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366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: YOUR LIFE IS ON THE LINE! A JOE CHRIST ANTHOLOGY, VOL. 1

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You have to feel sympathy for the poor microbudget filmmaker. There is almost nothing they can do that the Hollywood filmmaker cannot do better. The easiest option to stand out is to give viewers something that Hollywood can’t. This could be a non-clichéd storyline or avant-garde aesthetics; but those paths require hard work and talent. There is one fairly easy avenue to notoriety open to anyone brave and shameless enough to take it: show the audience something taboo. This path probably won’t get you rich, but it may at least get you noticed.

has repeatedly said, “It’s easy to be shocking. It is much harder to be witty at the same time.” Generations of underground filmmakers have been proving that adage true ever since Pink Flamingos spat in America’s face with its vision of smug, gleefully villainous drag queen coprophagia. Waters’ outcasts and gays weren’t sissies to be kicked around: they were powerful, they would cut you. And they would make you laugh, often against your better judgement. But ever since Waters blazed the path, punks, outsiders, and weirdos everywhere have spat out their own attempts at scandalizing the bourgeois, aping Waters’ shocks despite not possessing his wit or purpose, to diminishing returns. Few returns are as diminished as the 1980s-90s direct-to-VHS atrocities of one Joe Christ, punk musician turned garbage auteur. Now, VHS and early DVD revivalists Saturn’s Core have shoveled the collected refuse of Christ’s movie attempts from 1988-1995—God forbid, there’s a volume 2 coming!— into a trash bin of a Blu-ray. Here are the 5 short films included:

“Communion in Room 410” (1988): Joe literally cuts a woman with a razor on the arm and breasts, then he and another woman drink the blood. They also eat Wonder bread dipped in blood in mockery of communion. Joe’s irritating, badly recorded music plays in the background. This goes on for 20 minutes, with all the artistry of “2 Girls, 1 Cup.” Hard to watch; I suggest not watching it.

“Speed Freaks with Guns” (1991): Joe delivers a paranoid, methed-up monologue, then shows some home videos of him and 2 female cronies murdering random women, then steals a car and leaves New York. This mess does contain one interesting scene: a priest randomly pukes communion wafers on Joe as he passes by. It’s the one of a very few attempts at humor on the entire disc. It’s also, revealingly, the only scene where Christ depicts himself as a victim rather than the bully.

Still from Crippled

“Crippled”: A paralyzed woman is cruelly abused by her caretakers. This is actually a surprisingly trenchant critique of… naw, just kidding, it’s more crap.

Still from acid is groovy kill the pigs

“Acid is Groovy Kill the Pigs”: A meth addict buys acid because his dealer has no meth, eats the entire blotter, then goes on a killing spree and interviews the numerous other acid-chewing serial killers he knows. The “pigs” of the title aren’t cops; they’re everyone who isn’t a serial killer themselves. The only halfway good scene is death by puppy, another rare attempt at comedy. “Acid” shows improvement over the last 3 Christ films, in little details like title cards and music that’s properly recorded, but it’s still the cinematic equivalent of soap scum you find clinging to the grout in your shower.

Continue reading 366 UNDERGROUND: YOUR LIFE IS ON THE LINE! A JOE CHRIST ANTHOLOGY, VOL. 1 →
366 Underground, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: I NEVER LEFT THE WHITE ROOM (2000)

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AKA My Crepitus

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Todd Schneider

FEATURING: Michael Todd Schneider, Eric Boring, Tom Colbert, Amy Beth Deford

PLOT: Hospital patient Jeffrey has violent, bloody dreams revolving around his life as a sex criminal and murderer.

Still from I Never Left the White Room (2000)

COMMENTS: The general tenor of I Never Left the White Room is established not in the first act, not even in the first minutes, but in the vanity card of the production company. The Maggot Films banner boasts stabs, screams, and gore to assure the viewer can expect only the most unpleasant, blood-curdling material. By that standard, I Never Left the White Room is an honest production indeed.

Schneider expands on a short film, and while one is inclined to salute him for deftly hiding the seams between old and new, the patchwork nature of the movie makes that faint praise. While there’s the suggestion of a narrative spine, I Never Left the White Room is really just a collection of disparate images, scenes whose common thread is their origin inside Jeffrey’s mixed-up brain. The title turns out to be a description of our mise en scene. 

