man. At least, he may be the holiest example of a man we are likely to find in this pornographic society.

The above probably makes Love Exposure sound more serious and intellectual than it is. Rest assured, the running time leaves plenty of room for scenes of shoolgirls kickboxing wave after wave of gangsters. Despite the outrageous, transgressive nature of the material, Sono’s film is paradoxically light, and decent at heart. It’s a wildly plotted, elaborately stylized film with a simple “love conquers all” moral. And it is a romantic comedy, one that’s often quite funny (you don’t hear lines like “Jesus, I approve of you as the only cool man other than Kurt Cobain” in just any old movie). But Sono put religion front and center in the film, and most of the humor arises from the idea of the holy pervert, with the laughs frequently coming at the expense of the Catholic Church: e.g. the absurd notion that today’s Madonna would be re-imagined as a panty-flashing kung fu bisexual Japanese schoolgirl. As an outsider to Catholicism, Sono’s casual blasphemies don’t have the nasty points of the provocations of an insider to the religion like Luis Buñuel. Rather, he seems nonplussed by Christianity. He admires Christ’s focus on love: Paul’s famous “love is patient” sermon from 1 Corinthians 13 occupies the emotional center of the film. But he is bemused by the Church’s keen eye for sexual sin and its passion to root it out. Late in the film Yoko, believing herself holy, rejects Yu’s pure love again with the accusation “you’re a pervert! You’re a pervert by anyone’s standards!” Yu’s response is the classic anti-authoritarian moral cry: “Who cares about the standards of normal people?” Love Exposure is proof that Shion Sono doesn’t care about the standards of normal people; so long as there’s love, all else is forgiven.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…plays as if John Waters reworked a screenplay by Mel Gibson, then handed it off to the ghosts of Luis Buñuel and John Hughes for polishing.”–Jeanette Catsoulis, The New York Times (2011 release)

“…deserves any prize for weirdness going… Deeply strange…”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

“…it might be too obvious to say there is no other film quite like ‘Love Exposure,’ even if at times it can feel like watching every movie ever all at once… [a] singularly overwhelming oddity…”–Mark Olsen, The Los Angeles Times (2011 release)

OFFICIAL SITES:

Love Exposure | Third Window Films – The British distributor’s site includes the trailer, a collection of stills, and links to reviews

Love Exposure | Olive Films – The U.S. distributor’s site contains only a synopsis and basic information about the film

IMDB LINK: Love Exposure (2008)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Love Exposure: Q&A with director Sion Sono – Part 1 of a videotaped question and answer with Sono at the New York Asian Film Festival

Lengthy tale of lust and religion – Report on the film by Mark Schilling of The Japan Times, incorporating quotes from Sono

Upskirts for Christ: A Discussion About “Love Exposure” – A back-and-forth discussion between film critics Joe Bowman and Andrew Grant about the film (it would have been more interesting if they didn’t agree on absolutely every point, but it’s still thought-provoking)

DVD INFO: North American distribution rights for Love Exposure landed in the hands of Olive Films, known for taking chances on cult titles but not for their elaborate home video productions. The Love Exposure DVD (buy) crams the entire 4 hour movie onto a single disc (thankfully, with no appreciable loss of video quality). Not surprisingly, there are no DVD extras, as every kilobit of digital space is needed to host the movie itself. With less compression, Olive’s Blu-ray (buy) presumably offers better picture quality, but no additional extras.

If your player can handle Region 2 PAL discs, you might want to spring for Third Window’s 2-DVD British release instead (buy). It includes the trailer and a one-hour “making of” documentary on the second disc.

(This movie was nominated for review by “Janna.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

AKA Hot Number

DIRECTED BY: Nelson Lyon

FEATURING: Sarah Kennedy, Norman Rose

PLOT: An oversexed girl encounters stag film producers, perverts and lesbian seductresses as she searches Manhattan for the obscene phone caller who has stolen her heart.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The last twenty minutes. Up until then, The Telephone Book is a mildly absurd pre-hardcore sexploitation comedy with art-scene pretensions; a long confessional monologue from a pig-masked pervert followed by a surreally obscene, obscenely surreal animated climax launch it into a different stratosphere of weirdness.

COMMENTS: The Telephone Book is a sex comedy dirty enough for David F. Friedman but avant-garde enough for Robert Downey, Sr. In its seedy black and white universe, subway flashers, lesbian predators, and nymphomaniacs exist alongside surrealism, social satire, and cameos from Warhol superstars Ultra Violet and Ondine. It’s a strange mix but it generally works; there’s enough flesh and vulgar humor for the heavy-breathing crowd, and just enough wit and artistry to give the adventurous arthouse patron an excuse to keep watching. Young Alice lives alone in a room wallpapered with porn, with a giant breast hanging from her ceiling and an American flag as her bedspread. She’s exactly the kind of sexually liberated girl who, according to early 1970s understanding of female sexuality, might be turned on by a dirty phone call; and indeed she is, for she gets a random ring from “John Smith,” the self-proclaimed greatest obscene phone caller in the world. The first part of the movie, which starts strong but soon bogs down in repetitive sex sketches, involves Alice going on an odyssey through the phone book to locate Mr. Smith. The search immediately lands her in a fleshpile with ten other nude lasses at a stag film audition; later exploits bring her in contact with a sleazy psychiatrist who’s both exhibitionist and voyeur and a lesbian pick-up artist who sends Alice into a vibrator-induced trance. The girl’s erotic adventures are interrupted by confessionals from various members of an Obscene Phone Callers Anonymous support group, and by Ondine narrating while a naked man lies on his desk. Skinny Sarah Kennedy is a game nympho with a voice pitched somewhere between Marilyn Monroe and Betty Boop, but although she’s more than cute enough in a girl-next-door way, she doesn’t have the sex goddess quality that would put the movie over-the-top erotically. In the final reels the emphasis shifts from Alice to Smith, the obscene Lothario, who shows up at Alice’s apartment wearing a pig mask to hide his identity. Smith, played by dulcet baritone Norman Rose, sounds like a radio pitchman (Rose was in fact a voiceover artist), and has an interestingly precise erotic delivery (“…now, run your right hand over the previously described area…”) His appearance marks a big shift in the movie, taking it from mildly loopy sexcapades into totally alien erotics. He delivers a long monologue describing the origin of his X-rated calling career, while his porcine face spins in a black void, fetishistically juxtaposed beside various disembodied body parts supplied by Ms. Kennedy. This is all a teasing lead-in to the film’s startling climax; John won’t physically make love to Alice, but they can stand in side by side phone booths and swap dialogue so profoundly filthy that it can only be expressed symbolically with animation that looks like something a thirteen-year old Salvador Dali might have doodled in his notebooks after reading a copy of Screw magazine. The film goes to color and we watch a parade dirty pictures consisting of nesting phalluses, a lusty couple with tongues for heads, and a lady/robot hybrid who makes explicit love to a skyscraper. Some things just have to be seen to be believed; that’s The Telephone Book‘s biggest selling point. As a funny movie it doesn’t completely work, nor is it a hit as a sexy movie. As a weird movie, though… well, that’s another matter.

The producers actually shot footage with Andy Warhol but it was cut; the unused footage was later lost after the movie flopped and faded into obscurity. Nelson Lyon went on to write for the early years of Saturday Night Live, but his career ended after he was involved in the speedball binge that ended with John Belushi’s fatal overdose.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…plays like a more explicit variation on Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy… it’s clear that Lyon also drew inspiration from the surreal dreamscapes in Lewis Carroll’s books.”–Budd Wilkins, Slant Magazine (DVD)

“This is one of the strangest movies I have ever seen. I found it to be discomforting and just weird… This movie gives me the chills. However, I would watch it again just because it is so fascinatingly WEIRD.”–IMDB reviewer ethylester (June 2002)

DIRECTED BY: Henri Xhonneux

FEATURING: Voices of François Marthouret and Valérie Kling

PLOT: The dog-faced Marquis de Sade is imprisoned  in the Bastille for blasphemy, where he entertains himself by writing pornographic novels and holding long conversations with his talking penis. Among the other prisoners is Justine, a pregnant cow who claims she was raped and is carrying the King’s child. The prison’s Confessor plots to hide the bastard heir by claiming De Sade is the father; meanwhile, outside the Bastille walls revolutionaries would like to free the political prisoners for their own purposes.

BACKGROUND:

• The historical Marquis de Sade was imprisoned at the Bastille, where he wrote the novel “The 120 Days of Sodom,” from 1784-1789. The Bastille was just one stop in a series of trips to prisons and insane asylums that dogged the aristocrat his entire life.
• The two main female characters in Marquis, Justine and Juliette, are named after the title characters of two of de Sade’s most famous novels. Perverted scenes from the Marquis’ actual stories are recreated with the movie, using Claymation.
• Little is known about director/co-writer Henri Xhonneux, who besides this film has only a few even more obscure credits to his name.
• Artist/writer Roland Topor, of Fantastic Planet fame, was the better known co-scripter of Marquis. Topor also served as art director for the movie.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Surely it must be one of the many tender moments when the Marquis holds a heart-to-heart talk with his own member (named Colin), although there are so many of these dialogues that we will need to narrow down our search further. We’ll select the moment when Colin, lacerated from having pleasured himself inside a crack in the stone prison wall, stares weakly at the Marquis while wearing a little bloody bandage wrapped around his head like a nightcap, begging the writer to tell him a story so he can recover enough  strength to fornicate with a cow.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Every character in the movie is based on a different animal and wears a animatronic masks that looks like it came out of a pile of designs Jim Henson rejected for Dark Crystal as “too creepy.” In between Machiavellian political machinations, these beasts have kinky sex with each other. The Marquis de Sade, a handsome canine, holds long conversations with his cute but prodigious member Colin, who has not only a mind but a face and voice of his own. As pornographic costume biopics recast as depraved satirical fables go, Marquis registers fairly high on the weirdometer.

[wposflv src=http://366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/marquis_clip.flv width=450 height=300 previewimage=http://366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/marquis_preview.png title="Marquis clip"]
Short clip from Marquis

COMMENTS: Although you could consider it a porno puppet shock show or a misanthropic fable concerning man’s animal nature, perhaps the best way to look at Marquis is as a buddy picture about the misadventures of a canine aristocrat and his pet penis. The dialogues between the libertine pornographer and his chatty phallus aren’t just Marquis‘ most outrageous gimmick; they also form the core of the film’s most detailed relationship. Their tempestuous love/hate bromance embodies the eternal struggle between body and intellect: “Does my mind rule you,” asks Marquis, “or do you rule it?” Marquis’ member is named Colin, and with his bald head, big blinking eyes and foreskin he resembles a baby on a stick wearing a turtleneck. The two are inseparable, although their relationship is doomed; Colin knows his lifespan is shorter than Marquis’, and he constantly complains that the nobleman (who he refers to as a “vain Utopian”) prefers words to action. Indeed, it seems that Marquis would rather write than get laid. The two also become romantic rivals for the movie’s two female characters, the bovine Justine and the equine Juliette, creating a pair of complicated love triangles. Although political intrigues rage around them, with plots involving bastard heirs and imprisoned revolutionaries, Marquis and Colin prefer to stand apart as much as possible, the one buried in his art and the other in lust. The symbiotic tension between these two close chums, mind and libido, is the center of the piece.

Arguably, Colin is the movie’s most human-looking character, since all of the other roles go to other species. Their animal masks and animatronic eyes allow only a hint of human emotion to seep through, and this odd touch gives the artificial cast a sad and wistful appearance, molded rubber objects striving and failing to feel real human love and passion. Marquis’ floppy puppy ears give him the appearance of a balding blueblood with a fringe of hair still clinging around his ears (it’s a bit of a Ben Franklin look). As the star, he’s the cutest and most appealing of the cast, with the aforementioned exception of Colin. The characters’ unique morphologies provide individualized visual puns and jokes, such as the mirthful opportunities occasioned by scrotal wattle hanging from the head of the cocky rooster warden and the unexpected discovery of udders hiding under the skirts of cow Justine. Many of the players take shapes that reflect their characters. The head jailer, who’s in love with Marquis and willing to try any trick, no matter how low, to get himself buggered, has a rat face. The clownish prisoner Pigonou, a dimwitted gluttonous pork merchant, is a hog. Other characters are harder to pin down (why is the head priest a camel?), but the key point is that they are all weird beasts playing dress-up in 19th century garb. The attempted civilizing effects of their wardrobes, surroundings and polite manners do nothing to disguise their animal natures.

Unlike the Marquis, who channels his libido into words rather than deeds, and kindred literary spirit Justine, who is a victim of other men’s lusts, the rest of the characters are a depraved bunch. Every sort of sexual deviance gets its turn here. With the prison setting, incidental bondage is everywhere (at one point Colin gets a separate set of shackles), and of course it goes without saying that the barnyard stench of bestiality hangs over the whole proceedings. There’s also a dominatrix horse for the more hardcore B&D crowd, as well as the scene Justine gets tied up and menaced with a hot poker before being forcibly milked. The horny rat guard supplies a homosexual angle, and indirectly inspires one of the film’s best lines (“I grant you sodomy is against nature, but it’s for a good cause”). One scene is set at a surreal sex party where a buttock-faced string quartet supplies entertainment for orgiers who include a woman with giant lips on her rear and a pair of eyeball-headed twins. There’s even a hint of necrophilia, and if anyone out there has a circumcision fetish, there’s a something here for them, too. In the most disturbing sex scene, Marquis describes the tale of torture of a pregnant woman by a group of monks, which is depicted in claymation.

Thanks to the inhuman bodies and abstract sex organs, the compositions are far too bizarre to be erotic (if you find something in Marquis that turns you on, you probably should seek out a therapist to explore those issues). Marquis is obscene, to be sure, but it’s not arousing. If anything, the movie takes a sadly amused look at sexual perversion, seeing it as an absurd affectation of the elites. As mere kinks, these sexual aberrations are harmless, until they are turned into actions by those in power. The head guard is a conniving opportunist, the warden is an arrogant bully who secretly craves pain and humiliation, and the priest is a ruthless conspirator who is only turned on by political intrigue and who callously kills innocents to further his own aims. By contrast, Marquis’ only offenses in the movie are thought crimes; he is the artist whose depraved imagination is caged and punished by a sanctimonious society that is fine with sin so long as it’s tastefully hidden from public view. Marquis is a generic satire of moral and sexual hypocrisy. As is appropriate given its apolitical protagonist, the movie is more interested in reveling in its own imaginative depravity than constructing a political allegory, either about revolutionary times or our own.

