Tag Archives: Perverse

Capsules

CAPSULE: 2012 AFICIONADO DVD ZINE: ISSUE #0 (2012)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: None credited

FEATURING: N/A

PLOT: A two-plus hour “mixtape” of video clips, some rare, some shocking, a few weird, arranged with a minimum of editing.

Still from 2012 Aficionado DVD zine issue #0

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The “mixtape” concept is easy to  attempt, hard to master. This one contains little of interest and much that’s in terrible taste, with extremely irritating editing experiments as the rancid topping on an unappetizing pie. Few will be able to watch it to the end; many could not make it five minutes into this “movie” without giving up. For aficionados of 2012 only.

COMMENTS: Way back in the VHS era, tapes of rare video material—embarrassments taped off public access TV, censored news footage, forbidden clips from video nasties, strange home videos found in thrift shops—circulated among collectors who would often edit them into anthologies or “mixtapes.” In the age of the high-speed Internet, when everything has been uploaded and we are able to select our own clips with a mouse click, watching a video mixtape is like being trapped inside someone else’s YouTube playlist. Unless you invest your compilation with some sort of thematic coherence—like the ensemble, who elevated the genre to an actual artform with Doggiewogiez! Poochiewoochiez!—-there is no reason for anyone to watch it. Just stringing together stuff you think is cool is no longer sufficient.

“The 2012 Aficionado DVD Zine” falls into the “stuff the editor thinks is cool” school of mixtaping. If you don’t agree this stuff is cool—and most adults won’t think much of it is—then you’re not going to be interested in sticking with it through the bloated 2-hr. plus runtime. The “original” source material seems to be videotape, and the images are blurred and fuzzy, which adds more eyestrain than charm. Time stamps are frequently visible, particularly when some editing experiment is being done (in an attempt to add some artistic input of his own, the compiler is fond of looping the material so that the playback repeats and stutters, which becomes highly irritating—see below). There is only occasionally any kind of logical flow to the material—at one point, a George W. Bush speech segues into an anti-capitalist Afropop music video, which is about as close to a creative statement the assembler makes. Most of it is a random stream of fuzzy Bollywood dance scenes, evangelical propaganda videos, animated softcore porn, homemade amateur punk/rap/metal videos, a puppet singing about unrequited interracial love, John Kilduff’s public access exercise/painting program, exploding anime heads, Japanese softcore porn, a slo-mo version of “Soul Train,” a homemade sex tape of a furry making love to an inflatable dolphin, and so on.

It’s not as much fun as it sounds. First off, there is the horrible video quality and the fact that there is no flow to the clips. Second, there are several objectionable Faces of Death-type atrocity scenes added merely for their offensiveness and rarity. The clip of cat abuse (it is still debated how much of this scene was achieved through special effects) comes from the Hong Kong exploitation film Men Behind the Sun. Even more tasteless is the footage of combatants being eliminated by drone strikes, and a film purporting to show a man being burned alive without a trial by a vigilante mob. Since the mixtape provides no political context to these scenes—we aren’t even told what country the immolation occurs in—this is pure snuff entertainment. Finally, as if all that wasn’t enough to turn you against the project, there are the aforementioned irritating editing experiments, culminating in a one second clip of Pokemon characters yipping that is looped to run for—I kid you not—nine minutes. When I reached that point in the tape I had to turn it off and finish it the next night. You don’t have to go that far in; you never have to watch any of it at all.

I don’t understand how “the 2012 Aficionado DVD Zine” is, as it advertizes itself, “the first ever zine in DVD format.” A zine was an underground magazine composed of original material written or drawn by hobbyists. It did not consist simply of unauthorized reprints of other people’s work. Other than the ill-advised edits, nothing here was actually created by the person who assembled it. Still, it’s available here, along with five more episodes which are also each over 2 hours long. Some of you will doubtlessly be tempted to try this—but don’t say you weren’t warned.

(This movie was nominated for review by someone [almost certainly the original editor/uploader] whose comments have since been lost. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: WETLANDS (2013)

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Feuchtgebiete

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: David Wnendt

FEATURING: Carla Juri, Christoph Letkowski, Meret Becker, Axel Milberg

PLOT: A sexually precocious teen girl who is virulently anti-hygiene tries to seduce her male nurse when she is hospitalized with anal fissures.

