“…to eliminate the borderline between dream and imagination; to invent everything and then to objectify the fantasy; to get some distance from it in order to explore it as something all of a piece and unknowable.”–Federico Fellini on his motives for adapting Petronius’ Satyricon

DIRECTED BY: Federico Fellini

FEATURING: Martin Potter, Max Born, Hiram Keller, Mario Romagnoli

PLOT: Two students, Encolpio and Ascilto, argue over their dual ownership of the handsome slave boy Giton, whom Encolpio loves and Ascilto has sold. Encolpio seeks Giton through a series of adventures that take him across the ancient Roman world, encountering a pompous actor, a wealthy merchant who holds nightly orgies and fancies himself a poet, unscrupulous slavers, and other long dead satirical targets. Eventually Encolpio becomes involved in a plot to kidnap an albino hermaphrodite demigod, is cursed with impotence, and seeks the services of a witch.

BACKGROUND:

• Petronius wrote the rambling, erotic, and highly literary “Satyricon” during the reign of Emperor Nero, 1st Century A.D. It is sometimes considered the world’s oldest surviving novel.
• The original Roman satire survives only in fragments, which explains the often incoherent nature of the story in Fellini’s movie. Fellini invented a few small details (and one major one, in the hermaphrodite character who replaces the penis-god Priapus’ role in the story) to bridge gaps or help the story flow in the direction he wanted to. The director refers to the fragmentary nature of the source narrative by allowing the story to jump forward in time, and even ends a scene in mid-sentence (as Petronius’ surviving work ends in the middle of a sentence).
• Fellini’s name appears in the title not out of vanity, but to distinguish the movie from a competing adaptation directed by Gian Luigi Polidoro which was also released in 1969. Polidoro registered the title Satyricon first. United Artists purchased the international distribution rights to both films and sat on Polidoro’s movie while they promoted Fellini’s more marketable name.
• Fellini used international actors for the main parts (joking that he did so because there were no Italian homosexuals). The director saw that dubbing into Italian was deliberately made slightly out of sync with the actors’ lip movements to create an additional feeling of strangeness.
• Boris Karloff was offered the small but important role of Trimalchio, but was too ill to accept it (Karloff died in February of 1969).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Picking a single image to represent Satyricon is like trying to single out one scene that captures the essence of a sprawling carnival. The film is a nonstop parade of extreme imagery, grotesque tableaux and freakish costuming.  No one scene sticks out as more bizarre than another, and nothing is supposed to; everything inside  the borders of the known world of Satyricon is as weird as everything else, from the whorehouse at the center of the empire to the blank spot at the edge of the map where monsters be. Forced to select something, we went with the image appearing five minutes into the film of the actor Vernaccio, dressed in a porcine pink helmet with a fin on top, carefully placing a tiny pill-like object on his outstretched tongue. It’s Fellini’s signal to the Summer of Love crowd that the movie is dosing itself right now—strap yourselves in for the trip to come.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Fellini seizes upon the fragmentary nature of his classical source

John Landis on the trailer for Fellini Satyricon

material as an excuse to fly off on flights of phantasmagorical fancy; he sets his camera to observe these imaginary denizens of gluttonous old Rome as if they were alien lifeforms. Satyricon is the work of a master filmmaker at his most self-indulgent—but when tremendous talent indulges itself, the results are typically spectacular.

COMMENTS: The surviving text of the Satyricon begins with randy bisexual student Encolpio in the middle of an argument about literature and education, jumps from one incomplete adventure to another, and ends in the middle of another scene as a Roman is justifying why his will requires his heirs to eat his corpse in order to collect their inheritances.  The pseudo-surreal structure of the half-lost novel, along with its fantastic pagan eroticism, gave Fellini an excuse to indulge his weirdest impulses for a psychedelic age—all the while maintaining some deniability that that’s what he was actually doing. Satyricon may look like a sexually frank, big budget Technicolor drug movie, but the director could position himself as merely adapting a treasured piece of our shared cultural heritage in the only way that would honor the material. If that honor involved orgies of androgynous nude Romans engaging in kinky bisexual sex, hands amputated onstage for the entertainment of jaded spectators, and wild disorienting leaps in narrative logic, then that is the price that must be paid for Art.

With the story so deeply buried that we can’t possibly reconstruct it, Satytricon becomes an almost entirely visual film; it’s like studying an ancient fresco on a wall with large chunks missing. The decadent, exotic, and very weird look of this mythological Rome is so crucial to the experience of the film that it wouldn’t have been totally out of line to give costume designer Danilo Donati a co-directing credit, along with the makeup department and the set designers. Since the movie contains little to dig into in the way of overriding themes—the satire on greed, lust and general hedonism is fairly obvious—-and even less to discuss in the way of story, it’s best to survey and to savor the film bit by bit, scene by scene, as if looking at a collection of scattered relics in a museum.

The “brothel stroll” sequence is a good encapsulation of what’s going on in this movie; it’s a tour through a gallery of grotesques, alien creatures hiding behind strange smiles and stranger kinks. With the help of a Senator, Encolpio has just “rescued” his slave lover Giton from life as a drag queen working for an arrogant actor. Suddenly, in one of the movie’s many unannounced flash-forwards, the pair are holding hands, walking down a dark street in a nameless city (which appears to be a giant catacomb). They look down an alley and see a chariot dragging a giant stone head. They see an old woman they recognize, and ask her, “do you know where we live?” She tells them “you live here;” just then the Senator from the previous scene shows up with a small coterie of followers, one of who points at them and announces “there they are!” The old woman invites them to visit the “little sisters” and waggles her ancient tongue at them seductively; they hustle through the oversized doors, looking behind them at their pursuers with concern. Inside, they walk past a man telling fortunes with sheep livers and take a long stroll past a series of stone alcoves inside which (frequently obese) men and women lounge in lingerie. One contains a couple of women side by side, waggling their nude rears at the camera in unison; inside another room a swarm of small children jump on a grandfatherly man. A woman in a gold bikini wears a giant cubic headdress; outside her cubicle, her pimp leans against the wall in a see-through lavender nightie. The pair tramp along exhibiting little concern and only passing interest in the carnival of degenerate humanity, while the soundtrack mixes science-fiction theremin noises with flutes and drums and nonsense chants delivered in a mixture of Latin, Italian and gibberish by the people they pass. Each person they pass sports unique makeup, an eccentric costume and/or elaborately sculpted hair, usually all three. Suddenly they pass from the red light district into a stable district where livestock roam the streets; down one cubicle in this quarter a nude woman sleeps next to a grazing goat. They eventually make it to a secluded room, where they prepare for a night of lovemaking.

