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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

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

A Serbian Film – sanitized trailer

—————————————————

ADDENDUM:

A Serbian Film Is Socially Apposite and Cinematically Significant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why castigate these creatures
Whose angelic features
Are bumping and grinding on trash?
Are they not spawned by our greed?
Are they not our true seed?
Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash?”–poem from Trash Humpers

DIRECTED BY: Harmony Korine

FEATURING: Rachel Korine, Harmony Korine, Brian Kotzur, Travis Nicholson

PLOT:  Four rednecks in wrinkled geriatric masks wander around nearly deserted streets drinking wine, demolishing abandoned television sets, tormenting the bizarre outcasts they come across in their wanderings, and humping trash.  One of the humpers explains to the camera that, unlike the suburbanites sleeping in their homes, they “choose to live like free people.”  By the end of the video the focus shifts to a single humper who may be having doubts about the trashy lifestyle.


BACKGROUND:

• Trash Humpers was basically unscripted, although the characters and aesthetic had been thought out beforehand.  According to Korine, the cast wandered through Nashville for a few weeks, sleeping outdoors, and filmed their in-character improvisations; the most interesting bits were edited into the final product.
• Korine assembled this film quickly in reaction to his negative experiences making his third feature film, the relatively big-budget Mr. Lonely; he found the bureaucracy surrounding that production creatively stifling.
• Trash Humpers is distributed by Drag City, an independent music label that has only recently branched out into underground film.  Their other 2009 release, Vernon Chatman’s absurdist Final Flesh, was previously inducted onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies Ever Made.
• American DVD-by-mail rental giant Netflix originally declined to stock copies of Trash Humpers.  Drag City circulated a press release suggesting that the movie was refused because of its provocative content, and pointing out other controversial movies the company stocked.  Trash Humpers was accepted into the rental program soon after the press release.
• Trash Humpers was one of two winners of the second “reader’s choice” poll asking 366 Weird Movies’ readership to select films that had been reviewed but passed over for inclusion on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: It seems impossible to think of the title without immediately calling up the mental picture of actors in creepy geriatric masks in an alley grinding their groins against garbage bags.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Any film in which four rednecks in latex masks that make them look

Festival teaser trailer for Trash Humpers

like escapees from a nursing home for the criminally insane force a pair of Siamese twins connected at the head by what looks like a giant tube sock to eat pancakes doused in Palmolive has weirdness in its corner.

COMMENTS: Weirdness obviously counts for a lot.  For a movie that goes so far out of its way to alienate the viewer, Trash Humpers has a surprising number of fans, and even a decent number of defenders among established critics; that’s a tribute to the power of the odd imagination on display in this trashy trek through the armpit of America (i.e. the garbage-strewn back alleys of Nashville, TN).  The film’s shabby, uncanny feel flows first from the faces of the wizened old farts themselves: their geriatric masks are calibrated to look almost like real makeup, but are just artificial enough so that you never figure out whether the humpers are actually intended to be old timers, or just miscreants disguised for anonymity.  Watching a gang of hoodlums bumping and grinding bagged refuse would produce giggles; but, put these frightening masks on the figures and it the activity turns from silly into creepy.  And violating the bags you left out for the garbageman last night isn’t the humpers only strange activity. They like to break TVs with sledgehammers and ride around eerily deserted, trash-strewn suburban streets with baby dolls dragging behind their bicycles.  In the course of their wanderings they meet a boy in a Sunday suit whom they teach to slip razor blades into apples, abuse pancake-making fake Siamese twins, consort with overweight hookers who serenade them with a chorus of “Silent Night,” and throw firecrackers while a man dressed in a French maid’s costume dedicates a poem to them.

Among Trash Humpers many qualities, however, weirdness isn’t necessarily the pre-eminent one.  The movie is also repetitive, ugly, pointless, unsavory, deliberately annoying, and tedious.  In fact, the surrealism here is likely just another blunt weapon used to bludgeon the viewer; the film is intended as an anti-audience provocation.  As such, it’s a slog to get through the rubbish: your bourgeois sensibilities may or may not be offended, but they’ll almost certainly be bored and irritated.  The humpers all affect shrill Southern accents, and are prone to endlessly repetitive nonsense chants: “make it, don’t take it, make it, don’t fake it…”  One of them constantly breaks into mirthless cackles.  We get long, lingering shots of streetlamps, toilets, and the rear end of a man’s motionless body found in a field.  We get performance artists improvising: the transvestite poet is joined by a trumpet player who toots an “extrapolated monstrosity of redemption.”   We get tap-dancing.  All this makes Trash Humpers, even at a slim 78 minutes, an avant-garde endurance test.  My favorite, and perhaps the most honest, reaction to the film came from Bill C. of the Film Freak Central Blog: “Harmony Korine dares you to hate this movie…and I accept.”

Mimicking the lo-fi aesthetics of VHS tape, complete with horizontal hold tracking errors and blocky-fonted “play” and “rew” legends appearing on the screen, is a great trick to give Trash Humpers an antiquarian, found footage feel, and the film’s unique look is one of its few undisputed strengths.  The low-tech cinematography makes the picture alternately murky and glaring, depending on the lighting.  At times the lack of sharp detail makes shots look like impressionist paintings: yellow flowers in a field show up as garish smears.  And there is a sad sort of harsh beauty in the montage of streets and parking lots at night, with sickly gold and green glows of neon and halogen casting unnatural light on asphalt and cement surfaces.

But the look isn’t the only anachronistic thing about the movie, which evokes (like a third or fourth generation dub) the punk spirits of earlier shock auteurs like Paul Morrisey (1960s), John Waters(1970s), and Nick Zedd (1980s).  First rejecting conventional cinematography for the camcorder’s glare, Trash Humpers next dispenses with narrative in favor of disconnected episodes celebrating the beauty of vandalism and sadism.  Korine indulges his peculiar obsessions with the grotesque and with white trash anti-culture to the hilt here; the targets of the film’s satire are dumb rednecks, and the implicit sense of classism and self-satisfied superiority grates just as it did in Gummo.  In fact, Trash Humpers resembles nothing so much as the work of a budgetless student filmmaker determined to emulate Korine’s notorious first film.  But the inspired moments that gave life to Gummo, like the spaghetti in the bathtub scene, are missing, as is the stylistic variety and any semblance of emotional involvement with or sympathy for the characters.

Philosophically, the movie is reprehensible. Some generously see in it a critique of disposable consumer society, and the transvestite’s poem supports that view (“Are they not our true seed?”).  But, if you take Korine at his word, he likes and admires the humpers, seeing them as the stand-ins for the outsider artist free from society’s conventions. His director’s statement calls the film “almost an ode to vandalism” and he has said in an interview, “I have a real deep love and admiration for these characters… There can be a creative beauty in their mayhem and destruction.”  The director finds “creative beauty” here in vandalizing narrative (and other cinematic) conventions.  The humper he portrays expresses disdain for working Americans sleeping in their comfortable suburban homes, while he prowls the night looking for something to smash. “That’s a stupid way to live… We chose to live like free people.”

The humpers’ freedom is Sadean, however; they live with no consequences to their actions, free to torment Siamese twins and kill transvestites with hammers for a thrill. They’re hick Übermensch, living outside of society’s conventions according to their own laws, but they’re too stupid and unimaginative to do anything interesting with their freedom.  They smash idols (television sets) but can build nothing of their own.  It’s this “creative,” poetic,” “mystical” form of destruction that Korine, the artist, identifies with in the humpers; at the very least, he finds it preferable to the boring, bourgeois existences of the unseen respectable family folk slumbering inside their homes while the elderly roam the night, raping their trash cans and peeping in their windows.

Or does he?  As in Gummo, Trash Humpers features seventy to eighty minutes of grotesque, pornographic nihilism and ends with quick climax suggesting sudden epiphany, repentance and redemption.  The strategy here is reminiscent of what used to be called, in old roadshow exploitation films of the forties and fifties, the “square-up” reel.  A salacious feature would display with as much explicitness as possible whatever sex, crime, drug abuse, and general depravity the producers could get away with, then end quickly with a finale showing the socially corrupt anti-heroes getting their just deserts (prison, addiction, or a social disease).  The punishment “squared-up” the degeneracy, in a moral sense, and the depravity could be excused as a cautionary tale.  Like a bizarre exploitation film, Trash Humpers is detailed and leering when it’s time to describe surreal debauchery, but glancing when it addresses salvation.  The ending almost comes off as insincere and ironic, but a biographical fact—the director was a new father at the time the film was made—suggests the conclusion was honestly intended.

Korine is very good at shining a flashlight on American ugliness, but his art seldom progresses beyond that point. All he does is look for a new skewed expressionist angle for that beam, and fiddle with the contrast.  He tires to transmutes hideousness to beauty, and in small doses he nearly succeeds (the wrinkled rubber faces of the humpers, or with the tune he himself warbles in a folk-falsetto about the “three little devils” as he films weed-strewn fields.)  But a geek show is no substitute for poetry; he gives us novelty but not insight.  Like the failed cinematic alchemists of ugliness before him, the universal formula remains as elusive as ever.