Still from Wetlands (2013)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Wetlands proudly advertises itself as “the most WTF, NSFW movie” of the year, and it is unique in that it’s the world’s first art-house gross-out romantic comedy. It’s worth a look for the way it blends cuteness and transgression with a peppering of magical realism moments, but it’s more provocative than weird in the end.

COMMENTS: I recently saw a Dutch study that came to the common-sense conclusion that sexual arousal overcomes feelings of disgust, allowing us to propagate the species despite the fact that the process of sexual intercourse involves a lot of foul smells and exchange of potentially deadly fluid-borne bacteria. So it’s no surprise that Wetlands makes its hemorrhoid-ridden heroine with the crusty panties a) horny and b) hot.  Helen may be unhygienic, but thankfully she’s photogenic. A movie about a fat, homely girl who disdains hygiene and trades tampons with her best friend would be far harder to (forgive me) swallow.

There are more than a few softcore (and some pretty hardcore) sex scenes here, and graphic “ick” moments that will remind you of illustrated versions kinds of stories teenage boys like to swap in locker rooms to make each other gag. There are also a sprinkling of hallucinatory scenes to catch weirdophiles interest, anchored by the moment where an aroused Helen sees a tree sprouting from her vagina. Perhaps even more visually impressive is the opening credits’ psychedelic trip through the rainbow forest of microflora and fauna growing on a filthy public toilet bowl. Helen confesses that she “often mixes up reality, lies and dreams,” which calls into question some of her more extreme exploits, but her hallucinations are always psychologically revealing, and sometimes dead-on satirical (as in the fantasy where her mother faces her greatest fear—being struck by a bus while wearing a pair of dirty underwear).

Wetlands intends to challenge what it contends are our irrational prejudices about the uncleanliness of our own bodies. But in knowingly pushing the audience’s gross-out buttons, it sometimes perforates the wall of absurdity to the point where its legitimate  message is lost. The pizza scene, in particular, seems like something that belongs in a Pink Flamingos sequel. The movie risks sweeping its argument about the irrationality of taboos away in a flood of menstrual blood, mucous, semen, and the miscellaneous fluids that pool on the floor of one particularly unhygienic public toilet. Wetlands is filled with womb and birth imagery that suggests that the process of becoming human is inescapably wet and smelly, and that  perhaps we should embrace that reality as joyously as our heroine does.  Yet, Helen confesses that she’s had herself secretly sterilized. The statement is made offhandedly, and maybe its one of the lies that Helen mixes up with truth, but it metaphorically cuts off the “life-affirming” reading. Still, although it might be a little thematically confused and try too hard to shock, Wetlands is bold and original in tone, and it boasts a brave and winning performance from Carla Juri (who convincingly captures the raunchy and rebellious charm of a free-spirited teenager despite being in her late twenties).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an aesthetically amped-up affair, full of segmented screens, oversaturated colors, trippy special effects, and drugged-out flashbacks and dream sequences…”–Nick Schager, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

 

Canonically Weird (The List)

178. THE BLACK CAT (1934)

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Peter Allison: “Sounds like a lot of supernatural baloney to me.”

Dr. Vitus Werdegast: “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.”–The Black Cat

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , David Manners, Jacqueline Wells, Lucille Lund

PLOT: A rainy night and roadside accident lands WWI veteran Dr. Vitus Werdegast and a honeymooning couple at the old dark house of Satanist Hjalmar Poelzig. Poelzig, a mass murderer guilty of war crimes, is also Werdegast’s longtime nemesis. Werdegast is sworn to revenge, but must also protect the couple from being sacrificed at a Black Mass.

Still from The Black Cat (1934)
BACKGROUND:

