Auschwitz

When I saw the minute longish trailer for Uwe Boll’s upcoming film Auschwitz – a B-grade cinematic work that portrays death camp death via Zyklon B and postmortem incineration via unkosher oven – I was more than a little bit intrigued. In the trailer, Uwe Boll can be seen dressed up in SS garb while guarding the gas chamber door in an unintentionally hilarious manner. Upon first watching the trailer, I thought Auschwitz was an exploitation film as the deaths are portrayed in a manner that would probably bring a tear to Spielberg’s Asiatic eyes and incite unrelenting ecstasy in the blackest of hearts (especially members of the Black Israelites). In reality, Auschwitz is a docudrama that was supposedly designed to spark fear in the souls of thoroughly desensitized American audiences, as well as sinister historical revisionists. In various interviews, Boll has remarked that films like Schindler’s List are no longer emotionally and aesthetically potent enough to leave a powerful mark on modern moviegoing audiences, thus, the German director thought it was his duty as a good German to make a film that would provoke fear, sympathy, and historical knowledge in common apathetic folks and demonic anti-Semites alike. Boll has summed up his cinematic mission with Auschwitz as follows, “The movie is made for the people who deny or don’t know enough about the holocaust. It will possibly be tough for survivors to watch that movie, but I think they will agree that the movie is important.” Showing his true commitment to historical authenticity, Boll even went as far as hiring a real holocaust survivor to play an extra in the film, stating “We actually had a survivor in the gas chamber, and he was overwhelmed with the situation. If you see the movie, he is the old man just standing there while everybody was flipping out.” Auschwitz is divided into separate parts; a dramatic portrayal of the Teutonic murder mills and a segment where Boll interviews German high school students to find out how well versed they are in Holocaust trivia; no doubt a deranged dichotomy. Unfortunately, these two separate segments are from seamlessly interconnected; thus, the film sometimes feels like a jumble mix of anti-pornographic Jew-slaughtering and abandoned footage from an aborted after school special. During the beginning of Auschwitz, Boll makes the questionable claim that various academic professors have congratulated him on being “German” due to his Fatherland’s history of Jewocide. Of course, anyone who has ever had the misfortune of being involved with the modern academic world knows that such views can only result in career suicide, so I am somewhat dubious of Boll’s claims. Additionally, I doubt many people will buy Boll’s purported empathy for the Jews while watching Auschwitz as he seems to have made the film for the sole purpose of stirring sensationalism that sells.  I certainly cannot think of another film where naked prepubescent corpses are run through an easy-incinerate oven.  I honestly would not be surprised if Boll viewed Agustí Villaronga's ssicko masterpiece In a Glass Cage (1987) religiously for inspiration throughout the production of the Auschwitz. The fact that Auschwitz, like Boll's politically incorrect satire Blubberella, was made with the leftover set from BloodRayne 3: The Third Reich, only makes the film seem all the more insincere yet, at the same time, strangely charming.

