After not reaching out to the public for two decades, Charles Manson contacted Marlin Marynick to make a film. He wanted to be dressed up as a general, and call the world to war against pollution. The idea couldn’t be approved by the prison system, so Marlin recorded several conversations with Manson instead. This short features a segment of one of those conversations with the accompaniment of weird animator Leah Shore.
CONTENT WARNING: This short contains language and strong animated violence.
DIRECTED BY: Kelly Hughes
FEATURING: Betty Marshall, Ernest Rhoades, James Peterson, Sarah Katherine Lewis
PLOT: We are introduced to the work of Kelly Hughes, the creative guru behind the assaultive public access series “Heart Attack Theatre,” through the words, experiences, and memories of the cast and crew who worked with him.
COMMENTS: Kelly Hughes is an underground director who hails from Seattle. He established his prominence through “Heart Attack Theatre,” a series broadcast on public access airwaves from 1991-1993 that most bourgeois viewers would dismiss as trashy, reprehensible, or simply “shock for shock sake.”
I resent that last tautology the most. When pinned on an artist’s work, the cliche is frequently used to imply that the artist’s work is disingenuous, exploitative, and that the labor and the blood and sweat that they invested in it wasn’t meaningful as anything other than a cheap novelty to amuse a select few.
As the first interviewee, Ernest Rhoades, says as he recollects his experience working for Hughes’ “Lucky Charms Productions,” some artists simply create ugly and nasty things from pure love and passion. Some artists are just destined to be dismissed as ugly misfits. Despite being penniless, starving, and painstakingly filming under what most professionals would deem as intolerable conditions, they still work because they truly believe in what they are creating. I strongly emphasize with that warrior-like commitment.
And I’m sorry, Kelly Hughes, that you never were able to create the explosive-laden, cacophonous action film that you secretly always wanted to create.
But I do appreciate that you made something.
Heart Attack! gives us glimpses of the lo-fi, brazenly transgressive style of Kelly Hughes’ brief filmography. Obviously, the initial comparison that emerges is to the early films of John Waters (though to be honest, I think that comparison is just inescapable for a lot of low-budget filmmakers like Hughes, as pointless a criticism as when people carelessly fling around the descriptor Lynchian when reviewing weird films). Anyone familiar with the filmography of Harmony Korine will definitely notice the strange effect that Hughes gets from lo-fi VHS recording tape technology, the grainy texture and subtly abstract, impressionistic colors that making the visual aesthetic as tenuous and degenerative in form as the perversely grotesque content on display.
Though if we’re going to spend this much time pretentiously discussing art, I say let us recall the words of transgressive art’s intellectual forebearer, Antonin Artaud: “No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”
Here is a brief listing of some of the films featured within Heart Attack!‘s breezy hour-long survey of Hughes’ lo-fi inventions in the public-access television medium:
• “Shot In Hughes’ kitchen”: A woman and a man stare in horror at the open kitchen cabinet. The man crawls inside it. It inexplicably consumes him. The woman screams.
• La Cage Aux Zombies: An “upscale Grapes of Wrath lady” (played by a very handsome man) stares out of a rusting, dilapidated door window. S(he) has a cartoonishly shrill groan and an amputated arm, and salutes Hitler fashionably. More happens, but it is challenging to say where the other clips fit into the larger narrative. Looks cool, though.
• “Say My Name Before I Die”: A nude man and woman stand in front of a bathroom mirror. They are discussing monetary concerns. They begin to copulate lovingly.
• “An Inconvenient Whore”: A nude man stretches over the edge of a bed, moaning. A woman leans over his face and informs the strapping young prostitute that there is another client waiting. Moaning resumes.
• “Gut Reaction”: A grizzly man in the middle of the woods wields a chainsaw. His potential victim screams in terror. Hilarious Benny Hill-esque antics ensue. The woman escapes and is picked up by a good Samaritan driving a dingy pick-up truck. The grizzly man appears and straddles the truck, blocking the view of the front windshield. She admits that she previously had an affair with her gynecologist. We discover that the man chasing her was her former lover. And then there is dismemberment. Afterwards, she spontaneously gives birth to a gigantic lime-green toy serpent. Then her snake baby chases them off.
From what I saw of Kelly Hughes’ films, I genuinely liked them. The ensemble didn’t act poorly, either, for being mostly unrecognized and technically amateur by conventional standards.
But I won’t say anything definitively on Hughes’ cinema until I actually watch his films. In their entirety.