Inspired by his ceaseless imagination and principled rebellion against society’s restraints, Surrealists and other literati have continually sought to rehabilitate the Marquis de Sade and claim him as one of their own (the poet Guillaume Apollinaire called him “the freest spirit who has ever lived”). For most who read the Marquis’ works, which revel in the euphoria of cruelty and fascistic fantasies of domination, this embrace by liberal intellectuals seems bizarre. Marquis falls into the tradition of whitewashing de Sade’s crimes, rewriting history to make him a sympathetic character—as harmless as a cute little puppy. The movie’s unreal masks and surreal sex deliberately distance us from their horrific content of Sade’s fantasies. The writer is depicted as a principled man of the mind with exquisite control of his own libido, as opposed to the corrupt animals around him. In the movie’s context this is acceptable; this is a symbolic Sade, not a historical one. But in reality, de Sade strove to live out the fantasies he wrote about in his books. Knowing that the star character he was imprisoned not just for thought crimes like blasphemy and pornography, or victimless crimes like sodomy, but also for sexual abuse and poisoning prostitutes (!) reduces the pleasure of the movie a bit. It’s almost as if a script made Hitler into the hero of their movie; although they might rewrite his character to make him into a misunderstood art student, we would always see a ghost image of the historical Führer overlaid on the screen. Marquis‘ thesis that the imaginary atrocities of the free mind are nothing beside the real crimes of unreflecting power elites is accurate, but the historical de Sade is a poor spokesman for that position. Although I am not much of a fan of Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo: the 12o Days of Sodom, the movie which literally depicts Sade’s sexual fantasies in sickening, soul-crushing detail, I do have to admire that director for depicting Sadism unflinchingly in all its anti-human brutality. Marquis takes a much different approach to Sadistic horror, filtering it through a bestial dream so we can not only stomach it but even laugh at it, and perhaps even learn from it. That process leaves me uncomfortable; but then again, so do many great movies. In the end, the character we most admire is Colin, who rises from a phallic symbol into an angelic one. He’s honest in his pure biological desires that are untouched and uncorrupted by the sickness of society; perhaps Marquis should have given in and let him lead after all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a considerable oddity that manages to be witty, thoroughly obscene, and rather endearing all at once.”–Time Out London

“…a fascinatingly bizarre evocation of the sexual and intellectual passions of a certain M. de Sade… Imagine a blender churning R-rated Muppets, the fables of la Fontaine, both ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Animal House,’ ‘Marat/Sade’ and ‘Me & Him’ — and you’ll barely begin to imagine the perversely defined universe created…”–Richard Harrington, The Washington Post (1992 US Debut)

“Like some kinky Wind in the Willows conceived by Luis Buñuel…”–Steve Davis, Austin Chronicle (1992 US debut)

IMDB LINK: Marquis (1989)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Marquis trailer – A short German trailer for the film, somewhat NSFW (Not Safe for Work) due to sex and animated penises

DVD INFO: For as yet unknown reasons (possibly lack of interest), Marquis has never been released on DVD in Region 1. First Run Features produced a full-screen VHS edition (buy), but the title is no longer listed in their catalog. Used collectors copies are somewhat rare but available for a premium price. A French region 2 DVD was released but has seemingly disappeared from the market. Even if it were nothing else, Marquis is a professionally produced film with significant curiosity value, and it’s about everyone’s favorite topic, sex. The near complete unavailability of a video version is almost as bizarre as Marquis‘ story itself. Some distributor needs to get cracking on this; if you’re looking for a marketing angle, Marquis could see a second life among the furry community.

(This movie was nominated for review by “CXAReign-a,” who accurately described it as “incredibly bizarre.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Les Cauchemars Naissent la Nuit

DIRECTED BY: Jess Franco

FEATURING: Diana Lorys, Colette Giacobine, Paul Muller, Soledad Miranda

PLOT: An exotic dancer in a psychologically abusive lesbian relationship thinks she’s going insane when she has vivid recurring nightmares in which she kills people.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The simmering erotic atmosphere of Nightmares is either tedious, or hypnotic, depending on your outlook; but either way, although there are some dreamy moments, it’s not good enough to make the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies on its merits, nor weird enough to warrant inclusion despite them.

COMMENTS: It is bad enough to be constantly plagued by nightmares, but imagine—horrors!—if those nightmares were also directed by Jess Franco. They’d be poorly lit, out-of-focus, and go absolutely nowhere. This is the position poor Anna (voluptuous Diana Lorys) finds herself in. Not that her regular existence is vastly superior: even in her waking hours, she’s still trapped in a Jess Franco movie. Anna is in an unhealthy relationship with her Lady Svengali lesbian lover, Cynthia, who promises to make her a star but spends more time sleeping around and slapping her around than getting her gigs. Anna has nightmares where she kills men while birds fly around inside the house, then wakes up with actual blood on her hands. She thinks she’s going insane. She reveals her story to her psychiatrist in a long flashback that itself dissolves into more dream sequences. Whether its from intentional disorientation or merely sloppy scripting, the loopy storytelling of Nightmares does effectively create a situation where at times you aren’t sure whether the protagonist is dreaming, or whether what’s happening is supposed to be occurring in the present or in a flashback. Like a good bit of Franco’s oeuvre, Nightmares was made in a rush, and the movie frequently seems improvised. The short parts featuring cult actress Soledad Miranda were probably originally intended for a different film entirely (she watches the action from a window near Anna and Cynthia’s manor home and is never appears in the same frame as any of the principals). Franco’s directorial choices are frequently bizarre, and it’s often hard to locate the line between incompetence and experimentalism. For example, when Cynthia meets Anna for the first time, she proposes to make the stripper into a model: they carry on the conversation, but, because it is a flashback, Anna is simultaneously narrating the meeting in voiceover, recapping the conversation in real time as we listen to it. Later, while Anna and Cynthia are making love for the first time, Franco zooms in and out of focus seemingly at random, choosing to spend a lot of time on blurry closeups of the top of his actresses’ heads—it’s as if he’s suddenly handed the camera to a small child, or a monkey. At other times, his arty photography is more purposeful. When Anna and her psychiatrist talk in their car, he shoots the doctor from the side so his features appear normally, but films Anna head-on through a sunny windshield, so her visage is diffuse and otherworldly, as if she’s trapped in a separate reality. Nightmare‘s strangest sequence is, without a doubt, Anna’s narcotized, eight-minute striptease routine. She lies on a divan before a red backdrop next to a marble statue draped with white furs and very, very slowly removes her clothes while a tenor saxophonist plays Ornette Coleman licks over slightly out-of-tune piano chords (you know—strip club music). The strangely depraved atmosphere of this scene could believably have inspired David Lynch‘s “red room” sequences in “Twin Peaks,” although Lynch, of course, took that extra step of actually having things happen in his dream sequence. For an extra dollop of oddness, Franco announces this scene by having Anna explain that the cabaret owner had instructed her to “keep the audience’s attention for as long as possible with a strip that seemed to last forever.” In other words, not only is Franco padding his film, he’s brazenly rubbing his viewers’ noses in the fact that he’s padding the film. This slow-as-molasses, narratively confusing movie can be strangely hypnotic, if you’re in the right mood or very drunk, and there are nude women onscreen at almost all times, if that’s your thing. It seems obvious that Franco assumed that nudity would carry the movie and he could do pretty much whatever he wanted with the rest of it; the results are so peculiar that it’s unclear whether he was utterly indifferent about the effect he was creating, or completely enraptured by his own creativity.

Jess Franco directed nearly two hundred movies in his forty-five year career, most of them sleazy exploitation pieces, so it’s no surprise that almost all of them feel rushed. In 1970 alone he directed three other features besides this one, plus a forty-minute short. It may be hard to believe but, as bad as Nightmares is by any measure of conventional filmmaking, this movie is arguably Franco working at near the peak of his abilities.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It all comes together in Franco’s characteristically dream-logic-beholden way, the plot holes and pacing bumps smoothed over by the film’s low-key eroticism and semi-surreal atmosphere.”–Casey Broadwater, Blu-ray.com

DIRECTED BY: Roelwapper (editor)

FEATURING: Merrill Howard Kaelin (archival)

PLOT: A collection of grotesque video oddities, crazy b-movie clips, fetish porn, shock pieces, and public access embarrassments.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Even if it weren’t primarily focused on the sick instead of the weird, there isn’t a high enough percentage of original material (maybe 10-15%?) in this mixtape to qualify for the List of the Weirdest Movies ever made.

COMMENTS: In my review of Sweet Movie I wrote, “…no one wants to see Sweet Movie for its political philosophy. We want to see beautiful women writhing nude in liquid chocolate, gold-plated penises, and uninhibited orgies that go far beyond our deepest desires.” Retard-O-Tron embraces that shortsighted anti-philosophy wholeheartedly, and to prove it they include, among other atrocities, a clip from Sweet Movie‘s food fight/orgy with bald anarchists spitting pasta on each other and puking while pretty Carole Laure watches on in a catatonic daze. This mixtape isn’t pitched so much as a movie or an artistic endeavor as it is a dare, like peeking at a hobo’s rotting corpse discovered under a bridge. For those who think they’ve seen everything and can’t get it up for regular sleaze anymore, here’s your chance to gaze at humanity at its filthiest and most debased, with puke porn, geriatric porn, midget porn, scat porn, fake bestiality porn, stupid people being exploited for your amusement, and general nastiness. Although it’s XXX-rated, the explicit fetish parts are generally hit fast rather than lingered over, because the movie aims to arouse your disgust, not your lust. Granted, it’s not all bad: a good portion of the offerings are actually absurd/weird rather than sick/depraved. Alongside Sweet Movie, readers of this site may also recognize surreal body horror clips from Funky Forest and insane eyeball-kaiju battles from Big Man Japan among the cooler, tamer bits. B-movie madness is also a big running theme; there is out-of-context oddness from Indonesian fantasy movies, and I recognized scenes from Lou Ferrigno’s Hercules, the golf-cart chase from Space Mutiny, and some “gotcha!” scenes from Night of the Demons 2 amidst the debris. One of the most unintentionally nightmarish segments comes courtesy of notorious Christian scare-film preacher Estus Pirkle (If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?), who describes paradise in ridiculously materialistic terms (he claims the heavenly city is fourteen-hundred times larger than New York City) before trotting out a dwarf woman confined to a wheelchair who belts out a surprisingly assured (if high-pitched) gospel number. The depressing, washed-out color, bizarre theology, and wide lapels on a powder blue suit mark this sermon as something that seems like it could only originate from the alternate reality of 1970s post-late show UHF filler. Although some of the video is edited into montages or otherwise altered (the wittiest bit is an anus superimposed over Tom Cruise’s face), for the most part the material is presented as is, in apparently random order. Although the anarchic flow of the material may be intentional—it keeps you off guard, and you’re always dreading that the next clip will come from a snuff film—it makes you long for the artistry of more artistically inclined found-footage specialists Everything is Terrible!, who arrange their edits thematically and with a satirical vision in mind.

Besides porn and B-movies, the other major source of footage is cable access TV clips; these often fall flat (how many bad soul singers or Christian folksingers can you tolerate?) But public access also lends Retard-O-Tron III its most problematic segments, those featuring mentally disabled chef Merrill Howard Kaelin, who hosted an unhygienic amateur cooking show where he ruined dishes while muttering to himself and occasionally drifting off into deranged impressions and childlike bouts of giggling. That wouldn’t be too bad or offensive in itself, if Kealin were just left to do his thing and we were left to observe him as a case study in eccentricity. What’s upsetting is the sarcastic introductory narration supplied by the Retard-O-Tron staff: “Buried below the pedestrian boob could be found an underlying seething fury, a fury focused at the very curse of living and all that it had done to wrong and frustrate his character. There is soul, grace and power in each deliberate movement, in each syllable…”. Was this ironic commentary added because the mixtape makers really think it’s funny and the natural reaction to Kaelin’s antics? Or did they feel that the audience needed permission from an authority figure (the eloquent narrator) to allow themselves to lighten up and laugh at the disabled? Or did they think that just the Kaelin footage alone was insufficiently shocking, and it needed to be punched up with the taboo-breaking outrage of mocking the mentally deficient? None of the possibilities are flattering, and the inclusion of this commentary (which happens six minutes into the movie) reveals a hopelessly callous attitude that poisons everything that comes after. The entire project is thereafter infected with a heartless, sociopathic tinge that goes beyond the merely juvenile persona they hope to project. The essential problem with getting hooked on the shock aesthetic for its own sake is that once you’ve liberated yourself from the irrational “bourgeois” social restraints, you’ve got no way left to get your kicks except by shattering the necessary and rational ones, like respect for the less fortunate. Retard-O-Tron III‘s unthinking rejection of basic human empathy is what earns it its “beware” rating. With a few snips, it might have been a compilation 366 could endorse, if not champion; but although I can overlook (if not forget, dammit) the scene of a pretty Japanese woman vomiting dinner up all over her date’s upraised face, I can’t condone adolescent cruelty masquerading as wit.

Retard-O-Tron III can be bought from Cinema Sewer. It’s understood that the description above, and the “beware” rating, will tempt many of you to try this out. Hey, it’s your soul—you want to kill it, it’s none of my business.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…mind-melting mixtape madness… can you stomach the avalanche of sordid perversion and perpetual uneasy feeling this collection posits?”–Lunchmeat’s VHS Blog

(This movie was nominated for review by Roel N [the creator]. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this movie was provided by the distributor for review.

“‘Demonstration as theater,’ because then you got the headlines, and then you made your point. And there was a lot of competition for those headlines then [the 1960s]. So, it was theater as protest, certainly, which is something that, until the Seattle riots recently, kids don’t even know about… They know ‘I have a dream,’ they know Martin Luther King, they know Malcolm X, but they don’t know all that weird stuff… this is like a radical movement against cinema, which there hasn’t ever been one, but [laughs]…”–John Waters, Pink Flamingos commentary

DIRECTED BY: John Waters

FEATURING: Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary, Danny Mills, Edith Massey, Mary Vivian Pearce

PLOT: Divine, winner of a contest to determine the “filthiest person in the world,” has gone into hiding at a trailer park with her egg-obsessed mother, randy son Crackers, and “traveling companion” Cotton. The Marbles, a couple who make a living by kidnapping women, impregnating them, then selling the babies to lesbian couples for adoption, are jealous of Divine’s title, believing they are filthier specimens of humanity. An escalating war of outrageously foul pranks between the two camps eventually results in arson, murder, and consumption of doggie-doo.

