AKA Hot Number

“I said, anybody who makes dirty phone calls as a life’s project is a pretty weird person. So where am I going to get the kind of material that he would be speaking? He wouldn’t be speaking anything we know. He would be talking the kind of stuff that you see on men’s room walls. “–The Telephone Book lead animator Len Glasser on his inspiration for the final sequence

DIRECTED BY: Nelson Lyon

FEATURING: Sarah Kennedy, Norman Rose

PLOT: Oversexed Alice receives an obscene phone call and falls in love with the mellifluous caller, who reveals his name to be “John Smith” of Manhattan. She searches the telephone book to find him, encountering stag film producers, perverts and lesbian seductresses in her quest. When she finally tracks him down, they share the ultimate obscene phone call, whose orgasmic power is depicted symbolically as a crude, sexually explicit surrealist cartoon.

BACKGROUND:

• Andy Warhol “superstars” Ultra Violet and Ondine appear in small roles in the film. An “intermission” scene showing Warhol himself quietly eating popcorn was cut, and the footage lost. (Still photos of the scene do exist).
• Writer/director Nelson Lyon went on to write for “Saturday Night Live” in its earliest years, but his career ended after he was involved in an infamous speedball binge that ended with John Belushi’s fatal overdose.
• The film was a complete flop on release and quickly disappeared from circulation, preserved in rare bootlegs and only resurfacing as a curiosity in the new millennium.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In the animated sequence visually expressing the ineffable ecstasy aroused by John Smith’s erotic patter, the bottom half of a gargantuan woman—with rivets in her thighs, suggesting she’s an automaton—squats on a skyscraper and pleasures herself, while a man whose entire head is a tongue watches her with drooling interest. Sights like that have a tendency to stick in the mind.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: “Superstar” pontificating over a nude; rotating pig-masked man; tongue-headed cartoon libertine

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: 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.

Original trailer for The Telephone Book

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 that flopped badly on release, but it could work for the right audience; there’s enough flesh and vulgar humor for the heavy-breathing crowd, and just enough wit and artistry to give the adventurous art house patron an excuse to keep watching. More than anything, however, The Telephone Book is a pre-porno-chic relic of the dawn of the sexual revolution: an in-your-face, jocular swinger’s rebellion, but already with a hint of foreboding melancholy about the pursuit of selfish sexual pleasure as America’s unofficial new religion.

Young Alice lives alone in a room wallpapered with porn and a giant breast hanging from her ceiling. 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 find 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. Fortunately, for this film’s offbeat comic tone, she’s fairly perfect.

In the final reels, the emphasis shifts from Alice to loquacious Lothario John Smith, 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. Sparked by Alice’s unusually-phrased question, asked as Smith bathes her—“how did you come into being?”—he explains the origin of his X-rated calling career. As it turns out, he used to be quite the establishment square; ex-military, even, though given to kissing the enlisted men under his charge (“not like a fag—like the way a man would kiss another man”). His epiphany comes when he’s asked to become an astronaut, and, while ecstatically floating in the weightless chamber, he realizes that what he really wants in life is… “a tit.” As he tells his story, his porcine face spins in a black void, fetishistically juxtaposed beside various disembodied body parts supplied by Ms. Kennedy. His long monologue is totally absurd, and juxtaposed with portentous, arty camerawork implying existential depth. It sends the viewer into a confused vortex more disorienting than Smith’s own NASA-induced hedonistic vertigo.

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. Len Glasser’s animations, inspired by men’s room graffiti and rendered in a style reminiscent of both Robert Crumb’s underground comix and Saturday morning cartoons, are explicit, though abstract. They were enough to earn the film an “X” rating. Here, high and low art collide, in a sublime eroticism conveyed through the crudest anatomical drawings, transformed by a childishly surreal imagination that swaps and reconfigures body parts at will. Tongues grow out of starched shirts, a pyramid of tiny men sport penises taller than they are, and a four-legged, three-vaginaed, seven-boobed creature dodges a pecker with teeth like a snapping turtle. The entire segment is only five minutes long, interspersed with color reaction shots of John and a climaxing Alice, but the effect is unforgettable. Some things have to be seen to be believed.

Novelty is 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. It could only have come out of a period of profound sexual confusion. On the surface the movie appears to celebrate the new sexual permissiveness, but Lyon supplies the affair with an air of humorous cynicism. At the dawn of the 1970s, it seems everyone in New York is obsessed with sex, but very few people are actually getting together; for the most part, they’d rather talk about it than do it. Everyone is imprisoned by their own fetishes. A housewife confesses that, in the afternoon, she stuffs herself with a banana and calls up strangers on the phone before she makes dinner for hubby. Sex is a monologue. It’s no wonder Alice is (almost) doomed to be perpetually unsatisfied; it’s not the world’s greatest lover that she’s after, but a lover, period—someone who will actually touch her. As flighty as The Telephone Book is through most of its leering comic interludes, there is a serious undercurrent of alienation that “Midnight Only”‘s Jeff Kuykendall sees as conveying “an authentic loneliness.” Consider a strange scene from the very opening: Alice is alone in her apartment, lounging around in a one-piece bathing suit. Her walls are lined with pornographic wallpaper, her floor covered in smut mags, and her bedspread is an American flag. In a long shot, she is seen curled up in the corner on the phone. She’s calling the “dial-a-prayer” hotline. “Hasten with thy protection to those who are sorely tempted. Make them strong to resist and to conquer,” drones the recorded voice at the other end of the line. Patriotism, sex, religion, sin, loneliness—that’s a lot of conflicted priorities stuffed into a single frame. And a lot of bizarrely significant themes to weave into an underground sex comedy that looks for laughs from the sight of a porn star wearing Groucho glasses and mustache servicing a gum-chewing woman while proclaiming “it’s a living.” 1971 was a weird time.

Terri McSorley  adds: “I have spent the last two years exploring the little known film titles distributed through Vinegar Syndrome. The Telephone Book has, bar none, been my favorite of the lot. Alice receives a most satisfying dirty phone call and seeks to find the man behind it. He divulges his name is John Smith and dares her to find him in the telephone book. Alice meets all manner of interesting folks on her journey which ends with the mother of all orgasms complete with animated sequence! The Telephone Book is a great looking film and the aforementioned animated sequences are top notch. Sarah Kennedy, who plays Alice, is very watchable; she is quirky, cute and charismatic. Odd at every turn, The Telephone Book made me laugh regularly and heartily. Thoroughly entertaining and one-of-a-kind.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Brilliant. Hilarious. Daring. Bizarre.”–The Los Angeles Times (contemporaneous)

“…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)

“About as arousing as a tax audit and funny as jury duty, the picture is a surreal journey into random confessions and pig-masked monologuing, imagining itself to be a wonderland of carnal delights and cutting satire, wafting over its audience like a wave of marijuana smoke… With its outlandishness napping and its sense of humor missing, this X-rated relic is best served to fans of obscure exploitation cinema, those brave souls able to somehow appreciate the feature’s idiosyncrasies and its Vietnam-era taboo-smashing tastes.”–Brian Orndorf, Blu-ray.com [Blu-ray]

IMDB LINK: The Telephone Book (1971)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Telephone Book [Blu-ray/DVD combo] – Vinegar Syndrome’s The Telephone Book page has stills, two NSFW re-release trailers made specifically for this release, and critical quotes

STUDIO LAMBL HOMBURGER|Project|THE TELEPHONE BOOK – A look at the surprisingly elaborate German special edition release of The Telephone Book

CU: The Telephone Book Q&A Part 1 – Part one of a five-part Q&A session from 2010 with director Nelson Lyon, producer Merv Bloch and animator Len Glasser

Nelson Lyon dies at 73; director of sex comedy ‘The Telephone Book’ – The L.A. Times‘ obituary of Lyon considers The Telephone Book as his great legacy

LIST CANDIDATE: THE TELEPHONE BOOK (1971) – This site’s first take on The Telephone Book

DVD INFO: Almost lost to the ages, German art studio Lambl Homburger rescued The Telephone Book from obscurity in 2009. A short tour followed, succeeded by a 2013 DVD/Blu-ray combo release (buy) by porno/exploitation distributor Vinegar Syndrome. The print, mainly in glorious black and white, looks beautiful for such an old and badly neglected movie. It includes commentary from producer Merv Bloch, who although perhaps delving too much into his own career as a film marketer (including his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey), nevertheless provides almost everything we know about the film today in a snappy ninety minutes. Extra features include the original trailer, reissue trailer, radio spots, and an extensive still gallery that includes shots of the lost scene with Andy Warhol.

Tenemos la Carne

DIRECTED BY: Emiliano Rocha Minter

FEATURING: Noé Hernández, María Evoli, Diego Gamaliel

PLOT: A teenage brother and sister find their way to the lair of a hermit, who seduces them into acting out increasingly depraved, increasingly hallucinatory scenarios.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The overall project may seem to lack much purpose, but it’s intense and uncompromising—and weird—enough to merit a look.