What makes this sequence a perfect microcosm of Satyricon is that there’s little purpose or sense to this entire journey, other than to let us soak in the sights of the bizarre world Fellini has painstakingly created for us. We are sightseeing in a strange land; people watching in a world entirely populated by decadent freaks. The “brothel stroll” sequence comes early in the movie, so that the audience knows what it’s getting into; however, the film never really becomes this weird again. The outlandish costumes and amoral pagan antics persist throughout the film, but things do calm down and become a more grounded. The Trimalchio segment was the keenest moment of satire in Petronius’ original novel (his mocking of the rich and perverse boor who believes himself a poet may have been a disguised attack on the emperor Nero). Fellini keeps the original language and satire of the famous scene intact in his adaptation, but makes Trimalchio’s dinner a centerpiece of a different sort. Knowing we can’t taste the roasted hog stuffed with whole sausages and hens the merchant proudly serves his guests, Fellini turns the scene into an exotic feast for the eyes and ears instead.  The party starts outside, under a painted sky of orange, as a field of dozens of naked people bounce up and down in a giant bath. The action moves indoors for the banquet, where women with massive headdresses (to cover their massive hairdos) and men with faces painted silver and blue (like rabid fans of ancient Rome’s most effete sports teams) lounge in robes of red, green and purple and chat as slaves serve them roast doves and wine. There are more drums, theremins and chanting, and at one point a woman’s voice drones over what sounds like an ancient loudspeaker. Drunken painted matrons in see-through gowns dance provocatively. Trimalchio recites (plaigirized) poetry, and orders a real poet tossed into the giant oven along with the roasting chickens. Guests verbally assault each other for sport. Triamlchio’s wife sneaks lesbian pecks with her companion when hubby is not looking, but complains when he convinces a pretty slave boy to play horsey with him. She gets a heap of abuse and a face full of tomato pulp for her concern. The hedonistic bash wears on until we feel tipsy and bloated from the rich visuals we’ve drank. The soiree ends at dawn under another painted sky, with Trimalchio rehearsing his own funeral so that he can enjoy hearing his eulogy. This segment is very true to the original story, but Fellini adds a sumptuous visual decadence that Petronius could not supply in prose.

We now examine a third segment, a late arriving portion of Fellini’s own invention that, unlike many of the other sequences, creates a plot arc that carries through from one episode to another. What’s remarkable about this segment is that it feels completely organic; at least, as organic any adventure in a work this fractured can be. Without being told about it, you would assume that the tale of the hermaphrodite demigod appeared in the original novel; the satirical themes of selfishness, greed, and the triumph of the profane seem to come straight from Petronius. By this point in the story, Encolpio has been reunited with his old friend and romantic nemesis Ascilto. Traveling through the desert in a distant province after escaping from slavers, they hear tales of a man-woman demigod(dess) who cures the sick from miles around. They enter his/her temple and find another menagerie of Felliniesque weirdos waiting on healing: spastics, the legless, morbidly obese men with laughing sickness, and a trio of sheep. The hermaphrodite god is owned by an old man who charges admission to those seeking cures; the divinity itself an albino with breasts and is so sickly it can’t stand up without help from his owner. With the help of a rogue they meet inside the temple, Encolpio and Ascilto decide to kidnap the god and sell his services themselves; they’re willing to murder to get their hands on him. But the deity proves too fragile to survive the trip through the desert, and dies in a spectacular location, a natural rocky bowl with a dry cracked floor and walls of dusty grey stone. Blaming his young companions for the god’s death, their partner in crime assaults the two younger men with his sword; they barely escape.

In the next scene Encolpio, his companion having again disappeared, is being thrown down a hill by uniformed tribesmen. It’s another elision of the type we’ve become accustomed to; but, we’re still in Fellini’s original material. In a perverse tribute to Petronius, he’s deliberately lost part of his own script, and he now jumps to a scene of his own creation that will eventually pit the hapless youth against a minotaur, and then against the even greater horror of erectile dysfunction. Fellini is no longer adapting the novel faithfully; now, he’s just playing with us. But the additions are as seamless as can be in a story that’s gets a large part of its character from its visible seams, and so we don’t feel tricked or cheated. As a fantasist, Fellini proves himself Petronius’ equal; the uninformed spectator can’t tell where the ancient Roman ends and the modern Italian begins.

Despite it’s high culture sheen, this is a different, more visceral and shameless style of moviemaking than we typically associate with this highly intellectual arthouse director. Its nudity, violence, and frank exploitation of taboos like homosexuality, along with its trippy countercultural appeal, made Satyricon a huge popular hit. There’s none of Fellini’s usual philosophizing, no deep meanings beyond the implicit “look at these grotesque caricatures from a world long past… how like us they seem!” This is Fellini going fully, fearlessly weird. The results are audacious and a stunning success, even if the film is ultimately a curiosity in this director’s most curious canon. Fellini Satyricon is as shallow and degrading—and as enticing and unmissable—as an orgy staged by a modern Trimalchio.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Fellini draws upon his master-entertainer’s feelings for the daydreams of his audience, and many people find this film eerie, spellbinding, and even profound. Essentially, though, it’s just a hip version of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross… We seem to be at a stoned circus, where the performers go on and on whether we care or not…”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

“It has the quality of a drug-induced hallucination, being without past or future, existing only in a present that, at best, can be survived… a surreal epic that, I confidently believe, will outlive all its interpretations.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“…as hypnotically fascinating as a train wreck in a surrealistic brothel.”–Louis B. Parks, The Houston Chronicle (2001 revival)

IMDB LINK: Fellini Satyricon (1969)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Fellini Satyricon – Roger Ebert’s measured 2001 entry on the film for his “Great Movies” series (the article also contains a link to his original more ecstatic review)

Lawrence Russell: Fellini Satyricon – Short annotated analysis by Russell discussing the film from a postmodernist perspective

The Satyricon of Petronius – a 1930 public domain translation of the original Roman satire by Alfred R. Allinson

DVD INFO: The good news is that MGM has kept Fellini Satyricon in circulation (buy) with a fine print that brings the vibrant colors across with just a touch of weathered grain to add dignity and character. The bad news is that because this DVD is released by a major studio, Satyricon doesn’t receive the gala treatment that a boutique label like Criterion would provide. The theatrical trailer and an option to watch the film dubbed rather than subtitled are the only special features. Nor is MGM likely to make placing this prestige picture on Blu-ray a priority. A pity.

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

I say that up front because I have watched this film in the company of such alien types as the Hyperrealists. Their melodramatic, aggressive reactions were the same as I saw in a showing of the films of  Busby Berkeley (be forewarned: a series on Berkeley is coming). Naturally, I saw it as my aesthetic duty to cut those sophistic assailants down to size.

The Marx Brothers, perhaps, are the quintessential comedy team with an edge. W.C. Fields exhibits a comparable level of surrealism, but as a predominantly solo act, he’s a mono whisper compared to the quadrophonic Brothers. 1930s audiences showed themselves to be a somewhat more imaginative lot (not by much) than us in that they not only accepted the Brothers level of unhinged zaniness, but they even made stars out of them.