NOTE:  Trash Humpers originally received a negative review; that stance has been softened only slightly in this reassessment.  366 Weird Movies readers voted the movie onto the List of the Best Weird Movies of All Time, over editor’s objections, and we respect their will; even though we don’t necessarily like the film as cinema, on a pure weirdness level it’s clearly worthy of enshrinement.  We do preserve the original “beware” notice we gave the film, however.  After all, a “beware ” rating on a film isn’t a guarantee you won’t like it… it just means, well, “beware.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a pre-fab underground manifesto to rank beside John Waters’ legendarily crass ‘Pink Flamingos’… riveting beyond all rationality…”–Rob Nelson, Variety (contemporaneous)

“Korine works in an almost blissfully weird utopia of marginalized naughtiness here, and more craftily distills his willful transgressiveness into something strange and watchable.”–Robert Abele, The Los Angeles Times (contemporaneous)

“…the most bizarre movie you’ll see this year, guaranteed, maybe ever… proves to be less a scary, ‘found tape’ whodunit than a jaw-dropping shocksploit with one very weird agenda.”–Kam Williams, kamwilliams.com

OFFICIAL SITE: T!R!A!S!H! % H!U!M!P!E!R!S – Features the trailer, links to buy the video, three sound clips suggested for use as ringtones, and dozens of hi-res stills (available in the “press area,” which is open to all)

IMDB LINK: Trash Humpers (2009)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

His Humps – Interview with the director for the New York Press

NYFF ’09 PODCAST: Harmony Korine – Podcast interview with Korine, hosted by The Village Voice‘s Aaron Hillis for greencine.com

Harmony Talks Trash – Less an interview, as the title suggests, and more an expansive profile of Korine from Clodagh Kinsella of Dossier

Harmony Korine ‘Trash Humpers’ Award Video – Korine’s comic filmed acceptance of a prize from the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival

“TRASH HUMPERS” TOO TRASHY FOR NETFLIX? – Blog report on the minor controversy regarding Netflix’s reluctance to stock Trash Humpers

LIST CANDIDATE: TRASH HUMPERS (2009) – Our original assessment of Trash Humpers

DVD INFO: Drag City’s lo-fi DVD (buy) contains the widescreen version of the film (which is odd, when you think about it—oversight, or joke?) along with a xerox-style 24 page “fanzine.”  It includes a 2 minute short film called “Blood of Havana,” which features one of the masks used in the film but is otherwise unrelated in theme or style.  There are also 16 minutes of outtakes, along with the 27 minute “Mac and Plac,” which, although presented as a freestanding short, is actually one very long deleted scene showing how the Siamese twins got separated.  Though this raw footage is an even tougher slog than Trash Humpers itself, the clip does give the viewer insight into the improvisatory process.

(This movie was nominated for review by our own Cameron Jorgenson, who said “looks very promising [but] it may not make it, because Gummo is already on the list.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING:  Chris Morris, Mark Heap, Amelia Bullmore, David Cann, Julia Davis, Kevin Eldon, Roz McCutcheon

PLOT:  “Jam” was a six episode TV series that originally aired on UK TV Channel 4.  Each 25

minute episode was aired without ad breaks or credits.  The show featured various “sketches” and faux interviews dealing with suicide, murder, sexual abuse, rape, child death, and medical malpractice.  The whole thing was backed by occasionally intrusive ambient music and some segments were filmed or dubbed in an out of synch fashion that made them even more awkward and disturbing than the subject matter would suggest.

The show was repeated at a later hour as “Jaaam!”  This variation took the original sketches and remixed the visuals to make the viewing experience more tricky and surreal with shots sped up, fed through filters and replaced with stills.   Many of the sketches were born in a BBC Radio 1 very late night/early morning show called “Blue Jam” which mixed vocal skits with ambient tracks.  Some of the radio sketches were taken directly from the old soundtrack and then lip synched on TV, resulting in another layer in the onion of weird that was “Jam.”

COMMENTS:  To mix preserves, “Jam” is like Marmite: you’ll either love it or hate it.  Allow me to give you a taster.

A couple believes their young daughter is a 45 year old man trapped in a young girl’s body, so they have the genitals of a 45 year old man grafted to her body.

A woman calls a plumber to her house to fix her dead baby.  He is aghast, but she explains the baby is only 3 weeks old and they’re meant to last longer than that, and after all “it’s just pipes really.”  In a throwaway comment she reveals that the father has said he will leave if she doesn’t stop “going on about the pipes.”  An offer of £1000/hour convinces the plumber to give it a try, and later he takes her up to the bedroom to see his work.  He’s plumbed the baby’s corpse into the heating system to make it warm and added a little tap so it will gurgle.

A couple bargaining for a house negotiate a reduction in price in return for sex sessions with the seller.  When he receives a better offer, he threatens to renege on the deal, so they offer the services of the husband’s mentally disabled sister.

Some folks will have already decided that “Jam” is not for them, and I can’t really blame them.  Part of me died when I typed the words “he’s plumbed the baby’s corpse into the heating system.”  My mother would be so proud.  “Jam” is as much horror as comedy; at times, it stretches its muscles to the tearing point while pushing the envelope.  Maybe it tries too hard most of the time.  Morris repeatedly invites us to laugh at some absurdity, and then muddies the water until we no longer know what to think or how to react.  Disgust swells as laughter dies.

Take the “Baby Plumber” sketch as an example of his technique.  A dark ambient soundtrack plays throughout the whole thing, and the dialogue is delivered in a very quiet, understated way.  The sketch starts traditionally enough: a woman answers the door to a plumber who says he’s come to fix her boiler.  It could almost be a ropy porno.  Immediately she corrects him and says that it’s not the boiler, it’s her baby.  The plumber looks as nonplussed as anyone would.  As the woman explains the situation he looks by turns puzzled, disgusted, pitying.  Then she mentions the money, and his pity and disgust are gradually replaced by greed.  He doesn’t immediately jump at the offer; his moral wrestling is visible on his face at every moment.  When he takes her upstairs to see his handiwork, he is clearly revolted and proud in equal parts.  Any amusement we might have found in the initial absurd request dies as we hear the plumber detail what he has done, and we see steam rising from the out of the shot.  Then as the viewer deals with this the sketch ends with the mother leaning over the cot, talking to the baby as though he is alive, and saying she doesn’t think daddy will leave now.

There is some fine acting on display, from both performers.  And the writing subtly draws a picture of a broken woman whose baby has died and whose marriage is collapsing as a result.  The plumber isn’t a bad man, he pities the woman, is horrified by her request, but he’s weak and venal and £1000/hr is a lot of money.

But is any of this funny, in any way?  Are we meant to smile, or wonder what we would do in similar circumstances?

“Jam” poses this question time and again.  We can all imagine finding the house of our dreams.  If someone offered us a substantial discount in return for sexual services, would we be wrong to consider the option?  This sketch starts out amusingly enough.  What is really funny is not the offer but how the couple reacts.  When the man thinks that the seller is just interested in his wife, he thinks it’s a great idea.  When it becomes clear that the seller is happy for the husband to perform the oral sessions, suddenly he’s not so sure.  His wife not only overcomes her own reluctance but takes grim pleasure in paying him back for his willingness to sell her services just moments before.  Smart acting tells us lots about this couple and their relationship; so far it’s amusing and thought provoking.  Then suddenly the sketch takes a detour to the very dark side.  When the wife offers the services of her mentally disabled sister-in-law, everything immediately becomes very wrong indeed.  Then we see the final shots of the confused young woman being taken into the house by the leering seller, and none of this is funny anymore.

And here’s one of the problems I have with “Jam.”  Morris clearly wants to mess with our heads.  Everything, the unconventional filming, the odd soundtrack, the bad taste, is designed to keep us off balance.  Had the “Sex For Houses” sketch occurred in a more conventional series it would have been breathtakingly shocking, but “Jam” tries so hard to shock us that after a while, particularly if you watch more than one episode at a time, your mind starts to go “meh,” just to protect itself.

Watch “Jam” and you’ll see male porn stars ejaculate to death, a man have sex with a seductive doctor while his wife struggles to give birth alone, a six-year-old girl who cleans up crime scenes, an acupuncturist who nails her clients to the table and leaves them to hang, a lonely woman so desperate for friends that she kills to keep them.  I don’t think that TV has to be safe, bland and unchallenging, and I’ve always laughed at inappropriate things, but I struggled with “Jam.”  It tries so hard that all too often the effort shows, and it reduces its own impact by screaming its bad taste in your face for twenty five minutes at a time.

Chris Morris’ work is always challenging, though.  In the UK Morris is best known for his TV work on “The Day Today,” a satirical news show shown on BBC 2 in 1994, and for his controversial current affairs satire “Brass Eye.”  He recently directed the full length film Four Lions, about a group of inept terrorists from Sheffield.

“Brass Eye,” in particular, courted controversy by tricking celebrities into lending their names to fake publicity campaigns about (for instance) a made up drug called cake, and an elephant in a German zoo that had its trunk stuck in its anus.  Morris’ masterpiece is probably the “Paedogeddon” episode of “Brass Eye,” which mocked the press and public hysteria in the UK surrounding pedophilia.  This is an excellent piece of work and if you can find the DVD of “Brass Eye” I wholeheartedly recommend it, even if some of the cultural references don’t translate.