COMMENTS: The new year is only a few weeks old, and already we have a contender for Weirdest Movie of 2017. A demonic hermit uses two disciples—one reluctant, one willing—to transform his habitat into a womblike space where he enacts bizarre, perverse fantasies eventually incorporating sadism, rape, orgies, murder, cannibalism, and more. As the ringmaster in this cavalcade of perversions, Noé Hernández is believably crazy. He looks like he stinks, and rants like a guy you’d cross the street to avoid meeting. He projects a very specific form of charisma: like a Mexican Manson, he has a gravity capable of capturing those irretrievably lost to themselves in his orbit. “People shy from certain thoughts. Their lives are a continuous distraction from their own perversion,” the wild-eyed messiah preaches to an improbably intrigued teenage girl, while flapping his arms like a bird in the void. “Solitude drags you, forces you to come face to face with your darkest fantasies. And when nothing happens, you stop being afraid of your most grotesque thoughts.”

With siblings and a perverted Svengali, the story goes exactly where you think it will; but, incest is only the beginning. Once they indulge that taboo, all the walls come crashing down—and the plot immediately hops onto whatever crazy train it can catch, going to places you can’t possibly predict. In fact, after the strangely beautiful incest montage, shot in psychedelic thermal imaging and scored to a romantic Spanish ballad, there can hardly be said to be a plot at all, only a series of deranged, escalating provocations. (One presumes that in Catholic Mexico, the movie’s blasphemous parody of Christ—both the resurrection and the Eucharist—is the most shocking element). On a literal level, you might try to explain it all as the result of an all-purpose drug the hermit keeps in an eyedropper, which is capable of producing intoxication, serving as an antidote to his own homebrewed poisons, and possibly preserving the brains of those he’s lobotomized. More likely, the hermit simply personifies  perverse desire, and the movie is a representation of the nightmare of a narcissistic world of pure desire without taboos or boundaries. The tumbling of moral walls allows the irrational to flood in.

As shock cinema goes, Flesh displays far more artistry than most. The lighting is extraordinary—purple-lit faces in front of glowing yellow portals that serve to block, rather than lead to, the opaque outside world. These touches elevate the minimalist set into a true dream space. The music is also well-deployed, with horror-standard rumblings alternating with ironically beautiful ballads and a Bach concerto. Flesh shows the imagination of Jodorowsky, mixed with the despairing nihilism of von Trier, in a scenario reminiscent of Salo.

As for misgivings: I wonder if Flesh has enough substance to compensate us for its unpleasantness. Late in the film, it takes a stab at social relevance, with a subversive recital of the Mexican national anthem and a paradigm-shifting final scene. But these digressions come off as afterthoughts to a movie whose main interest is to indulge its own most grotesque thoughts. And there, I wonder if the film doesn’t pull its own perverse punch. A Clockwork Orange‘s Alex was deeply chilling because he made you feel the appeal and charm of evil; the hermit here does not. He’s too clearly insane, too cartoonish in his fleshy villainy. The ominous music and horror movie atmosphere also instruct you to be repulsed rather than aroused. Despite the madman’s advice, this movie does want you to be afraid of its most grotesque thoughts. But fans of extremity cinema will—pardon the pun—eat it up.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“We Are The Flesh is a bizarrely arresting treat from an exciting new talent. It’s also just about the strangest film you’ll see this year.”–Michael Coldwell, Starburst (contemporaneous)

“…after I saw Twin Peaks—Fire Walk With Me at Cannes, David Lynch has disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different. And you know, I loved him. I loved him.”–Quentin Tarantino

DIRECTED BY: David Lynch

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

PLOT: The first thirty minutes cover the FBI investigation of the murder of Teresa Banks (an event referred to in the first season of “Twin Peaks”). The action then moves to the town of Twin Peaks, focusing on high school senior Laura Palmer, the beautiful homecoming queen who has a secret life as a cocaine addict and upscale prostitute. As her father begins acting strange and tensions inside her home grow, Laura goes to a “party” at a cabin in the woods, where tragedy strikes.

BACKGROUND:

• “Twin Peaks” is a massive franchise, covering two original televised seasons, this feature film, a revival series broadcast twenty-five years after cancellation, and even two novels by co-writer Mark Frost and a book version of “The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer” (credited to David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer). Our coverage is similarly scattered: read about the pilot here, the original series here, and the 2017 series here.
• Lynch had originally planned for Laura Palmer’s murder to never be solved, so the television network’s decision to force the writers to reveal the killer or face cancellation in the second season was an outside force that changed the direction of the overall story.
• Some of the actors in the TV series’ large cast either refused or were unable to reprise their roles for the feature film, the most significant of whom was Lara Flynn Boyle (who played Laura’s best friend Donna). Boyle was replaced by Moira Kelly. Series co-creator Mark Frost also disagreed on the direction Lynch was taking the “Twin Peaks” story, and declined to participate in the movie.
• Over 90 minutes of additional footage was shot, including appearances by characters from the series who didn’t make it into the final product.
• Lynch originally hoped to make two sequels which would pick up where the television series ended, but Fire Walk With Me‘s disappointing box office ended those plans.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The angel in the Red Room (although the curtains suddenly turn purple for this scene). It’s one of those tender moments Lynch likes to put in to remind his viewers that, no matter how much evil and perversion he throws onto the screen, he still unironically believes in the ultimate power of goodness, love, and salvation.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: The blue rose; Southern Bowie on security cam; garmonbozia

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: “Twin Peaks” is an uneven franchise, ranging over a landscape that covers everything from soap opera to surrealism and quirky comedy to rustic perversion, and so it may be appropriate that Fire Walk With Me is an uneven movie. The feature film continuation of the story is packed with dream sequences, unexpected cameos, mystical characters, and bizarre symbolism (an Arm eating creamed corn?). It was a financial and critical flop whose unremittingly dark and obscuritan tone turned off both casual series fans and mainstream critics, but for better or worse, David Lynch defiantly tears his own way through the universe he dearly loves.

Original trailer for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

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: 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 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 tale at the film’s core and beautiful imagery scattered throughout, to me 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. Much of this confusion results from editing; Lynch originally shot about three-and-a-half hours of film and cut it down to two hours. Had the other footage, which was often lighter in tone, been spread throughout the film, the experience would have been much different—more like watching three or four television episodes strung together (but now with an “R” rating).

The overlong and unwanted 30 minute prologue, with two new FBI agents (Chris Isaak and Keifer Sutherland) 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). This prologue appears in Fire Walk With Me as much (if not more) from outside influences as from organic storytelling: MacLachlan was reluctant to reprise his role and could only be convinced to show up for five days. Isaak’s character was a replacement for Agent Cooper. David Bowie‘s part was included to introduce a plotline for a sequel that never got made. Cast members like Sherilyn Fenn, Lara Flynn Boyle and Richard Beymer either refused to do the film, or couldn’t fit it into their schedules. And so forth—Lynch was left working at a puzzle with incomplete pieces, fitting them together with whatever ingenuity he could manage. Still, the prologue feels like a mistake and an unnecessary intrusion in the story; it could have easily been cut altogether (even though that would have meant no Agent Cooper), or at least cut down to ten minutes or so. The idea of making the TV series’ MacGuffin (Laura Palmer’s murder) into the central attraction of the feature film was a brilliant one, and a firmer dedication to that premise would have resulted in a purer film.

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 (and to himself), 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 eight episodes. 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 television series. Lynch goes full bore for his hallucinations, especially a senseless bit with Bowie (trying out a Texas accent!) joining a cast of dwarfs, kids in plaster masks and other Black 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 grants the abused girl a coda of surrealistic grace. All in all, as a wrap up to the “Twin Peaks” phenomenon, Fire Walk With Me is frequently brilliant and sometimes frustrating, just like the series that birthed it. Much is explained, and much is 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. To me, Lynch obscured is much more interesting than Lynch decoded. I don’t want to know what’s behind those red curtains, because that revelation is sure to be less majestic than the infinite possibilities of the unsaid. Fortunately, Lynch never opens one door without closing another.

Fire Walk With Me is nowhere near as bad as contemporary critics thought, but nor is it the “masterpiece” (!) some revisionists have claimed. A lot of the film’s messiness comes from Lynch’s method of working: he films things that interest him, and hopes they will come together later. (See also Mulholland Drive, another movie birthed from a TV script in which Lynch had no idea where the story was going to end up when he started filming). The central villain BOB only enters the story when Lynch accidentally catches an image of crewmember Frank Silva reflected in a mirror while shooting a mundane scene in Laura’s bedroom, decides it was a happy accident, and writes a character for him. ABC network forces him to “solve” Laura Palmer’s murder against his will, which leads to Leland Palmer being named the sacrificial lamb-slayer, which creates this particular incest-themed back story explored in Fire Walk With Me. Over the years the world of “Twin Peaks” has evolved from outside influences—including the recent deaths of cast members—which have required things to be rewritten on the fly. The town lives its own life, only guided by Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost. And, for better or worse, this is the universe Lynch loves, the only project that could coax him out of an eight year retirement after completing 2006’s INLAND EMPIRE. So, with all its flaws, we’ll let Fire Walk With Me stand in for the entire “Twin Peaks” project. Consider it the representative of all the secrets of Peaks: the coffee and the cherry pie, the fish in the percolator, Audrey Horne trance dancing to jukebox jazz, the Man from Another Place talking backwards, the one-armed man, the secret diary, the pine weasel, the Black Lodge and its doppelgangers, the creamed corn of pain and sorrow, Dougie Jones, the jokes and the horrors, all the head-scratching mistakes and the inimitable triumphs. Twin Peaks: a (not so) nice place to raise your kids up. There’s nowhere quite like it.

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)

“While Lynch ladles on the random weirdness around the edges, it is Lee who keeps the film centered, with a harrowing but poignantly sympathetic portrait of a woman’s descent into horror and madness.”–TV Guide

“Memorable moments and ludicrous ones collide in this psychic autopsy, a weirdly fundamentalist cogitation on the intersection of Heaven, Hell and Washington state. Fans of the dark comedy will find little to laugh about — unless it is Lynch’s pretentiousness — in this horrific look at Laura’s last seven days.”–Rita Kemper, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

David Lynch – Fire Walk With Me – you can find a wealth of links, a freakishly large collection of stills, the script, the original press kit, and archived articles and interviews at the Fire Walk With Me page at the biggest David Lynch fansite

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me | Twin Peaks Wiki – For a deep dive into minutiae, check out the movie’s page on the wiki fansite

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) – The Criterion Collection page hosts a clip and an excerpt from a recent Sheryl Lee interview

Sheryl Lee on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and the life of Laura Palmer – Entertainment Weekly interview, occasioned by the TV show’s revival but centering on Fire Walk with Me

Was Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Really Booed At Cannes? – Contemporaneous reports said it was

Kermode Uncut: Film Club – Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me – Mark Kermode is sometimes credited with sparking a critical reappraisal of Fire Walk With Me with this video review

Anatomy of a Fascinating Disaster: Fire Walk With Me – Article for “Grantland” from self-confessed fanboy Alex Pappademas, full of obscure trivia and personal reflections

“Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces” Makes You See “Fire Walk With Me” In A Different Way – A fairly complete discussion of the unused footage from the film, released separately as The Missing Pieces

9 Ways ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’ Connects to the Series Revival – Noel Murray explains the connections between this movie and the 2017 series

LIST CANDIDATE: TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992) – Our original entry on the film

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

“Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” – Book length study by Maura McHugh, published in 2017

HOME VIDEO INFO: You basically have two options, depending on whether you just want Fire Walk With Me or you’d rather package the prequel together with the original series. We’ll start with the disc used to compose this review, the 2017 Criterion Collection edition. Remastered and director-approved (as are most Criterion releases), it comes in a two-disc DVD set (buy) or a single Blu-ray (buy). The second DVD is devoted to special features: most notably, The Missing Pieces, a feature-length assemblage of deleted and alternate scenes, including many involving returning cast members (e.g. Jack Nance and Joan Chen) which were (correctly) deemed irrelevant to the main plot. There’s also a shorter version of a conversation between Lynch, Lee, Wise and Zabriske that had previously appeared on “The Entire Mystery” (see below) and new interviews with Lee and composer Angelo Badalamenti.

Criterion released their disc not long after 2014’s nine Blu-ray set “The Entire Mystery” (buy), which gathered the original series together with Fire Walk With Me and The Missing Pieces. There are far too many extras in this massive set to list individually; most of them are related to the series rather than being specific to Fire Walk With Me. It is the ultimate edition for Peaks freaks (assuming you have a Blu-ray player).

Fire Walk With Me is also available to rent or purchase on demand.

Môjû; AKA Warehouse

DIRECTED BY: Yasuzô Masumura

FEATURING: Eiji Funakoshi, Mako Midori, Noriko Sengoku

PLOT: A blind sculptor kidnaps a model and imprisons her in his studio.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Blind Beast scores two points in its weird ledger: one for the set design (which is almost always described as Daliesque), and another for its irrationally sadomasochistic third act. At its core, however, it’s an odd and engaging “pinku” (as Japanese softcore erotic films of the 1960s were dubbed) that’s reminiscent of 1965’s The Collector (although the scenario was adapted loosely from a Edogawa Rampo story). The sight of the sightless sculptor’s bizarro studio would have gotten Blind Beast shortlisted had we reviewed it earlier, but given the limited available slots, we see Beast as close, but not quite worthy of being named one of the 366 weirdest movies of all time.

COMMENTS: Blind Beast quickly gets in gear after the abduction, which is handled in an absurdly economical ten minutes. The blind antihero selects his model victim by feeling up a sculpture of her, then steals into her apartment posing as a masseur. With the help of his trusty sighted assistant, who also happens to be his mother, he soon has beautiful young Aki imprisoned inside his remote warehouse studio, and this is where the “fun” begins. The blind sculptor’s studio utilizes a fetishized geometry, with high-relief assemblies of (female) body parts lining each of the eight walls, enclosing two giant, pliant sculptures of prone nude women (one on her stomach, one on her back). The blind, stumbling hunter and his victim chase each through this corporeal funhouse; he clutches a giant nipple as he bargains for her compliance. Later, they will make love—of their strange sort—while rolling about on the humungous feminine torsos. You probably have never seen that before.

The middle part of the film involves Aki’s machinations as she tries to escape, until a near-miss attempt permanently costs her her freedom and sets the bizarre third act into motion. These scenes work well as a standard woman-in-peril thriller. When she fails to sneak past the blind man fail thanks to the interference of his maternal assistant, Aki switches to a psychological ploy. She pretends to fall in love with her captor and plays son and mother against each other. Of course, were she to escape so easily, the movie would end prematurely; and the movie has a better—or worse—fate in store for Aki.

The blind man’s studio is as sick a materialization of a male libido as could be imagined. His love/hate relationship with his mother suggests an Oedipal complex. Still, the psychology here is only deep by the standards of pink movies. The sadomasochistic finale, a sudden and wrenching departure from first two-thirds of the movie, is foreshadowed from the film’s earliest moments, but the movie provides no real insights into the pathology. Given the absurd heights of agonizing ecstasy its characters travel to, how could it?  Their obsessions are perverse, and the tale depicts them poetically without trying to explain them. Blind Beast is surprisingly coy with its nudity, most of which is only seen in still photographs from the opening art exhibition. Mako Midori’s breasts are skillfully hidden throughout the film, and a corner of a nipple is a rare and tantalizing sight. This teasing modesty gives the erotic visuals even more impact, while serving the theme of frustrated voyeurism. Blind Beast would be nearly impossible to distribute today, through licit channels, due to its outdated attitude to consent. Seduction is important to the plot, but Aki willingly (and eagerly) surrenders only after an hour of brutal coercion. And yet, Blind Beast has a sort of innocence about it, largely due to the unreal nature of its psychodrama: a fantasy of total abandon to physical sensation far beyond any rational limits, played out in a subterranean lair of mountainous breasts, dismembered legs, and eyeballs leering from the walls. It’s a space we would never want to visit, but one we can’t look away from.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Bizarre and claustrophobic…  a masterpiece of mod 1960s art design… Completely freaky and utterly engrossing.”–TV Guide

(This movie was nominated for review by “MystMoonstruck” and seconded by “Dreamer.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel

FEATURING: Issei Sagawa, Jun Sagawa

PLOT: Confessed cannibal Issei Sagawa monologues to the camera, his face often out of focus, and talks to his caretaker brother, who is revealed to be almost as deranged.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Caniba would make a list of the most disturbing movies ever made—easily. It’s subject is a weirdo par excellence—in fact, he may be the world’s strangest living monster—and the film takes an experimental, offbeat approach to depicting him. Yet everything shown here is tragically real, and the effect goes beyond “weird” into “despairing.”

