Pin

When I was an angry young man with a unrefined sort of visceral hatred, I listened to a lot of punk/hardcore bands from the late-1970s/early-1980s like Black Flag, Minor Threat, The Misfits, and the Youth Brigade. Not to be confused with the less popular Washington D.C. hardcore band of the same name, Los Angeles-based Youth Brigade was comprised of Jewish (non-racist) skinhead brothers named the Sterns, who even had their own pseudo-fascistic Hitler Youth-esque organization entitled BYO (Better Youth Organization), which also served as their record company, as well as a promoter of their 'Peter Pan Punk' Weltanschauung that used such slogans as “youth is an attitude, not an age” and “every generation has a responsibility to change what they feel is wrong in the world.” Anyway, not until a couple years ago would I realize that the Stern brothers of the Youth Brigade had a Canadian-born filmmaker father named Sandor Stern who among other things, wrote the script for the original The Amityville Horror (1979) and was the winner of the 1979 NAACP Image Award for “best screenplay” for the now all but forgotten basketball flick Fast Break (1979), but more importantly, he was the director/screenwriter for the absurdly aberrant Canadian cult horror-thriller Pin (1988) aka Pin: A Plastic Nightmare. A patently perverse horror flick in the tradition of the Pinocchio legend, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Magic (1978) starring Anthony Hopkins, and WASP unfriendly horror Hebrew Larry Cohen horror flicks that is based on the 1981 novel of the same name written by V.C. Andrews’ ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman (Child’s Play, The Devil's Advocate), Pin is a patently contrived horror flick with a Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark?-esque (incidentally, both are Canadian productions) aesthetic with a cast of characters wearing anachronistic, dandy-like Ralph Lauren wardrobes of the perennial preppy sort, yet it has something curiously captivating about it as a sort of perverted propaganda of the conspicuously kosher variety. Featuring a wayward white bread bourgeois family comprised of individuals that all have striking and seemingly artificial blond hair and blue eyes, Pin is a peculiar pseudo-Freudian assault on the Aryan middle-class that is full of sexual impotence, incest, sexually-depraved schizophrenia, frigid housewives, agalmatophilia, fascistic fathers, and just about every other libelous attack that Judaic Freudo-Marxist maniac Wilhelm Reich made against the goys of Germany. A rather simply assembled and easy-to-follow flick that was clearly made to be palatable for young children, Pin is a piece of accidently absurd aesthetic terrorism geared at influencing the most impressionable and innocent of minds, even if it features fathers giving daughters abortions, mothers molesting life-size anatomically correct medical dummies, brothers controlling their sisters' sex lives, and nephews intentionally giving their bitchy aunts heart attacks, as director Sandor Stern assembled himself a putrid piece of hypnotic Hebraic propaganda that is more complex and intricate than it would seem upon a mere superficial glance as the kind of work that psychologically debased and destroyed an entire generation of the Occident. 

 Dr. Frank Linden (Terry O'Quinn)—a stoic man of ostensibly Germanic descent—is a creepy authoritarian WASP who teaches his children about the ‘birds and the bees’ and other unflattering bodily functions via ventriloquism through a human-size anatomically correct medical dummy named “Pin” that looks like a real skinless human on superficial glance in the spirit of Clive Baker’s Hellraiser (1987). Unfortunately, Linden’s son Leon (David Hewlett) believes that Pin is a living and breathing guru of immense and all-knowing wisdom, but his little sister Ursula (Cynthia Preston) is certainly not so naïve. On top of the fact that he has no friends because his acutely anal retentive mother reprimands him for playing outdoors and “getting dirty” (all furniture in the Linden household is encased in plastic), Leon is also apparently an undiagnosed schizophrenic with traits of disassociative personality disorder, thus Pin makes for the ultimate plastic imaginary friend. Needless to say, Leon is totally traumatized when he accidentally witnesses his father’s nurse raping the anatomically correct dummy Pin, which apparently has a protruding plastic pecker. Just like any serial killer or wicked sex fiend, little Leon naturally grows up to be a much more deranged young man and his ultimately malicious mental illness does not do his sexually active little sister any favors. 

 Now an angst-addled 18-year-old senior in high school, Leon becomes rather enraged when he discovers a couple of wisecracking jocks have written “if you want an easy screw, Ursula will do!” on his locker and not long after he discovers his 15-year-old sister fornicating in a car with a gentlemen that the teenage schizophrenic brutally beats up to a bloody pulp. Naturally, Leon gives his sister an ultimatum, stating to her, “I don’t want a sister who's a tramp. If you ever do it again you can forgot I’m your brother.” Being a loyal sis, Ursula ultimately abides by brother Leon’s demand, but unfortunately she is already pregnant. Leon recommends that they go to Pin for advice as they did as children and the dummy, which the schizo teen now acts as a ventriloquist for after learning the trick from his father, states, “The doctor is a truly scientific man. I don’t think morality will affect his attitude. You made a mistake and it must be rectified.” Indeed, doctor dad Frank Linden rectifies the mistake by personally performing an abortion on his own knocked-up daughter, even asking his son “Aren’t you going to observe, Leon?” in regard to his sister’s first child being ripped out of the womb by its physician grandfather. Dr. Linden may be an emotionally vacant fellow who seems to suffering from socially-retarding Asperger syndrome, but he has enough sense to get rid of Pin when he finally figures out the perturbing degree of his son Leon’s penetrating psychosis and rather ridiculous relationship with the doll, but unfortunately the good doctor and his wife are killed in a car accident en route to a medical school (where the doc planned to leave the dummy) where the man of the house was to give a speech. Being a martial wasp of the pathologically clean-cut and ultra-conservative kind, Dr. Linden hated being late and was driving rather fast and erratically to get to the medical school on time, hence why they crash, but while the Linden parents perish, Pin naturally survives and soon takes over the Linden household.