BACKGROUND:

• According to John Waters, neither his own parents (who financed Pink Flamingos), nor Divine’s mother, ever saw the movie; in fact, they were “forbidden” to see it.
• The film’s budget was $12,000 (about $68,000 in 2014 dollars). It made a reported $6,000,000 in its original run and perhaps an additional $12,000,000 in subsequent video rentals.
• The movie is dedicated to Sadie, Katie and Les, the Manson Family names of Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, and Leslie Van Houten. During the film you can also see graffiti (painted by the crew) reading “free Tex Watson.” Waters says that the Manson Family and their recent trials were a big influence in this “anti-hippie movie for hippies.”
• The chicken that was killed during the sex scene between Crackers and Cookie had been bought from a man who was selling them as food, and was cooked and served to the cast afterwards.
• Waters wrote a sequel to Pink Flamingos called Flamingos Forever; plans to film it were scrapped due to the reluctance of Divine to reprise the role in middle age and the 1984 death of Edith Massey.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Oh my. There is a phrase that was coined for images like those in Pink Flamingos: “what has been seen cannot be unseen.” A naked woman covered in fresh chicken blood, a rectal closeup of a curious proctological case study, and of course the film’s grand finale (and reason to exist)—300 pound transvestite Divine using her gullet as a pooper scooper, gagging down dog dirt with a grin—are all candidates. If we want to chose something less nauseating to remember, we can consider the vision of Divine herself (himself? itself?) as the takeaway image, since this is the movie that introduced the iconic drag queen—a character who looks like Elizabeth Taylor during the “Big Mac” years, if her makeup had been designed by a grateful but seriously stoned Ronald McDonald—to the wider world.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: About a 300 pound woman (played by a man) living in a trailer who is harassed by a couple of “jealous perverts” because she is anointed “the filthiest person in the world,” Pink Flamingos is a parade of hard-to-swallow, tongue-in-cheek perversities played out in an unreal subculture where society’s values have been turned on their head. It’s the ultimate stoned, amoral underground atrocity, an obscenity shouted at the normal world by angry freaks.

Clip from Pink Flamingos

COMMENTS: If you’re not offended by something in Pink Flamingos, then please go see a psychiatrist. The movie’s reason to exist is to shock and offend human decency; to fail to be offended is to admit you have none. That doesn’t mean you can’t also laugh while being shocked, because John Waters’ movie is indeed witty: he has an ear for ridiculous dialogue that can be both outrageously profane and absurdly formal (“oh my God almighty,” says Divine, upon opening a surprise package, “someone has sent me a bowel movement!”) But I suspect Waters himself would want to avoid the kind of person who finds nothing in Pink Flamingos to be disgusted by. If dookie-munching murderess Babs Johnson or the toe-sucking white slaver Marbles are your role models, seek professional assistance immediately.

Pink Flamingos posits “filthiness” as a state to aspire to, with all of the connotations the word carries: physically dirty, sexually obscene, and morally wrong. The film is dirty, nauseatingly so, in the literal sense. especially due to its focus on scatology: the turd in a box, the guy with the prolapsed rectum, and Divine’s famous “that’s not chocolate” snack. Edith Massey even gets dirty by scarfing fried eggs with her bare hands. If you’re looking for filthy sexual perversion, this movie has it all. It manages to make sex look pretty unappetizing, with flashing (enhanced by the sausages attached to David Locary’s member), rape, she-males, artificial insemination, and ridiculous episodes of “shrimping” (toe-sucking). There’s even brief, awkward incestuous fellatio between Divine and her son Crackers. But the movie wasn’t content to stop there: taboos against bodily functions and kinky sex could be broken in a lighthearted way, but to truly shock and offend you need cruelty and sadism. So, almost all of the main characters in the film have a mean streak that comes across in their everyday behavior. Connie Marbles humiliates a job seeker, and, when she and Raymond pick up a hitchhiker, they’re not just content to kidnap her for their sex dungeon, but they must immediately be rude (Mr. Marble’s response to the hitchhiker asking him where he got such a nice car is a sneering “at a car dealership, where do you think?”) Divine gets her jollies on her way to a shoplifting trip in town by teasing another hitchhiker, pretending that she’s about to pick him up, then speeding off when he approaches her. These “filthy” people are simply hateful out of habit, nasty by nature, and it’s no surprise when they castrate servants or stage executions for the press.

The filthiest act in the movie is not Divine’s coprophagia, although that is without question the film’s most nauseating moment. No, the filthiest, most depraved act is the chicken sex scene. Crackers is raping Cookie (who, unbeknownst to him, is a spy for the Marbles), and demands she grabs a chicken and hold it between their thrusting bodies. As they simulate bumping uglies, he snaps the chicken’s neck and rubs the blood all over her nude body, while Cotton watches them through a window (presumably masturbating). Waters, who for some reason doesn’t like chickens (he also killed them in his earlier feature Mondo Trasho) has held fast and not apologized for the scene, even though he admits to regretting some of the other elements of the film, such as dedicating the movie to the Manson girls. In his 25th anniversary comments, Waters said, “I eat chicken, and I know the chicken didn’t land on my plate from a heart attack. We bought the chicken from a farmer who advertised ‘freshly killed chicken.’ I think we made the chicken’s life better… it got to be in a movie… and then right after the next take, the cast ate the chicken.”

The argument is disingenuous, a feeble justification. No one but the most radicalized PETA-ite objects to the killing of a chicken. What we object to is John Waters killing a chicken for entertainment purposes (and mainly, his own entertainment, not ours). This is not a case where an animal was killed incidentally, like in an old Western movie where a horse was purposefully tripped in order to simulate being shot. This is intentional; the point of the scene is to spill a chicken’s blood, and to deliberately mix it with rape imagery in order to push the audience’s moral buttons. The scene could have been simulated with the same effect; like a snuff film, however, it gets its frisson from the fact that it’s real. The chicken assassination exposes Pink Flamingos‘ agenda: not only does the movie have nothing greater or more ambitious on its mind than the desire to shock the viewer, it has no ethical qualms about using whatever means necessary to outrage us. You think that, if Waters believed he could have gotten away with using a kitten instead of a chicken, he just might have (“we got it from the shelter, it was going to be put to sleep anyway…”) The chicken scene is the point that Pink Flamingos crosses the line from being a black comedy about sociopaths to actually being sociopathic itself. Something about Flamingos takes me back to the schoolyard playground, with Divine playing the part of the unpopular fatso who would eat bugs for the brief spasm of attention, and Waters as the weird kid who amused himself by pulling the wings off of flies.

And, to borrow a title from a future Waters affront, it’s a dirty shame, because Pink Flamingos real-life crimes cast a foul stench over a film that is often clever and inventively bizarre. The parade of shocks and surprises never lets up or slacks for a moment, and you really never can predict what is waiting round the next plot bend. Waters’ dialogue has a purplish poetic perversity to it: one of the more printable examples is Raymond’s declaration of love for Connie, delivered in between sucks on her toes: “I am yours, Connie, eternally united through an invisible core of finely woven filth, that even God himself could never ever break!” Waters throws bizarre details into Pink Flamingos consistently skewed world: Connie Marble’s hair is dyed flaming orange, while hubby Raymond’s do is slushie blue. In 1972 such novelty hair coloring was unheard of outside the circus, but what sets the Marbles apart is that they’ve colored their pubes to match. In the film’s one genuinely surreal touch, the flapping furniture tosses Connie Marble off of it when she tries to sit down, a lingering effect of Divine and Crackers’ curse when she licked the couch cushions. Edith Massey’s character—a feebleminded granny who lives in a crib and is obsessed with everything about eggs—is a brilliant creation, simultaneously comic and nightmarish. The overwrought, campy acting and deliberately atrocious camerawork (dialogue scenes often feature amateurish zooming and refocusing on the various speakers), elements appropriated from exploitation movies, add to a unique atmosphere that wobbles between comedy and repugnance.

A word on the “Beware” rating here. “Beware” doesn’t mean the movie is objectively bad or boring. In this case, it means that this is a movie you may want to consider skipping—and if you do decide to watch it, gird your loins. Although Pink Flamingos has morally reprehensible moments, it’s definitely a weird movie, and one that, like Divine, is too big and flamboyant to ignore. In fact, if you have to watch one shock-for-the-sake-of-shock film, content aside, this is the one to pick. It’s one of a very tiny number of films in its filthy genre that is actually funny and shows a creative vision. As Waters himself points out, “it’s easy to be shocking, even unintentionally, but it’s difficult to be witty and shocking.“

Although he’d probably never admit it, I think that Waters realized that with Pink Flamingos he had crossed a line of bad taste that appalled even him, or at least reached the outer limits of what he was willing to try. Trashy and nihilistic as they were, his later movies never lapsed into the documentary-style geek show behavior seen here. And they were better—if less notorious—movies for showing just that little bit of restraint. It’s amusing to realize that a movie like Female Trouble, which includes a scene of Divine raping herself, then biting off the umbilical cord when she gives birth, represents Waters exercising cinematic restraint. But at least in his post-Flamingo films, no one had to gargle with mouthwash and brush their teeth immediately when the cameras stopped rolling, and no real livestock were used in the sex scenes. Despite losing their chance at cinematic immortality, I think chickens everywhere would breathe a sigh of relief at that news.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…one of the most vile, stupid and repulsive films ever made.”–Variety (contemporaneous)

“If the events in this film were only simulated, it would merely be depraved and disgusting. But since they are actually performed by real people, the film gains a weird kind of documentary stature. There is a temptation to praise the film, however grudgingly, just to show you have a strong enough stomach to take it. It is a temptation I can resist.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1997 re-release)

“… a nonstop barrage of the bizarre…”–Bruce Walker, The Washington Post (1997 re-release)

IMDB LINK: Pink Flamingos (1972)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Pink Flamingos | Trailers from Hell – Mark Helfrich discusses the film over New Line’s original trailer for Pink Flamingos (which did not include any footage from the movie, only testimonials from audience members)

Dreamland News: Filmography: Pink Flamingos – Sadly, due to broken links, there is little left here aside from this fansite operator’s synopsis/review of the movie

Glenn Milstead – the Man Behind the Makeup - An interview with Divine by Huw Collingbourne, conducted in the 1980s and reconstructed from the interviewer’s notes (the original has somehow been lost)

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Pink Flamingos and Other Filth: Three Screenplays by John Waters – Waters’ screenplays to Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living, and the unproduced sequel Flamingos Forever

DVD INFO: New Line’s 25th Anniversary Edition of Pink Flamingos (buy) includes 15 minutes of extra footage, as introduced and narrated by John Waters. This is the version of the film that played theaters in the 1997 re-release. The disc also includes a very informative and entertaining commentary by Waters, whose genial, almost avuncular style of conversation is always a contrast to the filth onscreen. The disc also includes New Line’s original trailer that promoted the movie as a midnight event film without ever hinting at what it was about.

The disc can also be had (with the same extra features) as part of the eight-disc set entitled “Very Crudely Yours, John Waters” (buy), which includes most of Waters’ major films: Female Trouble, Desperate Living, Polyester, Hairspray, Pecker, and A Dirty Shame. If you only want to feel a little filthy and that set’s too much of a commitment, you can pick up “The John Waters Collection #3″ (buy), which pairs Flamingos with Female Trouble for a sicko double feature that will leave you needing to take two showers.

(This movie was nominated for review by many readers, but the first one to make it her top priority was annie, who anointed it “weird straight through.”  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Peter Allison: “Sounds like a lot of supernatural baloney to me.”

Dr. Vitus Werdegast: “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.”–The Black Cat

DIRECTED BY: Edgar G.Ulmer

FEATURING: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, David Manners, Jacqueline Wells, Lucille Lund

PLOT: A rainy night and roadside accident lands WWI veteran Dr. Vitus Werdegast and a honeymooning couple to the old dark house of Satanist Hjalmar Poelzig. Poelzig, a mass murderer guilty of war crimes, is also Werdegast’ s longtime nemesis. Werdegast is sworn to revenge, but must also protect the couple from being sacrified at a Black Mass.

BACKGROUND:

• In his native Hungary, Lugosi had often played romantic leads. Typecast since Dracula (1931), Lugosi was initially enthusiastic about taking on the role of Werdegast. However, upon seeing the script and discovering that his beloved “protagonist” raped the heroine, The Black Cat became a career nightmare for the actor. Adding to the onset tension was Lugosi’s increasing jealousy of Karloff. In an interview with author Gregory Mank, Ulmer’s widow, Shirley Ulmer, related that Karloff and her late husband were kindred, erudite spirits. The two often engaged in discussions ranging from art to philosophy and film aesthetics. Lugosi, who was no intellectual heavyweight, felt the odd man out. Threatened by his genre rival, Lugosi resorted to lurid anecdotes for attention, even claiming that he had once been a Hungarian hangman. Naturally, such yarn spinning only served to further distance Lugosi from his peers.
• According to Mank, Lugosi got increasingly excited at the prospect of “skinning” his rival. Multiple takes were required and, in each take, Lugosi’s English became even more rushed and indecipherable. Many years later, Karloff advised impressionist Rich Little to watch the skinning scene from The Black Cat, in order to mimic Lugosi’s idiosyncratic vocalizations: “Did you ever seen an animal skinned, Hjalmar? That’sh what I’m going to do to you now. Vear the skin from your body, shlowly, bit by bit.” Karloff’s infamous lisp, at its most pronounced here, parallels Lugosi’s language mangling. Reportedly, Lugosi, of all people, consistently ridiculed Karloff’s speech impediment.
• Among the excised scenes were the afore mentioned rape, a scene of Joan Allison actually transforming into a black cat, and shots of Karloff’s skinned Poelzig, crawling on the floor with bloodied, flayed flesh hanging off his frame. Awkward comedy relief and embarrassing scenes depicting Werdegast’s fear of black cats were added, along with a slightly more traditionally heroic shaping of Lugosi’s character.
• Ulmer drew his inspiration for Poelzig from two sources: first, the German architect and leading member of the avant garde architectural society “Der Ring,” Hans Poelzig. Polezig’s work was an eccentric mix of Gothic and Noveua, filtered through very personal sensibilities. Second was the infamous Satanist and misogynist Aleister Crowley, whose concupiscent philosophy is expressed by his motto “I rave and I rape and I rip and I rend.” Ulmer grafts those two identification points into a First World War backstory. Ulmer had additional influence here as well: his father was one of the countless European victims in the Great War.
• Ulmer doubled as set designer and imbued the film with Bauhaus sensibilities.
• Ulmer should have been Universal’s third iconic horror director, directly behind James Whale and Tod Browning. Like those contemporaries, Ulmer had enough personal vision to elevate a pedestrian seed into something unique. Unfortunately, Ulmer broke a basic rule: He had an affair with his boss’ wife, which lead to his being fired and blacklisted by major studios. Although Ulmer was offered a chance to direct a big budget Shirley Temple musical for Fox, he turned down the offer, choosing instead to makepoverty row quickies for  PRC, where he languished for the rest of his career. Most of  his films are saddled with execrable scripts, and despite a cult following in France, Ulmer’s ultimate artistic merit is speculative.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: After the roadside accident, Vitus Werdegast and company arrive at Hjalmar Poelzig’s mansion. Ulmer’s camera jerkily climbs the deco stairs. The light from a radio blinks. Through cracks and clicks, Poelzig’s manservant announces: “Dr. Werdegast has arrived.” Poelzig’s wife lies asleep in bed; a half nude vision of purest white. Next to her lies the blackened silhouette of Polezig. Upon hearing the voice of his servant, Poelzig awakes, clicks on a light, and sits straight up. It doesn’t take a Freudian to see the image for what it is; a blatantly erect phallus. Polezig rises and walks menacingly toward the bedroom door, seen through the sheer curtain of a canopy bed. He is a phallic symbol as harbinger of death. Sex and death awash in starkly cubist black and white, and dramatic classical music. Poelzig’s wife is also his step-daughter, and Werdegast’ daughter. Werdegast waits below, suspicious but not completely aware of the incestuous milieu permeating Polezig’s fortress.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Despite a checklist of outré taboos, The Black Cat, partly due to studio tampering, is characterized by subdued aesthetics. Rather than conveying grotesquerie and perversity through blood-soaked Poe-like dungeons, which would be the pedestrian route, Ulmer crafts a very personal restlessness through the icy tents of modernism, futurism, highly stylized acting, and artistic music. While this may make it a challenge for contemporary viewers, it renders this tale of revenge, lust and paranoia even weirder.

