Tag Archives: Oddity

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE FARTISTE (1987)

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DIRECTED BY: Mark Ruggio

FEATURING: Michael Pataki

PLOT: A fake documentary about the rise and fall of the (real life) “flatulist” performer Le Pétomane, who narrates his story from Purgatory.

Still from The Fartiste (1987)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This long-unreleased one-hour mockumentary is a curiosity, nothing more.

COMMENTS: I’m going to hold my nose and resist the urge to say The Fartiste stinks. (To be fair, I’m not going to claim “it’s a gas!,” either). There’s a reason that The Fartiste was never released after being completed in 1987, and it’s not because the subject matter was too outrageous. The truth is that one hour, while too short for a feature presentation, is too long for an extended fart joke, leaving The Fartiste in no-man’s land. Despite the fact that the historical Le Pétomane (real name: Joseph Pujol) was able to pack audiences into the Moulin Rouge for his concerts in a pre-talkie era, today, audiences are able to sate their curiosity about his peculiar talents in a Facebook post (“a guy who used to pack audiences in to hear him fart? That’s awesome! Oooh, now there’s a baby goat on a trampoline, how cute!”) Stretching this material into an hour’s worth of entertainment proves beyond The Fartiste‘s abilities. With a Pepe le Pew accent and a stage mustache (which disappears in some scenes, replaced with greasepaint), character actor Michael Pataki is acceptable in the role, but never makes Le Pétomane into a truly funny presence. Basically, the movie follows a typical showbiz narrative trajectory, with too much early success leading Le Pétomane into vice and arrogance. Near the end there’s a somewhat amusing slapstick duel with a hotshot bowel jock who wants to unseat the Fartiste. Flirting with fatal flatulence, the combatants drink cabbage juice before the showdown—generic cabbage juice, for extra foulness. The duel is one of the few “action” sequences in The Fartiste, which mostly proceeds as a series of talking head interviews with people whose paths crossed Le Pétomane’s, including famous late 19th/early 20th century figures like Freud, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Enrico Caruso. (Some of this has a grain of a historical basis—for example, Freud was said to have attended a Fartiste performance, although he probably never diagnosed the Frenchman as being trapped in the anal stage). Given that much of Le Pétomane’s career overlapped the silent film era, we also see lots of faux-silent movie footage (especially at the beginning), supplemented by real movies from the public domain. There is a shot of the chandelier crash from Phantom of the Opera (in this alternate reality, the collapse is brought about by a vindictive Pétomane poot) and scenes from Nosferatu illustrate the Fartiste’s early life. The mix of archival footage and fake footage never looks convincing, but that doesn’t matter much—the movie, originally shot on 1980s era TV video and transferred from the sole surviving element, doesn’t look very good overall. Anyway, visuals aren’t the point of The Fartiste. The movie’s greatest asset may be it’s short running time; the whole thing is as light and airy as a whiff of methane. I was actually more impressed with the DVD’s bonus feature, a modern silent one-reeler starring “Harlem Hank” and “Flatbush Frank” entitled “That Voodoo You Do.” Set in a funeral parlor, it’s got cleavage jokes, an undead body, a voodoo priestess in drag, a barrelhouse piano score, mugging in pancake makeup, and it ends on a groaner—it’s a lot of fun, and even shorter than the feature!

The Fartiste (1987) is not to be confused with “The Fartiste,” an unrelated 2006 off-Broadway musical that is occasionally revived. played Joseph Pujol in a 1983 Italian biopic, and there was also a 1998 French documentary on le Pet.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s short, sweet, stupid, and utterly bizarre…”–Mondo Digital

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this movie was provided by the distributor for review.

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE TELEPHONE BOOK (1971)

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The Telephone Book has been promoted to the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies ever made. Please make all comments on the official Certified Weird entry.

AKA Hot Number

DIRECTED BY: Nelson Lyon

FEATURING: Sarah Kennedy, Norman Rose

PLOT: An oversexed girl encounters stag film producers, perverts and lesbian seductresses as she searches Manhattan for the obscene phone caller who has stolen her heart.

Still from The Telephone Book (1971)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The last twenty minutes. Up until then, The Telephone Book is a mildly absurd pre-hardcore sexploitation comedy with art-scene pretensions; a long confessional monologue from a pig-masked pervert followed by a surreally obscene, obscenely surreal animated climax launch it into a different stratosphere of weirdness.