Those visions are largely troubled, and Schneider distinguishes them with varying degrees of stylization. The most compelling is a dialogue set on a railroad trestle that warps the video image with posterization and color correction to suggest the demons inside our protagonist’s mind. Sometimes the beasts are literal, like a monster whose features can be smeared away like shaving cream. Other times, the horror has only the barest pretension to metaphor, like an absurdly lengthy scene in which a man spies on a woman taking a shower, each pleasuring themselves until the woman begins to bleed profusely. If the same central character weren’t involved, you would never know one thing had anything to do with the other. 

What Schneider is going for, other than checking items off a list, is not clear. There’s murder of women, already an infuriating trope but even more so when shorn of any motivation. There’s gore but, aside from the occasional jump scare, nothing that’s truly inventive. The acting and bare minimum of scripted dialogue don’t help, and there’s neither a hint of disgust nor irony. I think it’s supposed to be chilling, not funny, when the psychiatrist (who might also be a cop?) tells his patient, “I should be straight with you: my wife and daughters were raped and murdered last night.” As delivered, though, it’s not momentous; it’s ridiculous. 

I Never Left the White Room is trash. There’s a market for trash, of course, as evidenced by Schneider’s later association with Fred Vogel and the August Underground series. But this isn’t even good trash. Schneider has an hour of video to reveal the depths of his imagination; it proves to be shallow and aimless. Leave the white room. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the main aspect of this 70-minute piece of headache-inducing insanity is the endless stream of spliced together nightmarish visuals, surreal dreamy encounters, gory visions, bizarre symbolic imagery, lustful masturbatory fantasies sometimes including violence, grating sound effects, eye-slicing color filters, grainy post-editing effects, and so on…. mostly tedious…”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

My Crepitus (I Never Left the White

My Crepitus (I Never Left the White Room) [Blu-ray]

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(This movie was nominated for review by Kenshin, who described it as “very insane, very trippy, very surreal and extremely creepy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Apocryphally Weird

58*. GOD TOLD ME TO (1976)

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AKA Demon; God Told Me To Kill

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” – Proverbs 3:5-6

DIRECTED BY: Larry Cohen

FEATURING: Tony Lo Bianco, Deborah Raffin, Sandy Dennis, Sylvia Sidney, Sam Levene, Mike Kellin, Richard Lynch

PLOT: NYPD detective Peter Nicholas investigates a series of spree killings in which the perpetrators all seem to act with no provocation or explanation, each justifying their actions by saying “God told me to.” Nicholas, a devout Catholic, is infuriated by this claim, but equally plagued by their certainty and his shame over his own sins and infidelities. His investigation leads him to an unearthly suspect, an individual with stories of alien abduction, virgin birth, and Nicholas’ own family history.

Still from God Told Me To (1976)

BACKGROUND:

  • Cohen was a genre chameleon whose c.v. includes the blaxploitation gangster flick Black Caesar, the giant-beast-in-New-York movie Q: The Winged Serpent, and the consumerism horror-satire The Stuff, and his previous film It’s Alive, the tale of a monstrous baby that our own Alfred Eaker called “one of the best horror films of the decade.”
  • Cohen planned to engage Bernard Herrmann, who provided the music for It’s Alive, to compose the score for the new film. According to Cohen, Herrmann watched a rough cut and afterwards discussed his plans with the director over dinner. Unfortunately, Herrmann passed away in his sleep that night. (The film is dedicated to the composer.) Cohen’s next choice, Miklós Rózsa, turned down the job, saying, “God told me not to.” Frank Cordell eventually scored the film.
  • Cohen first cast Robert Forster in the role of the detective. Forster worked on the film for several days before tiring of the director’s methods and leaving the production.
  • The policeman who goes on a shooting rampage at the St. Patrick’s Day parade is portrayed by Andy Kaufman, in his film debut. Cohen crashed the actual parade to film without a permit, and said later that he had to intervene with onlookers to protect Kaufman when the comedian taunted them.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In their final showdown, the glowing, androgynous Bernard tempts Nicholas to join forces and spawn a new race of beings on earth. As proof of his bonafides, Philip pulls up his tunic to reveal a pulsing vagina located squarely in the left side of his chest. It’s a startling sight (and a curious location at that), but it clears the bar for shock value, and ensures that Nicholas is definitively unconvinced to join the cause.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Abstract alien abduction; ribcage vagina