Because as a fellow misfit, and as a young reviewer, I believe he deserves my respect when I approach his films.
So until that day I see his films, I consider any opinion on the early cinema of Kelly Hughes as merely tentative.
Heart Attack! The Early Pulse-Pounding Cinema of Kelly Hughes is exclusively available online at vhx.com. Watch Heart Attack! The Early Pulse-Pounding Cinema of Kelly Hughes ($3.99).
DIRECTED BY: Rithy Panh
FEATURING: Jean-Baptiste Phou (English narration), Randal Douc (French narration)
PLOT: Rithy Panh remembers his boyhood growing up in a Cambodian work camp under Pol Pot’s murderous regime, using clay figures of his own design to recreate horrors from the past.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This handcrafted memorial of genocide is a heartbreaking and dreamlike testimonial to perseverance in the face of incomprehensible evil, but despite being both off the beaten path and worthy of your attention, it’s not what we could truly term “weird.”
COMMENTS: Strictly speaking, mass murder is never entirely rational, but there was something especially horrific about the crimes of the Khmer Rogue and the way they blended an absurdly suicidal ideology with naked hypocrisy. Pol Pot’s regime allowed thousands of people to die of malaria because they would not treat the ill with “capitalist” medicine. The people were asked to work in “rice fields” set up in deserts, dying of hunger and exhaustion today so that millions might be fed in some far-off tomorrow. If the children sent to work in one particularly tough camp could not extract three cubic meters of dirt per day, their quota was raised to five cubic meters. It was a utopia of perfect equality, except that the overseers in the red neckerchiefs carried guns and never went hungry.
Since there is no filmed record of the horrors of Cambodia’s killing fields, other than propaganda movies showing smiling workers loading sacks of grain onto trucks (the narrator suggests that they may be props filled with sand), Rithy Panh recreates his experiences in the death camps by carving clay figures and arranging them in dioramas, which he then films with bitterly poetic narration. This is the missing picture—a record of misery that went unrecorded, because the powers that be didn’t want it to be seen. The crude, pocked and weathered figurines with frozen expressions for make perfect victims. They are nameless masses, but no matter how blank their features, each is somehow an individual, whether the individuality comes from a unique pose or some imperfection in their sculpture. They are unable to express the horror of their situation, but this makes them the perfect dumb witnesses to inexpressible horror. They sometimes interact with rare footage of Kampuchea in the 1970s. Carved figures of red-scarved soldiers stand quietly in front of black and white archival war footage; newly enlisted workers stare out from cattle cars as back-projected scenery races by. The soundscape—melancholy Cambodian folk music, dark ambient music with exotic instrumentation—combines with the quiet, almost resigned narration to make the picture play like a muted nightmare.
Technically, The Missing Picture is a documentary, but that designation seems too limiting for such ambitious nonfiction. Picture (re)creates more than it documents. Watch this with the (slightly weirder, and far more acerbic) The Act of Killing for an unconventional and disturbing documentary double-feature about the capacity of man to deal death to his fellow man, from the right or the left, from action or from neglect. “To survive, you must hide a strength within yourself… for a picture can be stolen, a thought cannot.”
The Missing Picture was Cambodia’s first-ever submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. It was passed over.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
The following is not standard for 366 material, but given the controversial nature of the film, we feel it has an off the beaten path place here.
When Bill Maher’s Religulous (2008) premiered, it predictably opened to mixed reviews. Narrated by Maher and directed by Larry Charles, Religulous is a scathing criticism on what the filmmakers see as inherent ignorance and immorality within religion.
Most of the ammo is reserved for Christianity. Instead of confrontations that shatter myths and raise consciousness, Religulous goes for cheap laughs, manipulating footage to make the participants resemble complete boobs. Maher has the sense to pump the brakes around Islam, treading carefully. Salient points are made about this furiously hot-potato faith, but Maher is noticeably outgunned, challenging the history of Islamic bloodshed from behind the comfort of news clips and sheepish concessions. The way the Middle East rumbles these days, how could anyone blame him?
Indeed, the first third of Religulous concentrates solely on Christianity. However, Maher, who wrote the film, was raised as an American Catholic, though with a Jewish heritage. Often, writing is most effective when it focuses on what one knows, and Maher seems to know Christianity. Yet, what he primarily depicts is a particular variety of fundamentalist Christianity. While polls vary in regards to the percentages of American “liturgical” Christians in contrast to “fundamentalist” Christians, few would argue that the latter comprise the bulk of stereotypes of the faith.