COMMENTS: The Telephone Book is a sex comedy dirty enough for David F. Friedman but avant-garde enough for . In its seedy black and white universe, subway flashers, lesbian predators, and nymphomaniacs exist alongside surrealism, social satire, and cameos from Warhol superstars Ultra Violet and Ondine. It’s a strange mix but it generally works; there’s enough flesh and vulgar humor for the heavy-breathing crowd, and just enough wit and artistry to give the adventurous arthouse patron an excuse to keep watching. Young Alice lives alone in a room wallpapered with porn, with a giant breast hanging from her ceiling and an American flag as her bedspread. She’s exactly the kind of sexually liberated girl who, according to early 1970s understanding of female sexuality, might be turned on by a dirty phone call; and indeed she is, for she gets a random ring from “John Smith,” the self-proclaimed greatest obscene phone caller in the world. The first part of the movie, which starts strong but soon bogs down in repetitive sex sketches, involves Alice going on an odyssey through the phone book to locate Mr. Smith. The search immediately lands her in a fleshpile with ten other nude lasses at a stag film audition; later exploits bring her in contact with a sleazy psychiatrist who’s both exhibitionist and voyeur and a lesbian pick-up artist who sends Alice into a vibrator-induced trance. The girl’s erotic adventures are interrupted by confessionals from various members of an Obscene Phone Callers Anonymous support group, and by Ondine narrating while a naked man lies on his desk. Skinny Sarah Kennedy is a game nympho with a voice pitched somewhere between Marilyn Monroe and Betty Boop, but although she’s more than cute enough in a girl-next-door way, she doesn’t have the sex goddess quality that would put the movie over-the-top erotically. In the final reels the emphasis shifts from Alice to Smith, the obscene Lothario, who shows up at Alice’s apartment wearing a pig mask to hide his identity. Smith, played by dulcet baritone Norman Rose, sounds like a radio pitchman (Rose was in fact a voiceover artist), and has an interestingly precise erotic delivery (“…now, run your right hand over the previously described area…”) His appearance marks a big shift in the movie, taking it from mildly loopy sexcapades into totally alien erotics. He delivers a long monologue describing the origin of his X-rated calling career, while his porcine face spins in a black void, fetishistically juxtaposed beside various disembodied body parts supplied by Ms. Kennedy. This is all a teasing lead-in to the film’s startling climax; John won’t physically make love to Alice, but they can stand in side by side phone booths and swap dialogue so profoundly filthy that it can only be expressed symbolically with animation that looks like something a thirteen-year old might have doodled in his notebooks after reading a copy of Screw magazine. The film goes to color and we watch a parade dirty pictures consisting of nesting phalluses, a lusty couple with tongues for heads, and a lady/robot hybrid who makes explicit love to a skyscraper. Some things just have to be seen to be believed; that’s The Telephone Book‘s biggest selling point. As a funny movie it doesn’t completely work, nor is it a hit as a sexy movie. As a weird movie, though… well, that’s another matter.

The producers actually shot footage with but it was cut; the unused footage was later lost after the movie flopped and faded into obscurity. Nelson Lyon went on to write for the early years of Saturday Night Live, but his career ended after he was involved in the speedball binge that ended with John Belushi’s fatal overdose.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…plays like a more explicit variation on Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy… it’s clear that Lyon also drew inspiration from the surreal dreamscapes in Lewis Carroll’s books.”–Budd Wilkins, Slant Magazine (DVD)

Capsules

CAPSULE: 3 DEV ADAM (1973)

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3 Mighty Men; 3 Giant Men

DIRECTED BY: Tevfik Fikrat Ucat

FEATURING: Aytekin Akkaya, Yavuz Selekman, Dogan Tamer

PLOT: Captain America and Mexican wrestling champion Santo travel to Istanbul to help defeat evil antiques stealer Spider.

Still from 3 Dev Adam (1973)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It has its illucid moments, but there’s not enough consistent high absurdity beyond its preposterous pop premise. I admit that when three laughing puppet heads inexplicably appear in the middle of a sex scene, I was strongly tempted to make this movie a candidate for the List. But, at bottom, if you take the copyright-violation costumes off the actors and you would have a mildly exciting, ridiculous, and extremely cheap action film; a fun oddity to be sure, but not in the same league as the weirdest movies of all time.

COMMENTS: I’m not saying this movie would make a great deal of sense if the villain weren’t a blatant Spiderman knockoff, but about 90% of what makes 3 Dev Adam look absurd to us comes from the “facts” we know about Marvel’s classic superhero. Here in the West we realize that Spiderman does not wear a green costume with a red cowl and an overweight arachnid on the back. We know that his eyebrows aren’t so bushy that they stick out of his mask by a good two inches. And, most importantly, we know that Spidey does not bury women up to their necks in the sand and then pumice their faces with the propeller of a motorboat. If Adam‘s director is to be believed, it was no problem to make Spiderman into a villain because Turkish moviegoers had no idea who he was, which begs the question: why bother to rip off foreign superheroes at all if your audience doesn’t know who they are?

Perhaps Turks were more familiar with Captain America and Mexican wrestling hero Santo than with Spiderman, because these two crime fighters are garbed more faithfully in suits that look like they might have been rented from costume shops in Manhattan and Guadalajara, respectively. But this brings up another issue: these two heroes don’t have any superpowers, Captain America doesn’t have a magic shield, and neither has a secret identity to protect, so there’s no obvious reason for them to get all Continue reading CAPSULE: 3 DEV ADAM (1973) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: APHRODISIAC! THE SEXUAL SECRET OF MARIJUANA (1971)

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DIRECTED BY: Dennis Van Zak

FEATURING: John Holmes, Billy Curtis, and anonymous hippies

PLOT: A pro-pot documentary touting the aphrodisiacal properties of the titular herb, with brief

Still from Aphrodisiac!: The Sexual Secret of Marijuana (1971)

hardcore sex scenes to illustrate its key thesis.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s an absurd, exploitative historical oddity that’s worth noting, but it’s not nearly odd/hilarious enough to crack the List of the Best Weird Movies ever made.