COMMENTS: Issei Sagawa, an intelligent but shy Japanese man studying French in Paris, killed and ate a female classmate in 1981. He spent five years in a mental institution in France and then was deported to Japan where, due to quirks of the judicial system, he was freed. Since then he has lived a marginalized existence, making a meager living off his infamy. He is now weakened by a stroke and holed up in a dingy apartment, cared for by his brother.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, Harvard-based anthropologist filmmakers, chose to follow up their arthouse hit Leviathan (an uncontroversial documentary about commercial fishermen in the North Atlantic) with this perverted provocation about Sagawa. Most of the movie is out-of-focus shots of the ailing cannibal, closeups of his twisted, trembling hands or his blank face as he delivers halting, unhinged monologues (“I know I’m crazy,” he confesses). When he talks at all, he speaks as if he’s in a trance, gathering the strength to push out each phrase, about five or six words per minute, with long pauses in between. We also meet his caretaker brother Jun, who eventually reveals some shocking fetishes of his own—leading one to wonder whether there is a genetic curse on the Sagawa clan, or whether Jun was driven mad by knowledge of his brother’s crimes. Old black-and-white home movies of the two show what look like happy, normal children.  Back in the present, we have a very odd pixilated porn sequence starring Sagawa, inserted without any context, followed by a tour through the manga he drew celebrating his crime. Jun is both fascinated and disturbed by the graphic drawings of the girl’s corpse and his brother’s erection when faced with it. “I can’t stomach this anymore,” he says, but continues turning the pages. Issei, distant as always, seems embarrassed, if anything, reluctant to answer the questions his brother poses. For the final scene, they bring in a prostitute (or groupie?) dressed as a sexy nurse to read the cannibal a bedtime story about zombies, then take the invalid demon out for a wheelchair stroll around the neighborhood. The end.

I am glad someone documented these two twisted specimens of humanity with minimal editorializing, but the result is no fun whatsoever, and offers no insight to their pathologies, making it a very difficult watch on multiple levels. It’s of interest to sick thrill seekers and serious students of abnormal psychology. You should know this movie exists. God help you if you watch it. There is no guarantee it will get a commercial release. The film seems destined to remain forever underground, where it probably belongs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A weirdo documentary…  strange and unpleasant…”–Dennis Schwartz, Ozus’ World Movie Reviews

“There was no better director to learn from. He would always take the adventurous path even at the expense of coherence.”–Derek Jarman on Ken Russell

DIRECTED BY: Ken Russell

FEATURING: Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave, Gemma Jones, Dudley Sutton, Michael Gothard, Murray Melvin

PLOT: Father Urbain Grandier is the charismatic spiritual and political leader of the independent city of Loudun; Cardinal Richelieu wants him replaced because he refuses to allow the city’s walls to be torn down. Sister Jeanne, Mother Superior of the town’s convent, is tormented by sexual dreams about Grandier. When Sister Jeanne confesses her fantasies to a priest, Richelieu’s men hatch a plot to frame Grandier as a warlock, and the entire convent is whipped into mass hysteria, becoming convinced they are possessed by devils.

BACKGROUND:

• Father Grandier and Sister Jeanne, among many other characters in the film, were real people. Grandier was burnt at the stake in 1634 on accusations of practicing witchcraft.
• The Devils was based on John Whiting’s play “The Devils of Loudun,” which itself was based on Aldous Huxley’s novel of the same title.
• Ken Russell’s original theatrical cut ran 117 minutes, after the British censors removed an infamous 4-minute sequence known as “the rape of Christ.” The U.S. distributor cut an additional three to six minutes of sex and blasphemy out so that the film could be released with an “R” rating in the States, and that release became the standard version and the only one released on VHS. The longer director’s cut was not seen until 2004, thanks to a restoration effort led by Alex Cox. Russell’s director’s cut has never been issued on home video; the X-rated theatrical cut is the most complete version currently available. Portions of the “rape of Christ” scene are preserved in a BBC documentary called “Hell on Earth” (included on the BFI DVD).
• A young Derek Jarman designed the sets. This was his first feature credit.
• The Devils is included in Steven Schneider’s “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.”
• The contemporary arguments over the film became so heated that Russell himself attacked critic Alexander Walker on live television, hitting him on the head with a copy of his negative review.
• Warner Brothers has steadfastly refused to release the movie on DVD, but they did eventually sublicense it to the British Film Institute for overseas release.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Even with the “rape of Christ” scene excised, what sticks out in The Devils are the scenes of possessed nuns, some with shaved heads, whipping off their habits and cavorting in the nude, writhing, self-flagellating, jerking off votive candles, and waggling their tongues in an obscene performance. For a single, and singular, image that encapsulates the themes and shock level of The Devils, however, try the vision of Vanessa Redgrave seductively licking at the wound in Oliver Reed’s side when she imagines him as Christ descended from the cross to ravage her.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Crocodile parry; Christ licking; John Lennon, exorcist

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Nobody, but nobody, shoots a nun orgy like Ken Russell. Aside from a dream sequence or two, The Devils is a historically accurate account of a real-life medieval witch hunt—but Russell emphasizes only the oddest and most perverse details, so that the movie itself becomes as hysterical and overwrought as the frenzy it condemns. Truth, in this case, is at least as strange as fiction.

Original U.S. release trailer for The Devils

COMMENTS: Viewed from a great distance, The Devils is a classical story, one that (without the explicit blasphemy) might have constituted a Shakespearean tragedy. Urbain Grandier begins as a flawed man, vain, and with a powerful weakness for women (he confesses at trial that he’s “the world’s greatest sinner”). These flaws earn him enemies, and give them a way to entrap him. Yet the randy priest also has powerfully sympathetic qualities: he is an uncompromising orator and leader, concerned with the good of his town, a man of conscience willing to stand up to corrupt authorities at the risk of his own life. As the film progresses and the threats increase, he answers the call and grows more and more virtuous, until by the end he is a true Christ figure, persecuted by Pharisees who re-enact a cruel mockery of the Passion on him for purely political ends. He endures the Inquisition’s tortures, refusing to falsely confess to being an incubus and trusting God will reward him for his suffering. It is a universal story of redemption, persecution, sacrifice, and courage, with truly despicable villains aided by sadly tragic dupes.

On his DVD commentary Russell asserts that “you can’t invent the most fantastic things, they actually happened.” So, following Aldous Huxley’s historical novel about the Loudun hysteria, he focuses on the strangest, most distant archaic details of the account to create a heightened nightmare, a medieval landscape inhabited by grotesques. Most notable is the twisted Sister Jeanne, a hunchbacked, repressed spinster trapped in a convent (there are literally bars on the window to keep men out). Georgina Hale, as one of Grandier’s hopelessly adoring conquests, wears white pancake makeup and green lipstick; the effect is theatrically absurd, but Russell assures us this was a fashion at the time and that he picked up the detail from Huxley. In the movie’s background, the plague is ravaging Loudun, and at times we see piles of corpses which the main characters barely acknowledge. Oddly, some of the most outrageous, hardest-to-believe incidents may be the most factual: Russell based his orgies on Huxley’s accounts. Exorcists of the day really did use forced enemas as a means of cleansing evil spirits. (Huxley referred to Jeanne’s exorcism as the equivalent of a “rape in a public lavatory.”)

Not all of Russell’s ornamentation is so accurate. He begins the film with a shot of high decadence as Louis XIII prances around on a gilded stage in a clamshell bikini, having cast himself as Venus in a performance for Cardinal Richelieu. (Russell takes courtly rumors of Louis XIII’s bisexuality and turns the monarch into a flaming homosexual, a choice which might be more controversial today than the blasphemy). Russell said he wanted a clean-looking, lived-in city as opposed to the typical gray and mossy look of medieval towns on film. But the impressive architecture of Derek Jarman’s Loudun, with all the buildings uniformly cast from white brick and tiles, is far too modern and minimalist to be realistic; it’s a mythic, fairy tale town. A pair of quack doctors wear bizarre goggles with leather snouts and apply cures straight from Russell’s imagination, fighting poison with poison by placing hornets under glass jars to sting plague victims. Russell takes a mention of Louis XIII taking potshots at captured Huguenots and transforms it into a fantastical slapstick burlesque sequence where the King dresses up prisoners as blackbirds and hunts them while sitting on his outdoor throne. Richelieu was probably never wheeled through a massive library containing intelligence on heretics and undesirables on a pushcart operated by nuns. Russell’s most blatant anachronism may be Father Barre, the shaggy exorcist with tinted granny glasses (à la John Lennon) who acts as much like a rock star as a priest. The Loudun exorcisms were indeed conducted publicly—that was part of the strategy to discredit Grandier and whip up public sentiment against him—but they probably didn’t include quite so much nun nudity.¹⁾Roger Ebert’s scathingly sarcastic contemporaneous review of The Devils included the line, “Russell fearlessly reveals [that] all the nuns, without exception, were young and stacked.”