 At first, the Linden children, especially Leon, feel rather liberated by their parents' deaths and immediately take the plastic off the family furniture and Ursula jokes that, in regard to her mother, “I bet she is telling god to take off his shoes.” Unfortunately, the fun is short-lived as Leon and Ursula’s bitchy and nosey aunt Dorothy (Patricia Collins) moves in, but luckily Leon realizes that she has a heart condition and literally scares her to death via Pin. Ursula takes a job at a library and soon meets a nice and sensitive gentleman named Stan Fraker (John Pyper-Ferguson), which infuriates her brother Leon, who firmly believes the new boyfriend wants to swindle the Linden family inheritance and institutionalize the boy shizzo in a sanitarium. Leon, an aspiring epic poet, also does not take kindly to Stan’s negative critique of his novel-in-progress about a “modern day Beowulf” named ‘Testes’ who “creates as much progeny as he can” and uses rape (including against his sister “Ursula”) to do so. Jealous and lonely due to his little sister's hot and steamy relationship, Leon feebly attempts a date with a girl named Marcia Bateman (Helene Udy), but he can only think and talk about Pin when the gal gets undressed and attempts coitus with the schizophrenic sexual coward. Extremely jealous and wanting to keep his sister for himself, Leon drugs Stan and bludgeons him with a wooden statue when he attempts to fight back. Leon concocts a bullshit story about Stan leaving town to altruistically visit a sick friend, which Ursula initially believes, but it does not take long for her to discover her brother's loony lies and she eventually attacks him with an axe as if haphazardly attempting to impersonate Jason Voorhees. In the end, Leon enters a comatose state and takes the identity of Pin. 

 A virtual pseudo-psychoanalytic celluloid catalog of stereotypically Jewish diagnosis of Nordic pathologies in the form of a seemingly humble horror-thriller, Pin brings to life in ridiculous melodramatic form scatological Semite Norman Mailer’s analysis, “The mind of the Wasp bears more resemblance to the laser than the mind of any other ethnic group… To wit, he can project himself 'extraordinary distances through a narrow path. He's disciplined, stoical, able to become the instrument of his own will, has extraordinary boldness and daring together with a resolute lack of imagination. He's profoundly nihilistic. And this nihilism found its perfect expression in the odyssey to the moon—because we went there without knowing why we went.” Indeed, while the only normal member of the Linden family is Ursula—a ‘progressive’ girl who has sex with a number of men at a young age before marriage—everyone else in the family, especially father Frank Linden and Leon, both suffer an unhealthy detachment from reality and communication with other people. While Dr. Linden lacks emotional connection and sexual maturity to such a degree that he must teach his children about sex by proxy through a medical dummy as opposed to speaking directly to them like a normal and loving father would, Mother Linden is a sexually repressed wench who suffers from such a bad case of obsessive compulsive disorder that she prevents her son from developing friendships, thus helping to lead to his debilitating psychosis and dumb dummy fetishism. As originally theorized by late 19th century Viennese Jewish intellectuals like psychoanalyst ‘soul doctors’ like Sigmund Freud, Sandor Stern depicts Dr. Linden’s brilliance as a physician and Leon’s talent as a perverted poet in Pin as the result of unhealthy mental pathologies and not as true genius, which are the sort of libelous claims that have become rather absurd clichés in modern academia that speak more about the mental state of the intellectual than the person being ‘analyzed.’ Indeed, Mailer’s description of the Wasp mind being more like a “laser than the mind of any other ethnic group” is certainly readily apparent in the character of Dr. Linden and his son Leon in Pin—a virtual work of celluloid Kabbalah black magic unleashed on the soul of Faustian youth, just as multicultural merry shows like Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? worked in a similarly malicious anti-Occidental fashion, albeit to a less gratuitous and perverse degree that does not feature nurse-on-dummy action and father-on-daughter abortions. Undoubtedly, if there is anything ‘scary’ about Pin, it is not its psychological horror show about an unhealthy boy with a curious relationship with a dummy, but the degree to which director Sandor Stern goes to metaphysically defile traditional Nordic man and his culture, religion, and achievements.  Featuring a villain with an archetypical Hitler Youth-like appearance and haircut that fantasizes about impregnating as many young ladies as possible in the spirit of the SS Lebensborn in a totally white world of physically immaculate blond and blue-eyed people with something ugly and incestuous yet sexually-repressed hiding just underneath the surface, Pin is what happens when an Aryan-hating Hebrew does Hitchcock and creates something unintentionally enthralling as if directed by Woody Allen's humorless, horror-movie-loving third cousin.  If one is looking for a more objective approach to Jewish versus Aryan families, compare the fictional Nordic family depicted in Sandor Stern's Pin to the real-life Hebraic pedophile ring of foul family in the documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003) directed by Jewish auteur Andrew Jarecki.  Admittedly, I had a lot of fun watching Nordic lunatic Leon going deranged with his dummy comrade in Pin, but the film did not even remotely horrify me like the child-deflowering father-son duo in Capturing the Friedmans.

-Ty E