Fan made trailer for The Black Cat (by David Smith)

COMMENTS: For the first team-up of Universal’s horror stars, Karloff and Lugosi, uncredited producer Carl Laemmle Jr. virtually gave director Edgar G. Ulmer carte blanche and an A-budget for a film treatment of Edgar Allan Poe‘s short story “The Black Cat.” Laemmle then went on extended vacation. When he returned, he was aghast at what he found in Ulmer’s film. Satanism, incest, necrophilia and bestiality are merely the icing on the cake. Although Poe would probably have identified with and appreciated the nefarious, misanthropic atmosphere of Ulmer’s The Black Cat, the film was completely unrelated to its source material. Extensive cuts and reshoots were demanded, much to Lugosi’s relief. While Laemmle’s tampering certainly harmed the film, his efforts to transform The Black Cat into a pedagogical treatise on Poe utterly failed; its putrescent Mardi Gras quality seeps through, even in fragmented state.

Werdegast’s “ancient fear” of black cats is never explained and never was, even in the original script. Werdegast throws a knife at the feline, and we hear its death cry. We are informed that he killed the cat. Yet it reappears time and again to wreak mental havoc on the suffering Hungarian, which leads us to assume that the cat literally has nine lives. Karloff’s body language is as self-conscious as he was in roles such as Frankenstein (1931) and The Mummy (1932). Adorned in black, Polezig moves like a panther, which gives Werdegast’s dread additional impetus. In the original script, Joan’s metamorphosing into the title character drives Werdegast to rape that which he fears. Although this plot element was jettisoned, enough remains to strongly suggest that Werdegast covets the newly wed heroine. The primary difference between Poelzig and Werdegast is one of bridled lust vs unbridled lust. Unfortunately, Jacqueline Wells is so virginal and bland in her role that we are never convinced males desire her. Far more hypnotic is the underused Lucille Lund as Karen Werdegast (Lund later joked that she was only known for having gone to bed with Boris Karloff). As sexless as Wells is, David Manners is an even more vapid presence, which is perhaps the sole reason both Werdegast and Poelzig are inspired to steal his bride. 

As strange as it may seem, both Karloff and Lugosi are at their most sexually charged here. Ulmer’s camera frames them repeatedly in compositions which can only be described as examples of European eroticism. Karloff’s coiffed appearance echoes Ulmer’s architecture. He is a purple elf who, unlike his co-star and rival, never succumbs to self-parody. Karloff’s unsympathetic Poezig displays some degree of guilt solely through his facial reactions, but this is as brisk and faint as a blinking eye. Karloff’s most starkly kinky scene is shot from behind and below his ebony robed back. Poelzig clutches a statue of a nude female as the over-lit newlyweds embrace. His face is hidden from view, but his lustful expression is conveyed through hand movement. Later, in the “game of death,” Poelzig’s fingers amorously brush over a chess piece. Only the combination of Karloff and Ulmer could make a piece of white plastic erogenous.

Lugosi is also highlighted in sensual compositions, which undoubtedly flattered the star’s chivalrous self-view. Even the battles between Werdegast and Poelzig suggest primordial carnality. In a sharp, clearly intentional contrast, the  protagonist bride and groom are frequently exposed as adolescent American suburbanites. So complete is Ulmer’s portrayal of New World pedestrianism that Peter is given the occupation of a pulp mystery novelist. As Ulmer obviously intended, we hope, in vain, that its they who will suffer a “shlow” painful death.

Although Lugosi is outclassed by Karloff, the Dracula star gives one of his better performances. He is at his best inimitably delivering lines like “…a masterpiece of construction built upon the ruins of the masterpiece of destruction. Those who died were fortunate. I was taken prisoner where the soul is kilt, shlowly. Fifteen years I’ve rotted in the darkness… waiting, not to kill you, to kill your soul shlowly.” His Werdegast wears tragedy on his sleeve, and even in his most tender moments (such as his attempt to save Joan) his actions are viewed with base suspicion by both Peter Allison and the audience. Unfortunately, Lugosi’s performance is all too typically bipolar. His weaknesses contrast his strengths.

The two servants (character actors Egon Brecher and Harry Cording) are chimerical, their loyalties delightfully ambiguous.

Ulmer, who apprenticed in silent films under the likes of Max Reinhardt, G.W. Pabst, F.W. Murnau, Erich Von Stroheim, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Cecil B. DeMille, does not resort to excessive dialogue, as many early talkies were apt to do. His silent film credentials are evident in a bit of blitzkrieg between the grand guignol titans. Poelzig asks Werdegast: “Are we not the living dead?” Werdegast response is purely visual—a deep stare.

The fire and ice quality of The Black Cat is most pronounced in its dreaded atrophy: Poelzig’s female victims encased in glass, suspended like icicles, as the dual horror mavens wax erotic and ascend the stairs, all to the strains of Beethoven’s Seventh.

Ulmer’s pre-Black Cat resume included both set design and music appreciation. Liszt, Schubert and Brahms are among the composers whose music serves The Black Cat to perfection. Less than perfect is the awkward editing, which includes a nonsensical, but convenient interruption to Poelzig’s nonsense-Latin Black Mass.

Smartly, the brutal finale remains enigmatically in the shadow. The Black Cat is so stark and angular, that often it has the look of having emerged from a German Expressionist painting.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Story is confused and confusing, and while with the aid of heavily-shadowed lighting and mausoleum-like architecture, a certain eeriness has been achieved, it’s all a poor imitation of things seen before.”–Variety (contemporaneous)

“…nutty, nightmarish melange… a crepehanger’s ball.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (retrospective)

“This bizarre, utterly irrational masterpiece, lasting little more than an hour, has images that bury themselves in the mind…”–Philip French, The Observer (DVD)

IMDB LINK: The Black Cat (1934)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Black Cat (1934) – Overview – More information on the film from Turner Classic Movies’ database (including an essay by Bret Wood)

The Black Cat (1934) – This review from filmsite.org is mostly an extremely detailed plot synopsis

the black cat 1934 on Tumblr - Stills, artwork, etc. that has been tagged with “The Black Cat” on the popular social network

Borderline Weird: The Black Cat (1934) – G. Smalley’s original review of The Black Cat for this site

Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934) – Alfred Eaker’s original review of The Black Cat for this site

DVD INFO: Universal Studios home video division has not done justice to The Black Cat, a critically revered horror classic with a large cult following that was also their biggest money maker of 1934. They offer the film on an extras-free DVD-R (buy). For a few dollars more, however, you can own the film as part of “The Bela Lugosi Collection” (buy), along with Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Raven, The Invisible Ray, and Black Friday. There are no special features in the set save for trailers for three of the movies. No original trailer for The Black Cat is known to exist. If Dr. Werdergast was around, he would skin the Universal executives responsible for this travesty alive.

Feuchtgebiete

DIRECTED BY: David Wnendt

FEATURING: Carla Juri, Christoph Letkowski, Meret Becker, Axel Milberg

PLOT: A sexually precocious teen girl who is virulently anti-hygiene tries to seduce her male nurse when she is hospitalized with anal fissures.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Wetlands proudly advertises itself as “the most WTF, NSFW movie” of the year, and it is unique in that it’s the world’s first art-house gross-out romantic comedy. It’s worth a look for the way it blends cuteness and transgression with a peppering of magical realism moments, but it’s more provocative than weird in the end.

COMMENTS: I recently saw a Dutch study that came to the common-sense conclusion that sexual arousal overcomes feelings of disgust, allowing us to propagate the species despite the fact that the process of sexual intercourse involves a lot of foul smells and exchange of potentially deadly fluid-borne bacteria. So it’s no surprise that Wetlands makes its hemorrhoid-ridden heroine with the crusty panties a) horny and b) hot.  Helen may be unhygienic, but thankfully she’s photogenic. A movie about a fat, homely girl who disdains hygiene and trades tampons with her best friend would be far harder to (forgive me) swallow.

There are more than a few softcore (and some pretty hardcore) sex scenes here, and graphic “ick” moments that will remind you of illustrated versions kinds of stories teenage boys like to swap in locker rooms to make each other gag. There are also a sprinkling of hallucinatory scenes to catch weirdophiles interest, anchored by the moment where an aroused Helen sees a tree sprouting from her vagina. Perhaps even more visually impressive is the opening credits’ psychedelic trip through the rainbow forest of microflora and fauna growing on a filthy public toilet bowl. Helen confesses that she “often mixes up reality, lies and dreams,” which calls into question some of her more extreme exploits, but her hallucinations are always psychologically revealing, and sometimes dead-on satirical (as in the fantasy where her mother faces her greatest fear—being struck by a bus while wearing a pair of dirty underwear).

Wetlands intends to challenge what it contends are our irrational prejudices about the uncleanliness of our own bodies. But in knowingly pushing the audience’s gross-out buttons, it sometimes perforates the wall of absurdity to the point where its legitimate  message is lost. The pizza scene, in particular, seems like something that belongs in a Pink Flamingos sequel. The movie risks sweeping its argument about the irrationality of taboos away in a flood of menstrual blood, mucous, semen, and the miscellaneous fluids that pool on the floor of one particularly unhygienic public toilet. Wetlands is filled with womb and birth imagery that suggests that the process of becoming human is inescapably wet and smelly, and that  perhaps we should embrace that reality as joyously as our heroine does.  Yet, Helen confesses that she’s had herself secretly sterilized. The statement is made offhandedly, and maybe its one of the lies that Helen mixes up with truth, but it metaphorically cuts off the “life-affirming” reading. Still, although it might be a little thematically confused and try too hard to shock, Wetlands is bold and original in tone, and it boasts a brave and winning performance from Carla Juri (who convincingly captures the raunchy and rebellious charm of a free-spirited teenager despite being in her late twenties).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an aesthetically amped-up affair, full of segmented screens, oversaturated colors, trippy special effects, and drugged-out flashbacks and dream sequences…”–Nick Schager, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: None credited

FEATURING: N/A

PLOT: A two-plus hour “mixtape” of video clips, some rare, some shocking, a few weird, arranged with a minimum of editing.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The “mixtape” concept is easy to  do, hard to master. This one contains little of interest and much that’s in terrible taste, with extremely irritating editing experiments as the rancid topping on an unappetizing pie. Few will be able to watch it to the end; many could not make it five minutes into this “movie” without giving up. For aficionados of 2012 only.

COMMENTS: Way back in the VHS era, tapes of rare video material—embarrassments taped off public access TV, censored news footage, forbidden clips from video nasties, strange home videos found in thrift shops—circulated among collectors who would often edit them into anthologies or “mixtapes.” In the age of the high-speed Internet, when everything has been uploaded and we are able to select our own clips with a mouse click, watching a video mixtape is like being trapped inside someone else’s YouTube playlist. Unless you invest your compilation with some sort of thematic coherence—like the Everything is Terrible! ensemble, who elevated the genre to an actual artform with Doggiewogiez! Poochiewoochiez!—-there is no reason for anyone to watch it. Just stringing together stuff you think is cool is no longer sufficient.

“The 2012 Aficionado DVD Zine” falls into the “stuff the editor thinks is cool” school of mixtaping. If you don’t agree this stuff is cool—and most adults won’t think much of it is—then you’re not going to be interested in sticking with it through the bloated 2-hr. plus runtime. The “original” source material seems to be videotape, and the images are blurred and fuzzy, which adds more eyestrain than charm. Time stamps are frequently visible, particularly when some editing experiment is being done (in an attempt to add some artistic input of his own, the compiler is fond of looping the material so that the playback repeats and stutters, which becomes highly irritating—see below). There is only occasionally any kind of logical flow to the material—at one point, a George W. Bush speech segues into an anti-capitalist Afropop music video, which is about as close to a creative statement the assembler makes. Most of it is a random stream of fuzzy Bollywood dance scenes, evangelical propaganda videos, animated softcore porn, homemade amateur punk/rap/metal videos, a puppet singing about unrequited interracial love, John Kilduff’s public access exercise/painting program, exploding anime heads, Japanese softcore porn, a slo-mo version of “Soul Train,” a homemade sex tape of a furry making love to an inflatable dolphin, and so on.

It’s not as much fun as it sounds. First off, there is the horrible video quality and the fact that there is no flow to the clips. Second, there are several objectionable Faces of Death-type atrocity scenes added merely for their offensiveness and rarity. The clip of cat abuse (it is still debated how much of this scene was achieved through special effects) comes from the Hong Kong exploitation film Men Behind the Sun. Even more tasteless is the footage of combatants being eliminated by drone strikes, and a film purporting to show a man being burned alive without a trial by a vigilante mob. Since the mixtape provides no political context to these scenes—we aren’t even told what country the immolation occurs in—this is pure snuff entertainment. Finally, as if all that wasn’t enough to turn you against the project, there are the aforementioned irritating editing experiments, culminating in a one second clip of Pokemon characters yipping that is looped to run for—I kid you not—nine minutes. When I reached that point in the tape I had to turn it off and finish it the next night. You don’t have to go that far in; you never have to watch any of it at all.

I don’t understand how “the 2012 Aficionado DVD Zine” is, as it advertizes itself, “the first ever zine in DVD format.” A zine was an underground magazine composed of original material written or drawn by hobbyists. It did not consist simply of unauthorized reprints of other people’s work. Other than the ill-advised edits, nothing here was actually created by the person who assembled it. Still, it’s available here, along with five more episodes which are also each over 2 hours long. Some of you will doubtlessly be tempted to try this—but don’t say you weren’t warned.

(This movie was nominated for review by someone [almost certainly the original editor/uploader] whose comments have since been lost. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

“Parce que moi je rêve, je ne le suis pas.” (“Because I dream, I am not.”)–Léolo

DIRECTED BY: Jean-Claude Lauzon

FEATURING: Maxime Collin, Yves Montmarquette, Pierre Bourgault, Ginette Reno, Giuditta Del Vecchio, Julien Guiomar

PLOT: Young Léo Lauzon lives in Montreal with his dysfunctional family; he has an active imagination which he uses to escape from his squalid surroundings. He insists that his name is actually Léolo and that he is Italian, inventing a story that his mother was impregnated by a tomato contaminated with semen. He lusts after a neighbor girl (as does his grandfather) and tags along on salvage operations with his bodybuilding older brother in-between trips to the mental hospital to visit other family members; the entire time a mysterious old man hangs around the edges of the story.