  • In his native Hungary, Lugosi had often played romantic leads. Typecast since Dracula (1931), Lugosi was initially enthusiastic about taking on the role of Werdegast. However, upon seeing the script and discovering that his beloved “protagonist” raped the heroine, The Black Cat became a career nightmare for the actor. Adding to the onset tension was Lugosi’s increasing jealousy of Karloff. In an interview with author Gregory Mank, Ulmer’s widow, Shirley Ulmer, related that Karloff and her late husband were kindred, erudite spirits. The two often engaged in discussions ranging from art to philosophy and film aesthetics. Lugosi, who was no intellectual heavyweight, felt the odd man out. Threatened by his genre rival, Lugosi resorted to lurid anecdotes for attention, even claiming that he had once been a Hungarian hangman. Naturally, such yarn spinning only served to further distance Lugosi from his peers.
  • According to Mank, Lugosi got increasingly excited at the prospect of “skinning” his rival. Multiple takes were required and, in each take, Lugosi’s English became even more rushed and indecipherable. Many years later, Karloff advised impressionist Rich Little to watch the skinning scene from The Black Cat, in order to mimic Lugosi’s idiosyncratic vocalizations: “Did you ever seen an animal skinned, Hjalmar? That’sh what I’m going to do to you now. Vear the skin from your body, shlowly, bit by bit.” Karloff’s infamous lisp, at its most pronounced here, parallels Lugosi’s language mangling. Reportedly, Lugosi, of all people, consistently ridiculed Karloff’s speech impediment.
  • Among the excised scenes were the afore mentioned rape, a scene of Joan Allison actually transforming into a black cat, and shots of Karloff’s skinned Poelzig, crawling on the floor with bloodied, flayed flesh hanging off his frame. Awkward comedy relief and embarrassing scenes depicting Werdegast’s fear of black cats were added, along with a slightly more traditionally heroic shaping of Lugosi’s character.
  • Ulmer drew his inspiration for Poelzig from two sources: first, the German architect and leading member of the avant garde architectural society “Der Ring,” Hans Poelzig. Polezig’s work was an eccentric mix of Gothic and Noveua, filtered through very personal sensibilities. Second was the infamous Satanist and misogynist Aleister Crowley, whose concupiscent philosophy is expressed by his motto “I rave and I rape and I rip and I rend.” Ulmer grafts those two identification points into a First World War backstory. Ulmer had additional influence here as well: his father was one of the countless European victims in the Great War.
  • Ulmer doubled as set designer and imbued the film with Bauhaus sensibilities.
  • Ulmer should have been Universal’s third iconic horror director, directly behind  and . Like those contemporaries, Ulmer had enough personal vision to elevate a pedestrian seed into something unique. Unfortunately, Ulmer broke a basic rule: He had an affair with his boss’ wife, which lead to his being fired and blacklisted by major studios. Although Ulmer was offered a chance to direct a big budget Shirley Temple musical for Fox, he turned down the offer, choosing instead to makepoverty row quickies for  PRC, where he languished for the rest of his career. Most of  his films are saddled with execrable scripts, and despite a cult following in France, Ulmer’s ultimate artistic merit is speculative.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: After the roadside accident, Vitus Werdegast and company arrive at Hjalmar Poelzig’s mansion. Ulmer’s camera jerkily climbs the deco stairs. The light from a radio blinks. Through cracks and clicks, Poelzig’s manservant announces: “Dr. Werdegast has arrived.” Poelzig’s wife lies asleep in bed; a half nude vision of purest white. Next to her lies the blackened silhouette of Polezig. Upon hearing the voice of his servant, Poelzig awakes, clicks on a light, and sits straight up. It doesn’t take a Freudian to see the image for what it is; a blatantly erect phallus. Polezig rises and walks menacingly toward the bedroom door, seen through the sheer curtain of a canopy bed. He is a phallic symbol as harbinger of death. Sex and death awash in starkly cubist black and white, and dramatic classical music. Poelzig’s wife is also his step-daughter, and Werdegast’ daughter. Werdegast waits below, suspicious but not completely aware of the incestuous milieu permeating Polezig’s fortress.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Despite a checklist of outré taboos, The Black Cat, partly due to studio tampering, is characterized by subdued aesthetics. Rather than conveying grotesquerie and perversity through blood-soaked Poe-like dungeons, which would be the pedestrian route, Ulmer crafts a very personal restlessness through the icy tents of modernism, futurism, highly stylized acting, and artistic music. While this may make it a challenge for contemporary viewers, it renders this tale of revenge, lust and paranoia even weirder.


