Wiener Brut

While there is a long and ‘rich’ history of queer German cinema that had its peak during the 1970s through early 1980s yet dates all the way back to the silent era with works like Richard Oswald’s Anders als die Andern (1919) aka Different from the Others starring Conrad Veidt and co-penned and featuring a cameo from kosher cockucker sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s bizarre bisexual love triangle Michael (1924) starring Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922) director Benjamin Christensen in the last acting role of her career, Germany’s more traditionally conservative Catholic neighbor Austria does not have as nearly an extensive and eclectic aberrosexual film history, though that does not mean it is of total disinterest when it comes to fag flicks. Indeed, as an Austrian comrade told me, in comparison to Germany, “Our degeneracy is saucier and has more style... Austria's Baroque-Catholic heritage at work here.” Also, for whatever reason, Austrian queer cinema seems to be dominated by highly idiosyncratic and disturbingly aggressive carpet-munchers as demonstrated by absurdly wayward Super-8 cyber-dyke flicks like Rote Ohren fetzen durch Asche (1992) aka Flaming Ears co-directed by Ursula Puerrer, A. Hans Scheirl, Dietmar Schipek and the surrealist Sapphic celluloid experiments of Mara Mattuschka like Der Einzug des Rokoko ins Inselreich der Huzzis (1989) aka The Rise of Rococo in the Island Kingdom of the Huzzi People and the rather bizarre Godzilla parody S.O.S. Extraterrestria (1994), which features the director as a truly monstrous, gynocentric erotomaniac that uses the Eiffel Tower as a sort of makeshift dildo while members of the German Wehrmacht blow her away with a storm of bullets. Luckily for self-respecting Austrian Catholics everywhere, the Germanic nation is better known for producing Übermensch beings like Arnold a Schwarzenegger than raging kraut queens like Rosa von Praunheim, thus there really is not many cocksucker cult classics to choose from aside from a couple obscure films like Wiener Brut (1985) aka Sounds of Snow aka Vintage Vienna directed by one-time auteur Hans Fädler. A sort of punk-tinged sub-high-camp tragicomedy featuring Viennese punk queer squatters and outstandingly arrogant cocaine-addled aristocrats as portrayed by feisty fags in drag, Fädler’s somewhat respectable debauched debut certainly demonstrates that the director could have potentially been Austria’s answer to von Praunheim had he not perished a couple years after the film was released as a result of gay cancer. From the von Praunheim and Lothar Lambert school of gay Germanic filmmaking, Fädler’s flick is nothing if not great fag filmic fun that will appeal to both politically incorrect poofs and the sort of more discerning heterosexual cinephile who enjoys the films of the Kuchar brothers and the early pre-Hairspray cinematic works of John Waters. While Austria is not exactly best known for its campy cult cinema, Wiener Brut is unequivocally a work that manages to be just as intemperately zany, jovially absurd, and shemale-saturated as classic Cockettes vehicles like Michael Kalmen’s Elevator Girls in Bondage (1972) and Milton Miron’s Tricia's Wedding (1972). Sardonically advertised as a “Heimatfilm,” Fädler’s farcical flick naturally attacks the Austrian monarchy, Catholic Church, and, quite predictably, the country's infamous National Socialist past, albeit in such a pathologically campy way that is ultimately homos, drag queens, dykes and punks that seem the most ridiculous in the end. Indeed, while watching the film, you would never suspect that a grotesque narcissistic mutant freak like Conchita Wurst would become the most world famous Austrian figure just 21 years later, thus reflecting the deluge of malignant degeneracy that has completely consumed Europa over the past two decades.  In other words, Wiener Brut was made at a time when it still took some testicular fortitude to be a prancing fairy or a chick-with-a-dick, thus it has a crude charm about it that reminds one how obnoxious, anally retentive, and just plain bourgeoisie fags have become since the softcore authoritarian mainstreaming of aberrosexuality in the Occident.

 In what might be described as an act of tongue-in-cheek aesthetic irony (or, more realistically, a lack of funding), Wiener Brut was shot in a sort of gritty ‘social realist’ style typical of far-left New German Cinema works from the late-1960s and early-1970s like Christian Ziewer’s Liebe Mutter, mir geht es gut (1972) aka Dear Mother, I'm All Right. Of course, considering it was partially shot at a real gay punk squat (which apparently still exists today) and stars real-life punks and homos that look genuinely depraved and even sometimes AIDS-ridden, the film does have a certain quite literal ‘social realist’ dimension to it that is part of its cheap charm. Additionally, with its depiction of such absurd culture-besmirching scenarios as a sexually depraved punk twink sporting lederhosen, the film follows in the (anti)tradition of the overtly silly Heimat satires of Walter Bockmayer like Flammende Herzen (1978) aka Flaming Hearts and especially Geierwally (1988). Beginning with a headshot of a slutty looking blonde tranny diva singing an extra kitschy pro-pot ballad with lyrics like, “Dürnstein Gold! Grass for good times! You don’t have to be a Marlboro Man to enjoy it!” and then putting the stem of a pot leaf in between her teeth in a provocative pseudo-sexual fashion, the film then cuts to a satirical prologue that reads: “It is the year 1984! Everywhere in Europe and almost all over the world people are living in grueling slavery. Wantonly addicted to power and possession, sex and drugs and desires of every kind, more dead than alive they are eagerly awaiting a nuclear holocaust or a total ecological breakdown to release them from their drudgery.” As indicated by an excerpt from a news program, a dozen queer punk degenerates have taken over an old abandoned building in Vienna that is fittingly located at a place called Grass Street and have turned it into their own little slice of hyper hedonistic homo heaven where men can fuck men while sporting jockstraps while high on heroin and weed without the threat of being gay-bashed. Unfortunately, trouble arises when a pesky and hopelessly naive social worker of the fat and homely goes by the squat and begins threatening the squatters’ god given sodomite rights. 

 When a fat, short, stubby, and extra homely social worker of the meek and glaringly socially awkward sort named Hilde Urbanek shows up at the punk squat and dares to ask about the whereabouts of a short blonde teenage babe named Angelika Kotschnik, she is disturbed to discover that the inside of the building is completely pitch black and a weirdo with a commie Red Army hat named ‘Ferdl’ (Franz Brendinger) is having a hyper histrionic “psychotic fit.” When Hilde informs Ferdl that she is a social worker, he proceeds to go on a nonsensical spiel about how he regularly goes by the local unemployment office to look for work and then scares her by absurdly stating, “I’m a cancerous sore on the face of this earth and you are nothing but scumballs.” Naturally, Hilde is no less disturbed when she investigates the various eclectically themed rooms in the squat and discovers a demented bull-dyke in lingerie riding on top of a pantless middle-aged bourgeois dork like she is bull-riding, a jaded junky shooting junk into his arm, and two naked poofs spooning each other on a bed with leopard print sheets, among other unsavory things. When Hilde walks in on a topless blonde in the process of beginning a hot and heavy threesome with two gay twinks and realizes that the girl is actually the teen Angelika Kotschnik that she is looking for, she becomes so shocked that she tells the girl that she plans to report her to the authorities and then abruptly runs out of the room like a petrified toddler.  Upon running out of the room, Hilde overhears one of the punks saying, “Well, we’ can’t let her get away like this. Let’s grab her” and then has a delusion vision of her strangled corpse inside a telephone booth. In a sort of intentionally ersatz-ominous chase scene that mocks horror genre conventions in a somewhat Schlingensief-esque fashion, Hilde is followed in the woods by a sinisterly chuckling Ferdl and eventually passes out upon running up to a car for help and then suffering the shock that it is actually full of the punks, including the savage little slut Angelika. Luckily for the terribly naïve social worker, the punks, especially Ferdl, decide to get Hilde addicted to opium tea and brainwash her with a moronic punk Weltanschauung instead of actually killing her. 

 As can be expected from such a proudly anarchistic low-budget punk (anti)Heimat flick that wallows in its own technical ineptness and narrative incoherence, Wiener Brut has various subplots that either go nowhere or end quite anticlimactically. Since virtually all of the characters are either blond Nordic fags or decadently dressed drag queens (not to mention the fact that some of the actors play multiple roles), it is sometimes hard to tell who is who in the film, at least the first time you watch it.  Certainly, one of the characters that you cannot mistake or forget is ‘Her Royal Highness Maria Carolina’ (Johannes Weidinger, who later partially funded the gay agitprop doc Paragraph 175 (2000) co-directed by American homo Hebrews Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman), who is the supposed niece of the ex-empress of Austria and is naturally portrayed by a minty mensch in drag. After supposedly suffering the dual tragedy of receiving an internal abdominal injury after falling off an horse and having her valuable jewels stolen as is broadcasted on a special news report, Baroness Maria Carolina is visited by her all the more bitchy cousin with the somewhat fitting Proustian name Baroness von Guermantes (played by Kurt Freimüller, who also co-penned the script), who bitches at Her Royal Highness, “Ma chere cousin, I have always warned you of your fatal desire for wild young studs. You should have known what delicate and painful consequences it could have.” Indeed, while apparently reporting to the media that she was the victim of a horse accident, it seems that Maria Carolina actually fell prey to a violent thieving hustler. Unfortunately, despite her aristocratic cultivation, Maria Carolina has a softspot for seedy male sluts and she ultimately finds herself in a very intricately precarious situation when she decides to hire one of the punk poof squatters as her new butler-cum-whore. 

 When a certain Baroness Putpus (Rudi Katzer) shows up at her lavish countryside estate, Frogville Castle, Maria Carolina becomes highly agitated, at least until her faithful frenemy whips out some high-grade cocaine and declares, “Virgin snow from Colombia.” Indeed, like all of her blueblood shemale sisters, Maria Carolina is a voracious coke fiend and she will even go so far as to semi-tolerate mere bourgeois buffoons and lumpenprole peasants if the rich man’s candy is involved. After hiring a young punk squatter named ‘Lyn’ (Artur Singer) who she rechristens ‘Bela’ as her new butler after an extensive selection process that involves inspecting the muscles and members of the job applicants, Maria Carolina and her wealthy friends face potential tragedy when their tranny drug dealer aka ‘court coke supplier’ Alfonso (Erna Frühgeburth) is arrested by the cops. Naturally, Maria Carolina eventually orders her new bitch-boy Bela to cop her some coke. As a quasi-bisexual blond beast that fucks dykes (indeed, while fucking one particularly aggressive lily-licker, he compliments her by moaning, “You make John Wayne look like a sugar-plum fairy!”), screws random men in telephone booths while a group of confused Arabs watch, and wins that butler position by proudly showing off his “darkie dicky” and “chocolate balls” to Maria Carolina and her friends, Bela is an unscrupulous opportunist and shameless slut that will do literally anything to get what he wants. While Bela starts out simply sporting lederhosen and being the Baroness’ 24/7 royal fuck-boy, he soon begins driving Maria Carolina around in her Mercedes convertible while hunting for Cocteau’s kick, but things naturally do not stop there as the gay gigolo has uniquely unsavory personal connections that might prove to be quite useful for his employer's aristocratic ambitions. Indeed, after failing to procure coke, Maria Carolina becomes more ambitious and comes up with the wacky idea to get Bela to convince his punk squatter friends to run a revolution that she names “The Black Friday” (notably, the baroness and her friends mock the Red Army Faction by rightly describing them as, “Political amateurs”) so that she and her family can restore the monarchy and once again control all of Austria. As the baroness states regarding her supposed moral right in regard to the revolution, “Since the bourgeoisie cheated us out of our well-earned inheritance, the lumpenproletariat has to serve us in getting our innate rights back.” Luckily, Maria Carolina’s pedophile cousin is the local Catholic cardinal, so she easily gets the unholy holyman’s support for the cocksucker coup. Unfortunately for Maria Carolina, Bela and his punk pals not only make for rather lousy and unreliable revolutionaries since they are dope-addled degenerates who probably lack the intellectual capacity to tie their own shoes, but also have ulterior motives. 