Of course, it’s the sacrilege, even more than the pubic hair, that really got The Devils into trouble. And yet, its crystal clear throughout the movie that Russell (himself a Catholic) is not on the side of the blasphemers, nor was he shocking viewers without a larger purpose. Sister Jeanne’s visions—her degraded, literal vision of what it means to be a “bride of Christ”—are corrupt from the beginning, a product of the unnatural vocation she’s been forced into. The powers that be, Richelieu and his flunky, the Baron De Laubardemont, show no piety whatsoever; they are only concerned with consolidating power, and are willing to use any means to secure it. The fact that it’s the clergy, the Establishment, who are the blasphemers makes for an obvious political statement. Grandier and his wife are the only true Christians in the film. The action often cuts back and forth between the Father’s speeches or private devotions and the depraved performance art demonstrations by the exorcists to drive that point home. The Church as a political entity perverts morality; only in the lone, conscientious individual can it be found intact. This message jibes perfectly with the last act of the New Testament. The true devils wear starched white collars. If some think he drives this position home with a needlessly explicit lack of subtlety, then Russell might counter that they themselves are worshiping a false idol of propriety. After all, the nuns’ wild naked revelry is pagan and intoxicating, and this is what probably is most unnerving to the bluenoses—abandoning yourself to the devil looks like fun.

The Devils was made in a boundary-pushing year that also saw the release of the somehow-less-controversial A Clockwork Orange. Today, in the age of Antichrist, it seems strange that Russell’s movie outraged the public so easily. It’s easy enough for the timid to ignore a movie with disturbing content when they’re not interested in it. What’s stranger is Warner Brothers’ continuing shyness about releasing this film. It’s sad that the controversy, which should be as dead as the furor surrounding Clockwork and other transgressive works of the era, is still keeping people from seeing The Devils today. Copies of Two Thousand Maniacs and other torture-based exploitation films aren’t hard to come by. The message, one guesses, is to put whatever vile and degrading imagery you want on film, just don’t dare link it to religious hypocrisy. Whether you think that The Devils is great art or not, it is seriously intended. The amazing sets, high production values, epic scope, camerawork, Peter Maxwell Davies’ avant garde score, and Oliver Reed’s Shakespearean performance are all signifiers of High Art, and the message is essentially moral. The only possible objection to the film are its lapses of good taste; and these in themselves are valuable. Ken Russell’s most delirious and excessive movie is not something a true fan of the art form would want to miss out on. I’m not sure The Devils is an unqualified masterpiece, but it’s awfully close. And even if you don’t view it as an artistic triumph, it’s an unforgettable event.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Russell has become increasingly obsessed with madness—which is dangerously like a kind of madness in itself. Now, in The Devils, he has made a delirious fresco about the insanity of the witch hunts in 17th century France. It is a movie so unsparingly vivid in its imagery, so totally successful in conveying an atmosphere of uncontrolled hysteria that Russell himself seems like a man possessed.”–Jay Cocks, Time (contemporaneous)

“…like a David Lean remake of Pink Flamingos.”–Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

“…its writer-director’s most outrageously sick film to date, campy, idiosyncratic, and in howlingly bad taste…”–Halliwell’s Film Guide

IMDB LINK: The Devils (1971)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

BFI Screenonline: Devils, The (1971) – The British Film Institute’s page has basic info, a short essay by Micheal Brooke, some production stills, a link to a short account of the censorship scandal, and two film clips (available to subscribers in the UK only)

The Devils (1971) – Overview – Turner Classic Movies has an entry on the film, with a long synopsis and background notes

Ken Russell interview: The last fires of film’s old devil – 2011 interview with Russell in The Guardian on the occasion of The Devils revival

‘The Devils’: Why Ken Russell’s Crazy, Sexy, Heretical Shocker is a ‘Masterpiece’ – “The Wrap” report inspired by Richard Crouse’s book “Raising Hell”

Possession in the Grand Siècle: The Devils – An article about teaching the film in French history courses that outlines Russell’s deviations from historical fact

We Don’t Go Back #38: The Devils (1971) – Article/review by Howard Ingram, with some interesting footnotes on witchcraft and censorship

Derek Jarman’s Renaissance and The Devils (1971) – Abstract for an article from “Shakespeare Bulletin” on the influence of The Devils on Derek Jarman’s future career

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of the Devils – Book length study of the film’s production and aftermath by Richard Crouse

HOME VIDEO INFO: Although Warner Brothers stubbornly refuses to release The Devils to American home video audiences, they did (finally) sublicense the movie to the British Film Institute in 2012. If you are in Europe or have an all-regions DVD player, the BFI’s two-disc release is one of the finest and most complete editions of just about any film on the market. Clocking in at 107 minutes, it’s not the complete director’s cut with the “rape of Christ” (Warner balked at going that far), but it is the original X-rated theatrical release, with a few extended scenes not available on Warners’ VHS release. It begins with an optional 2-minute introduction from film critic and Devils champion Mark Kermode. Kermode hosts a commentary track featuring Russell, editor Michael Bradsell, and Paul Joyce (director of “Hell on Earth”). Disc one also hosts two trailers (British and American versions) and the early Russell short “Amelia and the Angel” (1958). “Amelia” is a 25-minute black and white fable about a little girl who loses the angel wings she needs for a school play, with no dialogue besides a narrator. This short feature shows Russell, then newly converted to Catholicism, in a pious mood, and although it’s fairly conventional it includes a few scenes of magical realism/surrealism that prefigure the direction the director would take in the future.

Disc 2 hosts additional featurettes, starting with the 50-minute BBC documentary “Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of ‘The Devils'”. This doc is itself notorious as being the only place you can see a few minutes of out-of-context footage from the “rape of Christ” sequence. The 20-minute “Director of Devils” is a contemporaneous American mini-doc about the film and attendant controversy, made by Warner Brothers as a marketing tool. It includes some interesting footage of Peter Maxwell Davies conducting the orchestral score, intercut with the final product. Rounding out the supplements are seven-and-a-half minutes of behind the scenes footage narrated by Michael Bradsell and a 12-minute Q&A with Russell from a 2012 screening. And if that’s not enough, the set comes with a 40-page booklet with essays on the film, Russell, Reed, Redgrave, and Jarman, along with a detailed record of the cuts demanded by censors and the studio. If you’re a Devils fan, you could not ask for much more (the uncut rape of Christ, sure, but given that that’s off the table…)

Occasionally, other DVD offerings pop up that claim to contain the complete and uncut version, but they always seem to disappear from the market quickly, and cannot be verified.

The Devils has not been licensed for Blu-ray or VOD presentation. Despite fan petitions and complaints, Warner has shown no interest in exploiting this still-controversial property, although you never know what might happen in the future.

(This movie was nominated for review by “lo-fi jr.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Lewis John Carlino

FEATURING: Jonathan Kahn, Sarah Miles, Kris Kristofferson, Earl Rhodes

PLOT: A young boy growing up in a seaside English town with his widowed mother is involved in a cultlike group of juvenile delinquents, but idolizes a passing sailor who woos his mom… for a while.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is one of the all-time great titles, but definitely not one of the all-time weirdest movies. What little weirdness it has is more of a function of its unfashionable (some might say “clumsy”) use of symbolic narrative than anything else.

COMMENTS: Lewis John Carlino (screenwriter of Seconds) adapted The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea from a novel by oddball nationalist Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Some critics argue that, in changing the location from Japan to Wales, the movie fails to achieve greatness because it can’t translate Mishima’s specifically Japanese cultural concerns to screen.

I disagree. I think The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea fails to achieve greatness on its own merits. Specifically, the movie is poorly paced, losing rather than gaining steam as it goes on, and the acting is flat and uninspired. Sarah Miles does best as the young widow hiding her simmering sexuality under the cover of prim country Victorianism (although her mournful masturbation scene in front of her dead husband’s portrait is risible). Kris Kristofferson is mainly there as a manly prop for the sex scenes, a duty he performs well enough. The main acting issue is one that brings down many coming-of-age films: the reliance on young, untrained actors in crucial roles. Star Jonathan Kahn, whose only other credits were literary parts in BBC juvenile television adaptations, is just serviceable: he has the look of a conflicted adolescent, but he can’t channel the surging hormonal rage needed here. Earl Rhodes, as “Chief,” is more of an obstacle to success. He gives theatrical speeches that sound like a schoolboy’s self-serving impressions of Nietzsche (“morality is nothing more than a set of rules adults have invented to protect themselves.”) He always sounds like he’s reading from a script and never develops the sinister charisma necessary for us to buy him as a mini-Manson; and if we can’t believe he seduces his schoolboy chums into bizarre acts of anti-adult rebellion (like a ritual involving a poor kitty), the delicate credibility of the plot falls apart.

Hints of perversity and sex can’t overcome the movie’s over-solemnity (the tone they were going for was “haunting,” but it’s a near miss). Sailor‘s lack of spark is a shame, because the film raises a multitude of interesting topics: youthful rebellion, missing father figures, Oedipal desire, the foundations of morality, the lure of romanticism, the tension between pure ideology and real life. While there is a certain fateful irony in the conclusion (optimistically promoted as “startling” in the tagline), it’s deliberately telegraphed so that there is no suspense. A few indicia of derangement–dissonant baroque music played on prepared piano during the boy’s memory of seeing his nude mother, a stuttering montage as the boys prepare their final act–give the movie the slightest touch of formal strangeness.