Fan made trailer for The Black Cat (by David Smith)

COMMENTS: For the first team-up of Universal’s horror stars, Karloff and Lugosi, uncredited producer Carl Laemmle Jr. virtually gave director Edgar G. Continue reading 178. THE BLACK CAT (1934) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

169. PINK FLAMINGOS (1972)

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“‘Demonstration as theater,’ because then you got the headlines, and then you made your point. And there was a lot of competition for those headlines then [the 1960s]. So, it was theater as protest, certainly, which is something that, until the Seattle riots recently, kids don’t even know about… They know ‘I have a dream,’ they know Martin Luther King, they know Malcolm X, but they don’t know all that weird stuff… this is like a radical movement against cinema, which there hasn’t ever been one, but [laughs]…”–John Waters, Pink Flamingos commentary

Beware

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , Danny Mills, ,

PLOT: Divine, winner of a contest to determine the “filthiest person in the world,” has gone into hiding at a trailer park with her egg-obsessed mother, randy son Crackers, and “traveling companion” Cotton. The Marbles, a couple who make a living by kidnapping women, impregnating them, then selling the babies to lesbian couples for adoption, are jealous of Divine’s title, believing they are filthier specimens of humanity. An escalating war of outrageously foul pranks between the two camps eventually results in arson, murder, and consumption of doggie-doo.

Still from Pink Flamingos (1972)
BACKGROUND:

  • According to John Waters, neither his own parents (who financed Pink Flamingos), nor Divine’s mother, ever saw the movie; in fact, they were “forbidden” to see it.
  • The film’s budget was $12,000 (about $68,000 in 2014 dollars). It made a reported $6,000,000 in its original run and perhaps an additional $12,000,000 in subsequent video rentals.
  • The movie is dedicated to Sadie, Katie and Les, the Manson Family names of Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, and Leslie Van Houten. During the film you can also see graffiti (painted by the crew) reading “free Tex Watson.” Waters says that the Manson Family and their recent trials were a big influence in this “anti-hippie movie for hippies.”
  • The chicken that was killed during the sex scene between Crackers and Cookie had been bought from a man who was selling them as food, and was cooked and served to the cast afterwards.
  • Waters wrote a sequel to Pink Flamingos called Flamingos Forever; plans to film it were scrapped due to the reluctance of Divine to reprise the role in middle age and the 1984 death of Edith Massey.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Oh my. There is a phrase that was coined for images like those in Pink Flamingos: “what has been seen cannot be unseen.” A naked woman covered in fresh chicken blood, a rectal closeup of a curious proctological case study, and of course the film’s grand finale (and reason to exist)—300 pound transvestite Divine using her gullet as a pooper scooper, gagging down dog dirt with a grin—are all candidates. If we want to chose something less nauseating to remember, we can consider the vision of Divine herself (himself? itself?) as the takeaway image, since this is the movie that introduced the iconic drag queen—a character who looks like Elizabeth Taylor during the “Big Mac” years, if her makeup had been designed by a grateful but seriously stoned Ronald McDonald—to the wider world.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: About a 300 pound woman (played by a man) living in a trailer who is harassed by a couple of “jealous perverts” because she is anointed “the filthiest person in the world,” Pink Flamingos is a parade of hard-to-swallow, tongue-in-cheek perversities played out in an unreal subculture where society’s values have been turned on their head. It’s the ultimate stoned, amoral underground atrocity, an obscenity shouted at the normal world by angry freaks.


Clip from Pink Flamingos

COMMENTS: If you’re not offended by something in Pink Flamingos, then please go see a psychiatrist. The movie’s reason to exist is to shock and Continue reading 169. PINK FLAMINGOS (1972) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: RETARD-O-TRON III (2013)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Roelwapper (editor)

FEATURING: Merrill Howard Kaelin (archival)

PLOT: A collection of grotesque video oddities, crazy b-movie clips, fetish porn, shock pieces, and public access embarrassments.

Still from Retard-O-Tron III

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Even if it weren’t primarily focused on the sick instead of the weird, there isn’t a high enough percentage of original material (maybe 10-15%?) in this mixtape to qualify for the List of the Weirdest Movies ever made.