Maher’s perspective on Catholicism suggests he believes it resembles a Protestant evangelical faith. Most post-Vatican II Catholics today would not identify with such views. One could even question the extent of Maher’s exposure to Catholic education, even in a pre-Vatican II environment. His portrayal of Revelations as a literal doomsday book is undeniably filtered through an evangelical lens. Yet, from its earliest history, Catholic readings have predominantly interpreted it as a metaphorical work, written in a popular period genre. It is not viewed as prophecy but, rather, as a book of the past, which sounded a warning regarding the first great persecutor of Christians: Nero.
Neeley Tucker of the Washington Post addressed Maher’s rudimentary knowledge of religion:
One of the rules of satire is that you can’t mock things you don’t understand, and Religulous starts developing fault lines when it becomes clear that Maher’s view of religious faith is based on a sophomoric reading of the Scriptures and that he doesn’t understand that some thoughtful people actually do believe in some sort of spiritual life.
While Maher was not writing an academic paper, his film could have Continue reading RELIGULOUS (2008)
DIRECTED BY: Jeffrey Schwarz
FEATURING: Divine (archival footage), John Waters, Frances Milstead
PLOT: This documentary chronicles the life of Glenn Milstead, from a chunky effeminate nerd who got beat up at school to the iconic, outrageous and obscene 300 pound drag queen Divine, the main attraction in John Waters’ transgressive early comedies.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: As a straightforward documentary on a strange guy who just happened to star in some pretty weird movies, it’s purely supplemental material.
COMMENTS: One of the biggest questions raised by I Am Divine is, do you refer to Divine as “he” or “she”? John Waters, the foremost living authority on the subject, always refers to Divine as “he,” probably because when he thinks of Divine he thinks of Glenn Milstead. Other interviewees are inconsistent, swerving between gender pronouns. Divine, the foul-mouthed three-hundred pound harridan in clown makeup, is clearly a she, while the performer who portrays the character is clearly a he. There isn’t much conflict in this haigiographic documentary that means to celebrate Divine’s life and legacy, but to the extent that there is, one of the two key tensions is the one between she and he, between Divine and Glen. Divine swallowed Glen, and he was unable to escape her mighty maw and forge the independent career as a male character actor that he desired. (The other important conflict, which occurs more on the surface level, is between Glen and his parents, who initially reject him as a freak, then touchingly reconcile late in life).
I Am Divine does a fine job of shrinking this giant career down to a ninety minute snapshot. It’s thorough (even fitting in Divine’s brief stint as a disco diva) while remaining fast-paced and succinct. The John Waters years are covered in detail, and some may appreciate the clips of rarely seen pre-Pink Flamingos films like 1968’s Eat Your Makeup (with Divine as Jackie in an incredibly tasteless recreation of the Kennedy assassination). Although little is revealed here that will shock Divine’s hardcore followers, there are a few surprise tidbits for casual fans: salacious stories suggesting that Milstead’s appetites for sex and pot may have rivaled his love of doughnuts, and scenes from his live show that demonstrate his talent for Don Rickles-styled improvisational insult comicry. Milstead was large enough to have his own gravitational pull (his image even dwarfed a character like John Waters) and some of the movie’s most revealing insights involve Divine’s satellites. Belated credit is given to Van Smith for creating the arch makeup that defined Divine, and the curious will learn the sad answer to the question, “whatever happened to Dreamlander stalwart David Lochary?”
Divine is inspirational to gays for obvious reasons, but the character’s appeal crosses the sexual orientation line. Divine is appealing because she represents the triumph of the misfit, the ugly, the loser. As Waters points out, Divine takes everything that people laughed at Glen Milstead for—his effeminacy, his weight—and “exaggerated it and turned it into a style.” Divine proves that “undesirable” traits can be turned into assets when they’re embraced rather than hidden away, which is a powerful solace to anyone who feels like an outsider forced to pretend to be normal.
I Am Divine was a Kickstarter success story, raising over $50,000 (of a requested $40K) for post-production and licensing costs. Hundreds of names of fans who paid $10 or more for the privilege appear in the seemingly endless credits. Given that the film was made explicitly “BY and FOR” Divine fans, nothing appears here that is too penetrating or negative. The reverential interviews and clips meet, but don’t exceed, your expectations for a documentary about Divine. Still, true priests and priestesses in Divine’s peculiar cult of trash camp will eat this movie up like Divine eats… well, you know.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: