Ex Drummer

As a small and somewhat insignificant European nation responsible for producing such wonderfully warped celluloid classics as Roland Lethem’s La Fée Sanguinaire aka The Bloodthirsty Fairy, Burr Jerger’s General Massacre (1973), Thierry Zéno’s Vase de Noces (1974) aka Wedding Trough aka The Pig Fucking Movie, Rob Van Eyck’s The Afterman (1985), and more recently Fabrice Du Welz’s Calvaire (2004), Belgium has done a fairly commendable job producing truly subversive cinema, so it should be no surprise that the nation is also responsible for the insanely iconoclastic dark tragicomedy Ex Drummer (2007) directed by Koen Mortier and based on the 1994 novel of the same written by subversive Flemish novelist/playwright/poet Herman Brusselmans. A conspicuously culturally pessimistic and thankfully politically incorrect piece of Flemish hate-fueled punk angst and post-WWII nihilism, Ex Drummer has something for everyone in terms of offensive and even odious material as a work that sardonically sacrifices virtually every postmodern-Occident sacred cow as the sort of unrelenting and pathologically contemptible work that one would expect from a psychopathic serial killer with a biting yet rather cultivated sense of humor. Indeed, the film features a pre-apocalyptic post-national Belgium where the ‘Volksgeist’ of the people is comatose, the nuclear family has been nuked, homosexuality and other forms of aberrosexuality have replaced reproduction and parenting has been replaced with drugs, racial aliens from the global south have taken over working-class jobs and white women, and the people have traded in religion for the culture-distorting phenomenon of rock ‘n’ roll, as a work that seems to be in the ‘right-wing’ anarchist spirit of Louis-Ferdinand Céline meets a Nordic take on the Grand Guignol. A rare ‘anti-Heimat’ (aka anti-homeland) film of the Flemish persuasion, Ex Drummer portrays a Weltschmerz-rattled Belgium populated by a super sadistic cultural elite and an emotionally despondent and apathetic lumpenprole population that has been sacrificed by the nation’s leaders to globalization and political correctness. The story of a severely snide, sadistic, and even sociopathic popular writer who, despite never playing drums in his entire life, becomes the drummer and fourth member of an untalented punk band that plans to give one show and quit, Ex Drummer portrays through the maniac microcosm of Ostend (a small city and municipality located in the Flemish province of West Flanders that started as a small village during the Middle Ages) the tragedy that occurs when a callous cultural creator takes advantage of three emotional and physical cripples with the sort of quasi-Satanic sadistic glee that one would expect from a character in a Hanns Heinz Ewers novel. 

 Dries (Dries Van Hegen) is a prick of a popular novelist and bored ‘bobo’ (aka bourgeois bohemian) who enjoys engaging in threesomes with his equally pretentious girlfriend and when three handicapped working-class losers who want to become famous ask him to be the drummer of their band, he thinks there might be a good story in it and reluctantly agrees, even if he thinks the rockers are smelly, uniquely handicapped retards. Koen de Geyter (TV actor Norman Baert), a mad misogynist who rather enjoys bloodying women, is the singer of the band and his special handicap is his tendency for being hit by cars. Bassist Jan Verbeek (Belgian standup comedian Gunter Lamoot) is a gay farmboy who does not look gay (or as Dries comments, “He was gay, although he didn’t really look like a faggot”) despite bearing a striking resemblance to Fassbinder superstar Kurt Raab and who suffers from a ‘stiff arm’ (the result of a masturbation mishap involving an unexpected walk-in from his overbearing mother) and an ‘interminable mother complex.’ Indeed, Jan’s mother Ma Verbeek (Bernadette Damman) is a little ogre of a butch beast who wears wigs to cover her bald head and who has cuckolded both her son and husband Pa Verbeek (François Beukelaers), who was once a proud soldier but now suffers from dementia and is tied to a bed at all times by his sadistic wife and pansy progeny. The guitarist of the band is a hobo-like deaf fellow named Ivan Van Dorpe (Sam Louwyck) who lives in a dilapidated shack with his raunchy wife Marleen (Nancy Denijs)—a woman who has no problem admitting in her very first conversation with Koen that her “cunt stinks of rotten fish”—and toddler daughter Mia (Nomie Visser). The band decide to call themselves, ‘The Feminists’ because, after all, “four handicapped guys are just as good as four feminist bitches,” and they opt for covering the classic Devo song “Mongoloid” in tribute to their personal handicaps. After Ivan’s wife feeds their daughter cocaine instead of a sandwich, the little girl dies and the already unhinged guitarist completely loses his mind and is institutionalized, so they hire Jan’s fag roadie friend, Dorian (Tristan Versteven) to fill the spot, with a blond fag named ‘Jimmy the Faggot’ (Wim Willaert) taking over the meek roadie position. Jimmy also willingly takes a 20-inch cock in the ass in a bar bathroom courtesy of the aptly named fellow ‘Big Dick’, who is the frontman of the rival band ‘Harry Mulisch’ (a group named after the Dutch Jew novelist of the same name who once had the gall to proclaim, “he did not just write about World War II, he was WWII” despite the fact he survived the war unscathed due to his banker father’s collaboration with the Nazis), which results in the rupture of his rectum and the lifelong need to wear adult diapers. With the cold and calculating demeanor of an East Asian dictator suffering from sexual impotence, morally vacant novelist Dries treats his band members like cattle and when the band wins a battle of the band event against Harry Mulisch and another group called ‘Six Million Jews’ and thus become an overnight sensation, he decides to destroy his musical miscreation.  After all, the band members originally agreed that the band would only be a one-off gig and narcissist Dries has nil tolerance for people feeding off his fame. Taking Koen with him, Dries heads to the Verbeek farmhouse, brutally murders the singer via stabbing, and unleashes Pa Verbeek from his enslavement. Naturally, Pa Verbeek kills his wife and son. “Big Dick’ also meets a grizzly end after he hooks up with a perverted chick with a big dick fetish. Of course, in the end, asshole antihero Dries comes away from the experience totally unscathed and thus can continue to victimize people that are intellectually inferior to him for his own sick amusement. 

 Undoubtedly, in its hyper cynical essence, Ex Drummer iconoclastically bulldozes virtually everything that is considered sacred in modern degenerate European society. Aside from making rather blatant light of the fact that Europeans have worshiped moronic musicians like gods for over the past half century or so due to deleterious American influences (with punk being the height of musical retardation), Ex Drummer makes it quite clear with the names of the bands—The Feminists, Harry Mulisch, and Six Million Jews—how European society has developed a slave-morality that mindlessly worships the tragedy of a hostile alien people, the so-called ‘holocaust’ (despite the fact that over 60 million people died in WWII, with the majority being European), not to mention the fact that so-called ‘women’s liberation’ has had a calamitous effect on Occidental society, which has emasculated males and turned women into frigid careerists who cannot bother to have kids, hence Europa’s drastic populous decline. Of course, Ex Drummer is no less hostile against the nation-destroying globalist joke that is multiculturalism as demonstrated by a rant made by the character ‘Big Dick’ who, after revealing that his father was one of the first people in Belgium to hire ‘darkies’ after being dissatisfied with the work habits of natives Belgians, states, “All the darkies come here to fuck our women. We should send ‘em all fuckin’ back! He brought his wife over. They bred like rabbits. I think the whole of Ostend is full of Indian. Fuckin’ hell! …and we pay for them. We mustn’t say anything, otherwise they say you’re a racist.” Naturally, the authoritarian smear word ‘racist’ is not the only thing that Big Dick thinks is ridiculous about contemporary society as he also demystifies the premium that modern porn-addicted society puts on animal-like members, confessing regarding his own giant johnson, “Fifty centimeters when it’s asleep. Imagine that between your legs, as a woman. But they all came back. I don’t know why. A sort of sick curiosity, maybe? But they didn’t want to fuck, just give me a blow job. But I got so fed up with that after a while. They were soon lying on their back again. I don’t know. A big dick, all men want that. They can have mine.” The commie-inspired labor force, which goes hand-in-hand with the plague that is multiculturalism with its importation of cheap brown labor, is also attacked in a scene where the character Ma Verbeek reminisces about the good all days, stating of her nostalgia for good old fashioned hard work, “From the age of twelve I cycled to the factory every day on my little bike. At that time they didn’t talk about child labour. Rich children went to school and the trash had to go to work. Now they make a big fuss about it. But they shouldn’t forget that our country was built on that. I’m proud of that.” Of course, in modern day Belgium/Europe there is virtually nothing to be proud unless you’re a queer, feminist, cripple, racial alien, and/or pompous cultural celebrity. In an ostensible tribute to ‘Patient Zero’ (the Canadian homo who intentionally infected upwards of 2000 men with AIDS), the character Chuck confesses, “I’m HIV positive. I’ve got AIDS. I’ve had everyone I can. I don’t want to die alone. They can all come with me. I’ve even had a woman.”  Indeed, Ex Drummer dares to spread the idea that some HIV-positive homos might intentionally spread cancer, thereupon making the film a sort of spiritual syphilis for those that have been mentally molested by the LGBT propaganda machine.

 Vaguely like Trainspotting (1996), except minus the innate dwelling on drugs (which are only mentioned in passing) and with some actual brain cells to waste, a nicely nuanced storyline with a quasi-cryptic message (as opposed to a literally narrated message like Boyle’s film), a decent soundtrack, actual genuinely controversial content (nothing is controversial about drug culture nowadays), and a true commitment to regional cinema, Ex Drummer is just the sort of film that the Western world needs to deprogram themselves from the sort of cultural Marxist swill that Hollywood has colonized the European mind with ever since (and, to some extent, before) the Second World War. Indeed, next to Ex Drummer, the conspicuously contrived philo-Semitic, Francophile comedies of impotent perennial hipster Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom) seem like comedy sketches from rerun episodes of Saturday Night Live as directed by a dilettante with Asperger's syndrome who has seen a lot of films by Godard and Truffaut but has no real insights into humanity, especially in regard to (European) mankind’s modern degenerate state. Don’t get me wrong, Ex Drummer is an undeniably ugly and decidedly debasing film with next to nil redeeming aesthetic qualities, yet it is also a fiercely farcical fountain of unfortunate fucked truths that manages to destroy the wet noodle Weltanschauung of the typical liberal lemming in a mere 100 minutes and for that reason alone makes it mandatory viewing for anyone who needs a good laugh in the age of the death of the West.  A literal killer comedy featuring Buñuel-esque surrealist scenes of two men entering a putrid and gaping vaginal hole, AIDS-ridden fags demanding to be sodomized by haggard heterosexuals with humongous members, old fat bald-headed women screwing violent 30-something-year-old misogynists with blood fetishes, and a hilarious mockery of Hebrew hack Harry Mulisch and the so-called six million, Ex Drummer demonstrates that even a second-rate Western European nation like Belgium produces better comedies than the senseless scatological neo-vaudevillian vomit that is incessantly regurgitated by the carny cons of Hollywood.

-Ty E