 One mustn’t forget that Uwe Boll is infamously known for heckling and baiting three of the biggest Jewish filmmakers in Hollywood: Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay, and Eli Roth. Of course, most liberally inclined individuals, especially modern cosmopolitan members of the self-loathing post-Holocaust Germanic race, tend to refrain from verbally assaulting members of the Judaic persuasion yet bodacious Boll has publicly bullied members of God’s chosen race like a jubilant SA brownshirt who got lost at a Hebraic wedding. In short, Uwe Boll’s empathy for his subjects in Auschwitz seems about as honest as Spielberg’s emotions would be had he directed a film about the Anglo-American firebombing of Dresden, Germany (aka the "German" Holocaust) during World War II. Although Boll may be less than honest in regard to his condemnation of Germany’s infamous past, that does not mean that Auschwitz is a film that is totally devoid of historical accuracy. In fact (and unsurprisingly), most viewer will learn more about the Holocaust and National Socialism watching Boll’s B-grade death camp flick than by watching Spielberg’s Shoah epic; Schindler’s List. Although post-World war II German youth may have had their brains lobotomized via Americanization of the Fatherland just like American adolescents do, they are certainly more proficient in history than their former "freedom loving" occupiers. Aside from the non-Aryan (aka Ausländer) German high school students featured in Auschwitz, most of the ethnic German teens featured in the film seem to know quite a bit about Das Dritte Reich. For example, a goofy hippie Aryan teen discusses Austrian rune-master Guido von List’s occult influence on National Socialist ideology; a subject that is no doubt unknown to your average American history professor. Of course, films like Schindler’s List are designed to stir the emotions of goys and god’s special girls and boys alike, thus, one cannot criticize Spielberg for directing a film that is nothing more than big budget and expertly disguised agitprop. When it comes down to it (and this is very low, I might add!), Auschwitz is one of the most bold and uncompromising looks at everyone’s favorite death camp. After all, what other German director would have the glorious gall to include himself in a film about Auschwitz as a German guard who is “just following orders.” I don’t think I am the only one that would agree that Boll has a striking resemblance to Rudolf Höss; the real-life first commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. I certainly would not complain if Boll decided to direct and play the lead role in a biopic about Höss; der todesking of the Holocaust. After all, it is the duty of every good German citizen to honor the legacy of their ancestors. 

 

 At the beginning of his filmmaking career, and while still a thoroughly confused work in progress, Uwe Boll directed Amoklauf (1994); a pretentious artsy farty serial killer flick that attempted (but failed) to steal the psychopathic cinematic brilliance of films directed by fellow Aryan auteur filmmakers Michael Haneke, Gerald Kargl, and Jörg Buttgereit. Of course, Dr. Boll soon realized that if he ever wanted to have a financially successful career in filmmaking, he would have to make films that could further wet the lips of drooling American buffoons, therefore, making Auschwitz was only the next logical step in his somewhat successful and equally notorious filmmaking career. The name of the game when working in Hollywood is prostitution and Uwe Boll has certainly proven to be quite the ghetto gigolo yet unlike most individuals working the streets of Sunset Boulevard, he has been able to maintain some dignity due to the dubious ambiguity and subversive subtexts of his films. It is pretty much a given that most audiences will find the production line murder featured in Auschwitz to be a glaring exercise in mores-shattering bad taste, but it is also the most rewarding and memorable aspect of the film.  I think that Uwe Boll might want to consider creating a director's cut of Auschwitz by exterminating the high school interview segments from the film. At the very least, Auschwitz is worth viewing just for the trip down Heaven's Street. Some film critics have already described the film as a work of “torture porn” but Auschwitz – with its assortment of ghastly nude bodies of every age and size; which are more horrifying than the actual Nazi gassings – lacks even the slightest inkling of eroticism (unless you have some sort of bizarre pedophile/necrophiliac dual-fetish). If Boll was aiming for all-encompassing ugliness with Auschwitz, he most certainly achieved it. Of course, as one finds out while watching the film, Mr. Boll certainly did not lose his appetite while standing around nude and supremely emaciated death camp slaves.  Now I just wish I could hear Steven Spielberg's thoughts on Auschwitz.

-Ty E

Hesher

In a way, Hesher reminds me of Kubrick's Lolita, in which Peter Sellers gives a typically varied comedic performance that takes up a lot of screen time in a story that does not at all require his services. You get the sense that Kubrick would have been better off trimming the Sellers footage and making it into a separate film, perhaps "The Pink Pantherphile" or something. Same deal with Hesher- Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a pitch-perfect, career-best performance as the ur-headbanger- a shittily tatted, long-haired pyromaniac who speaks in monosyllabic grunts and feels most at home clad only in his underwear on someone else's couch eating their cereal when he's not zooming around town in his souped-up van blaring "Battery". It is an instantly recognizable archetype, heightened to almost cartoon levels, but brought to life so effortlessly by a nigh-unrecognizable Levitt (Gordon-Levitt?) that one wonders why the fuck the filmmakers found it necessary to drop so awesome a character into so saccharine and unbearable a tepid family drama. I get the sense they were going for a sort of Visitor Q, "Teorema"-lite, the whole 'family in peril shaken out of their routine by enigmatic stranger' deal, only in this case instead of tit-milk orgies and homosexual dalliances with Terence Stamp we are treated to that guy with the big forehead from The Office looking stricken and miserable for two hours and one of the more grating child performances in recent memory.