There is one major support for the interpretation that the film is a failure of translation. Mishima likely intended the novel as an allegory for Japan’s postwar situation, and viewed the boys as the upcoming generation of heroes and patriots who would overthrow Western domination of “pure” Japanese culture. In Carlino’s hands, these brats are misguided monsters, Lords of the Flies refugees, who make the parents into tragic victims of their misguided fanaticism. Obviously, that’s a seismic thematic shift—but again, I don’t think that’s the reason the movie fails to hit its mark. With more vital direction, they could have pulled the reversal off.

At the moment The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is free to watch on Tubi.tv (no way to know if that will still be true by the time you read this, naturally).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…has an intriguing effect by virtue of its very strangeness, with its uneasy combination of a sex-starved widow and twisted kids making for, at the very least, a memorable experience, if not entirely for the right reasons.”–Graem Clark, The Spinning Image

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

Singapore sling: O anthropos pou agapise ena ptoma

AKA Singapore Sling: The Man Who Loved a Corpse

“You know the feeling of something half remembered,
Of something that never happened, yet you recall it well;
You know the feeling of recognizing someone
That you’ve never met as far as you could tell…”–Johnny Mercer, “Laura”

(with caution)

DIRECTED BY: Nikos Nikolaidis

FEATURING: Meredyth Herold, Panos Thanassoulis, Michele Valley

PLOT: A detective is searching for a missing girl, Laura, a supposed murder victim with whom he was in love and who he believes is still alive. Suffering from an unexplained bullet wound, he follows the trail to a villa where a psychotic “Daughter” and an equally insane “Mother” live in a sick relationship, hiring servants whom they later kill. When the enfeebled detective stumbles to their door, the two women capture him, dub him “Singapore Sling” after a cocktail recipe they find in his pocket, and use him in their sadomasochistic sex games.

BACKGROUND:

• Much of the plot references Otto Preminger‘s classic thriller/film noir, Laura, including prominent use of the famous theme song.
• Director Nikos Nikolaidis is well-known in Greece and is sometimes considered the godfather of the “Greek Weird Wave” films (best known in the work of Yorgos Lanthimos). Singapore Sling is his only work that is widely available outside of Greece.
• Singapore Sling was one of the top three vote getters in 366 Weird Movies first Apocryphally Weird movie poll, making it one of the most popular weird movies left off the 366 Weird Movies canon.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Warning: there are a lot of images in Singapore Sling which you would probably like to forget, but will be unable to. Among the least objectionable (believe it or not) is Daughter’s memory (?) of losing her virginity to “Father”: he appears as a bandage-swathed mummy.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Earrings on organs; mummy incest

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Imagine a cross between Laura and Salo, as directed by a young Luis Buñuel dabbling in pornography, and you’ll have some idea of what you’re in for—but it’s slightly weirder than that.

Short clip from Singapore Sling (1990) (in Greek)

COMMENTS: Singapore Sling blatantly references Otto Preminger’s
Laura, to the point where it could almost be accused of being an uncredited Surrealist remake of the 1944 classic film noir. The tribute extends to the name of the murder victim who may not be dead. It’s possible, however, that Laura’s famous, haunting theme song was an even bigger influence on Singapore Sling than the movie it came from. We hear the plaintive tune in two versions: Glenn Miller’s Mancini-esque instrumental arrangement from Laura, and Julie London’s ghostly half-a capella rendition, recorded at a teasingly slow tempo from within an echo chamber. And even more significant than the tune are Johnny Mercer’s song lyrics, which he wrote before he had seen the movie. Daughter recites them to Singapore Sling while she rides him during their first (conscious) sex scene: “Laura is the face in the misty light… That was Laura, but she’s only a dream…”

Then Daughter vomits on Singapore Sling’s face… but that’s getting ahead of the story. Mercer’s lyrics set a mysterious mood of longing for an indistinct romantic ideal, a lingering memory so distant that it has become indistinguishable from a dream. In the hard-boiled opening monologue, spoken over Miller’s mournful trombone, the nameless detective who will become our Singapore Sling delivers exposition that suggests Laura‘s plot, but also recalls the song lyrics. He recounts how catching a scent on a passing woman will set him to thinking of Laura again (much as the narrator in Mercer’s lyrics suggests that glimpsing a woman on a passing train sparks memories of his lost ideal). In the closing monologue, he laments that he’s the type of guy who “chases a dream with a female name” (recalling the momentous line “That was Laura, but she’s only a dream.”) In the song, Laura has faded, become an emotion rather than a person, and the uncertainty of Singapore Sling‘s “Laura” reflects this phantasmal quality. Daughter, by her own unreliable admission, killed Laura. But she also masquerades as Laura, both in a role-playing game with Mother and in order to milk information from Singapore Sling. At other times, she tells him “This Laura you’re looking for is only an illusion.” But she could actually be Laura, because, as we will see, people who cross the threshold and enter this house lose their identities, along with their minds. At times, Singapore Sling thinks Daughter really is Laura—although he is in a delirium from hunger, pain and dehydration. At times, Daughter acts as if she really thinks she is Laura—although she’s been stone cold crazy from the start. The whole crazy scenario recalls not only the misdirection of Laura but the Carlotta/Madeleine/Judy confusion of Vertigo.

In its best moments, Singapore Sling is about capturing that wistful mood of longing for an idealized, unobtainable romance—and the beautiful pain that it brings. The amazing black and white cinematography (which really should have been lensed in Academy ratio) conjures imagery much like the song’s “face in the misty light”: rain pounding on the sidewalk, curtains billowing in corridors, lovely cameos from the past. The costuming is sumptuous and recalls the elegance of classic Hollywood : Michele Valley’s headdress would fit perfectly on Mata Hari’s head. The Greek mansion where the action takes place could have been a summer home for Sunset Boulevard‘s Nora Desmond.

But although the film’s look and sound deliberately evoke Hollywood classicism, the film’s action violently and obscenely undermines it. An early scene hints at the transgressions to come: after the opening credits play over a tranquil garden soaked by a steady rainfall, we see two woman in lingerie digging a grave, and a flash of pubic hair under one’s gown. Once the detective enters the women’s lair, he is immediately seized, bound, used for sex, and warned that he will be subjected to torture. The scenes that follow are intense and repulsive; they are best not described, but be assured that even the most jaded viewers will find something here that will tempt them to turn away from the screen. Sexual torture, fetishistic bondage, bodily fluids, and a vomitous feast or two where the two women greedily devour a luscious smorgasbord of organ meats are all on the menu. Excess is the strategy here, but an intoxicated Nikolaidis overplays it, frequently leaving the camera on too long, turning some of the scenes from mere shocks into endurance tests. The debaucheries could have been expressed more economically and hit just as hard (as was the case in the necrophiliac incest scene, which is brief but incredibly effective). If he had toned the S&M and grossout marathons down, Singapore Sling may have been a stronger film—though a less notorious one.

The perversion breaks the mood, yet perversely also reinforces it. The tone shift suggests that Singapore Sling‘s film noir trappings are an outdated, artificial romanticism that is counterbalanced by gritty, visceral realities. The detective is dangerously out of touch, because outsiders do not live by his code of honor or respect the nobility of his ardor. The two women quickly turn on him, use him, and torment him for their own selfish desires. Their lives revolve around brutal bodily realities: viscera, blood, gorging and puking. He comes from a 1940s Hollywood dream world, where people symbolize emotional states, while they exist in a universe of torture porn. But their world, while physical rather than spiritual, is not depicted as more real than his; when they take the organs out of their prey and throw them in the sink, the heart still beats. He speaks only in cliché voiceovers, but the women break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience. Both sides are deranged, but on opposite ends of the spectrum; normality is nowhere to be found. None of our usual narrative expectations work to guide us through this story. Yet, true to genre, by the end we genuinely want Singapore Sling to recover his mind, kill the two psychopathic women, end the insanity, and escape from this house of horrors. The operatic finale is upholds the film’s depravity, but is also legitimately cathartic. It restores the sense of romantic noir longing that we started with—we have traveled through the perversion and come out the other side, a little queasy, but re-enchanted by the tragic poetry.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“All the ambiguity and weirdness only serves as a hypocritical facade for what is, ultimately, a rather revolting exercise in cinematic shock… this is not to suggest that Singapore Sling is without merit, however. While the film definitely suffers from an overdose of avant-garde superficiality, one is left admiring the sheer skill and artistry of its execution… Even so, one is left wishing that the director had used his obvious technical expertise to better ends.”–Troy Howarth, Eccentric Cinema (DVD)

“…a bizarre film to try and get a grip on… Trying to follow the plot is like trying to get a grip on an oiled fish.”–Richard Schieb, Moria: Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review

OFFICIAL SITE:

SINGAPORE SLING – nikos nikolaidis – A large gallery of stills and the director’s comments highlight the Singapore Sling page at what appears to be the late director’s official site. Poke around the site for further interviews and articles.