Note that “but not by much,” because Duck Soup (1933) was the Marx Brothers most revolutionary film, a surrealist-politico masterpiece, and it totally bombed at the box office. This resulted in the Brothers being released from their Paramount contract.  MGM and Irving Thalberg were quick to snap them up, but Thalberg, a self-confessed fan, knew he had to polish their act in order to increase their accessibility.

The MGM films that followed Soup retained a certain level of  zaniness, but it was noticeably diminished.  The new producers added musical numbers aplenty (the songs in Duck Soup are minimal and non-intrusive—and although I love musicals, saturating a Marx Brothers film with dance numbers is a really bad idea), and sacked the bland Zeppo (the sole good move). The best of the Thalberg lot was probably Night At The Opera (1935) directed by Sam Wood, a fleetingly competent commission director. Wood lacked the consummate craftsmanship and idiosyncratic comedic intuition of Duck Soup director Leo McCary. McCary had cut his teeth with some eccentric peers. He started as an assistant to Tod Browning and had worked, as a writer, with Chaplin, Stan Laurel, and W.C. Fields.  With Wood and Thalberg reigning the Marx Brothers in, a slow descent into the pedestrian was inevitable.

Still, we have Duck Soup, which has rightly been lauded (by those who know better) as the great anti-war masterpiece (along with 1964′s Dr. Strangelove). (Although, if I remember correctly, the late critic Leslie Halliwell preferred Fail Safe to Kubrick,’s film, a judgment I’ve never fully understood).

The irreverence displayed in Duck Soup should delight any weird movie lover. Nothing is sacred. Much to FDR’s dismay, patriotism was lampooned, as was religion: “We got guns! They got guns! All God’s children got guns!” Hallelujah! Bourgeoisie society is likened to fascism, and the boys libidos are raging.

Groucho is new President, Rufus T. Firefly, and his kingdom is the fictional Freedonia (only W.C. Fields could come up with wackier names). The object of Rufus’ affection is the aptly named Mrs. Teasdale (the hilarious Margaret Dumont—stocky, unattractive and no spring chicken, she couldn’t even make a local commercial today). Mrs. Teasdale is a wealthy widow, and Groucho’s painted mustache and ceegar have come ‘ a courtin’ her—and his ceegar is noticeably stiff.

The antagonistic neighboring country Sylvania has sent two spies into Freedonia (Chico and Harpo—go figure). Of course, this is a set-up for nonsensical dialogue, political intrigue, seductive vamps, surreal one-liners, even more surreal slapstick (during the eventual war), and raging testosterone.

A cabinet meeting scene is typical. Rufus is handed a report: “Your excellency, here is the treasury Department report. I hope you find it clear.” “Clear? A four-year old child could understand this report.” Rufus then hands the report to secretary Zeppo and instructs him: “Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make heads or tails out of it.”

Of course, Zeppo ignores him and goes about his business. And that’s sort of reaction led to much of the complaining I heard during the screening of the film. The unrealistic exchanges throw many modern audiences off. “He didn’t even respond to what she said!” “He looked at the camera!” and so on.

While Duck Soup was a subversive anti-status quo film, it was not rejected by the masses at the time because of all the unrealistic zingers (one of which will immediately be recognized by fans of the Addams Family movies, but then that’s old business). Rather, it’s unpatriotic irreverence went too far for a nation trying desperately to unite together during the depression (which few of us could fathom, I’m sure!) and for a nation on the brink of war. However, escapism was the order of the day, and the Marx Brothers were happy to oblige.

Although their films were probably not considered weird in their day, they have evolved into time capsule misfits because of shifting aesthetics and ideologies. That Duck Soup is still, unfortunately, frighteningly relevant possibly goes unnoticed.

The film is often callous, cruel, uncouth, and laced in spiked Jewish humor, but it never resorts to dumbing down to its audience. And that is a refreshing change of pace.

FEATURING: Ralph Richardson, Michael Hordern, Rita Tushingham, Richard Warwick, Arthur Lowe, Mona Washbourne, Marty Feldman, Spike Milligan, Dudley Moore, Peter Cook

PLOT: After the Bomb falls, a family who lives on a still-functioning subway train travels to the

surface in search of a nurse for their pregnant daughter.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: This absurd anxiety nightmare about the Bomb could only have come out of the Swinging Sixties; it’s one of the weirder relics of an era when filmmakers felt it was their patriotic duty to laugh in the face of the imminent apocalypse.

COMMENTS: The Bed Sitting Room began its life as a one-act play, written by comedian Spike Milligan and John Antrobus in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that time, at the height of Cold War paranoia, nuked-up powers were playing games of chicken with each other and worldwide nuclear annihilation seemed inevitable. In the average person’s eyes the world and its leaders had gone insane, and who better to depict the inevitable aftermath of our self-destructive impulses than Milligan and his “Goon Show” squad, under the cheerfully absurd direction of A Hard Days Night‘s Richard Lester? The results are a ridiculous apocalypse the likes of which has never been depicted on screen before. Looking like it was shot in a Welsh garbage dump, with heaping mountains of discarded boots and crockery and the police flying through the sky in a burnt-out VW bug attached to a balloon, the movie anticipates the junkyard visuals of post-apocalyptic films to follow. Tonally, however, Bed Sitting Room is miles away from the cutthroat scavenger worlds of Mad Max or A Boy and His Dog; it’s Theater of the Absurd performed by vaudevillians. The jokes are almost feather-light, contrasting with the inherent horror of the situation. ”I’m not eating,” complains a patient. When the doctor asks why, he answers matter-of-factly, “can’t get the stuff.” In another scene a lonely recluse asks “would you do for me what my first wife did?” to a nervous middle aged woman who’s fallen into his fallout shelter. Having no choice, she reluctantly agrees, and he hands her pots, pans and teacups to throw at him as he dodges them shouting “she means nothing to me!” The movie is full of corny one-liners that are uncomfortably ludicrous coming from refugees of a collapsed civilization; other aspects of post-nuke England are even weirder. Radiation causes some survivors to spontaneously mutate into cupboards, parrots or (of course) bed sitting rooms. The holocaust even caused bug-eyed comic Marty Feldman to dress in nurse drag. Sometimes it seems like the only thing that survived the “nuclear misunderstanding” intact were civil servants and the British class structure. A man on a bicycle generates the electricity that keeps the Underground running, officials roam the wasteland personally delivering death certificates to survivors, and the BBC keeps broadcasting by sending a correspondent around to give live reports from inside of the empty shells of television sets. The Queen may have burnt up into an irradiated husk and blown away, but the survivors have switched allegiances to a new symbolic head of state; they patriotically sing “God save Mrs. Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone,” in honor of the woman who’s next in line for the throne after 40 million citizens were incinerated. A father still prefers to marry his daughter to a man of breeding, rather than the father of her child; maybe he can get a political appointment out of the connection… Even after Armageddon, the British keep plugging on as they always have. After the bomb drops Australians might grow mohawks and go racing about the Outback in muscle cars fighting over oil and water, but in the United Kingdom, there are proper channels to be followed; you may be starving for food and supplies but you’ll still think twice about breaking into a locked room (“that’s public property!”) There’s (almost literally) a gag a minute, and although many wind up as duds, enough get through to ignite your sense of black humor. In the end it’s all more silly than satirical, but there is some affectionate lampooning of British propriety. In a 1988 interview Spike Milligan said his purpose in the play was to show that after the Bomb, “the moment the cloud had dispersed and sufficient people had died, the survivors would set up all over again and have Barclays Bank, Barclay cards, garages, hates, cinemas and all… just go right back to square one. I think man has no option but to continue his own stupidity.” That is a sentiment we suspect that Mrs. Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone would fully endorse.

The Bed Sitting Room (and the work of Lester, Milligan and their cronies in general) was an obvious influence on Monty Python (whose television series debuted on the BBC the very same year). Unlike the Pythons, however, this cataclysmic farce was a big flop with audiences, and Lester did not work again for four years. Promoters acknowledged the film’s “specialized” appeal with the tagline “we’ve got a BOMB* on our hands” and the footnote (“*BOMB – a motion picture so brilliantly funny it goes over most people’s heads”). The film is rarely screened and has never been released on DVD in Region 1, but at the time of this writing it is available on Netflix’s instant streaming service (which may be the wave of the future for obscure films).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A field day for funny collection of Brits. Weird picture originated in a well-known weird place, the mind of ‘Goon Show’ alumnus Spike Milligan… the players manage to keep the laughs flying thick and fast.”–TV Guide

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

FEATURING: Jessica Harper, Cliff De Young, Barry Humphries, Richard O’Brien, Charles Gray, Ruby Wax, Patricia Quinn

PLOT: A young married couple end up in a town that’s actually a giant television network; Janet

is groomed as a celebrity, while Brad becomes a mental patient in a hospital show.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Shock Treatment is a cult film even among the tiny subset of cult film enthusiasts. This “sequel” was rejected as a confounding disappointment by most fans of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but is still vehemently defended by a segment of that fan base. It’s a peculiar exercise in wacky musical satire, for sure, but it lacks the kind of résumé necessary to place it among the most significantly weird movies of all time.

COMMENTS: What would you get if you took The Rocky Horror Picture Show and stripped out Tim Curry‘s domineering performance as the mad scientist transvestite dominatrix, leaving behind only the theater-rock musical numbers and campy supporting players? (On the off-chance you don’t see where I’m going yet, the answer is Shock Treatment). Whereas Rocky Horror was a theatrical flop that organically grew into a cult movie, Shock Treatment was pitched as a deliberate cult movie, but became an instant flop. This delayed follow-up is full of amped-up ideas and energy, but it comes off as cocksure; it’s so convinced its madness is entrancing that it forgets to ground us in its quirky universe. The (confusingly executed) idea is that the entire town of Denton, U.S.A. is a TV studio, with the audience as regular citizens, the stars and staff as sorts of metro officials, and the sponsors as big-money villains manipulating studio politics behind the scenes. The movie throws so many colorful eccentrics at us that every character turns into a minor character, even the leads. Janet (not necessarily the Janet Susan Sarandon played in the previous movie) and Brad (again, a character with the same name but little connection to the original) enter the town’s audience, for unclear reasons, and wind up on a marriage counseling show run by a blind Austrian in an orange thrift-store tuxedo. He hands Brad off to a brother/sister pair of psychiatrists (writer Richard O’Brien, wearing uncomfortable-looking coke-bottle glasses, and Patricia Quinn—they played an analogous ambiguously incestuous couple in RHPS), stars of the mental hospital soap opera “Denton Vale.” Brad is caged up and drugged, Janet’s parents (also in Denton’s audience, for some reason) are given a reality TV showcase after winning a quiz show, and Janet is written in to the town’s script as some sort of celebrity. Fame goes to her head and she forgets her institutionalized hubby; it’s all a plot by smitten cult leader Farley Flavors, who wants to seduce her. There’s also a pair of recently sacked, disgruntled talk show hosts running around causing trouble, a sexy nurse (RHPS‘s Little Nell) in an extremely short mint-green minidress, red-jacketed support staff, and a couple of multi-purpose cheerleaders who show up on various programs. Even if they weren’t constantly breaking into songs, this plot and cast would be fairly exhausting to follow. O’ Brien’s light-rock tunes are in the RHPS vein, although there’s no knockout, hummable number like “Time Warp.” His style is a matter of taste; I’ve seen the score both praised and trashed. Though the melodies are a matter of subjective preference, the lyrics can pose objective problems; like the rest of the movie, they often drift off-topic. One of the major plot-advancing numbers is a song duel between two characters have no prior history together; it contains the inexplicable exchange “you lost your heart”/”you lost your cause”/”you lost your baby when you lost your balls.” The title tune references the “shock treatment” that has no other place in the movie. The script is also thematically vague; there’s an emphasis on concepts of “mental hygiene,” an idea that seems to want to link itself to television’s ability to construct reality in favor of status quo interests, but it takes a lot of work on the viewer’s part to construct a meaningful satirical angle out of that tangle. The end result of the plot turns feels something like RHPS—an encounter with weirdos initially corrupts but eventually liberates uptight straights—but without the mildly naughty free-love edge. On the plus side, although Shock Treatment is confusing, it’s never boring. The costumes, sets and choreography are genially bizarre, there are a smattering of funny lines (“thank God he was born an orphan, it would have killed his parents”), and the boob-tube parody does impressively predict the rise of reality television. The returning RHPS cast of O’Brien, Quinn, and Little Nell meet fan expectations in their kinky supporting roles; Jessica Harper makes a somewhat bland Janet but proves she can really belt out a tune; and although Cliff De Young spends too much of the movie bound and gagged, he is surprisingly good in two roles (it’s hard to believe the same actor played both parts). While watching this DVD, I was never anxious to hit the “eject” button; but, having taken the disc out, I’m not tempted to reinsert it into the carousel.

One curious feature of the DVD is that the commentary is supplied by the President and Vice President of the Shock Treatment fan club. Within two minutes, they’re literally comparing the movie to Citizen Kane. Dedicated Rocky Horror fans may want to check this out, although keeping expectations low is advised. Those who like Rocky but haven’t added it to their DVD collection yet may want to take a flyer on that film’s 3-Disc Anniversary set (buy), which includes Shock Treatment as a bonus disc.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a confusing mess that, despite moments of inspired insanity, sadly fails to live up to the standard set by the original.”–Jason Buchanan, All Movie (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by our own (pre-fame) Alex Kittle , who promised it would be “really awesome, and really weird…” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Steven Soderbergh, Betsy Brantley, David Jensen, Mike Malone

PLOT: A series of absurdist sketches and nonsense dialogues linked together by a thin plot

about an office worker struggling with an assignment to write a major speech for a cultlike motivational speaker obviously based on L. Ron Hubbard.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Hilarious witticism characterizing film’s oddness. Cautious disclaimer suggesting uneven satire undermines enjoyability, but granting nobility of purpose and peculiar appeal. Self-aggrandizing non sequitur.