Young TJ's mom dies and he has trouble coping and so he oh-so-quirkily becomes obsessed with owning the car she died in and runs afoul of this kid who works there who bullies him and he lives with his doting grandma whom he totally takes for granted and his dad who sits around in his underwear all doped up on pills, possible side effects of which include having a huge fucking forehead and only being amusing on The Office, intermittently at that, and so one day all angsty and unable to cope and shit TJ throws a brick through a window at a construction site and totally exposes Hesher in the process as that's where the dude was squatting so Hesher plants himself in TJ's house with the threat of bodily harm to TJ and in the process teaches TJ and his family about being a family, sticking up for oneself, AND he gets to totally plow away at Natalie Portman (Hesher that is, TJ totally wants to get at it, but he's like fucking 12 and she's Natalie Portman). So yeah, real TV Movie of the Week stuff, TJ dealing with grief, his shitty home situation, and being bullied with Hesher incongruously pasted onto the scenes, with nary a reaction from the cast. Hesher plops down on the couch across from dad, dad just kinda shrugs, Hesher watches TJ getting forced to eat a urinal cake at school, the bully hardly bats an eye. He also implicates TJ in some arson or something and TJ is the one taken to the police station. Up until the point we see Hesher and the grocery store clerk Portman plays going at it, I was pretty much convinced Hesher was just a creation of TJ's subconscious, like a live-action Calvin and Hobbes where instead of pissing on a Honda decal Calvin has just lost his mom and grows his bangs all shaggy like so they can hide his tears. Which reminds me, this TJ kid is fucking annoying- I think the only direction given to the kid playing him was "alternate between looking like your mom is not taking you to your dad's for the weekend so you'll have to wait a week to play the new Halo game and looking severely constipated."

Which sucks, because Hesher is an awesome character. Take for instance the scene where Hesher, chomping away at the dinner table, chastises TJ for not walking with his grandma by talking about how he heard about a "granny rapist" and proceeding to explain in graphic detail what being a granny rapist entails- hilarious! Or the scene where without rhyme or reason Hesher demolishes some random household's pool, throwing in all of the patio furniture and setting it ablaze, and since Portman is on hand during this it brings to mind the pool scene in Garden State, that sterile slice of linoleum masquerading as "indie" cinema, and in a way it's like Hesher is saying FUCK Garden State and fuck you, Ms. Portman, for producing THIS steaming pile, fuck Hesher, I want out. Dude has a horrible tattoo on his chest of a stick figure flipping the bird and blowing it's brains out! Hesher, the character, deserves a much better starring vehicle than Hesher the After School Special provides. By the time the finale rolled around, with Hesher the holy ghost to TJ's son and forehead guy's heavenly father pushing a coffin in slow motion as mood music blares on the soundtrack, I half prayed for Hesher, so vivid and malevolent and METAL, to flip the coffin over, grab the dead grandmother's corpse (oh yeah, SPOILER!) and drunkenly facefuck her, revealing himself to be the granny rapist, before cracking Dwight from The Office's bulbous dome like an egg and making TJ eat a piece of his cranial discharge, SATAN! But no, we are merely placated with the footnote of Hesher leaving behind "Hesher was here" in spray-paint on the roof of the house, har har, as TJ and dad look on all misty-eyed and appreciative and shit. What a waste.

-Jon-Christian

The Bunker of the Last Gunshots

If you thought the mental and physical deluge portrayed in Adolf Hitler’s bunker in the German epic Downfall (2004) was somewhat intense and even excruciating, you have yet to experience the distinct cinematic majesty of the neo-fascist dystopian sci-fi short The Bunker of the Last Gunshots (1981) aka Le bunker de la dernière rafale directed by popular collaborating French auteur filmmakers Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. The Bunker of the Last Gunshots is a 26 minute abstract work where the viewer is tested to their limit in regard to claustrophobic paranoia and an overall supreme agitation of the senses. Although the film includes no back story about its characters, the anti-heroes (if they can be called that) of the film seem like the sole survivors of an apocalyptic war who seem like they would be better off dead, hence the title of the film. The characters of The Bunker of the Last Gunshots sport neo-fascist uniforms worthy of Heinrich Himmler’s ghost and bald heads that are typical of a philistine skinhead tribe. In fact, the sardonically sinister and progressively depraved characters of the short make the protagonist Sam Bell of Duncan Jones’ Moon (2009) seem like a feeble-minded wimp. These nameless men call a postindustrial bunker ruled with a technocratic iron-fist in outer-space their unwanted virtual prison home. I wouldn't be surprised if many neofolk and power electronics musicians borrowed their wardrobe styles from the boys in the bunker. It is no exaggeration for me to say that the sleek and supremely suave fascistic uniforms featured in The Bunker of the Last Gunshots make the stormtrooper uniforms of the Star Wars films seem like schlocky Halloween costumes. One of the commanders featured in the short, who sits in a wheelchair paralyzed like Dr. Strangelove, has a striking resemblance to Erich von Stroheim; the iconic actor/auteur who was greatly loved and later died in France. On top of featuring charming wardrobes, The Bunker of the Last Gunshots was shot in a black-and-green night vision style that further accentuates the overall aesthetic martial prowess of the film. Like many of the great films of the silent era, the short relies exclusively on the visual as this exquisite frog flick features not a single line of dialogue, which only adds to the overall intensity and delightful dissonant ambiance of the film. From the beginning of The Bunker of the Last Gunshots, it will be apparent to the viewer that the mechanical stormtroopers of the film are on the break of deadly malfunction. While many of these malevolent men seem more machine than man, others are noticeably weary of their dubious comrades. One soldier seems to derive sexual pleasure from torturing and killing bugs while others find murdering fellow comrades to be quite an apathetic affair.Another soldier also find himself being experimented on by his comrades and crippled leader. By the end of The Bunker of the Last Gunshots, the boiling bunker inevitably explodes into all out mutiny of the murderous kind.

The Bunker of the Last Gunshots co-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet would later go on to direct the extremely popular French romantic comedy Amélie (2001). If The Bunker of the Last Gunshots has anything in common with Jeunet's cutesy girl comedy, it is that they are both aesthetically pleasing cinematic experiences that make love with the viewer’s eyes. With The Bunker of the Last Gunshots, one’s eyes are most certainly raped yet total pleasure is still derived from the rather vicious visual experience. Of course, it will be no surprise to most viewers of the short that both Jeunet and co-director Marc Caro would go on to direct the dystopian fantasy film The City of Lost Children (1995). Out of all of Jeunet’s films, The Bunker of the Last Gunshots is certainly the most brutal, as the characters of the short fail to inspire any empathy in the viewer, which, of course, was the intention of both directors. After all, one can only assume the characters featured in the film are mass murderers as they kill each other with a stoic precision that is undoubtedly foreign to a novice killer. The Bunker of the Last Gunshots is like a cross between Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Shinya Tsukmoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970), packaged in a neat, no bullshit 26 minute running time. I cannot think of many other films like The Bunker of the Last Gunshots, where mindfucking murder in a paranoiac microcosm is so vivid and well executed (especially during scenes of execution).  If there is any film that can induce temporary schizophrenia in the viewer, it is, without fail, The Bunker of the Last Gunshots.