If “Jam” were a movie rather than a TV series, it would be a List candidate;  it’s certainly unremittingly weird.  The lack of availability will probably count against it.  The DVD can still be found on some UK sites such as Play.com and is Region 0, so if folks are really keen they could get hold of a copy if they act quickly.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…most of Jam feels hideously, frighteningly wrong. But that’s what makes it so right. The word ‘genius’ gets flung around pretty casually; but if you accept that a good definition of a genius is somebody who creates something thoroughly new, utterly unlike what has gone before, then Chris Morris is a genius.”–The Independent, Thursday, 20 April 2000

DIRECTED BY:  Kinji Fukasaku

FEATURING:  Takeshi “Beat” Kitano, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Chiaki Kuriyama

PLOT:  Intergenerational relations in Japan have broken down to such an extent that

youngsters are rebelling by committing acts of violence and mass truancy.  The situation has deteriorated so badly that the government reacts by passing the “Battle Royale Act”: each year a randomly selected high school class is sent to an isolated, uninhabited island, fitted with remotely detonated explosive collars, given meager supplies and told to fight to the death.  One must emerge a victor or three days later everyone will die.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Although I consider Battle Royale to be a “must see” film, it really can’t go on the list.  It’s just not weird.  It’s funny, violent, overblown, disturbing, both operatic and banal, but not weird.

COMMENTS:  My first review of the film was a little flippant and then, quite randomly, I overheard a man say it was the “sickest” film he had ever seen.  He appeared to be quite sincere and I was driven to go back and watch it again, and again, to try and see what he had seen, what had disturbed him so much.

I don’t think that there’s anything in Battle Royale which will upset “366-ers.”  Yes, it is a film filled with images of youngsters killing each other and it would not be unnatural to find that disturbing.  The violence is so over the top, however, that it’s difficult not to be amused at times.  Who would have thought that a saucepan lid could prove to be such an effective weapon in the right hands?  It’s not even a very good saucepan lid.

The controversy surrounding Battle Royale on its release centered on the graphic violence and the age of the participants, but there is no connection between the violence in the film and real life violence involving teenagers.  The high school class that we follow are being forced against their will to participate in a life or death game, and they have been forced to do so by adults: adults who have stooped so far as to rig the game.  Despite having their backs against the wall, some of teenagers behave quite nobly; pleading for peace, setting up co-operative groups despite knowing only one can survive, committing suicide rather than participate in the game.

With every viewing of the film more and more contradictions appear.  The results of the battle appear to be televised during the opening scenes but the class chosen show astonishment that such a thing exists.  I would expect teenagers to talk about the Battle Royale Act incessantly.  The existence of such a grim piece of legislation would surely provoke further anger and violence amongst the younger generation, and hero worship of the victors.  There are indications throughout that the Act is counter-productive, that underground rebellion is growing.  A moment’s consideration would surely tell the adults that not only is this going to happen, but that there’s every chance the survivors of previous Battles are going to be eager rebels.  There’s nothing like training the best of the best to fight against you in the future, after all.

The more I think about this aspect of Battle Royale, the more impressed I am by how relevant it still is.  In the UK, at least, I can’t remember a time when the adult population was more terrified of their children, but who raised these children?  This generation of teenagers will go on to raise the next generation.  Will they in turn grow to fear their own children?

There’s certainly a deep and troubling message at the heart of Battle Royale.  You do have to dig through a wild and crazy cartoon ride of glorious, gory violence and hilarious teenage angst to get there, but it’s really worth it.  If you have a teenager, or can remember being one, then it is possible to laugh at the dialogue, all delivered in an appropriately earnest fashion.  In real life teenagers tend to flounce upstairs to their room, announcing that no-one understands them and they hate everyone, before terminating their soliloquy by slamming the bedroom door as hard as is humanly possible.  In Battle Royale they do the same thing, except they cap their tantrum by stabbing someone in the head.

I didn’t have the chance to ask the man I overheard just what it was that so upset him about this film.  I tend to think it was the depiction of youngsters stabbing, shooting and decapitating each other.  I could be wrong though.  The underlying message is one of fear and lack of communication between adults and their children, and this is far more disturbing than any number of bouncing heads with grenades in their mouths.

Is it possible to be disturbed and amused at the same time?  I find it is; in fact, real life does it to me all the time.  Battle Royale is both amusing and disturbing, and better than real life in that it has a fantastic, deadpan performance from the wonderful “Beat” Takeshi; watch with joy his possessiveness over the bag of cookies.  The only thing that puzzles me is why there isn’t a computer game version of BR yet.

366weirdmovies adds:  Battle Royale is just weird enough to deserve mention here, but not strange enough to vie for a spot on the List.  The “Battle Royale Act” itself is the weirdest thing about the film: randomly selected teenagers slaughtering each other in an un-televised death match mitigates the social problem of juvenile violence… how?  The Japanese people overwhelmingly vote to send their own children, innocent and guilty alike, off to be massacred… why?  The premise is absurd, and just in case we couldn’t see that on our own, the instructional video with the perky female commando describing to the students how their collars they’re wearing will blow their heads off if they disobey the games rules makes it crystal clear.  Something funny happens after this surrealistically satirical set up, though; the movie plays it straight the rest of the way, turning into a highly effective actioner with unexpected depth of characterization.  The fun is in watching the student’s varied and generally believable reactions to the bizarre situation, and in watching the field get winnowed down to the finalists in some very grim ways. The film’s midsection is invigorating—packed with juicy, bloody surprises—and the thrills you get block out the horror of the “Lord of the Flies” scenario.  Despite the perversity of the premise, the movie basically shows a good heart: it’s firmly on the side of the misunderstood kids, who aren’t just blood squibs waiting to be exploded for their splat value.  “Beat” Kitano unexpectedly makes for one of the slimiest, yet most haunted sadists since Norman Bates took out his mommy issues on random vacationers.   And although the movie does indeed prey on adult fears about the coming generation, it equally addresses teenage anxieties about cutthroat academic competition: the whole thing can be seen as a metaphor for the Japanese education system, where the pressure on kids to get into a prestigious junior high school can be overwhelming and feel like a life and death struggle.  Overall, Battle Royale is a very well-made film that’s unlikely to seriously disturb or offend anyone but the most squeamish; it’s not very weird, but it’s definitely in the ballpark, and worthy of a strong recommendation.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a stunningly proficient piece of action film-making, plunging us into a world of delirium and fear… this is a film put together with remarkable confidence and flair. Its steely candour, and weird, passionate urgency make it compelling.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Lars von Trier

FEATURING: William Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg

PLOT: He and She (the characters are nameless) are making love when their child tumbles to his death out of a window.  She falls into inconsolable grief, and He, a therapist, unwisely decides to take her under his personal care.  When He discovers the root of She’s anxiety and irrational fears centers around a woodland retreat they call Eden, He forces her to go there to face her fears; but when they arrive, nature itself seems determined to drive them both mad.

BACKGROUND:

• Von Trier says that he was suffering from extreme depression when he made Antichrist and that working on the script and the film was a form of self-therapy.  Von Trier was still depressed at the time of screening and sometimes had to excuse himself from the set.
• In the title card and much of the promotional art, the “t” in “antichrist” is suggested by a figure combining the Christian cross and the symbol for “woman.”
• The therapy He employs in the film is called “exposure therapy” (where an anxiety-ridden patient is gradually exposed to the source of their irrational fear); von Trier had undergone this treatment for his own anxiety problems, and thought little of the practice.
• The idea for the fox came from a shamanic journey taken by von Trier.
• Besides this film, British cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle also shot Slumdog Millionaire, for which he received the 2009 Academy Award, in the same year.  Of the two, Antichrist, with its extreme slow-motion photography, was the more difficult and magnificently shot film.
• Von Trier dedicated Antichrist to Andrei Tarkovsky, which caused jeers at Cannes and gave critical wags the opportunity to take deserved, if obvious, potshots (Jason Anderson’s “we now know what it would’ve been like if Tarkovsky had lived to make a torture-porn movie” was a typical dig).
• The film’s Cannes reception was tumultuous, with audience members reportedly fainting, and hostility between the press and von Trier (who proclaimed himself “the world’s greatest director.”)  Charlotte Gainsbourg won “Best Actress” for her brave and revealing performance.  The film received a special “anti-humanitarian” prize from the ecumenical jury (a Cannes sub-jury with a Christian focus), who called Antichrist “the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Without doubt, the searing image is of the encounter between Charlotte Gainsbourg’s intimate prosthetic and a pair of rusty scissors.  However indelibly gruesome this scene may be, however, it comes out of von Trier’s shock toolbox rather than from his weird shed.  For an image with a power to make us do more than squirm, we turn to the scene where He and She are copulating in the woods, with her head resting on a bed of roots from a massive oak tree.  The camera slowly pulls back to reveal a number of disembodied human hands sticking out at various places from between the woody oak limbs.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Though the graphic torture-porn (and plain old-fashioned porn)

Trailer for Antichrist (WARNING: contains non-explicit sexual content)

elements have stolen the headlines and alienated viewers, at bottom this is von Trier’s spookiest and most mysterious film, a trip deep into the heart of darkness, and one the viewer may have as difficult a time returning home from intact as the characters do.  The irrational horror of von Trier’s vision is only magnified by the sense that you aren’t so much watching a story of madness as watching a director going insane in real time, before your very eyes: he seems to lose control of his story as it progresses, turning the climax over to his internal demons for script-doctoring, before reasserting some measure of control of his material in a surreal epilogue.