COMMENTS: After Schizopolis bombed at Cannes, writer/director/star Steven Soderbergh appended a prologue where he stood on a stage and introduced the film. “In the event that you find certain sequences or ideas confusing, please bear in mind that this is your fault, not ours,” he advised. “You will need to see the picture again and again until you understand everything.” We are then thrown into the story of Fletcher Munson, a chronic office masturbator suffering from writer’s block as he attempts to pen a speech for “Eventualism” founder T. Azimuth Switters. A third of the way through the movie he meets (and sort of becomes) his exact double, an amorous dentist named Korchek who happens to be having an affair with Munson’s wife, but Korchek (or is it Munson inhabiting Korchek’s body?) falls in love with Munson’s wife’s doppelgänger, Attractive Woman #2. Then, in the movies final act we see the same scenes replayed from the perspective of Mrs. Munson. Interspersed with all of this are bits involving a pantsless old man running away from a pair of orderlies, news reports suggesting Rhode Island has been sold to a consortium of investors who want to turn it into a shopping mall, and a shot of a sign posted on a tree reading “idea missing.” Oh, and there’s also an exterminator who speaks gibberish and seduces local housewives. What’s there to possibly be confused about? Sorerbergh, who started his career with Sex, Lies and Videotape, the movie that launched the indie filmmaking revolution, made Schziopolis as a palette-cleanser after his big budget flop Underneath left a bad taste in his mouth (a fan cleverly described this as Soderbergh’s “second first film“). Working with his friends on a budget of only $250,000, it’s a loose, breezy, seemingly improvised movie. You can sense the crew cutting loose and having fun making it; in fact, you sense they’re having more fun making it than you’re having watching it, but their enthusiasm is infectious. The main running joke revolves around communication breakdowns between men and women: a husband and wife’s rote pleasantries are rendered with abstract literalism (“generic greeting,” “generic greeting returned!”) and another couple exchange nonsensical double entendres (“nose army… beef diaper?”), while later in the film male characters’ lines are dubbed into untranslated Japanese, Italian and French. The movie never develops an overarching theme, however, and always comes across as a series of sketches. The experience is something like watching a feature film made by a television comedy troupe recycling favorite bits and characters when you never saw the original shows. Sorderbergh, who plays the two main roles, turns out to be a surprisingly competent comic actor, and there are enough ideas thrown out to keep adventurous audiences watching. It’s basically a postmodern goof, light entertainment for smart, weird people; a curious frolic by a director who quickly returned to more conventional material.

Schizopolis, which had trouble landing a distributor and sank like a stone on release, was a surprise pickup for the Criterion Collection. The Criterion edition isn’t as packed with extra material as some of their other releases, but it does contain two separate commentary tracks. The first is a conversation between four cast and crew members which is informative but standard, but the other commentary is a very cool treat. On it, Sorderbergh interviews himself, pretending to be a pretentious auteur with a God complex while simultaneously taking the role of an increasingly exasperated interviewer. In the course of the conversation the fake Sorderbergh divulges his second career writing novels under the pseudonym “Stephen King,” explains how he thinks it will be more interesting for people to hear him talking about his artistic process rather than focusing solely on his influence on other filmmakers, and reveals how he strives to create a comfortable atmosphere on set where people will not be too intimidated to compliment him. He also takes calls on his cell phone while recording the commentary. At one point, he says, “I’m all for free speech and all that s**t, but I don’t think there should be critics. I just don’t think it’s right for people to be able to publish their responses to art, especially great art.” Sorderbergh’s self-parody here is  brave and brilliant, and I can honestly say this is the first comedy I’ve seen where I laughed harder at the DVD commentary than at the movie itself.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a real head-scratcher that so insistently keeps jumping all over the place that it becomes impossible to pinpoint its intent.”–Todd McCarthy, Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was first nominated for review by John, who described it as “strangely… funny.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

“If you don’t eat, you won’t die.”–Ugo, La Grande Bouffe

DIRECTED BY: Marco Ferreri

FEATURING: Phillipe Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni, Andréa Ferréol

PLOT: Four middle-aged, upper middle-class men (a judge, a TV personality, a pilot and a chef) hole up at a country villa to feast; it is gradually and casually revealed that they plan on eating themselves to death. They gorge themselves constantly, but the pilot can’t stand to go even for a day without sex, so prostitutes are invited to join them—along with a schoolteacher who attaches herself to the group willingly. As the gluttonous orgy continues the whores flee in disgust, but the teacher joins in the bacchanalia with gusto.

BACKGROUND:

• All of the main actors use their real names. All four of the male stars were well-established (Mastroianni, of course, was an international star and sex symbol). Except for Noiret, each had worked with director Ferreri before. Each had also had prominent roles in weird films from other European directors (Mastrioanni, most famously, in Federico Fellini films, but Noiret appeared in Zazie dans le Metro for Louis Malle, Piccoli was a mainstay in Buñuel movies, and Tognazzi had small roles in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella and  Fellini’s Satyricon). The quartet would reunite with the director the next year for a surrealist rendering of Custer’s last stand called Don’t Touch the White Woman (starring alongside another weird favorite, Catherine Deneuve).
• The scatological content of the film scandalized some viewers at Cannes, but the film nonetheless won a FIPRESCI prize for Ferreri.
• At its British showings La Grande Bouffe was protested by infamous decency crusader Mary Whitehouse; her attempts to have the movie banned ironically led to modification of the Obscene Publications Act to exempt films with artistic merit.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The visions that will probably stick with you when you think back on La Grande Bouffe are scenes of four great European actors stuffing their faces with turkey legs, a castle made out of pâtés, and a pair of matching cakes shaped like breasts. Michel Piccoli dancing with a pig’s head is another strong candidate, as are the numerous gross scatological moments. But, the strangest and most lingering image may be the final one: sides of meat scattered around the villa lawn—a slab of beef wedged in the crook of a tree—and a pack of dogs sitting and looking attentively at the carcasses, making no move to eat.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: La Grande Bouffe takes an absurd premise—four men decide to eat

Brief scene from La Grande Bouffe

themselves to death—and plays it out with illogical realism, proffering no explanations or motives for what happens.  It’s an unnatural but straight-faced parable that suggests nothing about how we’re supposed to take it. It’s a grotesque spectacle, but a strangely engrossing one, with a fascination that comes largely thanks to a dream cast of 1970s Euroweirdos.