-Ty E

The Long Island Four

For what is probably his most popular song, "Total Eclipse", Bavarian-born kraut new wave countertenor Klaus Nomi included the extremely controversial (especially for a post-WW2 Teuton of the hyper-homo sort) yet considerably catchy line, “hotter than a holocaust.” Being born in early 1944 just over a year before Germany’s brutal cataclysmic defeat and virtual total destruction, Nomi certainly grew up in a place and time of collective misery and unspoken guilt, thus I do not think it is a stretch to say that the singer’s distinct performer persona was largely the result of his desire to live in a state of total escapism and, ultimately, quasi-transhumanism as a mensch who gave off the impression that he was literally out of this world. When I discovered that Klaus Nomi played the role of a Nazi officer in the campy No Wave flick The Long Island Four (1980) directed by onetime-auteur Anders Grafstrom, I naturally made it my mission to track down a copy of the film. After all, few films can boast of featuring Klaus Nomi as a Nazi chic National Socialist who moonlights as a classy cross-dresser and crowd pleasing Jazz singer. Based on a true story about Nazi saboteur spies who infiltrated Long Island, New York in 1942 and were eventually caught and executed, The Long Island Four is a film that cares more about jovial sexual ambiguity (or not so ambiguous) than any sort of historical accuracy. I am certainly not the kind of person who throws around the word “camp” when describing a film, but The Long Island Four is camp to the core. In fact, I think the film would be best described as a work of “death camp” as the film combines queerness, National Socialism, and death like never before, even making the exploitative Hitlerite homoeroticism featured in LuchinoVisconti’s The Damned (1969) seem quite bland and less than campy by comparison. Although The Long Island Four features next to nil in the way of nudity and blood-gushing brutality, the film has an incomparable cinematic aura of camp eccentricity that would probably even make Soft Cell frontman Marc Almond quiver. French poet Jean Cocteau once described camp as, “The lie that tells the truth” but in The Long Island Four, this truism is exquisitely inversed in a work where conspicuous cocksuckers attempt to portray a little known historical truth regarding a failed Nazi spy operations in one of the most Hebraic areas of the world. Although playing the roles of nonfictional Nazi spies who express an affinity for heterosexual activities, the queenish gayness of the actors (who aside from Klaus Nomi, all have goofy American accents) is so shamelessly and hopelessly glaring that while watching the film, I wondered to myself if they were early AIDS victims (like Nomi himself). The celestially odd character of The Long Island Four is further accentuated by the gritty Super 8 film stock that it was shot on.  Despite the somewhat anarchistic nature of The Long Island Four, the film is hardly of an anachronistic nature as one would expect from such a film. In fact, while watching the film, I would sometimes forget that it was created nearly four decades after the time period that it is set in.

The Long Island Four starts when a small brigade of Nazi spy saboteurs land in Long Island.  Upon arrival, one of the lisp lips Nazis states, “It’s a perfect day to become an American” but as the viewer finds out whilst watching the film, this terrible Teuton has spoken too soon. Although all four spies enter Amerikkka with the sole objective of selflessly devoting their lives to the Third Reich at whatever cost, these kamerads soon learn that they cannot abstain from the sinister hedonistic self-worshiping lifestyle that American democracy has to offer. Of course, the actors playing these committed National Socialists look like natural born degenerates who see decadence as a civic right and duty, but they make for exceedingly charming fellows, nonetheless. One of the spies wears an eye patch in the tradition of 1/2 Aryan filmmaker Fritz Lang. Naturally, Klaus Nomi's character is the most multifaceted and mysterious Nazi featured in The Long Island Four. ↯↯-man Nomi acts as a ↯↯ employed voyeur and committed scopophile who spies on the newly arrived Nazi recruits in a curiously cunning and keenly discreet manner. Thankfully, Nomi’s singing talents can be also heard in The Long Island Four. When not checking up on his Nazi underlings, Nomi sings his classic pop love song “Falling In Love Again” in a dimly lit night club and later to his drag queen self while narcissistically gazing into a mirror. Klaus Nomi may not sport his iconic wardrobe and signature hairdo in The Long Island Four but his charismatic persona is fully intact throughout the film.  With his small/slender frame, pale skin, and black hair; Nomi kind of looks like a junkie version of Joseph Goebbels in the film. As Nomi's character states in the film, “the true god can have no friends”, which no doubt can be said of his character in The Long Island Four and in his short real-life. Although Nomi steals the show, most of the actors featured in the film must be praised for their memorable performances. Dasch, the dainty leader of the four Nazi spies, hilariously tells his American Frau early on in the film that in Germany, “we have big ovens, our ovens are very big.” Indeed, such ↯atricial dialogue is, as Nomi himself sang so many times, “hot as a holocaust.”