BACKGROUND:

• This was writer/director Jean-Claude Lauzon’s second feature film. He died in a plane crash in 1995 while working on his third.
• Lauzon said the film was semi-autobiographical. Leo’s last name is also Lauzon, which he Italianizes to “Lozone” when he decides he is really Léolo.
• The “Word Tamer” (or possibly “worm tamer”—“dompteur de vers” in the French may be a pun meaning both “worm” and “verse”) is played by Pierre Bourgault, a Quebecois separatist and professor. Lauzon was once a student of Bourgault’s.
• Named one of “Time” magazines “All-TIME 100 Movies.“

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The “contaminated” tomato, the film’s most deranged comic invention.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Immaculate conception via imported produce, underwater hallucinations, and bizarre sexual practices reign in the world of Léolo’s imagination. He uses these inventions to escape from an almost equally strange, but far less pleasant, reality.

U.S. release trailer for Léolo

COMMENTS: “Because I dream, I am not,” Léolo‘s young protagonist tells his diary, over and over. He is not what? He is not Léo Lauzon, a poor French Canadian boy. He is not related to the scat-obsessed madmen he bunks with. He is not, himself, mad.

Léolo’s problems originate with his family; he theorizes that his perverted grandfather passed down “one cell too many” to his progeny. Léolo dodges that DNA, at least in his imagination, through his accidental artificial insemination from a tomato. His mother teaches toddler Léo how to defecate via explicit demonstrations, and occasionally keeps a turkey in the bathtub, but she is the most stable one in the family (she “had the force of a large ship that sailed on a diseased ocean,” Léolo writes). The boy loves and respects his mother, but not his corpulent father, a dim-bulb tyrant of the toilet who force-feeds his children laxatives and enforces enemas to ensure the daily bowel movements he is convinced lead to health and well-being. Grandpa is a pervert, and, though “not a mean man,” he tries to drown the boy in a fury. He has a nearsighted older sister Nanette, about whom we do not learn much except that, like the rest of the family, she is sporadically institutionalized (the Lauzons have a suite reserved at the local asylum). He loves his younger sister Rita, with whom he shares a passion for bug collecting, but she, like the rest, ends badly. Léolo spends most of his time with his brother Fernand, a grammar school dropout who bulks up to Schwarzeneggerian proportions after being bullied by a local tough. Fernand’s failure to revenge himself on his tormentor even after he’s added an intimidating shell of muscle speaks to the Lauzons’ destiny as an impotent clan.

There is one more character of significance outside of Léolo’s family, an enigmatic figure known as the “Word Tamer.” He is, on the surface, some sort of vagabond who wanders around Montreal fishing for casually discarded literary relics among the garbage. Some of his prize catches include Léolo’s writings, poetic reflections on his failed childhood and his romantic dreams of becoming a great Italian lover. Perhaps the entire story is told from the perspective of the Word Tamer, reading through the boy’s writings years after the fact. A narrator speaks as we wacth the Word Tamer read Léolo’s diary, although to add an additional layer of ambiguity the voiceover is not performed by Pierre Bourgault. Léolo also knows the Tamer, at least in a dream. Together they throw old letters and photographs on a pyre to purify them, and the boy believes the old man is the reincarnation of Don Quixote. Throughout the story the Tamer checks up on Léolo, and even surreptitiously provides the Lauzon household with its only book, a work which inspires the boy to write down his own fantasies. The film’s final moments aren’t spent with Léolo, but with the Tamer, who fondly takes the boy’s writings down into his basement filled with books and classical statuary and files them away in art’s sepulcher.

This is the only immortality Léolo will find; the defiance of dreams. Like his brother’s inability to beat his childhood bully, despite hours of pushups and pullups and pumping barbells made from old paint cans filled with gravel, Léolo ultimately fails to transcend his origins. He fails to become a man, because he is afraid to become the lover he imagines himself to be. He escapes into his dreams but he is also trapped by them, terrified to leave their warmth and comfort for the real world. Throughout Léolo, perverted sexuality symbolizes the boy’s failure to come to grips with reality. From his imaginary conception onward, Léolo has no real knowledge or understanding of normal human sexuality or procreation. He lusts after the girl next door, but is afraid to approach her; instead, he caresses his sister and snuggles next to his beefy brother at night. He learns about female bodies only from girlie mags, and utilizes butcher shop scraps to simulate real women. He observes his grandfather’s perverted liaisons with the object of his devotions, and his frustrated libido drives him into a misdirected murderous rage. One of the final scenes (set with black humor, to the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”) is a heartbreaking vision of adolescent cruelty and erotic malfeasance. His lone act with a real woman is bought and paid for. “I discovered sex between ignorance and horror,” Léolo confesses. He is alienated from the world of love and sex, and therefore, of manhood.

Léolo is a weird movie, but it is also an exceptionally sad one. In fact, it could be one of the most despairing films ever made. What is a dream and what is reality is never one hundred percent clear in Léolo, but whenever you see something crushingly sad, you can bet that Léolo didn’t intentionally imagine it that way. The hero’s only escape from his nightmarish childhood is through art and imagination, but in the end, these escape hatches actually trap him, and he ends up in the same place as the family he sought to escape. There is a symbiosis between dreams and reality; they need to feed off each other. Because Léolo cannot bear to face reality, his dreams desert him.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If you are one of those lonely film lovers who used to attend foreign films, who used to seek out the off-beat and the challenging, and who has given up on movies because they all seem the same, crawl out of your bunker and go to see this one… It is a work of genius – and the best kind of genius, too, which is deranged genius. “–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“These ventures into surreal scatology are typical of Canadian writer-director Jean-Claude Lauzon. Claiming his own childhood as the source for these stunning visions, Lauzon is at his best working in the area where reality and fantasy blur, where dreams become as real as the dreamer’s waking life.”–Hal Hinson, Washington Post (contemporaneous)

“…a bold fusion of the mystical and the macabre… hallucinatory passages conjure a very real sense of childhood isolation.”–Time Out London

IMDB LINK: Léolo (1992)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

“It Takes Monsters to Do Things Like That” – Currently available on Google Books, Jim Leach’s informative chapter on Lauzon for the book “Great Canadian Filmmakers” is largely an analysis of Léolo

“Queering the Heterosexual Male in Canadian Cinema: An Analysis of Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo” – Scholarly article arguing that “it is the rejection of hetero-masculine influence which permits the protagonist, Leo Lozeau/Léolo, to transgress hetero-normative societal pressures and embrace his queerly positioned identity”; I’m not buying it

“Queering the Québécois and Canadian Child in Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo“ – Not a joke; this ran in the same issue of “Synoptique” as the article above, and its central claim is that “Léolo’s queer identity rejects the [1992 Canadian] child pornography law’s nationalistic discourse of childhood innocence and its erasure of child sexuality”

DVD INFO: The bare-bones DVD release (buy) contains no special features beyond the film’s trailer. Léolo is not currently available on Blu-ray or video on demand.

(This movie was nominated for review by Eric Gabbard , who avers that “like tomatoes… the film is not for all tastes.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

“It’s a strange world.”–Sandy Williams, Blue Velvet

DIRECTED BY: David Lynch

FEATURING: Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern, Dean Stockwell

PLOT: While home from college to visit his ailing father, who has suffered a stroke, Jeffrey Beaumont finds a severed human ear in a field. Though warned by his neighbor, Detective Williams, that the case is a police issue and he should not ask any questions, the curious Jeffrey decides to seek answers on his own, enlisting Williams’ daughter Sandy, a high school senior, in his investigation. The trail leads to a melancholy torch singer named Dorothy Vallens, and when Jeffrey hides in her closet after nearly being caught snooping in her apartment, he witnesses a horror he never imagined, which forever shatters his innocence.

BACKGROUND:

• Blue Velvet was David Lynch’s comeback film after the disastrous flop of 1984’s Dune.
• Warner Brother’s commissioned a treatment of Lynch’s basic idea for the film, but in 1986 no major studio would touch the finished Blue Velvet script because of its themes of sexual violence. The film was produced and distributed by Dino De Laurentiis (who formed a distribution company just for this release). De Laurentiis was known for taking chances on risky or salacious movies, whether exploitation or art films. He gave Lynch final cut in exchange for a reduced salary (possibly hoping that Lynch would refuse his insulting offer and chose a more commercial project).
• Blue Velvet is considered Lynch’s comeback film, but even more so Dennis Hopper’s. Hopper, who became a star when he wrote, directed and acted in the 1969 counterculture hit Easy Rider, developed a serious polydrug addiction problem throughout the 1970s. By the 1980s he had earned a reputation as unreliable and difficult to work with, and landed only minor roles after his memorable turn as a maniacal photographer in Apocalypse Now (1979). He entered rehab in 1983 and was sober for a year and a half before making Blue Velvet. Looking for a role to revive his career, Hopper told Lynch, “You have to give me the role of Frank Booth, because I am Frank Booth!”
• Booth’s character was originally written by Lynch to breathe helium from his gas tank, but Hopper convinced the director that amyl nitrate would be a more appropriate inhalant for Frank. The actual drug the villain breathes is never specified in the film.
• This was the first collaboration between Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti. Badalamenti was hired to be Isabella Rossellini’s voice coach for her singing numbers, but Lynch liked his arrangements so much he hired him to produce the film’s soundtrack. Badalamenti would work on the score of all of Lynch’s future films until INLAND EMPIRE, and is perhaps best known for the “Twin Peaks” theme.
• Jack Nance, who played a part in all of Lynch’s feature films until his death in 1996, has a small part here as one of Frank’s hoodlums.
• Lynch was nominated for a Best Director Oscar, losing to Oliver Stone for Platoon. Dennis Hopper’s performance was widely praised, but was too profane for Academy consideration; he was nominated for Supporting Actor for Hoosiers, where he played an assistant high school basketball coach struggling with alcoholism, instead.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: “Suave” Dean Stockwell performing a karaoke version of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” an illuminated microphone lighting his lightly-rouged face.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Dream of the robins; candy-colored clown; dead man standing

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Nearly everyone describes Blue Velvet as “weird,” but most of the time, when pressed, it’s hard to pin down exactly why. Yes, there is sexual perversity, a campy and impossibly white-bread Lumberton, and one of the strangest lip-sync numbers ever, but if we were to actually sit down and graph Blue Velvet on a axis of Lynchian weirdness, we would find it closer to The Straight Story pole than it is to the incoherent extremes of INLAND EMPIRE. But despite the fact that Blue Velvet is among Lynch’s less-weird works, it’s one of his greatest. The clear and powerful presentation of key Lynch themes—the contrast between innocence and experience, and sexuality’s fateful role in marking that line—make it a crucial entry in this weirdest of director’s oeuvre. Blue Velvet‘s influence is so monumental that it would be a crime to leave it off the List of the Best Weird Movies ever made.

Original trailer for Blue Velvet

 COMMENTS: David Lynch’s Blue Velvet exists in a heightened reality—and a heightened depravity—but essentially it is a straightforward, comprehensible thriller, though one set in a stylized world. Other than in The Straight Story, Lynch would never be this linear again. The weird touches are usually subtle, the moments of actual surrealism that so slight that we might find ourselves doubting whether they are, in fact, surreal at all, or whether we notice them simply from our own expectations of watching a Lynch movie. Frank Booth’s drug-huffing, sadistic, Oedipal sex practices trespass way beyond the line of merely kinky, but if his sociopathic behavior was the only bizarre element in Blue Velvet, it would merely be a perverted movie, not a weird one. Yet, despite the absence of ladies in radiators, backward-talking dream dwarfs, or sitcom rabbits, Blue Velvet feels weird at heart; its world is simultaneously real—the evil is on the verge of bursting through the screen and falling your lap—and unreal, filtered through a layer of dreamishness that paradoxically distances you from the horror while at the same time branding it more unforgettably into your brain. Blue Velvet is a masterful balancing act between the dualities of good and evil, light and dark, sincerity and irony, real and unreal, and it has provoked understandably strong reactions throughout its history.

The key scene in Blue Velvet—what David Lynch calls the “eye of the duck” scene—is our introduction to Ben (Dean Stockwell), a minor character whose onscreen impact goes far beyond his small role in the plot. In a narrative craft sense, this scene serves the same purpose as the drunken porter in “Macbeth”; comic relief as a break from murderous tension, which both temporarily distracts from and paradoxically heightens suspense. Jeffrey Beaumont has just been discovered leaving Dorothy Vallens apartment by the psychotic Frank Booth, who “invites” him to go on a joyride. We in the audience have seen Frank abuse Dorothy and know that he is ruthless, obsessive and unpredictable, and we also know that Jeffrey is erotically involved with Dorothy. Frank, however, does not know who Jeffrey is, nor could Frank know that Jeffrey knows who he is and has actually been spying on him. We have no idea what Frank will do to Jeffrey; killing him seems like a very real possibility, though Frank obviously enjoys frightening the boy first. Frank and his gang take Jeffrey to a strange location on the other side of town. (When they arrive, Frank hollers, “this is it!” Pay attention to what the neon sign in the window says). Inside, we expect to see a brothel, and perhaps it is; but if so, it is staffed mostly by matronly women in bouffant hairdos, and by Ben, a slip of a man who wears light makeup and a smoking jacket, and delicately gestures with his cigarette holder. The music, horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and wall lamps seem to come from the 1950s; it’s as if we’ve stepped back in time. Ben is a homosexual stereotype, but ultra-macho Frank, who we would expect to be a raging homophobe, doesn’t notice; instead, he’s overwhelmed and impressed by Ben’s “suaveness.” Frank’s hoodlums menace Jeffrey, but we are unprepared for the most horrific event: Ben serenades Frank with Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” swaying his hips, staring into his eyes, and using a light-up microphone. While nothing happens in this scene that we could put our finger on and say “that’s impossible!,” the effect is undoubtedly weird—and frightening. It is one thing to be captured by gangsters who you know are going to beat, maim or even kill you; but when they stop along the way to perform karaoke, you realize that all rules of normal human behavior are off, and there is no possible way to predict your fate.

Roger Ebert did not single this scene out in his infamous diatribe against Blue Velvet, but he might have had it in the back of his mind. Ebert hated the movie, not because of its disturbing sadomasochistic content, but because he viewed Lynch’s “jokey” moments as betraying the emotional core of the story. He believed that Lynch used black humor and irony in the film to distance himself from having to face the real implications of his exploration of the dark side of human sexuality, complaining that “[a]fter five or 10 minutes in which the screen reality was overwhelming, I didn’t need the director prancing on with a top hat and cane, whistling that it was all in fun” and “What’s worse? Slapping somebody around, or standing back and finding the whole thing funny?” He concluded that Lynch had betrayed his actors, particularly Rossellini (who admittedly is asked to do and to endure some pretty nasty things), by turning their sacrifices into one big joke. (Of course, Rossellini wasn’t nearly as humiliated or abused as Carole Laure in Sweet Movie, which a younger Ebert had given a two-and-a-half star pass).