COMMENTS: Lars von Trier deserves to be roundly criticized for burdening Antichrist with four transgressive, shocking scenes: not because of their content, per se, but because these gratuitous displays dominate the experience and draw attention away from the rest of the film, forcing viewers (and reviewers) to deal with their reactions to these provocations first.  Their main function is to serve as obstacles to appreciating the grim beauty of the remaining film.  Whether their inclusion is a calculated act by a prankster director, or a lapse in judgment resulting from psychological impairment (von Trier claims to have written the script as self-therapy to help him deal with a crippling bout of depression much like the one suffered by Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character), they are a blight on a work that otherwise is startling, stark, and deeply disturbing.  Some are poisoned by these masochistic directorial indulgences and can’t move past them.   But, if your internal editor can cut about 1-2 minutes of gross, gratuitous gunk from the movie when you play it back in your head, you may witness miracles.

The artistically offensive scenes are a gratuitous shot of hardcore penetration, a needlessly graphic scene of Gainsbourg masturbating, and two scenes of graphic genital mutilation, one of which brings to mind the farcical climax of Nekromantik.  The penetration scene, though only seconds long, is in a way the worst offender, because artistically it adds nothing to the beautiful, monumental opening classical montage, but only distracts our attention.  There’s no point to it other than to send the prudes scurrying out the door early, and prepare the remaining audience to expect later shocks.  Although there is a thematic excuse for the clitorendectomy, there is little  aesthetic justification for look-at-me, “Hustler”-meets-Saw explicitness with which it’s depicted.  It evokes a visceral grossout response that’s far out of harmony with the meditative spiritual dismay that surrounds the scene; the literalism takes us out of the moment, forcing us to wonder what’s possessing the director rather than what is possessing Gainsbourg.  It has to be a mistake rather than a prank or a cynical ploy, because no director could be so self-loathing as to deliberately sabotage the transcendental tone he’s labored so painstakingly to create by inserting a Pink Flamingos moment into his sincerely despairing, metaphysical horror film.

Your ability to enjoy Antichrist may depend on your ability to deploy selective amnesia to those distracting scenes (and, of course, also with your ability to enjoy movies that are divided into chapters accurately titled “Pain,” “Grief,” and “Despair”).  The rest of the movie is a mood piece with an uncanny ability to unnerve and to pull you in scary psychological directions you’d probably prefer not to follow to their conclusion.  The film begins with an exquisitely (hardcore insert aside) realized black and white, slow motion prologue, scored to a yearning Händel oratorio whose title translates as “Let Me Weep,” in which Gainsbourg and Dafoe make love while their unattended one-year old child plummets to his death.  (Watch the way the water droplets hang magically in the shower as the couple hump; suspended particles, often linked to procreation, will become one of the film’s major visual motifs).  After the boy’s death, the movie becomes a searing psychological drama as Gainsbourg falls into inconsolable grief, and therapist Dafoe, fearing her psychiatrist is medicating her into oblivion and denying her the opportunity to heal, suspends his practice and his ethics to devote his life to helping her work through her bereavement and face her pain.  This section of the film is fascinating, and gives us the opportunity to observe two fine actors at the peak of their powers.  Gainsbourg, while avoiding histrionics, is credibly hysterical, while Dafoe’s performance is subtle; at the same time, we admire his devotion to his wife while knowing that his treating her is a Bad Idea (in capital letters).  There’s more than a hint of psychological sadomasochism in their sessions, but never a suspicion of deliberate malice; just the foreordained fear that one of them will inevitably and inadvertently scar the other by probing too deeply.

When the couple travel into the twisted forest to face Gainsbourg’s irrational fear of the hermetic retreat where she spent time writing her thesis on gynocide, things get decidedly weird.  Their psychological turmoil seems to manifest itself via a malevolent nature.  These tantalizingly deliberate middle scenes, where an unknown but terrifying tension builds through odd apparitions such as a deer galloping away from Dafoe with a half-born foal sticking from its hindquarters and the unaccountably anxious sound of acorns pounding on the roof, are perhaps the richest in the movie, full of mysterious implications.  Two more totem animals appear alongside the deer, each with a disturbing quirk (one of which will causes some watchers to laugh instead of cringe).  Things become more and more unhinged, as themes of sexual guilt and nature’s inherent antipathy to human desires become mixed with increasing otherwordly imagery and a slow-boil occultist plot that hints at much more than it reveals.  As Gainsbourg appears to heal, Dafoe becomes less and less controlled, until a final rustic therapy session boils over into shocking violence—and into that damned distracting, revolting imagery.  Inside the cabin, as the couple lays bloody and battered on the dirt floor, rationality finally departs altogether, replaced by mysticism.  Von Trier wraps it all up with an epilogue that brings back the black-and-white and the Händel, and ends on a mysterious, dreamlike image that raises even more unanswered questions.

It’s difficult to divine what all of this—the erotic loathing, the marital dynamics, the battle between rational and irrational, the witchcraft and the feral mysticism, the evocation of anxiety and depression, the hints of religious allegory—is meant to add up to.  And yet, the picture feels cohesive; perhaps as nothing more than a terrifying vision of a universe hostile to human hope.  The movie’s  inscrutability didn’t stop many critics from dismissing it as pretentious and empty.  The most common complaint was Antichrist is blatantly misogynistic.  I find this interpretation both reductive and extremely hard to swallow, though easy to predict based on von Trier’s previous record of psychologically torturing and debasing his female characters (the sexual debasement of  Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, Nicole Kidman’s rape in Dogville, and the fact that Bjork accused the director of being an “emotional pornographer” and refused to act again after working with him in Dancer in the Dark).  Certainly, misogyny is one of the subjects of Antichrist, but a movie does not become racist simply because racism is one of its subjects.  It’s hard to imagine that anyone actually sees the intended message of the film as a transparent “women are inherently irrational and literally evil.”  If anything is obvious, it’s that there is nothing easy or literal about the movie.  Gainsbourg’s She is an incredibly complex character, both victim and victimizer, powerless and powerful.  Her “evil” is a mental condition, largely created by unquenchable grief (itself a product of an unquenchable love); even at her most sadistic, she’s never an unsympathetic cardboard villain

I think true misogyny mocks women and reduces them to frilly, ineffectual nothings (as the quote from the genuinely misogynistic The Horrors of Spider Island goes, to “hot goods for cold nights.”)  Here, Von Trier depicts femininity as powerful and mysterious; the trappings of witchcraft can be seen as empowering, rather than debasing.  The female is associated with the irrational, but it is also much more attuned to nature and to procreation.  There is an uncomfortable, almost Buddhistic intimation throughout the film that sex is evil, because its purpose is to perpetuate a cycle of pain. From the moment her boy tumbles to its death as her face contorts in orgasm, the association of emotional pain with sexual pleasure is the explicit source of the crippling guilt She feels throughout Antichrist.  She suffers at the death of her child, and the cause of her final desperate act to cut herself off from the shame sexual desire inspires in her.  Images of reproduction as a horrific event recur in the stillborn fetus hanging from the hindquarters of the bounding deer and the sinister acorns that rain on the rooftop and around Dafoe’s head.  The feminine, nature, and sex are all connected here, and He is alienated from them and cannot understand or control them.  With her intimate connection to procreation, She is more directly trapped inside the evil of nature than He is, and She seems to realize and live a deep, despairing truth that he cannot grasp.  If this is misogyny, it’s a far more complex and nuanced form of misogyny than the simple prejudice that goes under that name; it’s also not something that can be immediately dismissed by name calling.

Von Trier is more disturbed here by existence itself than he is by women.  His philosophy in Antichrist appears to be a completely nihilistic one, at least until the enigmatic epilogue with faceless women arising as if freed from their graves.  Unlike most nihilist prophets, von Trier’s not self-congratulatory, not proud to have figured out a gnostic truth the unwashed bourgeois masses can never grasp.  With a philosophy forged in the fires of deep depression, he’s revulsed by the abyss he has seen.  The disgust that flows through Antichrist is genuine, and while it doesn’t totally absolve von Trier from the missteps in taste that weaken the movie, they do come from his desire to communicate—and to not glamorize or gloss over—his sincere loathing.