If anything can be learned from watching The Long Island Four, it is that America can deracinate even the most rooted of genocidal nationalists. Whether fornicating with blonde beastesses with lesbo haircuts or crawling into a Chinese opium shotgun, the Nazi saboteurs of the film cannot help but enthusiastically knock on death’s door in their unconscious quest for unquenchable pleasure. The real National Socialists themselves looked upon cities as training grounds for turning moral rural folk into immoral rootless cosmopolitans, hence their “blood and soil” ideology, thus The Long Island Four is a film that is more conscious (whether intentional or not) of Nazism than it initially appears to be. Although the film tends to fall short of the flashy ↯↯ uniforms one would expect from a film featuring ostensibly nefarious Nazis, The Long Island Four radiates the sort of strangely charming and classiccamp that would even make Uncle Adolf giggle with glee. Unfortunately, director Anders Grafstrom died tragically in a car accident during a trip to Mexico shortly after the completion of the film, hence his rather small one-film-oeuvre. Of course, by creating The Long Island Four – the apotheosis of true artsy fartsy camp and No Wave cinema – Grafstrom achieved more artistically than most filmmakers do in a lifetime, thus, his premature passing was not in vain. After all, it is quite an achievement for a filmmaker to make a brilliant work of camp while remaining subtle and abstaining from using too much nonstop nudity and endless gratuitous bodily dismemberment.  The Long Island Four is also another example as to why Nomi's early death was a tremendous lost for the NYC (and beyond) art world as he could have had a somewhat successful acting career like his fellow musician and performing arts pal David Bowie.  With all the forgettable and worthless exploitation films that have received fancy dvd releases over the past decade, it is undoubtedly a shame that The Long Island Four has yet to be digitally remastered and re-released.  If you only had the opportunity to watch one No Wave film, make it The Long Island Four.

-Ty E

Sex, Death & The Hollywood Mystique

When it comes to the history of Hollywood, the behind-the-scenes antics of its participants and stars has always intrigued me more than the actual films they produce. Sure, Rudolph Valentino may have been the first male heartthrob in cinema history, but the facts regarding his magical rise and rather pathetic fall have always interested me more than his actual movie roles. Even German expressionist director F.W. Murnau – who is arguably the greatest filmmaker to have ever worked in Hollywood – had quite an interesting personal life whilst working in the foreign world of Tinseltown, as not many people can say they died as a result of an unruly mix including an underage quasi-slave Filipino boy, a blowjob mishap, and a moving motor vehicle.  Of course, some of these purported historical facts are somewhat dubious yet the libertine mystique of Hollyweird and its past live on. In Satanic documentarian auteur Larry Wessel’s Sex, Death & The Hollywood Mystique, a number of forgotten Hollywood entertainers and suave pseudo-historians give you the inside dirt on Sunset Boulevard’s most depraved, perverted, and downright degenerate stars and its equally unethical business practices. During the early days of Hollywood, actors/actresses were essentially the prostitutes of the pimp-like producers and sexually barbaric businessmen who virtually owned them. Although Austrian born Hollywood director Billy Wilder exposed some of the ostentatious oddities of Follywood (in the form of an ungracefully aged silent screen queen) with his masterpiece Sunset Boulevard and absurdo auteur David Lynch would later make films of a similar nature (albeit, in a more ambiguous, ambitious, stark, gritty, and exceedingly grotesque manner), few films have seriously examined the creepy cryptic history of the L.A. worldwide entertainment epicenter, especially from a strictly fact-based (or as close to fact as one can get for such a mysterious underbelly of sin masquerading as a saintly promoter of moral and ethical progress) and documentarian perspective. Thus, those who have found themselves more addicted to Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon than internet porn will find Sex, Death & The Hollywood Mystique to be a lucid piece of uncensored film history gold of the most glimmering and rewarding kind.  It also doesn't hurt that the documentary features a complimentary video aesthetic that echoes back to porn flicks of the 1980s, as Sex, Death & The Hollywood Mystique makes such sex flicks seem like wholesome and banal Sunday morning programming.