IMDB LINK: Singapore Sling (1990)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

SINGAPORE SLING HD TRAILER – The NSFW trailer

Singapore sling (1990) – Trailer – A longer and even more NSFW trailer

Singapore Sling: Postmodern Noir, Narrative, and Destructive Desire – David Church examines Singapore Sling as a postmodern noir for “Off Screen” magazine

RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: SINGAPORE SLING [O ANTHROPOS POU AGAPISE ENA PTOMA] (1990): Eric Gabbard‘s original recommendation for this site

HOME VIDEO INFO: Synapse Films released Singapore Sling on DVD sometime in 2006, but all traces of that edition seem to have vanished; perhaps it was only a dream. There are plenty of options to purchase the film in Region2/B (Europe), but for North Americans the best (and maybe only) choice is the German Blu-ray issued by Bildstörung (buy). It has German language packaging and menus and no extra features, but the film looks and sounds terrific (aside from being cropped from its original dimensions). Most importantly, it will play on standard North American players.

Singapore Sling is not available on streaming services, and due to its specialized appeal, it’s not likely to ever be picked up. It remains a true underground cult film in an era when any property that can make a copyright holder at least $5 has been monetized to death.

Ai-naki Mori de Sakebe

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DIRECTED BY: Sion Sono

FEATURING: Kippei Shîna, Eri Kamataki, Shinnosuke Mitsushima, Kyoko Hinami, Sei Matobu

PLOT: A group of young filmmakers make a movie about a con-man they suspect of being a serial killer, but he turns the tables on them when he offers to produce the film, then turns the crew into a sadomasochistic cult of killers.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Sion Sono doesn’t do “normal”; he goes for broke on every project. Forest of Love is overlong, ugly, perverse, masturbatory, and fascinating.

COMMENTS: The intricate plot of Forest of Love includes, among other things, a “Romeo and Juliet” centered lesbian love triangle, a schoolgirl suicide pact, a Svengali-like conman who seduces younger women into sadomasochistic relationships, an outlaw film crew who act like the Manson cult and run around Japan committing murders, bourgeois parents given a punk makeover, days of wine and electrocution, ghosts, and possible identity switches at the end. Sono purportedly based the screenplay on a real-life killer, but I’m thinking that he might have changed a few of the details.

The Forest of Love is a bruising movie. Its two-and-a-half hour length would normally only pose a minor challenge to the viewer, but the extreme level of emotional cruelty Sono wallows in makes it into more of an endurance test. The suicide attempts are particularly brutal, not only because of the squirmy gore, but also due to the callous reactions (the family here finds suicide shameful, and are more concerned with covering up the disgrace than empathizing with their suffering child). But although many stretches of the film are nightmarish episodes of physical and psychological torture that feel like they’re never going to end, there are also moments of incredible beauty (slo-mo schoolgirls in their underwear singing and dancing to Pachelbel’s “Canon”) and black comedy (Murata, taking on the persona of a rock star, hosts a concert with an audience stocked with his previous marks).

Sono mixes elements that are purely exploitative (and often frankly sick) with gorgeous mise en scene, expert style, and just enough intellectualism and self-reflection to overcome charges of pandering. In true Surrealist fashion, he attacks the basic institutions of society, showing Murata molding those in his orbit into an obscene mockery of a nuclear family. But he contrasts this caricature with a portrait of a real dysfunctional Japanese family that is even worse, because it is so real. There’s a lot of subtle mirroring in the plot; the teasing play between the lesbian trio in flashbacks reflect the sadomasochistic dynamics we see between Murata and the two girls, and between Murata and the two young male filmmakers. One figure is always playing off two against each other.

Sono also treads a fine line between realism and absurdity.  Murata manipulates his marks subtly, so that when they go along with his requests it seems almost reasonable at first; he then pushes them further and further until murder seems not only natural, but inevitable. Murata isn’t physically imposing and is greatly outnumbered, so all it would take to frustrate his plans is for any individual to stand up to him at any point. But cowering before his bullying seems reasonable; you see how they fear him, and feel their fear. No one wants to be the first to call him out, because he seldom dishes out punishment himself, instead commanding another to do the dirty work for him. As long as you are the one Murata asks to wield the electrical paddle against the disobedient, you won’t be on the receiving end. Of course, that respite only lasts until you displease the master; but you can see how easy it is for everyone to fall in line. By the time things get truly ridiculous, with the austere father sporting a mohawk and chugging a beer while assaulting his honored relatives, the audience has been brought along so slowly—like the proverbial frog boiled in a pot of gradually warming water—that it almost seems believable. (Of course, the finale will blow any claim to non-hallucinatory realities out of the water).

The fascist element of Murata’s charisma, coupled with the satire aimed at the Japanese family and society, suggests a political allegory. But I couldn’t help theorizing that Sono sees himself as something of a Murata… at least, recognizes that he has the potential within him to be a Murata. In the very first scene, in Murata tells a waiter he’s a screenwriter, and wonders out loud what it feels like to kill someone. The many generic references to other Sono movies and themes—the self-destruction pact like in Suicide Club, filmmakers documenting real crimes like in Why Don’t You Play in Hell?, the manipulative serial killer straight out of Cold Fish—only reinforce that sense of self-identification. “Crimes are fun in the movies and in real life,” muses one character. Does the impulse to film such dark fantasies say something about Sono? What does our desire to watch them say about us? Is Sono a con-man implicating us in his cinematic crimes? Sono fools around with those ideas, blurring the lines between representation and reality; he’s in a sadomasochistic relationship with his own demonic persona.

It’s a sign of Sono’s rising prestige that Netflix would sign him for an original exclusive production just like an Alfonso Cuarón or a Martin Scorsese, and give him carte blanche to make a movie so transgressive that people might think it really was made by a serial killer. It’s a sign of Sono’s continued outlaw status that Netflix would then hide the finished product away, not giving it a token theatrical release like Roma or The Irishman.

Forest of Love was Sono’s first film project after returning to work from a heart attack in February of this year. It was funded by, and screens exclusively on, Netflix (unfortunately, they did not give it even a token theatrical release). The dubbed version plays by default, so look around in your settings to switch it to the original Japanese with subtitles for a better experience.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sion Sono does not care that his movie is too long. He doesn’t care that it’s weird or gross or inconsistent or anything that a producer’s note might protest. We see so many movies every year that feel like the product of a focus group or marketing team. Not this one.”–Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com (contemporaneous)

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DIRECTED BY: Daniel Scheinert

FEATURING: Michael Abbott, Jr., Andre Hyland, Sarah Baker, Virginia Newcomb

PLOT: Two dimwitted band members try to cover up the suspicious death of the third member of their trio in a small town.

COMMENTS: “Hey… ya’ll mfers wanna get weird?,” asks the eponymous (and still living) Dick Long in the opening scene. The Death of Dick Long does get—sort of—weird, though not in the way you might be expecting from half of the directing duo behind Swiss Army Man. Like the crude joke in the movie’s title, which makes you think you’re headed for a raunchy redneck comedy, the word “weird” is a little bit of misdirection. Though the movie is set in Alabama, the “weird” here is of the species you’d expect to see in a headline beginning with the words “Florida Man…”

Initially submitted as a regional black comedy with subtle situational humor, Death quickly moves to dealing with the consequences of the trio’s “weird” night, which we gather must have involved something more intense than the beer bongs, joints and fireworks we see in the opening montage. At first, Dick’s body (which his bandmates surreptitiously dumped at the emergency room door in the wee hours) is unidentified, and the precise cause of death unknown. Zeke and Earl aren’t too good at coverups, but fortunately for them the hometown cops—led by a sheriff with a cane and her friendly lesbian deputy—aren’t too good at solving unexpected crimes, even when the suspects literally hand them clues. The first half settles into a Fargo-esque groove that we’ve seen before, as sleep-deprived Zeke forgets to cover up bloodstains and neither conspirator shows much skill at improvising cover stories under pressure. Then, around the midway point, Dick Long takes its outrageous premise and, unexpectedly, wrings serious drama out of it. This tonal shift was a huge gamble, but it pays off.