COMMENTS: In the course of their Grande Bouffe, the four suicidal gourmands scarf down oysters, kidneys for breakfast, crusty baguettes, cakes, quail served on skull skewers, turkey legs (convenient for gnawing on during sexual congress), a suckling pig roasted over a spit in the garden, Provencal pizza, steaming bowls of tortellini with cream and mushrooms, crepes doused in Cointreau, brioche dipped in milk, and a three-poultry pâté molded into a Faberge-egg cathedral, among other delicacies. The quartet (later quintet) nosh at all moments: in the bedroom, while picking out a tune on the piano, while taking schoolchildren on a tour of the grounds (a poet of local renown once lived there). In the beginning the mouthwatering spread may make your tummy rumble, but even before the gluttonous consequences—Michel’s flatulence, the exploding toilet— show up on screen, you may start to lose your appetite, as you imagine the men forcing all that food down their throats despite being stuffed full to bursting. As they get near the end of their blowout, each succeeding bite becomes a painful trial. Just look at poor sick Michel’s face as he lies on the bed, straining to swallow a spoonful of chestnut purée as his friends goad him on, telling him it’s a question of will and advising him to imagine himself as a starving child in Bombay.

One of the reasons La Grande Bouffe fascinates, even though not much really happens in the film, is because the men have chosen such an appealingly appalling form of suicide. If we have to die (and we do), why not go out with a banquet of food and sex, in an orgy of pleasure? The feast is at the same time tempting and revolting. In our daily food lives we restrain ourselves because we know the downside of overindulgence—indigestion, nausea, vomiting—but these men keep going at it, as difficult as it becomes. It’s a wish fulfillment fantasy for us to vicariously experience their hedonistic excesses; we aren’t given a free ride, though, because Ferreri makes sure we pay a price for our vicarious delight by giving us vicarious revulsion, too. We get an eyeful (and earful, thanks to the most egregious farting soundtrack ever attached to an arthouse film) of the result of that food after it passes through the debauchees digestive systems. The mixture of lust and disgust demonstrated here is the essence of decadence, simultaneously attractive and repellent.

In researching opinions on La Grand Bouffe, I lost track of the number of times viewers either confessed they did not get what Ferreri was getting at, or scolded him for giving no explanation for the men’s desire to eat themselves to death. Because the raw spectacle here is so hard to get a handle on, so unlike what we see in ordinary narratives, people constantly look for a reference point to compare it to.  The most obvious influence is Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), where the guests at a dinner party find themselves unable to leave (in what may be an explicit Angel nod, Marcello gets disgusted and in fact tries, but fails, to exit the feast). Distancing surrealism is not on the menu in Bouffe, however. The scandalous scatology and perverse sensibilities made some see it as a precursor to the 1975 shocker Salò, but the comparisons don’t go very far. Salò is rife with sadism and cruelty, which is noticeably absent in the genial La Grande Bouffe; all the debauchery is scrupulously consensual, there are no victims anywhere to be found. Bouffe shares many similarities with Peter Greenaway‘s The Thief, the Cook, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), although in that banquet there again is a layer of stylization and allegory standing between us and the material, which is missing in the Ferreri’s unvarnished film. The movie that Bouffe most resembles may be Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (1995), where Nicolas Cage steadfastly drinks himself to death, for reasons he’s forgotten, as faithful whore Elisabeth Shue takes care of him in his final days.

Shue’s Vegas hooker may have been the illegitimate cinematic daughter of Bouffe‘s Andréa Ferréol, who plays a similarly nonjudgmental caretaker to the four suicidal epicures. Andréa, a zaftig schoolmarm whose eyes light up at the idea of days on end of continuous eating and fornicating, may be this feast’s most interesting and troublesome character. She’s also a surprise co-star, holding her own against the four male acting titans. The five thespians hold the inherently implausible scenario together; there’s a real feeling of camaraderie between the four men, who seem to have known each other for decades, and the Rubenesque Ferréol convincingly worms her way into the pal’s hearts and beds as a party guest who immediately clicks with the assembly. Tognazzi, who plays the chef, was the least distinguished of the crew coming in to this film and exits with the same reputation, although he has a featured moment doing a Marlon Brando impression. Piccoli shows more depth; it’s slowly revealed that he’s a closet musician and philosopher, and probably secretly in love with Mastrioanni’s character as well. Speaking of Marcello, he has the most fun here, playing off his image as a ladies’ man. In Bouffe he’s ridiculously insatiable, insisting the party expand its roster to include three or four prostitutes because he’s unable to go half a day without sex. He’s also the only one of the foursome to show misgivings about the pact, which are apparent almost from the beginning (watch how, in the space of a second, his face goes from apprehension to bemused resolution after he announces “the feast begins!”)

Along with Ferréol, Noiret emerges as the most fascinating character, and despite his often passive personality he is in fact the movie’s driving force. A judge and the apparent ringleader of the cadre, he’s decidedly odd in his stiff mannerisms and his ironic concern with propriety (he insists on storing a fallen comrade in a meat locker rather than interring him because “the illegal burial of corpses is highly reprehensible.”)  He has a twisted sexual backstory that makes it entirely appropriate for his final meal to be a cake in the shape of ripe bosoms. He stands awkwardly at attention, staring straight ahead like a guard at Buckingham palace, on the two occasions where women service him. He’s repressed and droll, and where the other three men in some sense seem to “regular guys,” Phillipe is “off” by quite a bit, the kind of citizen who’s respectable on the outside but who you would not be shocked to find out is secretly a stalker, sex addict or serial killer. He falls in love with Andréa immediately after she shows him just a bit of attention and asks her to marry him. He persists in his ardor despite the fact that she insists on having regular intercourse with the rest of the company, often as Phillipe lies in the same bed. For her part, Andréa seems to return his affections, even though she seems to be more sexually attracted to everyone else at the party, and despite the fact that she knows he’s soon to depart this world. They make for a strange couple indeed.

As weird as Phillipe is, Andréa remains the most interesting and troubling character because she breaks the movie’s template. The four men are all representatives of the bourgeoisie, the bored and decadent upper middle class. For them to enter into a pact to eat themselves to death seems like the type of simple satirical stab at that strata of society that leftist filmmakers were required to take to retain their credibility. But Andréa is a schoolteacher, presumably a virtuous member of the hardworking proletariat, and she proves as gluttonous and oversexed as the men—actually, more so. She forces the movie to widen its lend to accommodate her, making it more a portrait of humanity’s failings then an attack focused on a particular class. Some reviewers even criticized the inclusion of her character as destructive of the satire, but that’s only the case if you’re convinced going in that the movie should be a satire of the bourgeoisie. Ferreri doesn’t force that view upon us. He deliberately gives us no explanations, and none are needed. It’s obvious, predictable, and comfortable to read the movie as an attack on bourgeois consumerism. But perhaps that’s not the point at all. Perhaps the film is deliberately intended to be as senseless as life itself: you’re born, you eat, and you die.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the satire is implicit, and the action is strangely devoid of content, comedic or otherwise… a quiet and observant screed, a cousin to Pasolini’s ‘Salò’… laying waste to modern man and refusing to tell us how to feel about the process.”–Michael Atkinson, IFC.com (DVD)

“…no satire, no tragedy or insight, and no message. Just shocking brainless art posing as an allegory.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre (DVD)

“…a satisfying piece of surrealist satire, recommended to fans of boundary-pushing art-house cinema.”–DVD Holocaust (DVD)

IMDB LINK: The Big Feast (1973)

DVD INFO: The 2009 Koch Lorber DVD (buy) contains no extras other than a five-minute excerpt from the documentary The Director Who Came from the Future discussing the film and the scandalized reaction to it.