Like most people, I disagree with Ebert’s assessment; I think Lynch’s use of irony and black comedy here is masterful and thematically appropriate, and complements, rather than betrays, the horror. On the other hand, I do think Ebert was onto something; he just had the wrong movie. Perhaps his jeremiad was a prophecy, rather than a criticism. Ebert was concerned about the insincere use of irony as an tool by artists to legitimize their own (and the audience’s) sadism. In fact, the widespread critical and popular success of Blue Velvet gave future movies implicit permission to be much nastier and sleazier—so long as they played it off as a joke. Think of the way by 1994 Quentin Tarantino uses an ironic killshot to the head as a punchline in Pulp Fiction, or how Natural Born Killers depicts an abusive family as literally living in a sitcom, or even how “South Park” killed a child each week, among the more artistic examples of the phenomenon. It is conceivable that none of these would have existed in their current form had not Blue Velvet paved the way with its juxtaposition of campy comedy and violent brutality. Just as Miles Davis may be posthumously blamed for decades of hackneyed fusion jazz snores by founding a musical genre only he could play correctly, Lynch might be indirectly to blame for the atrociously grating pop-shock humor of “Family Guy.”

Still, although I think it’s important to consider his concerns, and generally support the pro-sincerity principle, I stand with the majority in thinking Ebert is way off base in regards to Blue Velvet. I think Lynch’s use of irony in Blue Velvet, while admittedly attached to stronger material than usual, is well within the classical narrative tradition’s parameters for employing this tool. A more astute appraisal of the movie comes from a man who wrestled with the dilemma of irony his entire life: “Infinite Jest” writer and Lynch-booster David Foster Wallace. In “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (a profile written on the set of Lost Highway, reprinted in the collection “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again“), Wallace wrote about seeing Blue Velvet as a grad student with a group of his MFA peers: “The movie’s obvious ‘themes’… were for us less revelatory than the way the movie’s surrealism and dream logic felt; they felt true, real.” Further, Wallace contends that “Lynch’s movies [are] fundamentally unironic…” This, of course, is precisely the opposite of Ebert’s position. Of course, Wallace could not fail to notice that Lynch employs irony; it’s just that, in direct opposition to Ebert, he does not see the “ironic self-consciousness [that] is the one and only universally recognized badge of sophistication” as part of Lynch’s makeup. Lynch uses irony the way people did before the postmodern age; he is not hyper- or meta-ironic. Lynch is odd, Wallace thinks, because Lynch is odd, and perverse because he is at heart a prude who possesses the prude’s natural fascination with perversity. His work is not a pose or a cynical attempt to shock; Lynch simply channels his unconscious preoccupations onto the screen without worrying about whether they will be considered “hip.”

I don’t know if I can get 100% behind Wallace’s assessment that Lynch is irony-free, but I agree that Blue Velvet feels true, real. And a large part of what makes it true and real is its pervasive use of irony against the happy-faced platitudes of middle class life. The 50s sitcom world of Lumbertown, a Mayberry inhabited almost entirely by extras from “Leave it to Beaver,” is exposed as artificial, fake, a construct. Lumberton’s picket fences are lies; reality lies under the manicured lawns, with the squirming, fighting beetles and severed ears. What’s terrifying about Blue Velvet is how it depicts Lumbertown’s “clean” daytime world of waving firemen and friendly crossing guards as absurd and artificial, while the “dirty” nighttime world of drug-sniffing fiends and rough sex appears vital and real. Jeffrey sees Lumberton as a child would, full of iconic red, white and blue images of American virtue. When he begins investigating the mystery—not just the mystery of the missing ear, but the symbolic mystery of sex and the fallen grace of adulthood, which he first learns of as a voyeur spying on Dorothy and Frank—a new reality is revealed to him. “Now, it’s dark.” Jeffrey learns of the evil within himself; Frank is his shadow, just as Dorothy is sunny Sandy’s blue-hued, tragic double. I choose to take Lynch at his unironic word when he says that Jeffrey’s discovery of the knowledge of good and evil will not inevitably doom him, that someday the robins will return. But, just as Jeffrey will never see the world the same way after peering through the slats in Dorothy’s closet, we can never see movies quite the same way after we’ve experienced Blue Velvet.

Scott Sentinella adds: Blue Velvet was released in 1986. David Lynch’s similar television series, “Twin Peaks”, made its debut in 1990. For those of us who saw “Twin Peaks” first, Blue Velvet comes off as less than revolutionary. Yes, the film features much rawer language, violence and sexuality than the TV show, bizarre though it was, could ever have included. But Blue Velvet gives off a whiff of déjà vu, only in reverse. However, there is no doubt there is much that is memorable, if not unforgettable, about the film. The famous opening scene, where the camera tracks down a white picket fence and into the ground, revealing a frightening world of ugly insects, is a beauty. Obviously, we are being told, beneath the wholesome façade of small-town America lives a “strange world”, to quote the movie’s last scene.  After seeing this movie, no one can hear that famous Bobby Vinton song again without thinking of Kyle MacLachlan lurking in a closet. MacLachlan is impressive, but Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper are genuinely disturbing. Hopper’s Frank Booth is as one-dimensionally evil (not necessarily a bad thing) as Kenneth McMillan’s pustulous Baron Harkonnen in Lynch’s earlier, disastrous Dune. While Dune does not make the List, Blue Velvet, although arguably overrated, has to be one of the five or ten most famous “weird movies” of all time. Angelo Badalamenti’s florid music, the typically Lynchian pulsating sound effects, the non-stop, creeping sense of dread: there is so much that is striking about this film, and yet I can’t help shake the feeling that the whole is somewhat less than the sum of its parts.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Lynch’s use of irrational material works the way it’s supposed to: we read his images at some not fully conscious level.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

“Once the film’s hero, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), discovers a severed ear lying in the tall grass and begins tracing its origin, ‘Blue Velvet’ begins ricocheting from one weird episode to another, propelled by the logic of a bad dream. These forays seem to grow even longer and stranger as the film progresses.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“‘Blue Velvet’ isn’t about David Lynch’s view of the world, it’s about David Lynch; he isn’t interested in communicating, he’s interested in parading his personality. The movie doesn’t progress or deepen, it just gets weirder, and to no good end.”–Paul Attanasio, Washington Post (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK: Blue Velvet (1986)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Blue Velvet – David Lynch – An extensive compendium of links and resources, including a reproduction of the original press book, at lynchnet, the David Lynch fan portal (unfortunately, the page does not seem to have been updated for at least five years)

My Problem with ‘Blue Velvet’ – Roger Ebert’s infamous negative review of Blue Velvet, incorporating quotes from his interview with Lynch

Filmmakers on film: Tom Tykwer on Blue Velvet – Director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) discusses Blue Velvet’s influence on his own aesthetics in this running series for The Telegraph

Notes About One of the Last Scenes in Blue Velvet (SPOILERS) – Blogger F. Fred Palakon takes an almost forensic approach to analyzing the unresolved mysteries of Blue Velvet‘s ending

21 Things You Might Not Know About ‘Blue Velvet’ – Basically an enhanced version of the IMDB “trivia” section for the movie

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Blue Velvet (BFI Modern Classics) – Film critic Michael Atkinson gives Lynch’s work a Freudian reading in this British Film Institute monograph

DVD INFO: 20th Century Fox’s “Special Edition” DVD (buy) was released in 2002, and, like all home videos associated with Lynch’s name, the transfer was approved by the director.  Special features include a “making of” documentary, a Lynch interview, and, perversely, the clip of Siskel and Ebert’s split decision on the film for their popular “At the Movies” TV show.

For a long time the montage of stills of deleted scenes of footage thought to be lost (called “Are You a Pervert?”), was the suprelative extra of this DVD. That changed with the 2011’s “25th Anniversary” Blu-ray release (buy), which includes all the supplemental material from the DVD with one important difference: gone is “Are You a Pervert?”, replaced by nearly an hour of deleted scenes that were discovered in 2011. Most of the scenes are unremarkable, but one includes a flaming nipple (!)

Of course the movie is also available to buy or rent on demand (buy or rent on-Demand), with no extra features.

(This movie was first nominated for review by reader “Oregon JayBird,” who called it “a cinematic triumph for weird movie fans the world over.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Jörg Buttgereit

FEATURING: Monika M., Mark Reeder

PLOT: A young woman digs up a corpse with the intention of making him her lover; romantic complications arise when she falls for a living man.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Nekromantik 2 is disconcerting, at times graphic and difficult to look at, but it is not that weird.

COMMENTS: According to Wikipedia, “necrophilia, also called thanatophilia, is a sexual attraction or sexual act involving corpses. The attraction is classified as a paraphilia by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The term was coined by the Belgian alienist Joseph Guislain, who first used it in a lecture in 1850. It derives from the Greek words nekros; ‘dead’ and philia; ‘love’.” Even Disney would have difficulty making family-friendly fare based on the subject of “dead love.” German director Jörg Buttgereit had no intention of making a family film, of course. The original Nekromantik was banned in several countries.

Nekromantik 2 begins where the first one ended. Robert Schmadtke’s graphic and gruesome suicide is replayed during the credits. He stabs himself repeatedly in the stomach as his exposed erection ejaculates fountains of semen. We are then taken to a graveyard where we see a young woman digging up Robert’s corpse. She is a nurse named Monica who intends to make Robert her lover. No time is wasted establishing the premise. Monica, eluding detection, wheels Robert’s rotting corpse into her apartment. Once in the privacy of her abode she begins to fondle, kiss and undress Robert before mounting him.

The viewer is treated to a trippy slow motion scene of Monica’s coital experience. Soon she is running to the bathroom to vomit. Could it be her aversion to her own depravity making her physically ill? It seems unlikely. Monica’s character makes no apologies for her actions throughout the film. The character is not empathetic, she is a strong, independent woman obsessed with death, who also happens to have an affinity for sex with corpses. It is more likely the licking, sucking and kissing of a rotting, oozing, embalming fluid-filled corpse that is making her vomit. Robert is one nasty, icky looking corpse! The gore effects across the board were all properly gag-worthy and effective.

Enter Mark: a shy, awkward loner who does voiceovers for adult films. When a friend fails to meet him at the theater he offers the extra ticket to Monika as she happens by. The two see a black and white art film where a naked couple sit at a table covered in hard boiled eggs discussing birds. (This is apparently a cheeky wink to Louis Malle‘s My Dinner with Andre). Mark and Monica hit it off and are soon dating. Mark falls hard for Monica, and tries to ignore her eccentricities: the family album full of funeral shots, the request he pose for pictures as if he were dead, the saran-wrapped covered scrotum in her refrigerator, the friendly all-female get-togethers to watch animal dissection footage. There are some tongue-in-cheek moments, and a few outright comedic ones, and a cameo from Beatrice Manowski who played Robert’s girlfriend Betty in the original film. Betty goes to Robert’s grave with the intention of digging him up, and is ticked off to see someone has beaten her to it.

Dialog throughout is quite spare. Not a word is spoken for the first eighteen minutes of the film, and there are several lengthy scenes without dialog that follow. There are a couple of scenes that definitely could have used a trim. Having seen the original Nekromantik, I thought I was prepared for anything. After watching the first ten minutes of Nekromantik 2, I started to think that I might have taken on something that was going to challenge me in a way I was not up to. Much to my surprise, I actually liked the film. And that finale! I could not have constructed a better ending for this film! Nekromantik 2 is well-filmed and appropriately nasty with a fascinating central character who makes no apologies for her most disturbing fixation. Outside of a few scenes in need of tighter editing, I found Nekromantik 2 unsettling and compelling viewing.

There are a ton of supplements included with Cult Epics Limited Edition DVD, including an introduction by Jörg Buttgereit; commentary from Buttgereit, co-writer Franz Rodenkirchen, and the film’s lead actor and actress; a “making of” feature; trailers for other Buttgereit flicks; an entertaining Buttgereit-directed music video for the Half Girl ditty “Lemmy, I’m A Feminist” (available on YouTube); the short film “A Moment of Silence at the Grave of Ed Gein”; a concert performance by Monica M. with guests; and two versions of the film’s soundtrack, recorded and live. But the best extra is the two postcards included in the package that you can send off to loved ones. Cult Epics really went all out with the bonus material; all films should be treated this well!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Buttgereit’s potent stab at transgressive cinema is more in line with the early films of John Waters or David Cronenberg than with the litany of directors associated with torture porn movies…”–Cole Smithey, ColeSmithey.com

“Erogotoshitachi” yori Jinruigaku nyūmon

“What kind of fish is that? What is it doing there?

“Very strange…”–dialogue spoken over the opening credits of The Pornographers

DIRECTED BY: Shôhei Imamura

FEATURING: Shôichi Ozawa, Sumiko Sakamoto, Keiko Sagawa, Masaomi Kondô

PLOT: Ogata makes illicit pornographic films to support his widowed landlady, who is also his lover, and her two teenage children. The widow believes her ex-husband was reincarnated as a carp she keeps in a fishbowl next to the bed and that he disapproves of the arrangement, but she cannot control herself. When she dies, she insists Ogata marry her daughter, but the pornographer has become impotent and obsessed with building a mechanical woman to be the perfect mate.

BACKGROUND:

• Shôhei Imamura apprenticed as an assistant director under Yasujirô Ozu, and although he was considered a major figure in the Japanese New Wave, his movies are little known outside his native land. In the West, The Pornographers is his best-known work.
• The scenario was based on a 1963 novel by Akiyuki Nosaka (who also wrote the story on which Grave of the Fireflies was based).
• The Pornographers was made by Nikkatsu studios, who ironically turned from producing art films to making pornography (“pink films”) soon after the scandal over Seijun Suzuki‘s “incomprehensible” Branded to Kill in 1967.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Shôhei Imamura frames many of the shots in The Pornographers oddly, including a couple of bedroom scenes viewed through a fish tank; the idea is that we are watching the jealous carp as he spies on his human wife making love to Ogata. The weirdest of these shots, however, has to be a Haru’s deathbed scene, also shot through the carp cam—improbably, this time, from above, as if the fish is looking down from heaven on the spouse who is soon to join him.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Carp ex-hubby; slow schoolgirl porn star; Ogata floats away

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A cavalcade of perversions flecked with short dream sequences and unannounced flashbacks, almost every scene in The Pornographers is eccentric, if not flatly surreal. The main character delivers a philosophical monologue as he walks though an orgy, the matron freaks out to the surf-rock soundtrack in her head, and a new wife strips to garter and stockings as she walks down the corridor to meet her mother-in-law for the first time. Although the story is based in realism, the film’s tone is melodramatic and dreamily erotic—but, ironically, hardly pornographic at all.

Original trailer for The Pornographers

COMMENTS: The key to understanding The Pornographers may be found in its Japanese subtitle, which didn’t make it into the title’s English translation. “Erogotoshitachi” yori Jinruigaku nyūmon can be translated as “’The Pornographers’: An Introduction to Anthropology” or “An Introduction to Anthropology Through the Pornographers.” Although The Pornographers is set in a specific time and place—Japan during the postwar economic boom—it is a work of anthropology, not sociology. Shôhei Imamura believes that pornography can be a lens that reveals something about our essential nature, a belief reflected in pornographer Ogata’s tearful epiphany, “human beings are made this way.”