The acting, from a string of unfamiliar and semi-familiar faces, is universally strong—actually, close to great. Michael Abbott, Jr. handles the lead with tragicomic aplomb. He doesn’t want the secret to get out, sure, but he’s even more afraid of losing his wife and child, which makes it easy to root for him despite his duplicity. His buddy Earl (Andre Hyland) is a comic foil and actually kind of a dick, a vapin’ fool whose philosophy of life distills down to a beer and a shrug. Sarah Baker makes you think that someday soon she might grow up to be Alabama’s answer to Marge Gunderson. Virginia Newcomb has a supporting role as Zeke’s wife, but gets a major moment when hubby awkwardly and reluctantly confesses after inconsistencies in his story give him no other choice. The smaller roles are handled with equal ability. Scheinert deserves credit for assembling and guiding this fine ensemble.

The Death of Dick Long put in a token appearance in theaters before showing up on a extras-free DVD and Blu-ray in December. This solo outing for Scheinert does not mean that he’s broken up with directing partner Daniel Kwan. The Daniels are currently at work on a new project, Everything Everywhere All at Once, described as an “interdimensional action film.” 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Never remotely as goofy as [Swiss Army Man] but still bizarre in its own way, it’s sort of difficult to believe the film exists. But in a post-Mother and Sorry to Bother You world, perhaps anything can… takes a turn for the weird around the halfway point, and what happens shouldn’t be spoiled…”–Justin Jones, CBR

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DIRECTED BY: Sean Hogan, Andrew Parkinson, Simon Rumley

FEATURING: Jodie Jameson, Luke de Lacey, Siubhan Harrison, Holly Lucas, Tom Sawyer, Kate Braithwaite

PLOT: Three anthologized shorts: a wealthy couple toys with a homeless girl, an ex-junkie and ex-prostitute joins a pharmaceutical trial, and a young couple’s sadomasochistic relationship turns sour.

COMMENTS: For weird purposes, we can dispose of two of the three sexually-charged horrors that make up Little Deaths quickly. The opener, “House & Home,” is a well-produced but obvious R-rated “Twilight Zone” thing where a couple who exploit homeless women find the tables turned. Even though you might not guess the exact details, the twist is something less than a surprise when it arrives. The closer, “Bitch,” is a bit more involving because of its depiction of unusual fetishes (canine roleplay among them) in the context of a very dysfunctional S&M relationship, and its exceptionally cruel ending. It’s essentially sleazy sex life portraiture, though with a climax that’s equal parts troubling and ridiculous.

That leaves the middle segment, “Mutant Tool,” which is indeed about as weird as its title suggests. The central character is Jen, a recovering junkie and ex-prostitute who’s finding it hard to go straight. Her drug-dealing boyfriend enrolls her in an experimental pharmaceutical treatment with a major side effect: she hallucinates about a strange man (or monster) hanging in a cage. The plot gradually brings an old Nazi experiments and a develops a cyclical pharmaceutical ecosystem somewhat reminiscent of the one in Upstream Color (2013) (if less rigorously developed). The film is visually murky, with only brief glimpses of the dingy mutant behind a face shield and a shower curtain, though the restrained imagery can be effective—and there is one WTF closeup that is both creepy and sort of funny.  The exposition can be a bit clumsy: Jen keeps taking calls from her escort agency, even though she claims to be no longer working for them, just so we can sense the pressure she’s under. And there’s a crusty old caretaker character who keeps coming up with excuses to volunteer mutant backstory to a trainee. Plus, it seems like an awfully bad idea for Frank to refer Jen to Dr. Reese, considering the ghoulish nature of his prior dealings with the physician. Still, if you can overlook those narrative shortcuts, “Mutant Tool” has a strong and weird conceit, and also has the only likeable characters in the triptych—Jen and Frank are lowlifes, sure, but they’re at least trying to escape from the horror rather than hurtling into it like the others.

Although perversity abounds throughout, and “Mutant Tool” perks some interest for seekers of the eerie, none of Little Deaths offerings are essential shock-horror. But at thirty minutes each, none of them outstay their welcome, either.

Little Deaths has been accused of misogyny, and although there’s some basis for the charge (e.g. the uncomfortable verbal lingering over a rape scene), it’s overblown in general. In Little Deaths, people are simply cruel to one another, and males are victims as much as females. The one exception might be that final episode, Rumley’s provocatively-titled “Bitch,” which invites (though doesn’t demand) the misogyny-minded to identify with its emasculated antihero. To their credit, the directors do anticipate these charges and address them in a series of interviews included on the DVD—although Parkinson has nothing to answer for, and Rumley glibly dismisses the objection with a shrug.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…three tales of the strange, the weird, and the fantastic… ‘Mutant Tool’ is Andrew Parkinson’s way-strange contribution… [‘Mutant Tool’] is some pretty weird and (to use the word yet again) ‘dark’ stuff, made all the more so by being played as straight drama…  LITTLE DEATHS as a whole is pleasantly unsettling and worth watching for horror fans on the lookout for something different.”–Porfle Popnecker, “HK and Cult Film News” (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Donatien,” who qualified his recommendation: “i don’t think all three short films can be classified as weird, only the 3rd one.” Maybe he misremembered the order of the tales? Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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DIRECTED BY: Giuseppe Andrews

FEATURING: Bill Tyree, Giuseppe Andrews

PLOT: Intertwined stories of a number of absurd characters including a French dwarf who has rough sex with a teddy bear and a perpetually naked old man who has sex with an imaginary woman.

COMMENTS: “WARNING: This film contains senior citizen nudity and dead pigs.”

Now, geriatric nudity is no big thing (although when the octogenarian attempts to holds pork rinds between his buttcheeks, you may disagree). That dead pig, though… we’ll get to it.

Period Piece is a series of absurdist sketches that rarely rise to the level of jokes, and never to the level of insights. They aren’t planned out, they are just passing spurts from the brain of director Giuseppe Andrews, whose mind is not filled with classical allusions like a Jean Cocteau or scathing anti-bourgeois fantasies like a Luis Buñuel, but mostly with dirty words, bodily function imagery, and trailer park culture. The result is arrested development surrealism, like something made by Harmony Korine if he were a complete psychopath.

You get segments about two guys who siphon gas to get money to shoot heroin in a car wash. Two other guys mime eating each others’ farts (which they slice with a plastic knife and eat with a fork, in about the closest the film comes to eliciting a chuckle.) Stop-motion tater tots have sex in front of a shrine to Charles Manson. A guy eats raw hamburger. That kind of stuff. It’s shot in camcorder glare, and the editing is deliberately bad, as if a few “good” fifteen second takes were assembled to make a scene. Sometimes the same line repeats with slightly different inflection. It’s unpleasantly disorienting and visually unflattering, so Andrews does achieve the Americana nightmare feel he’s going for. And just so you won’t be fooled into thinking you’re watching something with socially redeeming value, it opens with a bit where a guy wearing a fake mustache and speaking in a Pepe le Pew accent sodomizes a teddy bear with an industrial sized can of calm chowder. (The repeated, graphic molestation of the stuffed sex slave is an ongoing motif.) Also, a lot of people shoot themselves in ineffective mock suicides. It’s as disgusting as it sounds, and much of the time, it’s repetitive and tedious, but it’s capable of holding your interest—against your better judgement.

Although the climactic dead pig is explicitly named “Society,” the main target of the film’s ongoing and pervasive anger has been women and scarcity of sex. The teddy bear who “likes it rough” seems to stand in for woman as sexual objects. In one vignette a man threatens to kill a “whore” for cheating on him. A father and son leaf through the gynecological displays in well-worn stroke mags, and the son dreams of scoring someday. The naked old man delivers obscene, scatological monologues about vaginas. Although Andrews had  a girlfriend at the time, and there is a woman in the cast, the whole project gives off the vibe of something conceived by poor white guys who’ve lost all hope of ever getting laid. Therefore, when Andrews’ attempt to top Pink Flamingos in the grossout department has the naked old man hack at the pig’s head with a hatchet while screaming insults at it, I was put more in mind of incels releasing sexual frustration than outsiders taking revenge against a system that has marginalized them.

The ending of the film disclaims that “no animals were hurt in the making of this film… they were already dead!” This is not strictly true. What about the human animals in the audience who had to watch it?

Troma proudly (?) picked up Period Piece (and some other Andrews movies) for distribution, despite the fact that it’s much darker (and even cheaper) than their usual fare. The DVD features an incongruously cheerful introduction by Lloyd Kaufman, a Kaufman interview with Andrews, trailers for other Andrews movies, an obscene misogynist poem written by Andrews and read bumblingly by Tyree, and the entire 70-minute bonus feature Jacuzzi Rooms— which is literally just an unscripted chronicle of four rednecks drinking heavily in a motel room. Fun stuff, for people for whom nothing matters.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Take John Waters at his shock heights, a sizable helping of Harmony Korine’s Gummo, and a completely amateur visual aesthetic you have a vague idea as to what kind of film your in store for… From frame one you are forced into its full tilt bizarro world. You either get on for the ride or reject it completely.”–Infini-Tropolis (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by Tally Isham, who said “Not sure if I recommend seeing it, but it’s zero-budget weirdness.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)