(This movie was nominated for review by “Irene,” who called it a “wonderful and quite bizarre movie… a kind of a modern burlesque, a farce reminding me of the Luis Buñuel films…” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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)

Chaplin later said that if he had known the actual extent of the horrors perpetrated in Nazi Germany, he could never have made The Great Dictator.  His detractors went so far as to accuse him of merely being angry at Hitler for stealing his mustache.  Of course, Chaplin had been making films against government oppression and the struggle of the little man almost from day one.  Additionally, Chaplin’s half-brother’s father was Jewish, giving him further motive to lampoon the dictator.  Chaplin’s mistake was that he spoke out against Hitler and the Third Reich before the United States entered the war.

Whether or not the Jewish Barber is the Tramp has been debated for years.  He is not referred to as the Tramp, but he is certainly a Tramp-like character, and that is really enough.  But, for the first time, Chaplin is uneasy with his iconic character.  After seeing the Tramp in all of his silent eloquence for years, hearing him speak in the opening WWI sequence is  greatly disconcerting.  This opening is awkward, and Chaplin reveals that verbal humor is not his strength.  Jokes about gas and, later, plays off the words “Aryan” and “vegetarian” fall embarrassingly flat.  His Tramp doughboy had done better lampooning the Great War in First National’s uneven Shoulder Arms (1918), which may be the first anti-war film.  Still, the Marx Brothers bested Chaplin in both of his anti-war films with their hilariously surreal and biting Duck Soup (1933).

When The Great Dictator picks up in Nazi Germany, the film improves, albeit sporadically.  Not surprisingly, Chaplin’s best moments are in two and a half silent vignettes.  In the first, the Jewish Barber is in a scuffle when Paulette Goddard’s Hannah accidentally hits him over the head with a frying pan intended for one of the bullying Nazi soldiers.  The Barber’s brief, dazed dance trot down a ghetto street, past shop windows painted with the word “Jew,” evokes anxious humor.  Unfortunately, this brief scene is only half silent.  The scene is framed with slapstick interplay between the Barber and the stormtroopers—ranging from buffoonery with a paint dipped brush to an attempted lynching—which further weakens its impact.  All of this is akin to Keystone Cops antics.  Something more unsettling was desperately needed.

The second and third silent vignettes are shared between the Barber and the Great Dictator (also played by Chaplin).  The Barber’s shaving of a customer, choreographed to the music of Brahms, is a brilliantly polished bit of quicksilver business and has nothing to do with the rest of the film.  (The shaving sequence had been attempted in a previous short and is a good example of how Chaplin re-worked ideas).  It is the Tramp’s best moment in the film, however.  In the final silent vignette, The Great Dictator nearly copulates with a balloon globe of the world.  Oddly, it is in the portrayal of Hitler, rather than the Barber, that we see more of Chaplin’s Tramp shining through.  The Dictator hearkens back to the earliest Keystone Tramp characterizations, when the little fellow could be cruel, selfish, and remarkably antagonistic.  (Later in his career, Chaplin’s First National Tramp has a moment, in The Pilgrim [1923], when he delivers a sermon in a hyperkinetic, uncannily Hitler-like stance).  Chaplin clearly invests most of his energy into this new character.

The Barber’s cutesy relationship with Hannah is forced and occasionally irksome, although through no fault of Goddard, who is probably Chaplin’s best leading lady.  Her role here is not the level of her compelling Gamin in the Modern Times, but she is Chaplin’s equal in ways that Edna Purviance, Georgia Hale, and Virginia Cherril, good as they were, could not be.

In 1917 Chaplin lost his great on-screen nemesis, Eric Campbell, to a car accident.  Chaplin’s films thus lost the sense of rudimentary mystery that Campbell’s foil gave to the Tramp.  The closest Chaplin came to having a worthwhile nemesis again was in Jack Oakie’s “Napolini” (i.e. Mussolini.).  Although Oakie has been rightly praised for his performance here, time  has also somewhat rusted his Chico Marx-like caricaturization.  Almost as good, although his appearance is brief, is Henry Daniel’s Herr Garbitsch (likely based on Joseph Goebbels).  Daniel, as usual, supplies macabre precision to his villainous role, although he is, overall, too sophisticated for the part.  The Great Dictator benefits from Chaplin’s attention and development of his co-stars Goddard, Oakie, and Daniel, but the film also frequently flounders by being littered with flat, obvious jokes.

The speech at the end is as naive and as heart-felt for its age as John’s Lennon’s “Imagine” was three decades later.  Chaplin steps out of character here, and critics of the period were right in their assessment that the speech throws the film off.  In hindsight, the oration is a  coda of sorts for Chaplin’s Tramp, although, again, verbal expression amounts to a new, nervous language for the actor.  The creation and the creator merge into a persona of maudlin sentimentality and extravagant social satire.  To criticize Chaplin for either is to criticize Chaplin as a whole.

Chaplin said if the Tramp ever spoke, he had to say something important.  Imagine, a filmmaker actually believing a film needs to have a point.  For all of its flaws, The Great Dictator is an important and enjoyable film.  Whether it’s important or enjoyable enough is debatable.

*The Criterion extras are sprinkled with The Great Dictator‘s seeds.  “Chaplin’s Napoleon” is a short “visual essay” detailing an abandoned film on the French dictator.  More interesting is the short King, Queen, and Joker, directed by Chaplin’s brother Sydney. It contains one of two blueprints for the barbershop sequence (the second is a scene cut from First National’s Sunnyside).

Another fascinating document in this impressive criterion package is film critic Michael Wood’s impassioned essay in defense of the film. Chaplin was probably grateful, considering all the negative heat he received from other quarters.

DIRECTED BY: Aramis Sartorio

FEATURING: Aramis Sartorio, Caleb Emerson, Vincent Cusimano, Kimberly Kane, Camilla Lim, Karen Sartorio, Gia Paloma

PLOT:  Struggling actor Tommy Pistol isn’t much of a success, but he doesn’t let that hinder

his dream of becoming a star, even when his wife and child leave him.  Left alone with hot dogs, porn and a penis pump, Tommy dreams his dreams of success and stardom, but even in dreams, things don’t turn out as he hopes.  And his reality is just about to get even worse…

COMMENTS:  It’s not inaccurate to call TGDOTP a Troma-esque grossout horror-comedy anthology, but that description leaves out quite a lot. It’s also a cautionary tale about obsession, fame and filmmaking in Los Angeles with autobiographical elements.