Von Trier’s decision to dedicate his ultraviolent shockfest to Andrei Tarkovsky moved Cannes audiences to catcalls.  Certainly, the tasteful Russian would never stoop to such cynical exploitation tactics as explicit genital mutilation, and the deeply Christian director would never endorse such a nihilistic message.  But there actually are many echoes of the mysterious minimalist master in von Trier’s hypnotic pacing; in his lingering on images of pure cinematic beauty; and in the enigmatic, supra-rational, irreducible meaning of the film, which seems channeled from some other plane of existence.  It’s just that, while Tarkovsky had angels whispering in his ear, von Trier has terrible devils.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the only honest way to deal with a movie as dreamlike and filled with self-hatred and sealed off from the world as ‘Antichrist’ is by resisting von Trier’s shtick…  this isn’t just the most personal film von Trier has ever made, but something like an unconscious film. As magnificent as Dafoe and Gainsbourg are, they’re specters in a shadow play excavated from the deepest recesses of Lars von Trier’s troubled psyche.”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com

“[Antichrist] speaks the language of madness with astonishing fluency.”–Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle

“…an out-and-out disaster — one of the most absurdly on-the-nose, heavy-handed and unintentionally comedic calamities I’ve ever seen in my life. On top of which it’s dedicated to the late Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, whose rotted and decomposed body is now quite possibly clawing its way out of the grave to stalk the earth, find an axe and slay Von Trier in his bed.”–Jeffery Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere

OFFICIAL SITE: Antichrist (2009) – The Criterion Collection – contains the trailer, a scholarly essay by film professor Ian Christie, and a collection of press clippings

IMDB LINK: Antichrist (2009)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Antichrist Pressbook – courtesy of the Cannes Antichrist page.  Contains the “director’s confession,” a very intelligent interview with von Trier by Knud Romer, and more

Lars von Trier – ‘It’s good that people boo’ – von Trier’s first post-Cannes interview/profile, by a sympathetic Kaleem Aftab of The Independent

“I Don’t Hate Women”: Lars von Trier on Antichrist – von Trier briefly addresses the controversy surrounding the film, among other topics discussed in this Rotten Tomatoes interview with Luke Goodsell.  An earlier RT interview with Jonathan Crocker is here.

Cannes #6: A Devil’s Advocate for “Antichrist”- Roger Ebert’s Cannes blog entry goes much deeper than his official newspaper review of the film, offering an interpretation of the movie as a fantastical religious allegory

Antichrist’s Willem Dafoe: ‘We Summoned Something We Didn’t Ask For’ – Movieline interview with star Dafoe

Lars von Trier’s film Antichrist shocks Cannes – Reuters contemporary account of the furor Antichrist raised at Cannes

ANTICRHRIST: The man who made this horrible, misogynistic film needs to see a shrink – Chris Tookey, of the Daily Mail, is one of the few critics who actually outlined the case for Antichrist‘s alleged misogyny, rather than accepting it as a given

Is Antichrist director Lars von Trier a misogynist? – Slate’s Jessica Winter gives a nuanced and well-researched analysis of the title question, though she stops short of definitively answering “no”

DVD INFO: There was an Australian DVD release of Antichrist (with the “scissors” cover) that was pulled very quickly when Criterion became interested in acquiring the rights. It’s highly unusual for Criterion to issue a new release film, but they chose to do so with their 2-disc, director-approved Antichrist set (buy). Disc one provides the film, three versions of the trailer, and a commentary dialogue between von Trier and film scholar Murray Smith (von Trier stumbles a bit in the commentary; Smith seems to understand the film better than the author does). Extras on disc 2 include interviews with von Trier and stars Dafoe and a 45-minute session with Gainsbourg; footage from the Cannes premiere, including the star’s promotional interviews and footage of a reporter demanding von Trier “justify” the film; and seven “making of” featurettes, each about 15 minutes in length, covering the “test film” made with different actors, the visual effects, the soundtrack, the production design, makeup and props, the animal wranglers, and a bit by the movie’s “misogyny consultant” divulging her research into the history of witchcraft persecutions.
The film is also available, with the same features, on Blu-ray (buy).

DIRECTED BY: Harmony Korine

FEATURING: Rachel Korine, Harmony Korine

PLOT: A narrativeless, shot on VHS chronicle of four rednecks in wrinkled geriatric masks

who wander around a nearly deserted suburbs drinking wine, demolishing abandoned television sets, torturing and murdering the bizarre outcasts they come across in their wanderings, and (of course) humping trash.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Any film in which four rednecks in latex masks that make them look like escapees from a nursing home for the criminally insane force a pair of Siamese twins connected at the head by what looks like a giant tube sock to eat pancakes doused in Palmolive obviously has weirdness in its corner.  But among Trash Humpers many qualities, weirdness isn’t the pre-eminent one: the movie is also repetitive, ugly, pointless, unsavory, deliberately annoying, and tedious.  In fact, the weirdness here is likely just another blunt weapon used to bludgeon the viewer; the film is intended as an anti-audience provocation rather than a movie.  As one reviewer sagely put it, “Harmony Korine dares you to hate this movie…and I accept.”

COMMENTS: Mimicking the lo-fi aesthetics of VHS tape, complete with horizontal hold tracking errors and blocky-fonted “play” and “rew” legends appearing on the screen, is a great trick to give Trash Humpers an antiquarian, found footage feel. But the look isn’t the only anachronistic thing about the movie, which evokes (like a third or fourth generation dub) the punk spirits of earlier shock auteurs like Paul Morrisey (1960s), John Waters (1970s), and Nick Zedd (1980s). First rejecting conventional cinematography for the camcorder’s glare, Trash Humpers next dispenses with narrative in favor of disconnected episodes celebrating the beauty of vandalism and sadism. In between bouts of garbage copulation, the nameless humpers break TVs with sledgehammers and ride around a deserted, trash-strewn Nashville with baby dolls dragging behind their bicycles. In the course of their wanderings they meet a boy in a Sunday suit whom they teach to slip razor blades into apples, pancake-making fake Siamese twins, overweight prostitutes who serenade us with a chorus of “Silent Night,” and a street poet dressed in a French maid’s costume. Korine indulges his peculiar obsessions with the grotesque and with white trash anti-culture to the hilt here; the implicit sense of classism and self-satisfied superiority grates just as it did in Gummo. In fact, Trash Humpers resembles nothing so much as the work of a budgetless student filmmaker determined to emulate Korine’s notorious first film. But the inspired moments that gave life to Gummo, like the spaghetti in the bathtub scene, are missing, as is the stylistic variety and any semblance of emotional involvement with the characters. This makes Trash Humpers, even at a slim 78 minutes, an avant-garde endurance test. Philosophically, the movie is reprehensible. Some generously see in it a critique of disposable consumer society, but if you take Korine at his word, he admires the humpers and sees them as the stand-ins for the outsider artist free from society’s conventions. His director’s statement calls the film “almost an ode to vandalism” and he has said in an interview, “I have a real deep love and admiration for these characters… There can be a creative beauty in their mayhem and destruction.” The humper he portrays expresses disdain for Americans sleeping in their comfortable suburban homes, while he prowls the night looking for something to smash. “That’s a stupid way to live… We chose to live like free people.” The humpers’ freedom is Sadean, however; they live with no consequences to their actions, free to torment Siamese twins and kill transvestites with hammers for a thrill. They’re redneck Übermensch, living outside of society’s conventions according to their own laws, but they’re too stupid and unimaginative to do anything interesting with their freedom; they smash idols (television sets) but can build none of their own. Korine is very good at shining a flashlight on American ugliness, but his art seldom progresses beyond that point. All he does is look for a new skewed expressionist angle for that beam, and fiddle with the contrast. He has a talent for the shabbily uncanny: the geriatric masks are calibrated to look almost like real makeup, but are just artificial enough so that you never figure out whether the humpers are actually intended to be old timers, or if they’re just wearing masks for anonymity. Korine himself frequently warbles a little tune about “three little devils” while filming empty parking lots or weed-strewn fields, and the falsetto folk melody mixes the irritating and the sublime in a curiously effective way. In these tiny slices Korine nearly transmutes hideousness to beauty, but, like the failed cinematic alchemists of ugliness before him, the universal formula remains as elusive as ever.

Trash Humpers was made in only a few weeks with a small crew of family and friends, and largely improvised; production began soon after the director’s biggest budget production, Mister Lonely (2008), flopped commercially. Distributor Drag City got fortuitous mileage out of Netflix’s initial refusal (since revoked) to stock the film, which made the picture’s content seem much more daring and outré than it actually is (it’s not tame, but if you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen much worse).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Korine works in an almost blissfully weird utopia of marginalized naughtiness here, and more craftily distills his willful transgressiveness into something strange and watchable.”–Robert Abele, The Los Angeles Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by our own Cameron Jorgenson, who said “looks very promising [but] it may not make it, because Gummo is already on the list.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Benjamin Christensen

FEATURING: Benjamin Christensen, Astrid Holm, Karen Winther, Maren Pedersen

PLOT: The film’s narrative segments involve the betrayals and accusations of witchcraft that destroy a small town in medieval Europe, and the monks who instigate them. Most of the film, however, consists of Christensen’s free-form discourse about the history of witchcraft and demonology.