COMMENTS: In my review of Sweet Movie I wrote, “…no one wants to see Sweet Movie for its political philosophy. We want to see beautiful women writhing nude in liquid chocolate, gold-plated penises, and uninhibited orgies that go far beyond our deepest desires.” Retard-O-Tron embraces that shortsighted anti-philosophy wholeheartedly, and to prove it they include, among other atrocities, a clip from Sweet Movie‘s food fight/orgy with bald anarchists spitting pasta on each other and puking while pretty Carole Laure watches on in a catatonic daze. This mixtape isn’t pitched so much as a movie or an artistic endeavor as it is a dare, like peeking at a hobo’s rotting corpse discovered under a bridge. For those who think they’ve seen everything and can’t get it up for regular sleaze anymore, here’s your chance to gaze at humanity at its filthiest and most debased, with puke porn, geriatric porn, midget porn, scat porn, fake bestiality porn, stupid people being exploited for your amusement, and general nastiness. Although it’s XXX-rated, the explicit fetish parts are generally hit fast rather than lingered over, because the movie aims to arouse your disgust, not your lust. Granted, it’s not all bad: a good portion of the offerings are actually absurd/weird rather than sick/depraved. Alongside Sweet Movie, readers of this site may also recognize surreal body horror clips from Funky Forest and insane eyeball-kaiju battles from Big Man Japan among the cooler, tamer bits. B-movie madness is also a big running theme; there is out-of-context oddness from Indonesian fantasy movies, and I recognized scenes from Lou Ferrigno’s Hercules, the golf-cart chase from Space Mutiny, and some “gotcha!” scenes from Night of the Demons 2 amidst the debris. One of the most unintentionally nightmarish segments comes courtesy of notorious Christian scare-film preacher Estus Pirkle (If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?), who describes paradise in ridiculously materialistic terms (he claims the heavenly city is fourteen-hundred times larger than New York City) before trotting out a dwarf woman confined to a wheelchair who belts out a surprisingly assured (if high-pitched) gospel number. The depressing, washed-out color, bizarre theology, and wide lapels on a powder blue suit mark this sermon as something that seems like it could only originate from the alternate reality of 1970s post-late show UHF filler. Although some of the video is edited into montages or otherwise altered (the wittiest bit is an anus superimposed over Tom Cruise’s face), for the most part the material is presented as is, in apparently random order. Although the anarchic flow of the material may be intentional—it keeps you off guard, and you’re always dreading that the next clip will come from a snuff film—it makes you long for the artistry of more artistically inclined found-footage specialists , who arrange their edits thematically and with a satirical vision in mind.

Besides porn and B-movies, the other major source of footage is cable access TV clips; these often fall flat (how many bad soul singers or Christian folksingers can you tolerate?) But public access also lends Retard-O-Tron III its most problematic segments, those featuring mentally disabled chef Merrill Howard Kaelin, who hosted an unhygienic amateur cooking show where he ruined dishes while muttering to himself and occasionally drifting off into deranged impressions and childlike bouts of giggling. That wouldn’t be too bad or offensive in itself, if Kealin were just left to do his thing and we were left to observe him as a case study in eccentricity. What’s upsetting is the sarcastic introductory narration supplied by the Retard-O-Tron staff: “Buried below the pedestrian boob could be found an underlying seething fury, a fury focused at the very curse of living and all that it had done to wrong and frustrate his character. There is soul, grace and power in each deliberate movement, in each syllable…”. Was this ironic commentary added because the mixtape makers really think it’s funny and the natural reaction to Kaelin’s antics? Or did they feel that the audience needed permission from an authority figure (the eloquent narrator) to allow themselves to lighten up and laugh at the disabled? Or did they think that just the Kaelin footage alone was insufficiently shocking, and it needed to be punched up with the taboo-breaking outrage of mocking the mentally deficient? None of the possibilities are flattering, and the inclusion of this commentary (which happens six minutes into the movie) reveals a hopelessly callous attitude that poisons everything that comes after. The entire project is thereafter infected with a heartless, sociopathic tinge that goes beyond the merely juvenile persona they hope to project. The essential problem with getting hooked on the shock aesthetic for its own sake is that once you’ve liberated yourself from the irrational “bourgeois” social restraints, you’ve got no way left to get your kicks except by shattering the necessary and rational ones, like respect for the less fortunate. Retard-O-Tron III‘s unthinking rejection of basic human empathy is what earns it its “beware” rating. With a few snips, it might have been a compilation 366 could endorse, if not champion; but although I can overlook (if not forget, dammit) the scene of a pretty Japanese woman vomiting dinner up all over her date’s upraised face, I can’t condone adolescent cruelty masquerading as wit.

Retard-O-Tron III can be bought from Cinema Sewer. It’s understood that the description above, and the “beware” rating, will tempt many of you to try this out. Hey, it’s your soul—you want to kill it, it’s none of my business.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…mind-melting mixtape madness… can you stomach the avalanche of sordid perversion and perpetual uneasy feeling this collection posits?”–Lunchmeat’s VHS Blog

(This movie was nominated for review by Roel N [the creator]. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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