Unfolding as a series of dreams, the first, “Snuff Said,” has a young Pistol fresh off the train, answering an ad on a web site to act in a movie.  It turns out to be a snuff film, but Pistol, not being the sharpest tool in the box (so to speak), thinks that it’s just extremely realistic special effects.

The second dream, “10 Minutes of Fame”, sees Pistol sneaking onto a location set of a major film and gradually worming his way to become the assistant of the star—Arnold Schwartzenegger!  He accidently kills Arnie and takes his skin, which gives him the ass-kicking skills to take out the rest of the crew.

In the last dream, “Attack of the Staph Spider”, Tommy is a porn director whose lead actress is bitten by a radioactive spider in the alley just prior to the shoot.  Things do not turn out like “Spiderman,” unfortunately—the actress develops boils and starts leaking addictive fluids, which end up infecting the crew.  Meanwhile, Tommy’s biggest problem is getting the makeup person to make her presentable so the shoot can go on.

The humor is pitch-black; as in most of the Troma-esque lot, the grossness factor is pushed pretty much past the hilt, then doubled.  All of the characters in the dreams are, at their best, amoral to immoral; but in a satire about fame and filmmaking, that’s probably an accurate portrayal.  It also helps that the movie’s pretty damn funny.

What raises TGDOTP a notch above most of its cousins is that the grossness isn’t merely for the sake of grossness—there’s actually some substance behind it.  “Tommy Pistol” is actually Sartorio’s nom de porn when he was acting in adult films such as Repenetrator, The XXXorcist and Neu Wave Hookers.  Deciding to branch out, he made “Staph Spider” as a short, then pursued other opportunities as a struggling actor in Hollywood.  Although his wife did not leave him, many other elements in the film—being late for auditions, getting fired from ‘real’ jobs and dodging creditors—Sartorio probably knows all too well, as well as the other side of Hollywood: sketchy characters willing to do anything to anyone; narcissistic actors; and the desperation and self-delusion of everyone in town, especially those attempting to find their big break.  It may be exaggerated, but there’s a definite sense that there’s some personal experience involved.  The best example is a scene in the first dream, which mocks the aside to camera in JCVD, but also functions in the very same fashion.  And surprisingly, the movie ends in a sad and strangely graceful place, something completely unexpected, and also appreciated.

The acting is strong—better than you would expect in films of this ilk; and tech is pretty good, especially in the effects.  The humor is not going to appeal to everyone, obviously, but those who ‘like it black’ will enjoy it, especially the segment about Schwarzenegger.

Ultimately, it’s not a weird film, despite the over-the-top humor.  Most reviewers have been calling this Troma-esque, and Troma, especially “balls-to-the-wall, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink grossout humor Troma” is just not “weird” anymore.

Even calling it a “horror-comedy’ isn’t quite correct, but a “horror-comedy” is a much easier sell than a “pitch-black Hollywood satire.”

The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol facebook page

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this film was provided by the production company for review.

FEATURING: Ryan Reynolds, Melissa McCarthy, Hope Davis, Elle Fanning

PLOT: Three separate plot strands—about a self-destructive actor under house arrest, a

writer trying to get his series past the pilot stage while being filmed by a reality TV crew, and a video game designer whose car breaks down in the middle of nowhere—intertwine in a mysterious way, with the same actors playing different characters in each mini-story.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Any doubts I might have had about considering this pretty good, pretty strange movie as a candidate for the List were allayed when I heard writer/director John August proclaim “we’re a weird movie, for a lot of reasons…” on the “making of” DVD featurette.  If the director deliberately set out to make a weird movie, who am I to refuse to consider it?  But, while August’s movie scores above average in terms of both quality and of weirdness, I’m not sure that it’s combined totals are high enough to inaugurate it as one of the greatest weird movies of all time, at least not on the first ballot.

COMMENTS: I have to be careful in discussing The Nines not to give away much more than you’d discover on your own by reading the blurb on the back of the DVD case.  When you pop the disc into your player, you can expect to see three different stories—”The Prisoner,” “Reality Television,” and “Knowing”—acted by the same core trio, each playing different roles in each tale.  Besides the actors, locales, song lyrics, a television series, and—especially—the number “9″ recur in each of the divergent plot lines, drawing correspondences and reverberances between these various worlds.  There is a thread connecting each strand; and although the first two stories, at least, are engaging on their own terms, it’s figuring out that overarching plan that supplies most of the interest.  One thing that can be discussed (and praised) without spoiling anything is the acting.  Hope Davis plays, variously, a horny housewife, a conniving TV producer, and a hiker in the middle of nowhere; Melissa McCarthy tackles the triumvirate of a bubbly public relations expert, the mother of a mute girl, and herself, the “Gilmore Girls” actress.  But it’s previously unheralded Ryan Reynolds who’s the real revelation here.  As a dimwitted, self-destructive Lothario actor and an erudite gay screenwriter, he projects two such diverse personae that you almost can’t believe it’s the same actor inhabiting both roles.  (His third role is, oddly, a bit blander, but you won’t mind after watching the first two perfs).  The bizarre first raises it’s head in story one when the actor character freaks out after trying crack for the first time, but drug hallucinations are expected, conventional type of Hollywood weirdness.  The continued appearance of the number 9 everywhere marks the ascendency of the odd, and things get into a high weird gear when a character decides to suddenly expresses her inner feelings through a musical number.  Working against the film’s weirdness, however, is the fact that the mystery dissolves too early, and everything becomes perfectly logical (according to the movie’s speculative conceit) long before the end rolls around.  The tone of The Nines is primarily a moody psychological thriller, but each segment contains a dramatic core, and there are numerous satirical jabs throughout—especially at the world of television (the second segment comes from the author’s real life travails trying to bring a series to life in a cutthroat corporate world where backstabbing is a routine duty performed over a power lunch).  The different styles blend surprisingly well, but the movie’s overall emotional impact isn’t what it aims for, primarily because the central character turns out to be difficult to relate to. Comparing The Nines to one of Charlie Kaufman‘s metaphysical conceits is appropriate; it’s in the same ballpark, at least (though Kaufman, come to think of it, tends to hit his ideas out of the ballpark).  Multilayered, The Nines ultimately could be interpreted as anything from (cosmically speaking) a treatise on man’s relationship to God, to (on a concrete level) a reflection on the addictiveness of video game culture.  If those diverse interpretive possibilities don’t stir your curiosity, I’m not sure what will.

The Nines is John August’s first feature directing credit.  The Sony DVD includes August’s hilarious short film, “God,” with Melissa McCarthy, which is about a woman’s (literal) relationship with her Creator.  August has also written several Hollywood screenplays, most notably for the Tim Burton projects Big Fish, The Corpse Bride, and the upcoming feature version of Frankenweenie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…weirdly engrossing head-scratcher of a metaphysical puzzle movie…”–Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly (contemporaneous)

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