BACKGROUND:

• Christensen was an actor-turned-director with two feature films (The Mysterious X and Blind Justice) under his belt when he made Häxan.  He later moved to Hollywood, but he never recaptured Häxan‘s magic, and most of his subsequent films have been lost.
• The film spent two years in pre-production as Christensen researched scholarly sources on medieval witchcraft, including the Malleus Maleficarum, a German text originally intended for use by Inquisitors.  Many of these are cited in the finished film, and a complete bibliography was handed out at the film’s premiere.
• In the 1920s and afterward Häxan was frequently banned due to nudity, torture, and in some countries for its unflattering view of the Catholic Church.
• Some of the footage from this film may have been reused for the delirium sequences in 1934′s Maniac (along with images from the partially lost silent Maciste in Hell).
• In 1968, a truncated 76-minute version of Häxan was re-released for the midnight movie circuit under the title Witchcraft Through the Ages by film distributor Anthony Balch, with narration by William S. Burroughs and a jazz score.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The scenes set at the Witches’ Sabbaths are overflowing with bizarre imagery.  The most unforgettable example is probably when the witches queue up and, one after another, kiss Satan’s buttocks in a show of deference.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: In making Häxan, Christensen dismissed the then-nascent rules of

Scene from Häxan (1922)

classical filmmaking and turned it into a sprawling, tangent-filled lecture based on real historical texts.  This already makes the film unique, but the use of ahead-of-its-time costuming and special effects in order to film a demonic panorama right out of Bosch or Bruegel, and Christensen’s irreverent sense of humor as he does it, is what makes it truly weird.

COMMENTS: In 1922, even before the documentary had been firmly established as a cinematic genre, Häxan was already undermining its conventions.  It’s a meticulously researched, intellectually credible film about science and historical fact, but it’s nonetheless replete with scatological humor, religious satire, and grotesque flights of fancy.  It’s an utter anomaly for its time period, with an ambitious structure and outrageous content that looks as if they were pulled out of an avant-garde film from the 1960s.  If one didn’t know better, it’d be easy to mistake Christensen for a time traveler who set down his roots in the silent era.

The film starts out in a relatively innocuous fashion with Christensen himself giving the audience a primer in medieval cosmology, followed by a rundown of how scholars and artists understood witchcraft.  Pointing at models and woodcuts, he lays out a historical basis for the inquiries and reenactments that constitute the bulk of the film.  The dry, pedagogical mode of the first chapter is functional (and informative) as actual documentary, but it serves an additional purpose within the film: to set up false tonal expectations which Christensen can eagerly overturn.  At every opportunity, he undermines his straight-faced history lesson, first by lingering on spectacles like a giant clockwork mock-up of hell, and then by descending into a full-fledged dramatization where sincere sociological curiosity and lurid jokes coexist in an uneasy alliance.

For the rest of the film, Christensen—still narrating via intertitles in a first-person perspective—jumps from one macabre episode to another, vividly illustrating beliefs about witches, and then (in the film’s longest segment) detailing how those beliefs led to violent, institutionalized persecution.  But he’s never restrained by these mini-narratives, readily interrupting them with montages of other, wilder satanic practices.  A witch procures love potions, leading her client to fully visualized fantasies of being pursued by a horny monk.  This scene leads, by and by, to a presentation of the devil’s many methods for seducing housewives, which features a rare example of pre-1960s screen nudity when one of them goes for an unclothed jaunt by moonlight.  The devil, here and elsewhere, is played with transgressive glee by—who else?—Christensen.

This is just a taste of how far the film travels in its first half-hour.  It’s hard to find an analogue anywhere to the tone and structure that Christensen employs: the only two I can really conjure up are Richard Linklater‘s Waking Life, which similarly blends documentary and fiction, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, whose refrain of “and now for something completely different…” could be Häxan‘s rallying cry.  But, for all the radical ingenuity of the film’s genre-blurring structure, it’s the visual fragments that really stick with you.  Like so many of the filmmakers whose works have been featured here—Tod Browning and Ken Russell, for example—Christensen’s many motivations are all tied up with his desire to show the audience something truly shocking.  To put it briefly, he succeeds.

It’s ironic, and probably Christensen’s intention, that for a film proposing to debunk archaic beliefs about witchcraft, Häxan‘s depictions of evil magic rites are easily its most enduring moments. In the service of his feverish imagination, the director yokes together nudity, gore, torture, and monstrous disguises, which produce macabre tableaux that are striking in their visual originality, visceral repugnance, and ribald comedy. Early in the film, a drunken old woman falls asleep, then dreams of a mansion inhabited by the devil, who showers her in coins. The coins, in turn, come to life and attack her through stop-motion animation—a technique used again moments later as a goat-headed imp breaks through a door. Christensen’s use of stop-motion is reminiscent of Georges Méliès or Charley Bowers, and, like many of Häxan‘s techniques, anticipates horror films made 40-50 years later.

The only other scene to really match the old woman’s dream arrives when Maria, a beggar accused of witchcraft, is being tortured into confession. She suddenly gushes forth with one fantastic account after another, and the film visually tracks with her admissions, displaying demonic orgies, sacrilegious rituals conducted by the devil’s grandmother, and an eye-popping scene in which Maria gives birth to the devil’s children—children who look like a cross between the Mugwumps from Naked Lunch and something out of Star Wars‘ Mos Eisley Cantina. This infernal imagery really illuminates the gulf between Christensen and Hollywood cinema of the early ’20s, or even the admittedly weird German Expressionists, who still weren’t delving into the same kind of phantasmagorical, explicitly erotic visions.

If Christensen has any stylistic kin, it’s Carl Theodor Dreyer, who directed him as an actor in the queer drama Mikaël (1924), and later made The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which echoes the close-ups of grotesque monastic faces from Häxan‘s trial scenes.  Film scholar Chris Fujiwara also cites Häxan’s influence on literary and cinematic surrealists like Luis Buñuel, whose L’Âge d’Or (1930) also juxtaposes documentary and twisted fantasy (and also has a healthy dose of anticlericalism).  Like all good avant-garde masterpieces, however, Christensen’s magnum opus didn’t exactly spark any widespread changes in silent cinema.  Instead, it remains confined to its own lonely corner of cinema’s ancient history, ready to be
revisited by cinephiles seeking out their weird heritage.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Häxan flows along like a waking dream. Alternating between hallucinatory nightmare, black humor, and straight faced documentation, the film is never less than visually stunning and contains more imaginative visuals than any ten Hollywood blockbusters combined.”–Mondo Digital (DVD)

“Ostensibly an exposé of religious persecution born from ignorance of science, Häxan can be easily classified as a masterpiece of silent horror — or, when filtered through the bong water of the psychedelic ’60s to become Witchcraft Through the Ages, as a trippy exercise in surreal pop filmmaking extravagance.”–Mark Bourne, DVD Journal (DVD)

“…boldly sensationalistic, it’s a session of medieval woodcarvings animated into a zesty parade of satanism, anti-clericalism and anarchic sexuality…a brimstone headtrip before they were fashionable.”–Fernando F. Croce, Cinepassion.org (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Haxan: Free Download and Streaming – Häxan available to stream or download on the Internet archive, with a public domain classical score<

Häxan (1922): The Criterion Collection – Criterion’s homepage for the release includes an essay on the film by Chris Fujiwara and detailed notes on the recreation of the original score

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Witchcraft Through the Ages: The Story of Haxan, the World’s Strangest Film, and the Man Who Made It: 127 page biography of Christensen by Jack Stevenson, focusing on Häxan

DVD INFO: Häxan received an opulent DVD release from the Criterion Collection (buy) in 2001.  In addition to some informative special features—including outtakes, a well-documented listing of the woodprints used in the film, an introduction recorded in 1941 by Christensen himself, and a commentary track by Danish film scholar Casper Tybjerg—the DVD contains the abridged alternative version, Witchcraft Through the Ages.  While its narration by William S. Burroughs would appear to enhance the film’s weird credentials, it’s actually more of a distraction, as is the cacophonous jazz score (featuring violinist Jean-Luc Ponty).  This version makes for an amusing oddity, but little more, while the original conveys the full sense of Christensen’s dynamic authorial personality, and has a classical soundtrack modeled on the music played at the film’s Stockholm premiere.

The Criterion release supersedes the old Tartan DVD (currently unavailable), which may be interesting to some because it includes two alternate soundtracks for the film: an electronic/industrial composition by the band Bronnt Industries Kapital and a score performed on hammered dulcimer by Geoff Smith.

Because Häxan is in the public domain, it can be downloaded and viewed freely from the Internet Archive, youtube or other sources. The Witchcraft Through the Ages cut of the film with the jazz score and William S. Burroughs’ narration is not public domain, however, and must be purchased or rented.

FEATURING:  Morjana Alaoui, Mylène  Jampanoï, Catherine Bégin, Robert Toupin, Patricia Tulasne

PLOT: A girl ventures into unknown territory when she helps her lover, a former torture victim,

seek revenge on her one-time captors, in this unusual, bloody tale of madness and sadism.

WHY IT  WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  You may have heard incomplete descriptions of Martyrs in the media or by word of mouth.  Hushed references and whispered gossip might make it sound like a snuff movie, a sado-masochistic tableau, or a scandalous exploration of taboos.  It is none of these things. While Martyrs is a heavy, very violent film with a grim story, it is not a snuff movie or a sensational expose of torture.  It is an offbeat, horrifying thriller, and nothing more.

COMMENTS: When Anna (Alaoui) and her lover Lucie (Jampanoï) embark on a mission of revenge against Lucie’s childhood torturers, the situation quickly spirals out of control.  The couple locates Lucie’s alleged abductors, but did they find the right people?  Lucie is stalked and victimized by the spectre of the mutilated sister she had to leave behind, and Anna is not so sure where the truth lies.  In the process of exacting retribution the landscape changes dramatically and Anna is swept into an incomprehensible morass of hell on earth.