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: God Told Me To builds upon the intriguing decision to take the rantings of homicidal lunatics seriously, and to consider the possibility that God really is commanding the insane to do their horrible deeds. Upon this simple subversion, Cohen piles up a child’s treasury of conspiracy theories and paranoid tropes, including shadowy cabals of power, police corruption, ancient astronauts, hermaphroditism, mind control, and angel/devil dichotomies. It’s a mad melange of wild ideas and outlandish plot twists that guarantees you never quite get your footing.

Original trailer for God Told Me To (1976)

COMMENTS: “It’s based on a true story!” Larry Cohen told the Village Voice about God Told Me To in 2018. “No, seriously, it’s a picture about religion, and the violence people do in the name of religion — which feels really relevant today.” Of course, Cohen was far Continue reading 58*. GOD TOLD ME TO (1976) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DETENTION (2011)

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DIRECTED BY: Joseph Kahn

FEATURING: Shanley Caswell, Josh Hutcherson, Spencer Locke, Aaron David Johnson, Dane Cook

PLOT: A serial killer is loose in the halls of Grizzly Lake High, and there may be a connection with events 20 years in the past; only a pair of eye-rolling millennials, uncool vegetarian klutz Riley and popular slacker screwup Clapton, can save the day.

Still from Detention (2011)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Plenty of movies like to subvert audience expectations by mixing genres and deploying radical shifts in tone. Yet it’s hard to recall a film that pursues these goals with such ruthlessness, rapidity, and thoroughness as Detention. The filmmakers practically carpet-bomb the audience with twists, references, and backstories, producing a tale of such density the only people who could possibly keep track of it all are the men who made it. Detention is a movie that would make Dennis Miller say, “Whoa, Chachi, dial it back with the pop culture smorgasbord.”

COMMENTS: The opening credits of Detention are the essence of the whole film in microcosm: exceedingly clever, with names appearing in every possible location: sneaker brand, chocolate bar, upchuck in a urinal. (The director reserves that last one for himself.) Several have even been thoughtfully chosen to match, like the costume designer’s name stitched on a letter jacket or the sound designer appearing on a fire alarm. The flip side to this visual wit is that the names go by so quickly, amidst so much activity and chaos, that there is precious little opportunity to take the information in. The signal is overwhelmed by the noise, and you feel assaulted rather than edified. This will become a theme.

Even if Detention weren’t determined to be some kind of tonal chimera, it would still be a massive millennial snarkfest. The first five minutes play out as a kind of Clueless-meets-Scream, as a too-cool ice princess outlines the secret to high school success (complete with whip-pan edits and onscreen text) before having her head briskly removed from her body. It’s a whole postmodern vibe, and it telegraphs the desire of director Kahn and co-screenwriter Mark Palermo to pile on the jokes and references like so many hats on hats. But this is just an appetizer. The movie adds characters and plotlines like courses in a fancy meal. After introductions to our heroes, all the other high school archetypes get their turns in the spotlight, including the blond cheerleader, the lunkhead jock, the nerdy sidekick, the tech wizard, the bitter administrator… heck, even the stuffed bear that serves as the school’s mascot gets its own storyline. But Detention finds its own path by layering on incongruous genre elements that stupefy with their appearance. Time travel, UFOs, body swapping, predestination paradox, Cronenbergian body horror, and even a Minority Report-style touchless interface are among the twists and turns that arrive unexpectedly.

It’s tempting to view Detention as a parody or send-up of horror and teen comedy genres, and it does work on that level. But Kahn is such a committed nerd that you have to take all the sci-fi tropes as legitimate ventures into the genre. For all the seeming randomness of each new element, the film studiously connects everything in the end. No matter how arbitrary – a cheesy horror film within the film, a teenager obsessed with the 90s, a legend of a student engaging in sexual congress with a stuffed animal – it all ties into the plot. And cast’s commitment to playing every bizarre left turn earnestly (especially Caswell, who should have found a springboard to stardom here) helps keep you engaged, even as the dense plot pushes you away.

Kahn, an incredibly successful music video director, is excited for the opportunity to try his hand at the big-screen format. (He reportedly provided the bulk of the budget himself.) He’s willing to take his lumps – one student speaks disparagingly of his debut feature Torque, while another snarkily references the coke habits of music video directors – and he puts his experience to work on some appealingly offbeat setpieces. Easily the film’s highlight is a montage of one student’s 19-year-long detention, a one-shot tour backwards through changing fashion styles and popular music of the day. But Kahn also refuses to let a moment be a moment, and every bit of wackiness is decorated with more wackiness, so that there’s no real opportunity to take any of it in. Like a McFlurry with a dozen different mix-ins, it’s undeniably sweet, but dizzying and ultimately too much.

For a film as cravenly derivative as Detention, there’s honestly nothing quite like it. It stands as a fascinating artifact, a celluloid Katamari Damacy collecting genres and tropes and stereotypes into one big stew. It’s a piece of pop art, fascinating to observe even if difficult to admire.   

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A seriously (and unapologetically) bizarre piece of work… while Kahn deserves some credit for attempting something different within the teen-movie genre, Detention is simply (and finally) too weird and too off-the-wall to become anything more than a mildly amusing curiosity.” – David Nusair, Reel Film Reviews

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

Detention

Detention
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  • AC-3, Blu-ray, Dolby
  • English (Audio Description), German (Subtitled), French (Subtitled)
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Capsules

CAPSULE: LONGLEGS (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Osgood Perkins

FEATURING: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Alicia Witt, Blair Underwood

PLOT: The FBI assigns Special Agent Harker to a 20-year-old serial murder case, triggering a serious of unsettling breakthroughs.

Still from Longlegs (2024)

COMMENTS: What’s that expression—Longlegs, short review? Some thirty-dozen reviews for this Cage-y bit of strange are out there, so let us dive quickly, and deeply, into the merits of Osgood Perkins’ latest outing. Be warned: we shall be heading far away into lands of the Pacific Northwest, and back in time to a magical period known as “the ’90s”.

The sights and sounds will be familiar to some; but none will be more familiar than the sight of Nicolas Cage being crazy-go-nuts. But come to think of it, he is rendered somewhat unrecognizable: invariably coated in off-white makeup, and buried beneath a chubbed-out face. Whenever Longlegs goes off on a spiel, though, we hear Nic busting out of this cage. Much of this film’s appeal manifests during the (shrewdly) intermittent dosing of this titular oddity.

What Longlegs gets up to is where the nostalgia comes in. (And—if I may editorialize a moment—not that tedious kind on display from a more famous filmmaker.) That special time, The ’90s, oozes from every pore—and wrapped within the main throw-back are bursts of the ’70s, as our baddy loves T. Rex, Lou Reed, and Duran Duran. Our heroine, Special Agent Harker (a spectacularly spectrometric Maika Monroe), lives up to her namesake: an eye for detail, quiet courage, a a pull toward the supernatural, and a fate that can best be described as “mixed.”

Satanic Panic, alas, can only be taken so lightly: in this corner of the US, Satan appears altogether too real. How does Longlegs do their thing? (I emphasize that pronoun: it’s not altogether clear just how Cage’s character views themselves.) However they do it, they perform their deadly spree amongst stark snow-lighting, cool-as-thriller interiors, and, one of my favorite flourishes, inside a house with twin-point front roofing which forms—you guessed it—the shape of longlegs legs.

So, bust out the Shark Bites, pop a straw in your Capri Sun, and take a dangerous walk through a valley of diabolic dolls.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Perkins combines the grisly realism of a crime-scene photograph with the startling surreality of a nightmare… Cage does his version of warbly-voiced weirdo crooner Tiny Tim – an affectation that would be bonkers coming from anyone else, but is just another day at work for Cage.”–Katie Rife, IGN (contemporaneous)

Longlegs [4K UHD + Blu-Ray]

Longlegs [4K UHD + Blu-Ray]
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