 As time passes, kidnapped social worker Hilde eventually develops Stockholm syndrome and begins falling in love with punk freak Ferdl, who manages to convince her that work is bad and anarchy is good because, as he absurdly states, “Sure, ‘Working frees you’, that’s what was written at the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp.” Ferdl also rationalizes his particularly pathetic pot addiction by stating to Hilde, “The Turks are to blame. When they tried to conquer Vienna in 1683, they left the cellar full of 100 kilo sacks. All hashish.”  Of course, when Hilde catches Ferdl making out with a hot blonde at a punk show, she decides to dump his sorry ass. Meanwhile, the punks decide to go to a “legalize weed” concert called “INHALE!” (aka INitiative HAsh LEgal!) at a place called the Metropol that is curiously owned by the local conservative party. Not unsurprisingly, bald middle-aged cops show up at the concert in disguise in less than inconspicuous punk garb because they rightly believe it is a “terrorist’s nest.”  During the concert, the lead singer of one of the bands sings super moronic lyrics that epitomize the senseless nihilism of punk like, “Chaos is much better! Chaos I prefer!” and “Fuck yourself! Chaos is much better!,” amongst other verbal swill. During the concert, two homo-hating cops decide to gay-bash Bela and even consider raping him, but luckily the seemingly latently gay policemen are scared away when about half a dozen menacing looking punks walk by. As can be expected in such an obnoxiously chaotic film like Wiener Brut, the planned revolution never even happens. Indeed, a large group of the punks end up showing up at Maria Carolina’s castle unannounced and make a series of absurd demands to the blueblood drag-queens like how they want to turn the Vienna Opera House into a rock club after the revolution, but the fairly stupid would-be-revolutionaries ultimately give up on pursuing their aims when singing aristocratic ghosts (!) randomly appear out of nowhere and cause them to literally run out of the ancient estate while screaming in terror. In the end, three cops attempt to raid the punk squat, but are scared away when they happen upon junkies shooting up dope, gay orgies, and a political prisoner in a gimp mask and bondage. 

 With the uniquely undeserved fame of creepy and seemingly half-braindead bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst as a result of winning the the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest as Austria's entrant and subsequently becoming dubbed the “Queen of Austria” by the anti-Occidental culture-distorting international mainstream media, it seems that the corrosive cocksucker kultur has reached an all-time high in the once great land of legendary Übermenschen like Otto Skorzeny and Schwarzenegger. Indeed, I hate to say it, but I think Russian nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky was right when stated in regard to the wretched Wurst phenomenon, “Fifty years ago the Soviet army occupied Austria. We made a mistake in freeing Austria. We should have stayed,” but I digress. In terms of German-language poof punk squatter flicks, Michael Stock’s ultra gritty debut Prinz in Hölleland (1993) aka Prince in Hell makes Wiener Brut seem like a low-budget Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer flick in terms of sheer of subversive artistry and depravedly debauched idiosyncrasy, yet I still regard it is mandatory viewing for fans of kitsch and camp, especially if you enjoy the early works of Rosa von Praunheim (who was incidentally Stock’s mentor). In its tragicomedic satirizing of both the decadent aristocracy and all the more decadent youth subcultures, Fädler’s flick features many similarities Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s rather loose Heinrich von Kleist adaptation San Domingo (1970).  One of the most interesting aspects of Fädler's film for me is that all the punk fags and drag queens in it ultimately seem fairly tame and banal in comparison to real-life suburban folk featured in the documentaries of Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl like Tierische Liebe (1995) aka Animal Love and Im Keller (2014) aka In the Basement, thus reflecting the decidedly debasing effect that globalization and Americanization have had on everyday Austrians (indeed, many of the subjects in Seidl's films look and dress exactly like the sort of people I can find at my local Wal-Mart).  Surely, in many ways, ostensibly transgressive figures like Conchita Wurst—a totally deracinated and vapid creature that would be totally forgettable were he not sporting the aesthetically revolting combination of a beard, makeup, and a dress—are the ultimate conformists as they represent the sort of model testosterone-free world citizen that certain scheming globalists, who do not want to have to deal with another Uncle Adolf, count on in their campaign for world domination.  After all, what could be better for Zionist globalist types like George Soros for easily enslaving a nation than a place that is plagued with a decidedly defective youth population like the sexually and emotionally disturbed and spiritually vapid punk squatters featured in Wiener Brut.  While punks like to think that they are uncompromising anarchists that are above all forms of law and authority, they are really just the unwitting metaphysical slaves of Marcuse, Abbie Hoffman, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Fat Mike and other phony Hebraic ‘heretics’ who see Europeans and white Americans as nothing more than stupid goyim.  Luckily, Fädler's film manages to make punks seem like shallow drug-addled losers of the emotionally and sexually dysfunctional sort who should probably be all forced to live together in dilapidated old buildings just like in the flick.  In its satirizing of a subculture of sexual cripples and dope fiends with stupid haircuts, Wiener Brut is probably the closest thing to an Austrian equivalent to Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky (1982), albeit sans the sci-fi elements and synthesizer score, thus making it essential viewing for any serious semi-offbeat cinephile.

-Ty E