 One aspect of Sex, Death & The Hollywood Mystique that especially intrigued me was when I found out that John Gilmore – a man who has made a career out of exposing controversial Hollywood based crimes and serial killers – is one of the main subjects of the documentary. As someone who has read many of his books for the mere pleasure, I knew that Gilmore would provide a certain charisma to the documentary that is quite rare and underappreciated nowadays. After all, no other true crime author has been able to uncover such odd and obsessive facts like Bobby Beausoleil’s pre-murderer interest in American Neo-Splengarian philosopher and political activist Francis Parker Yockey’s tome Imperium. In Sex, Death & The Hollywood Mystique, Gilmore reveals the cunning criminal tactics of semen-slurping Hollywood pimp-producers and the revolting facts behind his friend James Dean’s painful rise to post-life stardom. According to Gilmore, Dean became the sex slave of various Hollywood producers before making his way to the silverscreen.  Knowing that Dean subjected himself to sexual torture yet never got to reap its rewards just makes his life seem all the more tragic. In early Hollywood, it was not uncommon for up-and-coming actors of both genders (but especially males) to use and abuse their body as a rite of passage in Tinseltown. Apparently, James Dean was sub-literate but he had a keen knack getting what he wanted via his sometimes charming antics and his ability to perfectly mimic other people's behavior. As John Gilmore explains in Sex, Death & The Hollywood Mystique, very few people in Hollywood gave Dean the time of day before his godlike and quasi-mythical success, but when he died, these disingenuous individuals (including Maila Nurmi aka Ms. Vampira) claimed to be his best friend.  Naturally, the documentary also covers a variety of iconic L.A.-based serial killers and murderers, including Charles "The Pied Piper of Tucson" Schmid, the Manson Family, and the unsolved Black Dahlia murder.  As someone who has read various books on these subjects/individuals, I must admit that Sex, Death & The Hollywood Mystique does an excellent job in "cutting the fat" in regard to providing only the most unconventional and naked facts about the murderers and their victims, and not merely regurgitating the same kind of cheat-sheet and beat-to-death yellow journalism facts you find on television programs like 60 Minutes or in books written by Vincent Bugliosi.

Personally, I see it as no sort of revelation that Hollywood has a genocide worth of skeletons in its many closets as the contrived and artificial nature of its films gives evidence that its owners have something to hide; or, at the very least, they do not want to reveal the true nature of their characters. After all, it is no mere coincidence that some of Hollywood best films, including Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, have been set in the fey and cryptic criminal underworld of Tinsletown. To my knowledge there is not another documentary like Sex, Death & The Hollywood Mystique; where the devil’s whorehouse of showbiz is showcased in a most pleasantly uncensored way. Of course, the documentary is undoubtedly a continuation of its star John Gilmore’s lifelong work, as well as Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon series, but Sex, Death & The Hollywood Mystique is much easier to digest for those that loathe literature (myself, not included). For me, the documentary was like revisiting Gilmore and Anger’s work, minus hours of reading. If you’re a friend, foe, or fan of Hollywood, you will certainly find Sex, Death & The Hollywood Mystique to be a stimulating affair where the seedy sex, exploding stars, and sinister business of Hollywood is displayed on a sparkling dimestore platter.  For more info on this film, checkout:  www.wesselmania.net