I’m so underwhelmed!  I was expecting a real stick of dynamite, but instead, I got one of those Fourth of July smoldering snake novelties.  Movie site rumors and an ongoing debate over whether or not Martyrs amounts to little more than “torture porn” made me expect a wild ride.  I had hoped to see the ultimate horror movie, or at least something mindlessly vulgar and sensational, but no dice.

What I got was an extremely well-shot, conventionally produced, offbeat story.  Unfortunately, it consists of two loosely linked plot sequences which, once combined, don’t amount to a sum greater than their parts.  Nor do they deliver any sort of soul stirring revelation.  Ho hum.

I found Martyrs to be intriguing, but, well, kinda boring.  Maybe even a little tedious in places.  The movie would better lend itself to being made into a couple of twenty-three minute “Twilight Zone” episodes.

The film’s climax, while innovative, offers an opportunity for something highly imaginative and colorful that never comes.  The idea revealed at the denouement begs for deeper elaboration and exploration.  It turns out to be a discovery which is the very cornerstone of the movie, the justification for everything we have endured.  This paradigm should be central to the plot; but instead, it is a parting note.  Glossed over, it receives only a cursory nod of  acknowledgment for having driven all of the action.  It can be argued that the irony and surprise of the ending hinges on this idea being veiled in mystery, but really it was obfuscated as a writer’s convenience.  The truth of this is apparent because the rest of the film is rather one dimensional otherwise, and can only be redeemed in context by the conclusion.

While horrifying at times, Martyrs is almost a drama, marginally a thriller—a slow, unsuspenseful thriller.  There are a few realistic,  graphic depictions of straight-forward violence that leave little to one’s sense of curiosity, but these are less horrific and gratuitous than what is now standard in many horror and crime movies.  The violence in the Hellraiser movies, for instance, is far more excruciating to watch.  By contrast, the blood-letting in Martyrs is not really the kind we want to see, nor does it provide a satiating thrill for the cruel at heart.  Accordingly, I dismiss allegations that the film is “torture porn.”

There is the fact of torture and we see the results, but not much in the way of the actual act of torture.  Martyrs is a dark, unusual movie that has a few spine tingling moments and flirts with a very wild, mind blowing plot concept, but then fails to explore it.

I would recommend Martyrs as a well-produced, refreshing change of pace from conventional Hollywood crap.  The actors are interesting, the film doesn’t follow a hokey formula, and the sets are engrossing.  Disappointingly, because Martyrs hints at something profound yet does not deliver, it never rises to its potential to be a truly innovative entry in the thriller or horror genres.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Up until the halfway point, the film is straightforward, if numbingly violent and deranged. However, it then takes an abrupt twist, becoming a bizarre, metaphysical conspiracy thriller blending Illuminati literature with peyote buttons.”–Al Kratina, Montreal Gazette (contemporaneous)

“Unless you regularly do mushrooms and go to Lady Gaga concerts with your good friend Crispin Glover, then watching Maniac is guaranteed to be the weirdest experience you have ever had.”–ad copy for the Rifftrax version of Maniac

DIRECTED BY: Dwain Esper

FEATURING: Bill Woods

PLOT:  An on-the-lam vaudevillian kills and impersonates his mad scientist employer, driving

himself mad in the process.

BACKGROUND:

• Dwain Esper was a successful building contractor who, it is rumored, only got into the movie business when he came into possession of a cache of filmmaking equipment that was abandoned in a foreclosed property.  He worked outside the film distribution system, taking his exploitation movies on the road and showing them in rented venues, accompanied by lurid advertisements promising forbidden fruit for “adults only.”  Esper obtained the rights to Tod Browning’s Freaks from MGM for a song, and took the movie on the road with his other exploitation hits.  Other films he directed or produced had titles such as Marihuana, the Weed with Roots in Hell and How to Undress in Front of Your Husband.
• Made outside of the Hollywood system, Maniac was not subject to the Hays Production Code, although it probably ran afoul of most local censorship laws.  Audacious directors like Esper deliberately put racy material into their films that the major studios could not touch.  Maniac contains a scandalous amount of nudity, which had been extremely rare in motion pictures up until that time and was banned outright when the Hays Code began to be enforced in 1934.
• The film incorporates (steals) footage from Maciste in Hell (1925), and reportedly also from Häxan (1920) and Fritz Lang‘s Sigfried (1923), for its delirium sequences.
• Named one of the 100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made in The Official Razzie Movie Guide.
• One gruesome scene involving a cat’s eyeball appears to be a real case of animal abuse, but is almost certainly a convincing illusion.
• The movie’s ending rips off the Edgar Allen Poe short story “The Black Cat.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are lots of strange, unexpected sights to be seen in this time capsule of man’s freakish desires, but you won’t forget the cat’s eyeball.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Maniac promises to show us the life of a madman as a shameless

Scene from Maniac

pretext for delivering multiple shock scenes in an “educational” context, but the final product is so disjointed, feverish and crazily assembled that it seems to be the work of an actual madman.

COMMENTS: Most bad movies are just bad.  A rare breed are so bad they’re “unintentionally” entertaining (famously, Ed Wood Jr.’s Plan 9 from Outer Space).  Another rare breed are so bad—so cluelessly revealing of their auteurs skewed worldviews—that they assume a mantle of weirdness (see List entries Horrors of Spider Island and The Beast of Yucca Flats).  But probably no film in history has been as simultaneously bad, weird, and entertaining as the unique Maniac.  Aside from Esper’s exploitation masterpiece, perhaps only Wood’s Glen or Glenda? could be considered as having completed this unholy hat trick ; but that 1950s pro-transvestite pseudo-documentary contained dry passages that thrill bad movie enthusiasts highly attuned to continuity errors and strangled prose but alienate regular folk, whereas Maniac is packed with wall-to-wall jaw-droppingness that cannot fail to stun and impress the most straight-laced viewer.

The claim that Maniac is weird, entertaining, and bad brings to mind that old metaphysical conundrum about bad movies: if a movie is entertaining, then can it also be bad?  Movies are generally meant to entertain, after all, so isn’t an “entertaining bad movie” an oxymoron?  Maniac is one of those oddities that obliterates the distinction between “good” and “bad”: it carves out its own insane realm where deranged overacting, insane plot twists, and superimposed Satanic stock footage converge to create a self-contained universe of consistent absurdity.  Abominable acting and illogical story aside, if we consider the way in which the director realized his intended vision as the standard for a “good” film, then Maniac is a masterpiece.  Esper created exactly the shocking, impossible-to-turn-away-from movie he set out to make.  He was almost certainly as pleased to see the final product—which made him a mint on the roadshow circuit—as lovers of deranged cinema are to view this maniacal curio.

The one feature of Maniac that is unquestionably bad, but in a fun way, is the acting.  Early in the film, our hero’s mad scientist benefactor utters—in his bad German accent, drawing out every syllable as if he’s being paid per second of dialogue—the immortal, unintentionally ironic words, “Once a ham… alvays a ham.  You… an actor?”  He’s addressing the main character, but the charge could be leveled at anyone in the cast.  The movie is a grand tour through all the pre-war styles of over- and under-acting.  Starring as a vaudevillian with a legally spotty past indentured to a man trying to bring the dead back to life, Bill Woods seems to think he’s in a Shakespearean tragedy.  He enunciates, and conveys immense psychic distress via his eyebrows.  (Woods does deserve credit for mimicking the deceased doctor’s ostentatious accent almost perfectly when he impersonates his ex-boss).  One character, Mrs. Buckley, is uncannily calm and levelheaded when, just after her husband absconds with a zombie girl, she uncovers a murder.  She delivers the lines “Doctor, what have you done? This looks like murder!” in a tone reminiscent of a bad actress scolding a naughty child.  Minor characters seem to have been grabbed from a rest homes or dancing halls and given their lines to learn five minutes before filming starts.  There’s the cat-raising imbecile next door (known in the script as “Goof”), who thinks he’s auditioning for a role as the slow-witted Dead End Kid, despite the fact that he’s in his forties.  There are the four women chosen mainly for their willingness to act their scene in lingerie, including one with an improbable chipmunk voice that sounds like Betty Boob with a lungful of helium.  Even the woman hired to play a corpse isn’t convincing.  And of course there’s the incredible “transformation” performance (see clip above), which might actually be good acting: although it looks like Shemp Howard struggling to complete a monologue from Tennessee Williams while undergoing an epileptic fit, for all anyone knows, this is exactly how a man who believes he orangutan acts when accidentally shot up with an overdose of superadrenaline.

