DIRECTED BY: Kelly Hughes
FEATURING: Betty Marshall, Ernest Rhoades, James Peterson, Sarah Katherine Lewis
PLOT: We are introduced to the work of Kelly Hughes, the creative guru behind the assaultive public access series “Heart Attack Theatre,” through the words, experiences, and memories of the cast and crew who worked with him.
COMMENTS: Kelly Hughes is an underground director who hails from Seattle. He established his prominence through “Heart Attack Theatre,” a series broadcast on public access airwaves from 1991-1993 that most bourgeois viewers would dismiss as trashy, reprehensible, or simply “shock for shock sake.”
I resent that last tautology the most. When pinned on an artist’s work, the cliche is frequently used to imply that the artist’s work is disingenuous, exploitative, and that the labor and the blood and sweat that they invested in it wasn’t meaningful as anything other than a cheap novelty to amuse a select few.
As the first interviewee, Ernest Rhoades, says as he recollects his experience working for Hughes’ “Lucky Charms Productions,” some artists simply create ugly and nasty things from pure love and passion. Some artists are just destined to be dismissed as ugly misfits. Despite being penniless, starving, and painstakingly filming under what most professionals would deem as intolerable conditions, they still work because they truly believe in what they are creating. I strongly emphasize with that warrior-like commitment.
And I’m sorry, Kelly Hughes, that you never were able to create the explosive-laden, cacophonous action film that you secretly always wanted to create.
But I do appreciate that you made something.
Heart Attack! gives us glimpses of the lo-fi, brazenly transgressive style of Kelly Hughes’ brief filmography. Obviously, the initial comparison that emerges is to the early films of John Waters (though to be honest, I think that comparison is just inescapable for a lot of low-budget filmmakers like Hughes, as pointless a criticism as when people carelessly fling around the descriptor Lynchian when reviewing weird films). Anyone familiar with the filmography of Harmony Korine will definitely notice the strange effect that Hughes gets from lo-fi VHS recording tape technology, the grainy texture and subtly abstract, impressionistic colors that making the visual aesthetic as tenuous and degenerative in form as the perversely grotesque content on display.
Though if we’re going to spend this much time pretentiously discussing art, I say let us recall the words of transgressive art’s intellectual forebearer, Antonin Artaud: “No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”
Here is a brief listing of some of the films featured within Heart Attack!‘s breezy hour-long survey of Hughes’ lo-fi inventions in the public-access television medium:
• “Shot In Hughes’ kitchen”: A woman and a man stare in horror at the open kitchen cabinet. The man crawls inside it. It inexplicably consumes him. The woman screams.
• La Cage Aux Zombies: An “upscale Grapes of Wrath lady” (played by a very handsome man) stares out of a rusting, dilapidated door window. S(he) has a cartoonishly shrill groan and an amputated arm, and salutes Hitler fashionably. More happens, but it is challenging to say where the other clips fit into the larger narrative. Looks cool, though.
• “Say My Name Before I Die”: A nude man and woman stand in front of a bathroom mirror. They are discussing monetary concerns. They begin to copulate lovingly.
• “An Inconvenient Whore”: A nude man stretches over the edge of a bed, moaning. A woman leans over his face and informs the strapping young prostitute that there is another client waiting. Moaning resumes.
• “Gut Reaction”: A grizzly man in the middle of the woods wields a chainsaw. His potential victim screams in terror. Hilarious Benny Hill-esque antics ensue. The woman escapes and is picked up by a good Samaritan driving a dingy pick-up truck. The grizzly man appears and straddles the truck, blocking the view of the front windshield. She admits that she previously had an affair with her gynecologist. We discover that the man chasing her was her former lover. And then there is dismemberment. Afterwards, she spontaneously gives birth to a gigantic lime-green toy serpent. Then her snake baby chases them off.
From what I saw of Kelly Hughes’ films, I genuinely liked them. The ensemble didn’t act poorly, either, for being mostly unrecognized and technically amateur by conventional standards.
But I won’t say anything definitively on Hughes’ cinema until I actually watch his films. In their entirety.
Because as a fellow misfit, and as a young reviewer, I believe he deserves my respect when I approach his films.
So until that day I see his films, I consider any opinion on the early cinema of Kelly Hughes as merely tentative.
Heart Attack! The Early Pulse-Pounding Cinema of Kelly Hughes is exclusively available online at vhx.com. Watch Heart Attack! The Early Pulse-Pounding Cinema of Kelly Hughes ($3.99).
David Foster Wallace once wrote a piece on what could or could not be deemed “Lynchian” in films and, referring to multiple movies during the article, it perhaps would appear, dear sir, in your chastising of those who do indeed use the word “Lynchian” or reference it for specific purposes, that the claim regarding nominal relevance or lack thereof is purely haughty on your part.
To be fair(and I do appreciate Wallace, from what I read of his non-fiction works, especially concerning the death of irony and Updike’s decline as a writer), I always found some truth in Bret Easton Ellis’ declamation of Wallace(of course, in response to Wallace’s own derisive reading of his texts) on how pretentious he personally found his writings. Which is sort of a long-winded way of saying that usually when people fling around descriptors such as ‘haughty’, and other of their ilk, it not only reflects the arrogance of the recipient, but reflects the arrogance and prickly pretension of the one who implements it as a pejorative.
So if I seem haughty, and excessively aggressive, it is because I anticipated reactions like this.
I’m just pleased to see that at least they’re well-thought out.
But I won’t resist acknowledging your arrogance in openly denouncing my written work as if you’ve exposed some sort of grand hubris behind my journalistic writing about film. Because it is just slightly arrogant to excessively criticize and denigrate the opinion of the author’s article when they’ve only just started assignment writing for this site, for a non-paying assignment.
But, what am I supposed to know about terms such as ‘Lynchian’ being thrown around derisively? I mean, I’ve only read this site almost exclusively for film criticism since I was a teenager. And I’m sure that if you ever took a cursory glance at the A.V. Club commenting board(and film reviewing alumni), you will see people throw the same word as flagrantly, if not even more poorly, as I have specifically used it within the context of criticizing reviewers who throw John Waters comparisons around whenever a young, low-budget, provocative director creates a film.
Just as surreality had it’s own artistic pioneers and history before and beyond Lynch, so does works that fit loosely within this style of art.
Sharing an appreciation for what is categorically considered a niche film audience, even if occasionally stratified among their own audience because of how decisively subjective an adjective such as ‘weird'(with its many, many connotations applied throughout the years), it can tend to make the individuals who wish to convey those perspectives seem at least somewhat narrowsighted in their tastes and personal preferences and opinions at times.
And for the record, I definitely didn’t agree with everything in Wallace’s reappraisal of Lynch’s Lost Highway.
But then again, Pynchon and DeLillo have always been more appealing to my tastes.
you just totally made my day.
bless you.
dont stop writing ever.
Thank you! 🙂