-Ty E

Subconscious Cruelty

For most viewers, the experimental horror film Subconscious Cruelty directed by Karim Hussain will be a blatant exercise in the director’s conscious cruelty, as the work treats sadistic sacrilege in a most viciously visceral yet artistically sound light that is surely unconventional for such an exceedingly depraved work. Packed with ultra-bloody-flesh-shredding-anti-sex that was assembled with a precision that is comparable to the human-meat-mutilating surgical skills of Jack the Ripper, most audiences will feel unconsciously guilty for finding the bodily dismemberment featured throughout the film to be of an aesthetically pleasing persuasion. Simply put, Subconscious Cruelty is a minor masterpiece of the macabre that will never be rightfully recognized as a work of cinematic art by your typical taste-challenged arthouse film snob. To be fair, Subconscious Cruelty has its fair share of flaws, but they can be easily overlooked and forgiven due to the film’s uncanny aesthetic prowess. Although influenced by auteur master filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky, Luis Buñuel, and Dušan Makavejev, Subconscious Cruelty lacks the thematic depth and subtle symbolism associated with its influences. While dreaming up his phantasmagorical nightmare, director Karim Hussain was mainly inspired by the unpleasant plague of heroin addiction and nihilism that was vogue among art subcultures during the mid-1990s. Of course, Subconscious Cruelty is a potent film due to its stark imagery and ambient atmosphere and not due to the intellectual pretensions Hussain had while creating the film. After all, most viewers will be too startled to notice the passé philosophical nature of the film after seeing a scene where a woman’s sacred meat curtain is ripped to shreds via nightmarish childbirth. I am willing to bet that most people who own a copy of Subconscious Cruelty also own works by Jörg Buttgereit and Nacho Cerdà but it is unlikely these same individuals own any films directed by Jean-Luc Godard. In fact, it will probably be no surprise to most viewers of Subconsciously Cruelty that Karim Hussain co-wrote the script for Cerdà’s The Abandoned (2006). I was certainly not surprised to learn that Hussain also provided his cinematographer skills to Hobo with a Shotgun (2011); a film that owes a lot of its distinct character to its kaleidoscope of killer colors. 

 Like all truly audacious works of art, Subconscious Cruelty was plagued by production setbacks and trouble with the law. While coming home from a business trip in the United States, Hussain was stopped by Canadian custom agents who viewed parts of Subconscious Cruelty and confiscated it as illegally obscene material. With a name like Hussain’s, I wouldn’t be surprised if the custom agents were under the suspicion that the filmmaker was a terrorist, as Subconscious Cruelty is undoubtedly a delightful work of aesthetic terrorism that cinematically vomits on the medieval morality of American evangelical Christians. I have a feeling that if Hussain were to have created Subconscious Cruelty in a country like Iran, his life would have reached its climax in a rainstorm of peasant pelted middle eastern stones. If I were to lump the film into a category all of its own, I would describe Subconscious Cruelty as an arthouse porn flick for misogynistic serial killers of the more culturally refined kind. Bodily fluids are some of the most imperative components of life as semen is the seed from where all human life begins and blood keeps life sustainable but in Subconscious Cruelty, these precious fluids are demoted to a level that falls below toxic fecal matter. Of course, Subconscious Cruelty is a film that will have its viewers chanting Long Live Death, for few films have made bloodbaths so soothing and depravedly delectable. 

With Subconscious Cruelty, Hussain admirably achieved the seemingly impossible; constructing a work of libertine cinematic art as sadistically powerful as Nacho Cerdà’s short Aftermath but in the form of a perfectly paced feature-length film. Naturally, I assume many viewers will find themselves ejecting Subconscious Cruelty from their dvd player after the first five minutes of viewing it, but for those rare and initiated lovers of blood drenched cinematic bliss, the film makes for a truly rewarding and liberating experience that has next to no worthy rivals. After watching uncountable horror films over the pass year that are typically nothing more than a mediocre celluloid (but more often digital) mess covered with repulsive schlocky blood, I certainly found myself invigorated after watching Subconscious Cruelty; a distinctly flavorful flick where blood is beautiful and genital mutilation is as serenely scenic as a sunset on a beach during the summertime. I just wouldn’t recommend watching Subconscious Cruelty if you’re pregnant, unless you’re hoping to have a painful miscarriage. Despite its bodacious message of remorseless blasphemy, the film certainly puts the fantastic story of Jesus’ birth from the womb of a virginal mother in perspective.  I, for one, cannot think of another film like Subconscious Cruelty where the tall tale of immaculate conception is immaculately murdered in a most tasteful manner that is bound to stain most viewer's souls.

-Ty E