Although Maniac‘s acting is unquestionably terrible, the script’s awfulness is more ambiguous.  Managing to shoehorn in reanimation of the dead, a mad doctor, a murder, an orangutan man rapist, two topless scenes (so the adults-only audience gets their money’s worth), a one-eyed heart-eating cat named Satan, two scheming women, a subplot on the unexpected economics of cat skinning, a catfight with hypodermic needles, a protagonist serially suffering from three or four major psychiatric disorders, and an Edgar Allan Poe finale, all in under an hour, is no mean feat; it’s no surprise that logic had to be cut to make room.  Still, it’s remarkable that things flow together as well as they do: the mad doctor’s experiments lead to his murder, the murder leads to the Maxwell’s impersonation, which leads to his blackmail by Mrs. Buckley, which leads to his plan to dispose of her and to his eventual capture.  There is a dream/nightmare logic at work here.  It’s also hard to imagine that the screenwriter (Hildegarde Stadie, Esper’s wife) wasn’t at least partly aware of the absurdity of the script.  There’s a strand of what appears to be deliberate black humor at play, as when Maxwell examines a cat’s eyeball and proclaims (in full ham mode) “It’s not unlike an oyster, or a grape!”  It’s hard to imagine that even the most inept hack could type that line, or a speech like “The murderous Satan—the wretch that ate Meirschultz’s heart!  He still has the gleam…” without chuckling knowingly to herself.

Esper clearly can’t direct actors—unless he had a hidden genius for coaxing deliberately campy performances from them—but he does add some unique, memorable touches to the film.  Most notably, it was a stroke of demented genius to take the infernal footage from the old silent film Maciste in Hell and superimpose it over Maxwell’s face to show his descent into madness.  The effect is striking and incongruous in it’s juxtaposition of the ridiculous (Bill Wood’s spasming face) and the sublime (hazy imps and long-nailed warlocks).  Also, his cinematography is not as static and stagebound as some films of the era; rather than nailing the camera in one spot and filming the action, Esper changes the angles and makes the film visually tolerable.  A less successful directorial gambit, but one that also adds to the movie’s singular atmosphere, is his decision to interrupt the action with occasional intertitles describing dementia praecox, paresis, paranoia, and manic depression.  These tidbits serve as funny, blatantly insincere reminders of the educational value of the motion picture which we are watching unspool before us.

Maniac is a cautionary tale.  The prologue, by Wm. S. Sadler, M.D., F.A.C.S.,  warns of “the disastrous results of fear thought not only on the individual but on the nation” and reminds us that it is “the duty of every sane man and woman to establish quarantine against fear.”  Dr. Sadler also coins a snappy slogan that today would land him a gig as a syndicated TV psychologist: “fear thought is most dangerous when it parades as forethought.”  The movie’s message is obvious: if we give in to fear for even a moment, we will go insane, murder our employer, accidentally inject a patient with an experimental drug,  and orchestrate a syringe duel between our wife and our blackmailer in a basement.  Either that, or Esper was looking for some flimsy moral/educational justification to show topless women and a guy eating an eyeball, as a defense in case of an obscenity prosecution.  Whichever the case, it’s the audience that benefits: Maniac is one of the wildest cinematic rides you’ll ever take, an experience not soon forgotten.  Thank God for Dwain Esper’s sleazy courage in bringing to light the timeless, titillating pitfalls of poor mental hygiene.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Jaw-dropping weirdness, a real piece of showmanship history, and a must for genre aficionados.”–”VideoHound’s Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics”

“Don’t pass up an opportunity to see this incredible old adults-only oddity… You won’t believe it.”–Michael Weldon, “The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film”

“Even seeing it isn’t believing!”–Ken Hanke, Mountain Xpress (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Maniac (1934)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Maniac script – The complete Maniac script (including parts that weren’t filmed) as written by Hildegarde Stadie Esper, Dwain Esper’s wife

Maniac B-movie review – a hilarious synopsis, stills, audio clips and a snippet of film from Andrew Borntreger of badmovies.org

Maniac (1934) – Turner Classic Movie’s Page on the film contains a complete plot synopsis, but little else

DVD INFO: Maniac is in the public domain and can be watched or legally downloaded at the Internet Archive.  The best available DVD edition may be the Kino Dwain Esper double feature disc (buy), which contains both Maniac and the almost-as-wild Narcotic (1933); the print is supposedly the best available, and there are even extras including the unedited footage from Maciste in Hell and audio commentary by an exploitation movie expert. Alpha Video has put out a cheaper Maniac only edition with no extras (buy). The best deal, though not the best print, comes in Mill Creek’s 50 Horror Classics Movie Pack (buy), which also contains a copy of the Certified Weird Carnival of Souls along with other public domain classics like White Zombie, Metropolis (unrestored version), Night of the Living Dead, The Phantom of the Opera, Nosferatu, and a host of truly awful movies.

Do not confuse this film with Joe Spinell’s 1980 slasher Maniac, which also has its share of fans.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Bruce,” who claimed “this movie is so weird that your lawn will die as you watch it.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe, Arno Frisch, Frank Giering, Stefan Clapczynski

PLOT: Held captive by two charming but very twisted psychopaths, a family tries to outwit them

as they are forced to play sick parlor games.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Funny Games is a more substantial captive torment tale than most. It features enigmatic villains, and unconventional breaking of the fourth wall.  At times parts of the plot are relayed from different points of view. Overall it is still a straight-forward psychological thriller, too conventional in structure and subject to be considered weird.

COMMENTS:  With son Schorschi (Clapczynski) in tow, rich yuppies Ana and Georg (Lothar, Mühe) arrive at their vacation house on a remote mountain lake ready for a quiet summer of relaxation and solitude. And what better setting for it than a security gated compound in a security gated community where everyone minds his business and doesn’t come knocking unless invited?

Despite their hi-tech Maginot line of fortified privacy, Ana and Georg have no phone line to their house. Their only link to the outside world is Ana’s cell phone and she’s not prone to be careful with it. No matter. Nobody is planning on getting in touch with them, nor is anyone expecting contact from the couple for a few weeks. Or longer.

Of course, all of the security in the world is useless when one lowers the drawbridge to admit a Trojan Horse. Charming Peter, a guest of friends down the way, shows up to borrow some eggs, and of course Anna lets him right in. Peter accidentally destroys her phone, and then just can’t seem to leave.

Peter’s friend Paul arrives, and the next thing you know, the family watchdog is mysteriously dead. Now neither Peter nor Paul can seem to get out the door and go home. Georg. who had been out, returns and won’t listen to Ana’s assertion that the beguiling young men are trouble. One mustn’t be rude to guests. Georg discovers too late that he should have listened to wifey for a change. He meets the business end of one of his own golf clubs—with his knee. And a little help from Paul, of course.

Ever the gracious guests, Peter and Paul decide to stick around indefinitely to make sure their new hosts are content. They devise some rather unique parlor games to keep everybody occupied during their visit. After all, idle hands are the devil’s workshop.

While there have been countless movies about the naive being held captive and tormented by the psychopathic, most such stories are redundant and sick in a gratuitous way. A little suspense is always nice, but not at the expense of seeing helpless victims tortured in the absence of any sort of thoughtful point or purpose. Surprisingly, with the setup to be just such a film, Funny Games manages to avoid the stereotype. It evolves into something that amounts to more than the sum of its components. Not that Funny Games is art. It isn’t. But it is formalist in a meaningfully dramatic way. In the case of Funny Games the form is terror.

Although Funny Games is not particularly gory, it is scary, edge of the seat material for the following reasons. The attackers are very clever, and so even though Ana and Georg are dumb, the viewer still cares about them. The two psychos holding them captive are smart enough to have tricked the viewer as well. For this reason the beholder never gives up on the hapless couple (trio to be precise, as Georg and Ana’s young son is stuck in this mess too.)

To add insult to injury, it’s their own fault that the family is in their predicament. Paul and Peter preyed on a natural human instinct: Georg and Ana didn’t want to seem rude. And neither do Paul and Peter, who are excruciatingly polite and proper throughout the encounter.

Furthermore, although the prognosis appears hopeless, we feel compelled to see what will happen. This is because we known or understand nothing regarding Paul and Peter’s background or motives. There is no way to know what it is that they are after, what they will do when they get it, or how far they will go to do so. They seem too clever and well- prepared to be senseless butchers. They have a well-conceived plan which they execute with great precision, so they must have a purpose. But what the devil is it?

Another captivating plot feature is that the incident unfolds like an automobile accident, from the point of view of the driver. Like any awful transportation mishap, the cause is the sum total of numerous factors and missteps. Once trouble occurs, it is too late to remedy it; one can only enumerate what should have been done differently. This amplifies the feeling of helplessness. When a car careens out of control, beyond any hope of recovery, everything slows down for the driver, who can only hang on and wonder how far he will go, what will he hit, and how much will it hurt.

Similarly, the viewer of Funny Games suffers a terrifying sense of helplessness because like the driver in the example, Ana and Georg are no longer in control. We wants to see them as the protagonists, and so we adopt their perspective.

But this is Paul and Peter’s game board. The audience realizes this when the pair blatantly and arrogantly break the fourth wall.  Paul and Peter are in control, and the events have actually been presented from their perspective.  This turnaround causes a disorienting effect and adds to the frightfulness.  Although breaking the fourth wall is not new in horror movies, it is rare and unsettling.  When it happens in Funny Games, the viewer comes to the stark realization that Paul and Peter have now taken him on board for the ride as well.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…tricked out with a number of Brechtian devices to catch audiences in a voyeuristic trance… Posing as a morally challenging work of art, the movie is a really a sophisticated act of cinematic sadism. You go to it at your own risk.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

Funny Games trailer