COMMENTS: Aphrodisiac! The Sexual Secret of Marijuana is an example of a type of film of enormous importance in the history of film censorship.  (Yeah, that’s why we wanted to check it out…)  In the years before Deep Throat (1972) beat the censors in court, would-be pornographers were trying to stay on the good side of the Roth obscenity test, which concluded that a work could discuss and arguably depict sex if it was not “utterly without socially redeeming importance” and so long as “the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole” did not “appeal to the prurient interest.”  A few sleaze sellers pounced on the documentary format as a promising way to provide “socially redeeming importance” while avoiding appealing “to the prurient interest” (at least, “as a whole”).  They released daring films with titles like Man & Wife: An Educational Film for Married Adults (1969), Pornography in Denmark (1970), and Sexual Liberty Now (1971) that included some hardcore sex scenes amidst the “serious” (i.e., seriously boring) discussion of social issues.  Aphrodisiac! falls into this brief tradition, but it’s extra-shameless in its willingness to meld sexploitation with drugsploitation while wrapping the whole thing in a semi-sincere wrapper of social relevance.  Aphrodisiac! bounces back and forth between documentary nuggets, obviously fake “man in the street” interviews, and graphic illustrations of cannabis’ connubial powers.  As a documentary the film is far from incisive, but really not as shoddy and misleading as you might have expected: prohibitionist Harry J. Anslinger’s central role in influencing public opinion against the “killer drug” is highlighted, as is New York City mayor Fiorella La Guardia’s much-ignored 1939 study concluding that marijuana posed little threat to public health.  We also learn (correctly) that George Washington grew Continue reading CAPSULE: APHRODISIAC! THE SEXUAL SECRET OF MARIJUANA (1971) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

89. FINAL FLESH (2009)

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“I don’t know if I really like this movie, it’s just kind of weird. It’s worth checking out; it’s weird. Something to talk about. So, if you like really, really weird stuff, check out Final Flesh, it’s really weird.”–YouTube reviewer

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Written by Vernon Chatman, directed by “Ike Sanders” and three other uncredited directors

FEATURING: Twelve amateur porn stars

PLOT: After a prologue explains that the atom bomb is about to drop, we’re shown a family of three (mother, father and adult daughter) sitting around a kitchen table, deciding that they will stay and “die with dignity.” The mother and daughter give birth to various food items and the father tires to climb back into the womb, and then daughter relates a dream. We see a mushroom cloud, then another trio of actors in a different apartment who believe they are in the afterlife: they recite more humorous nonsense about God, death and the apocalypse and enact more bizarre skits before the action shifts to another trio in a different room, then another…

Still from Final Flesh (2009)

BACKGROUND:

  • Vernon Chatman made Final Flesh by submitting scripts to four different amateur porn production companies that specialize in acting out their client’s fantasies. The scripts were submitted between 2002 and 2009, so the film was actually 7 years in the making.
  • Chatman is a stand-up comic and Emmy-winning television writer. He wrote for “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” and “The Chris Rock Show” before co-creating the short-lived, weird cult TV series “Wonder Showzen” and “Xavier: Renegade Angel.” He’s most famous for his work with “South Park,” where he provides the voice of “Towelie,” the pot-smoking towel.
  • Chatman is a member of the Brooklyn-based art collective PFFR, who produce music, art, and short films. The first segment of Final Flesh was made as a short film for a PFFR art show, and although the final project was Chatman’s work alone, it was still released under the PFFR umbrella.
  • Final Flesh is distributed by Drag City, an independent music label that has only recently branched out into underground film (and may have given up that side-business already). Drag City’s other 2009 movie release, Trash Humpers, hogged the company’s headlines when it became a minor cause célèbre after Netflix refused to stock it.  Final Flesh received relatively little promotion, despite the fact that Netflix declined to carry it, as well.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: For Final Flesh, we’re going to break with tradition and provide four different “indelible images,” one from each segment of the film. A girl breastfeeds a porterhouse steak; a woman in a jeans, a tank-top and a skull mask threatens a man on his deathbed; a couple make out by mashing the skulls drawn on their backs together; a young lady in black lingerie performs a wedding ceremony on two corpses lying side by side.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The conceptual art premise of sending a non-erotic script to be acted out by pornstars-for-hire might be weird enough, but when that apocalyptic screenplay requires the bemused amateur actors to bathe in the tears of neglected children and recite lines like “I just creamed my demon” after being slapped, we’ve traveled beyond the snarkily experimental into the realm of the existentially deranged. All the world’s a stage and these men and women play many parts; if some of those roles require them to pour ketchup in a conch shell and poke at it with a turkey baster while moaning orgasmically, then maybe that’s just how this universe rolls.


Short clip from Final Flesh

COMMENTS: In porn, when a woman wiggles and says “oh my God, there’s something going Continue reading 89. FINAL FLESH (2009) →