Ogata’s business interests includes not only homemade porn movies, which he shoots guerrilla style in public parks and dingy warehouses, using four cameras at a time to save on duplication costs, but also dirty novels, aphrodisiacs, covert recordings of neighbors’ lovemaking sessions, and customized pimping services for wealthy clients. His private life shows equal erotic variety: he’s sleeping with his landlady Haru and lusting after her teenage daughter Keiko, while she and her son Koichi have an Oedipal relationship that’s nearly as scandalous as anything in the pornographer’s films. Voyeurism, incest, pseudo-pedophilia, panty-sniffing, prostitution, orgies, and exploitation of the mentally handicapped may all be part of Ogata’s daily routine, as are shakedowns by gangsters, harassment from the cops, and familial turf battles with a resentful and jealous Koichi. Ogata’s situation is exaggerated because of his vocation as procurer, but Imamura presents this messy jumble of erotic longings and selfish jostling for advantage as a bleak image of human existence.

Strangely, despite all the bad things Ogata does—seducing his landlady while peeping at her daughter, slapping Keiko around for calling him “filthy”—he remains a likable, and even tragic, character. Partly this is because he feels keen guilt, symbolized by the carp and the scar on Keiko’s leg, omens that put in an appearance when his lust is getting the best of him. Ogata prides himself on being “honest,” yet he has no problem presenting a forged doctor’s certificate to a client who has requested a virgin for the night. Nonetheless, while he lives a lie, pretending to sell medical products instead of smut, Ogata is “honest” in some sense; he supplies men with their real, unedited fantasies. He is loyal to his fellow pornographers, whom he always treats fairly, and to the makeshift family he supports—up until they die off, reject, or betray him.  His love for Haru appears to be genuine, and somehow isn’t sullied by his uncontrollable lust for her daughter, a fact that the widow accepts and acknowledges when she proposes he marry the girl after her death. Ogata can’t control his urges, or give up on his calling to provide other men with their sickest desires. He ends up spent, jaded, and impotent, disillusioned with humanity and with the messy reality of love; left alone to vainly pursue a perfect, mechanical eroticism, free from conflict and pain.

It’s certainly possible to view this film, as liberal critics instinctually do, as an attack on the sexual repressiveness of then-contemporary Japanese society. I think there is far more evidence, naturally, that The Pornographers is a criticism not of the post-war society’s repressiveness, but of its growing permissiveness. Democracy, capitalism and personal liberty were new concepts to the Japanese, whose pre-war culture had been built around values of obedience, duty and honor. In The Pornographers, Ogata embraces the new values, perversely, almost out of a sense of civic duty, advising Keiko to read books on democracy instead of pornography. Ogata throws out the magical carp, a symbol of authentic Japanese religion and culture, and it returns to haunt him, and presumably is responsible for his eventual karmic backlash. Throughout the film, pornography linked to democracy and capitalism. A fellow pornographer argues in favor of incest and orgies, suggesting that sexual perversion is a way to transcend the human condition and find true freedom. “You’re misinterpreting democracy,” the progressive Ogata insists. But pornographic literature of the type he purveys as “social welfare” is the first spur that leads Keiko to eventually whore herself; when he warns her not to fill her head with such filth (“that’s for stupid adults”), she distracts him from his lecture by offering to let him kiss her. These desires—these urges—may be natural to humans, but pursuing them freely leads to destruction of the family, and to the downfall of both Keiko and Ogata.

Pornography is one-sided: it promises perfect sexual fulfillment without having to negotiate the matter with another person. The pornographic fantasy image is always willing to perform. It never has a headache or a qualm. “A woman’s body strikes me as dirty,” muses Ogata’s partner in porn. “Doing it yourself is much better.” The pornographers may indeed offer freedom—freedom from repression, freedom from taboo—but is it worth the price? Adrift all alone in a shack with his “Dutch wife,” Ogata has “true freedom”; but, he has given up on all humanity, not just women. Given unfettered freedom to pursue their desires, The Pornographers asserts, men will withdraw from community. “Human beings were made this way,” weeps Ogata, in an anthropological mood. We are made of lust, greed, repressed desires, fetishes, and pain; the only way to escape is to excise our own humanity, mechanize the problem away, replace messy sex with perfect porn.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The large carp that presides over parts of Shohei Imamura’s ‘Pornographers’ is only one of many testaments to Mr. Imamura’s real and piquant eccentricity... [the film]  has a bizarrely matter-of-fact tone and a great many flashes of dark humor. It’s at least as engaging as it is obscure.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (1987 revival)

“… in this dark, cunning, Fellini-esque black comedy, the unspoken ‘niceties’ of voyeurism, incest and rabid prostitution become, if anything, acts of desperate liberation.”–Tim Wong, The Lumiere Reader (DVD)

“Imamura has always been viewed as more experimental than his contemporaries, using surrealism, dream imagery, and flashbacks to lace his story with wit, wisdom, and occasional just plain weirdness.”-Bill Gibron, DVD Verdict (DVD)

IMDB LINK: The Pornographers (1966)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Pornographers (1966) – The Criterion Collection – Includes the trailer and an essay by J. Hoberman

Introduction to the film The Pornographers (1966) by Imamura Shōhei – Introductory lecture on The Pornographers by Japanese art historian Stephen Salel, with plenty of background and a summary of the confusing plot (with stills)

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

The Pornographers – The original Japanese novel in a 1968 translation by Michael Gallagher

DVD INFO: The Pornographers (buy) was acquired and restored by the Criterion Collection in 2003. Unfortunately, this disc has none of the extra features Criterion is famous for; it includes only the original trailer and a booklet with an essay by J. Hoberman, making this the closest thing to a bare-bones release the revered label has ever put out.

(This movie was nominated for review by Ervin Knives, who “found it a kind of weird film… Definitely some Bunuel/Fellini in there.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

AKA ZOO

DIRECTED BY: Peter Greenaway

FEATURING: Brian Deacon, Eric Deacon, Andrá Ferréol, Joss Ackland, Frances Barber

PLOT: After the deaths of their wives in a freak car crash, the brothers Oswald and Oliver, both zoologists, pursue different paths of obsession in an attempt to cope with their losses.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: As an art-house film, A Zed & Two Noughts succeeds with its precise interiors, high-minded dialogue, and a cavalcade of mise en scène goodies. Smashed into its philosophizing and clever conversation are decomposing animals, two differently unhinged brothers, a surgeon with an unhealthy obsession with Vermeer, and a borderline-spastic score from long-time Greenaway collaborator, Michael Nyman.

COMMENTS: Taking the idea of in medias res to its logical conclusion, A Zed & Two Noughts (hereafter to be referred to as ZOO) starts with a flash of photography and a smash of a white swan onto a white car. Inside, two women perish—and a third survives, only to have had her leg crushed beyond repair. So far, so good—but not so “art house”, I hear you think. Yet this unlikely (and grisly) beginning somehow morphs into one of the most precisely arranged specimens of film I’ve had the pleasure to watch. After climaxing in the first few minutes, the remainder acts as something of an extended dénouement, culminating in a comparably macabre, though more peaceful, conclusion.

Stylistically, ZOO is like nothing more than a painting. Every shot is impeccably staged, suggesting that director Peter Greenaway could give even Wes Anderson a lesson or two on orderliness in the frame. Scene after scene exhibits meticulous use of vertical and horizontal framing: doorways, windows, mirrors. Those who know a thing or two about Greenaway will be unsurprised: he trained as a painter before beginning his career as a film-maker. The precision of the film’s look is mirrored within it by the surgeon Van Meegeren, who obsesses over the Dutch painter Vermeer, going so far as to try and recreate the latter’s masterpieces Lady Seated at Virginal and The Music Lesson, using the fiery-haired Alba Bewick (the survivor of the opening car crash) as a template. During her first surgery we see him lightly caress her exposed body; after convincing her that her second leg needs removal, we see the surgeon’s assistant provide Alba with a new hair-do and earrings to make her look more like the young women in the Vermeer paintings.

Somehow I have as yet to mention the centerpiece of this refined ostentation, the Deuce brothers. Oliver and Oswald Deuce are, combined, the main character of ZOO. At the film’s beginning, they are obviously identifiable as separate people. Oswald is, so to speak, the left brain: he starts by trying to work out the facts, the tiniest specifics, leading up the deadly car crash that took his wife’s life. Oliver, on the other hand, is right-brained. He contemplates the greater role that the cosmos played in the tragedy as part of his mourning process, watching David Attenborough’s “Life on Earth” program. He feels he needs to start from scratch–the TV series spans some millions of years of natural history—in order to work his way to how events conspired to take his wife from him.

Events proceed in a sinister direction. The brothers’ work starts as time-lapse photographs of rotting fruit, then small fish, and finally works up to their penultimate project: the recording of a zebra’s decomposition. Thrown into this mess of decay, philosophy, paintings, and obtrusive music is an aspiring bestiality writer, a zoo warden who moonlights procuring exotic meats, and sundry “unexplained” escapes of animals. ZOO poses some tough questions, perhaps the most important of which is educed by the zoo’s chief administrator: “What valuable conclusion can be gained from all this rotting meat?”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Greenaway’s eccentric exploration of where all life’s absurd varieties must begin and end is, like a road accident, always fascinating, if not exactly pleasurable, to watch.”–Anton Bitel, Movie Gazette

La Bête

“There was nothing in his previous output—a respectable career that stretched back to the late 1940s—to prepare the viewer for this terrible outrage. Or perhaps, if you looked hard enough, there was. For the exotic and the erotic—and the downright weird—had always been part of Borowczyk’s cinematic universe.”–Cathal Tohill & Pete Tombs, “Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies, 1956-1984”

DIRECTED BY: Walerian Borowczyk

FEATURING: Guy Tréjan, Lisbeth Hummel, Pierre Benedetti, Sirpa Lane

PLOT: Lucy, an impressionable young heiress, comes to France for an arranged marriage with Mathurin de l’Esperance, the socially awkward scion of an aristocratic family. The de l’Esperance family harbors many secrets, including the story of an ancestor from centuries ago who went missing and whose corset was discovered covered in claw marks. The first night she stays in the de l’Esperance chateau, Lucy has a erotic dream about a Victorian lady ravished in the forest by a beast.

BACKGROUND:

• Walerian Borowczyk began his career making highly regarded surreal animated short films. He moved on to live action art house features like Goto, Island of Love (1969) and Blanche (1972), which  were respectable and well-received.
• After 1972 Borowczyk’s career took a turn towards the explicitly erotic/pornographic when he began work on Immoral Tales, a portmanteau of erotic shorts based on literary sources or historical personages (Erzsebet Bathory and Lucrezia Borgia).
• The Beast was originally intended as a segment of Immoral Tales, but Borowczyk decided to expand it to feature length. The “original” Beast is the segment that now appears as Lucy’s dream. Screened as an 18-minute short entitled “La Véritable Histoire de la bête du Gévaudan,” it understandably caused quite a scandal at the 1973 London Film Festival.
• The Beast in Space (1980) was a totally unauthorized Italian “sequel” that also starred sex siren Sirpa Lane.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The Beast‘s indelible image is too obscene to be mentioned in polite company. Being as circumspect and polite as possible, we’ll simply say that it has to do with the titular creature’s, ahem, “equipment.” Scrub your eyes though you may, you can’t unsee these things, so beware. If you can make it through the equine porn scene that opens the film, you should be fine. (Not surprisingly, most of The Beast‘s promotional material has focused on Sirpa Lane’s stunned face, framed by a powdered wig, as she gazes in shock at the same images that will be indelibly stained in your memory).

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Horse porn cold open; eternally spurting beast; clerical bestiality lecture

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Some movies are designed to be weird. Some movies become weird because of certain confluences of incompetencies. And then there are movies like The Beast—a nugget of explicit (if simulated) bestiality porn wrapped in a nuptial drawing room drama, made by a director on the cusp of art house stardom who seems intent on throwing it all away as dramatically as possible—that are weird simply because, if not for the evidence of your own eyes, you could not believe that they exist.

Re-release trailer for The Beast

COMMENTS: No one can accuse Walerian Borowcyzk of sandbagging. After a quote from Voltaire (“worried dreams are but a passing folly”) accompanied by the sounds of clomping hooves and anxious whinnying, we are treated to a shot of a massive, erect stallion phallus, soon followed by a closeup of a twitching mare vagina. Then, in a four minute stretch with only horseshoes on cobblestones and the snorting of flared steed nostrils for a soundtrack, we absorb the particulars of equine lovemaking (foreplay and all) in more graphic detail than most of us outside the racehorse breeding industry would ever care to know.

Watching animals do it is uncomfortable, and uncanny. Their equipment, and their mechanics, are so close to our own; yet we are instinctively repulsed, while at the same time forced to concede that the entire procedure is wholly natural. Nature, we conclude, is pretty damn disgusting. The horse-humping scene prepares us for an upcoming exploration of eroticism that is, to say the least, a little bit askew. The Beast‘s central plot involves marriage, which is an invention designed to cheat nature and divert the sexual impulse into a safe and controlled channel. Marriage is also, according to Pierre de l’Esperance, an estate planning tool; he wants to wed his oddball son Mathurin to the wealthiest match he can find to help preserve the aristocratic family’s dwindling fortune. Civilization puts arbitrary barriers, enforced by the Church in it’s role as monopoly provider of matrimony, in his way. Mathurin must be baptized, a task his father has neglected since the boy’s birth, and a will specifies that the marriage must be performed by a particular prelate with whom the family has had a falling out. Meanwhile, for reasons he doesn’t explain, his uncle is convinced that marriage will be the death of Mathurin.

Mating is much easier for the horses in the stable. Inside the chateau, society seems to be set up to prevent people from getting laid. Mathurin’s sister, Clarisse, tries to sate her lust with the black servant, Ifany—a taboo relationship on grounds of both class and race, though not species. He is continually called away in medias coitus, leaving her to satisfy herself on the bed rail. Lucy Broadhurst, the bride to be, finds her virginal imagination constantly titillated by the sight of copulating horses, and by the bestiality sketches she finds stashed in various places around the home; but she’s stuck masturbating with a rose, and only finds consummation in her dreams. The only person in the chateau who may actually be getting any regularly is the local priest, who has brought two altar boys along with him for companionship on his trip.

There is a droll, farcical element to these proceedings. Lucy, with her wide-eyed eagerness to take in anything sexual, to the humiliation of her prim aunt, makes for an odd sort of comic heroine. But the subdued humor rises to another level when the Beast himself pops up in a dream, with his absurdly enormous oozing phallus (that seems carefully modeled on the horsehood of the steed we saw earlier). He is obviously a man in a suit, but what is he meant to be—bear? Gorilla? Bigfoot? He chases the Victorian lady who discovers him dining on an innocent lamb, and as she flees her petticoats and underthings drop away, layer by layer. When he catches her, he will… well, delicacy and the desire to preserve some kind of mystery prevents us from describing the activities in detail, but let’s just hint that they are very kinky, and very wet. Jean Marias’ Beast was a noble gentleman in a fur suit, but this anonymous Beast is a beclawed burlesque rapist. To add a layer of irony, the entire dream/violation is scored to a dainty repeating harpsichord fugue by Scarlatti. It is uncertain whether Borowcyzk intended the Beast’s scenes to be erotic—I’d hate to meet the guy or gal who is turned on by them—or horrific. I suspect, however, that since shock slowly transitioning into disbelieving amusement is the emotion the sequence naturally elicits, that is the reaction he was going for. Sex is bestial and ridiculous, the author seems to be saying, and even if we try to deny the animal messiness of the procreative act, the truth will come out in our dreams and fantasies.

The Beast isn’t a Surrealist movie, but it is informed by the tenets of the movement, including dogmatic anticlericalism and reverence for the irrational. Borowczyk takes his cheap shots at the Catholic Church here, in the character of the lustful priest who dabs his forehead with holy water when he gets hot. But the Church is emblematic of a wider corrupt society, which opposes nature and natural urges, and can’t even understand them. The priest scarcely tries to hide his perverse relationship with the two boys he keeps by his side; his hypocrisy is officially sanctioned and protected. The scheming patriarch praises human reason, which he says allows us to overcome our animal instincts, yet he uses his own intelligence only to advance his financial condition, not caring whom he tramples in the process. The movie’s overall vision is an inversion of the old Catholic order which says nature is corrupt and reason helps us to overcome it. We are naturally beasts, the movie says, and we’re in a state of neurotic denial about that fact; culture at large is a con game meant to foster the delusion that we are different than the horses copulating in the courtyard.

A fine message, perhaps, but it’s delivered with such hysterical outrageousness that it’s bound to be drowned out. Overall, Borowcyzk’s project is more than a little bit mad. Still, I’m glad someone made this movie—once. Even given advances in CGI—think of what they could do with Andy Serkis portraying the Beast in a motion capture suit, with a digitally enhanced dingus—this is not a film that’s crying out for a remake.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a sleazy blend of fairy tale, Freudian foolishness and Eighth Avenue peep show.”–Guy Flatley, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“…for all its many faults… the film does exert a bizarre fascination and contain moments of genuine eroticism. A distinctly surreal, unsettling viewing experience and certainly unlike anything else to currently be found in cinemas.”–David Wood, BBC (2001 British revival)

“This is the most purely absurd film you will ever see in your life, and yet there is something magnificent in its absurdity: it is weirdly serious, and yet has an enigmatic playfulness.”–Peter Bradford, The Guardian (2001 British revival)

IMDB LINK: The Beast (1975)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

La Bete: The Beast | British Board of Film Classification – Case study of The Beast‘s distributor’s attempts to cut the film to pass British censors

The Cinema Snob – Snarky video review of (the badly dubbed version) of The Beast from Brad Jones, the Cinema Snob (NSFW)

DVD INFO: For obvious reasons, The Beast has had trouble finding a firm place on home video. It’s far too gross for most art house movie fans, and too slow, arty, and gross for those looking for late night titillation. VHS copies were often heavily cut to meet the objections of censors, and poorly dubbed for English-speaking audiences. Cult Epics put out a short run 3-DVD set that quickly went out of print. But Arrow Video came to the rescue, with a DVD/Blu-ray combo pack (buy) that treats The Beast with the reverence due a Criterion Collection title. Besides a new transfer and improved subtitles, the discs include an introduction by film critic Peter Bradshaw, a couple of “making of” featurettes, and a booklet. It also includes the standalone short film version of the dream sequence (“La Véritable Histoire de la bête du Gévaudan”), Borowczyk’s 1975 short “Venus on the Half-Shell” (a portrait of Surrealist painter Bona Tibertelli de Pisis), a trailer, and some of the director’s commercials.

Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes; Doctor Jekyll and His Women; The Bloodbath of Doctor Jekyll

DIRECTED BY: Walerian Borowczyk

FEATURING: Udo Kier, Marina Pierro, Patrick Magee, Gérard Zalcberg

PLOT: Dr. Jekyll throws an engagement party in his mansion, and the guests soon find themselves dying to leave.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Although it has its deliciously decadent moments and is probably the strangest version of the Jekyll and Hyde story, it’s more of a second tier weird movie. It is recommended only for fans of Eurotrashy artsploitation features.

COMMENTS: Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osborne starts off slowly, with seemingly endless dinner conversation and a long (if fetishistic) dance by a teenage ballerina, so that you may feel you’ve been cheated and that maybe this isn’t the perverted Freudian freakshow the ad copy promised. Flash-forwards to snippets from the coming night’s brutal debaucheries keep hope alive. Fortunately, about a third of the way through Patrick Magee starts blindly firing his pistol, virgins are despoiled, a father is tied up while Hyde (and his oversize prosthetic member) violates his daughter before his very eyes, and Jekyll is writhing in a bathtub full of filthy, rusty water (no director outside the porn world requires as much writing of his actors as does Borowczyk). Soon enough, Jekyll’s maiden fiancee, Miss Osborne, catches onto the fact that her hubby is able to transform into the well-hung Hyde several times a night, and finds herself intrigued by the idea.

Jekyll/Osborne continues Borowczyk’s obsession with the notion that humans beings are just a few flimsy bourgeois notions away from bloody rutting animals, although this movie does not exploit that idea as explicitly and audaciously as in his Certified Weird atrocity, The Beast. Despite the explicit nature of the film, the relocation of the action to a single night in a single house, and the crucial infusion of female sexual energy in the person of Jekyll’s fiancee, this adaptation does legitimately capture the sense of Victorian rot and the dualist tensions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s original story, while at the same time being a revolutionary erotic expansion of it. Fanny Osborne was the name of Stevenson’s real-life fiancee (and later wife), who, according to Stevenson, encouraged the author to burn the first draft of “Dr. Jekyll” for being too sensationalist and not allegorical enough. Borowczyk originally marketed the film as being an adaptation of that lost first draft which he claimed to have uncovered, but later admitted the story was made up.

With this film Udo Kier became, to my knowledge, the only actor to portray Dracula, Dr. Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll.

In 2015 Arrow Video released a shockingly lavish DVD/Blu-ray combination version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osborne. This virtually unknown movie gets its own Criterion-style booklet of essays and a host of extras. The DVD architecture even resembles a Criterion edition, right down to the style of the short prose introductions before the special features. The most substantial extra features are Borowczyk’s slyly naughty 1979 short “Happy Toy” and the experimental tribute film “Himorogi.”There is also a commentary track fashioned from interview segments with various people who worked on the film, as well as over an hours worth of interviews and analysis with stars Kier and Pierro and others. Fans of the director will consider this a must-buy.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“….a film of strange and outrageous beauty that seems to emanate from that place where our fears are also desires.”–Chris Preachment, Time Out (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Pier Paolo Pasolini

FEATURING: Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto P. Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti

PLOT: Four Italian fascists kidnap dozens of young boys and girls and imprison them in an isolated villa to sexually torture them in bizarre rituals of sadism.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: There are a lot of words that can be used to describe Salo: disturbing, intense, perverse, depressing, extreme. “Weird” is pretty far down the list. (I did not find any critics who used the word “weird” in discussing Salo). So many of our readers have nominated it for review that I am forced to confess that it may be found lurking somewhere in the outermost penumbra of the weird—but if you want to see a truly weird treatment of the same source material, look at how Luis Buñuel ended L’Age d’Or with a Surrealist reference to the same de Sade novel adapted in Salo.^[1] Casting Jesus Christ as Duc de Blangis is less obscene but far more provocative than anything Pasolini could depict in his literal rendition of the book.

COMMENTS: “Although these crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters depicted are composites… and the events portrayed, have been condensed into one locality for dramatic purposes… We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous crimes will never occur again.”

Salo, The 120 Days of Sodom may seem stranger to someone who comes to the movie with no foreknowledge of the source material, the Marquis De Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom,” than it does to someone who knows the backstory. De Sade, of course, is the 18th century writer whose name inspired the now commonplace words “sadism” and “sadist.” He was an aristocrat devoted to literature, philosophy, and pornography (not in that order), and he produced some genuinely accomplished works. His most powerful books, such as “Philosophy in the Bedroom” and “Justine: the Misfortunes of Virtue,” mix shocking depictions of sexual cruelty with virile intellectual monologues wherein the characters philosophically justify their depravity and smash moralist objections.

“The 120 Days of Sodom” was not one of those books. It was De Sade’s first major work, written while was imprisoned in the Bastille (for a string of crimes including the beating of a prostitute and consensual homosexual sodomy). “Sodom” is an obsessive catalog of perversions, with almost none of the philosophical speeches that would add meaning and value to De Sade’s later work,^[2] arranged according to a mathematical progression: 30 days of orgies in each set of four escalating perversions, moving from “simple” passions (such as urine drinking) to “murderous” ones. The novel was probably intended for De Sade’s own sexual gratification. The result is the Marquis’s least philosophical and most purely pornographic work.

Prior to Salo, Pasolini had taken advantage of the new sexual freedom of the 1970s to produce erotic versions of three famously naughty works of world literature: The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1974). While this trilogy was merely ribald fun, life-affirmingly erotic, Salo would be something else entirely, a 180 degree pivot into nihilism. Obviously, the unique features of “120 Days of Sodom” present a problem for the would-be adapter, even beyond the hurdle of getting it past the censors. De Sade was an intellectually brilliant psychopath who literally believed that the pain of a torture victim is, though psychological alchemy, transformed into the pleasure of the tormentor—and who further believed that the only reason everyone doesn’t acknowledge this obvious truth is because a conspiracy of the weak, using Christianity as their propaganda tool, have conspired to rob the strong of their rightful position as tyrants. What’s terrifying about De Sade is that his intelligence and fierce commitment to this thesis make you wonder, for even the slightest moment, if he might be right. What’s valuable in De Sade is how you decide to disagree with him. But while you can engage in an internal dialogue with him while reading one of his texts, you can’t do that when his philosophy is only executed (pun intended) on screen.^[3] Salo shows us all of De Sade’s repulsiveness, but almost none of his seductiveness, and this makes it a far less dangerous and subversive movie than it aspires to be.

Pasolini’s only real alteration of the material, most of which is taken directly from the book, is to set it in Fascist Italy (“Salo” was the name of a town hosting the informal seat of government for Benito Mussolini during the late Fascist period in World War II). Pasolini was a Marxist and a sworn enemy of the Fascists; however, by the time Salo premiered, the political movement had already been discredited for 25 years. The metaphor here hardly seems to add weight or significance to the movie; the literal depiction of forced coprophagia overwhelms even such an unsubtle analogy. Pasolini’s deeper criticisms of the capitalist system aren’t apparent under the oppressive weight of his oversimplistic equivalence of Fascists and sadists (those connections were left for academics to make, but they rely on evidence outside the boundaries of the movie itself). Pasolini’s decision to cast Fascists as De Sade’s revelers was criticized even on the political left. Literary critic Roland Barthes, who was thanked and whose work on Sade was cited in Salo‘s credits, would later write that “Fascism is too serious and too insidious a danger to be treated by simple analogy, the fascist masters coming ‘simply’ to take the place of the libertines” (although he remained a fan of the film overall because it is “bothersome” and “irredeemable”).

But Pasolini’s invocation of fascism does make one wonder if the director was influenced by another movie about Fascists sexually abusing innocent victims: Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S., which jump-started a Nazisploitation cycle in 1974, beating Salo to the screen by a year. The quotation that starts this article comes not from Salo, but from the prelude to Ilsa. One key difference between Ilsa and Salo‘s revelers is that, while the She-Wolf clearly enjoys her work and even indulges in a little recreational sex torture on the side, her perversions are explicitly authorized by the state, and her medical experiments are intended to further the cause of National Socialism. Although fictional, Ilsa does have an actual historical basis—the character is based on real-life war criminal Ilse Koch, “the Witch of Buchenwald.” A critic like Barthes might therefore have defended Ilsa as a more honest attack on Fascism, since it addresses the movement as a real, specific historical phenomenon and sources actual atrocities.

Speaking of atrocities, Ilsa’s résumé would have won the approval of Salo‘s council of libertines: she castrates lovers who fail to satisfy her, injects prisoners with syphilis, orders others to be flogged by topless guards, breeds maggots in prisoners’ wounds, and does some sick stuff, too. In one scene that would have fit perfectly into Salo, Gestapo soldiers feast at a table with a centerpiece composed of a nude woman with a noose around her neck who stands on top of a melting block of ice. After dinner is finished and the corpse has been put away, the Nazi commandant lies on the floor and asks Ilsa to relieve herself on him.

Ilsa is almost universally reviled (when not ignored) by critics, while Salo is generally praised as a masterpiece; but the impulse behind them appears to be largely the same. Only the superior technical aspects—sets, acting, camerawork—set Salo apart. Salo’s major virtue is its courage, its willingness to “go all the way”; but don’t exploitation films always aspire to the same heights (er, lows)? The major distinction critics make between the two films is to presume that Pasolini made his movie with serious artistic intent, while Ilsa‘s producers only hoped to make a quick buck off of salacious material. But it’s far from clear that Salo achieves whatever broader point Pasolini intends (Fascism is bad? Sadism is bad?) Judging from the “customers who bought this also bought” algorithm on Amazon, modern purchasers of Salo are not, by and large, arthouse patrons who pair their purchase with his thoughtful Teorema, but torture porn fans seeking an extreme accompaniment to nauseating fare like Cannibal Holocaust. Now that I’ve become desensitized to shock films, I don’t hate Salo as much as I did when I first saw it. But I do think that it ranks as world cinema’s most overrated masterpiece.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This film is essential to have seen but impossible to watch: a viewer may find life itself defiled beyond redemption by the simple fact that such things can be shown or even imagined.”–Richard Brody, The New Yorker

(Salo was nominated for review by many readers, the first of whom was future contributor Caleb Moss, who argued that it “contains bizarre, deviant acts of sexuality, strange marriages involving transvestism, a plot structure similar to the Circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, and strange gatherings where aging hookers tell tales of sexual perversion, all which seems to me a good candidate for the list!” Others disagreed, however, with “Michiel” echoing my own opinion: “it was sickening and the violence was grotesque, yes, but weird? I don’t get that.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here).

1. Henri Xhonneux and Roland Topor also make far stranger references to the book in their twisted De Sade biopic, Marquis.
2. “The 120 Days of Sodom”  was unfinished and the ending only sketched, so it is conceivable De Sade would eventually have inserted philosophical reflections later.
3. In his defense, Pasolini does take a couple of speeches from De Sade’s later works, especially “Philosophy in the Bedroom,” and insert them into the narrative here, but not enough to rescue the movie from its wallows in the pornographic end of the De Sade pool.