Liquid Sky

After viewing the Austrian cyber-dyke flick Flaming Ears (1992) and taking heed of a film recommendation from my culturally refined lady friend, I decided to finally give the New Wave sci-fi work Liquid Sky (1982) directed by Slava Tsukerman (Stalin’s Wife, Perestroika) a serious viewing.  Tsukerman decided to create the film after his previous project Sweet Sixteen – also a science fiction film designed with the New Wave style in mind that was to feature Andy Warhol – never received the funding the director needed, thus he became resourceful and merely used the cast of the aborted project for Liquid Sky, including star and script co-writer Anne Carlisle (Perfect Strangers, Crocodile Dundee). Although often associated with the punk subculture, Liquid Sky – which was released the same year as the Hollywood cyberpunk classic Blade Runner (1982) – has more in common aesthetically with the U.K.-based New Romantic fashion movement of the early 1980s as the film most certainly looks like it could have been directed by Visage frontman Steve Strange himself. Somewhat surprisingly, Liquid Sky was instead directed by a Soviet-born Jew who created TV movies and documentaries (he would later have a successful career in Israeli television) before assembling the avant-garde libertine sci-fi comedy that would gain him the most notoriety as a filmmaker because on top of being extremely influential culturally, Liquid Sky was the most economically profitable independent film of 1983. Materialistic monetary matters aside, Liquid Sky obtained a steady cult following over the years, not least due to the film's bittersweet cocktail of dazzling psychedelic special-effects, plentifully perverse humor (the lead anti-heroess is repeatedly the victim of rape), sometimes silly computer generated soundtrack and inter-sexual New Romanticist imagery. Taking its name from the English-translated American Indian saying for heroin, Liquid Sky is an often absurd and authentically campy sci-fi farce about a group of tiny and invisible junk-addicted space aliens (whose spaceship is about the size of a dinner plate) who come to earth to harvest the endorphins created in the human brain during sexual orgasm – which are apparently similar in chemical structure to heroin – by using an androgynous bisexual lady named Margaret as a vessel for obtaining orgasmic juices via her surly and sadistic sexual partners. In the process of obtaining their opiate-like pheromones, Margaret’s sexual partners die post-orgasm after a crystal blade appears protruding through their skulls that is used by the aliens to extract the pleasure molecules. Needless to say, Liquid Sky is not the sort of sci-fi flick that was made with virginal fanboys and turdish trekkies in mind, but instead junkies, perverts, pessimists, and degenerates of all sorts. 

 Liquid Sky begins at a newer-than-new-wave fashion show featuring model Margaret (Anne Carlisle) and her equally sexually ambiguous archenemy/doppelgänger Jimmy (also Carlisle); a fairy of an effeminate fellow who has a hard time fueling his life-consuming addiction to heroin. Luckily for Margaret her butch gal pal Adrian (Paula E. Sheppard) is a hip heroin-dealer. Being a linguistically elegant and articulate lady of high Manhattan culture, Adrian describes her girlfriend as an, “uptight wasp cunt from Connecticut.” Indeed, miss Marge came of age in New England suburbia and had a relatively mundane upbringing as expressed by various childhood photos of her featured in Liquid Sky. It was not until Margaret moved to the city with overtly delusional aspirations of being the next David Bowie that she became an increasingly masculine, drug-addicted drama queen with a less than lavish libertinage lifestyle. Luckily for her, Margaret finally gets her big break in show biz, at least in her own mind, when an alien spaceship lands on the roof of the penthouse apartment that she shares with her stocky and cocky Alpine-shaped girlfriend Adrian. Indeed, Margaret wants to become a space oddity of sorts and she has no qualms about fucking people to death to appease her extraterrestrial masters (although she initially theorizes that an Indian God is guiding her). During her wild night of sexual seduction and depravity, Margaret helps the alien secure the endorphins of a rapist soup opera actor, an ex-hippie college professor, a failed artist who likens himself to French poet Jean Cocteau, among various other individual that probably deserve to die. Meanwhile, a socially inept German scientist named Johann Hoffman (Otto Von Wernherr) flies into Manhattan from Berlin as he has been monitoring the space aliens for some time now, but he has a hard time convincing the citizens New York City’s most densely populated borough that they are under attack by minature junky spacemen. While attempting to find a view adjacent to Margaret’s apartment so as to monitor the space alien's dubious activity, Johann is welcomed in the apartment of Sylvia (Susan Doukas) – a television producer who also happens to be the mother of jerk junky Jimmy – and carries the rest of his UFOphile voyeurism in her window. Clearly a sexually-deprived masochist, Sylvia is especially turned on by the fact that Johann is German and she is Jewish, thus she spends the rest of the night trying to get in the pants of the seemingly asexual Teutonic Scientist. Needless to say, there are a variety of outré sexual liaisons featured throughout Liquid Sky, but very little of it is mutually reciprocal, thus the aliens are the only group the truly benefits from the counter-culture phenomenon of free love in world were souls are vapid and emotions are artificially altered via downers and uppers.

 

 One thing that most viewers will notice almost immediately upon watching Liquid Sky, aside from the quasi-schlocky futurist fashion imagery, is the curiously cynical comedic tone of the film, as if director Slava Tsukerman truly longed for the colonization of earth by endorphin-fiending extraterrestrial beings. In an interview featured in the book Destroy All Movies!!! (2010), Tsukerman stated in regard to his satirical objective with Liquid Sky, “Criticism of the scene was not intended…criticism of our entire civilization was intended.” Unequivocally, from the emotionally sterile Faustian scientist to the deadbeat opiate-driven would-be artist, Liquid Sky is an aesthetically hypnotic yet delightfully scornful condemnation of the culturally-vacuous and technocratic Occidental world. With highly quotable lines like, “Cocteau was Cocteau before he ever did drugs” and “I kill with my cunt. Isn’t it fashionable?”, it is easy to see why Liquid Sky has remained a popular work among both cinephiles and sexually ambiguous New Wavers alike since its initial release three decades ago.  Equipped with what Tsukerman describes as, “the first computer-generated music score in the history of film” and a number absurd avant-garde fashion styles that Lady Gaga has stolen and repackaged over the years, Liquid Sky is like all great works of science fiction; a fantastic but unsentimental window into a dystopian future that has subsequently revealed itself. A work influenced by heroin abuse that often looks like an acid trip, Liquid Sky is delicious cyber-candy for the eyes and a delightful despoiler for the soul.

-Ty E

Le salamandre

With his risqué interracial-love-story-turned-homicidal-rampage Le salamandre (1969), Italian auteur Alberto Cavallone (Man, Woman and Beast, Blow Job) announced his potent and steadfast arrival in the world of Italian cinema. On top of making Cavallone a hot name (at least as far as producers were concerned) for the one and only time in his filmmaking career due to the film’s surprisingly successful monetary gain at the box offices (earning 500 million liras),  Le salamandre also launched the (albeit brief) careers of lead actresses Erna Schürer (Summer Love, Scream of the Demon Lover) and Beryl Cunningham (Il dio serpent, The Black Decameron). Despite its various scenes of gratuitous nudity (which seem quite tame by today’s standards) and preposterous scenarios of lipstick lesbian pseudo-love, Le salamandre – which is mostly set at a post-colonial Tunisian vacation spot – is fundamentally a staunchly defiant socio-political work with a biting and acrimonious message targeting the white colonial oppressor. The film opens with a conspicuously consternating dream-sequence featuring a young black man being violently beaten and eventually castrated by three good ol’ white boys on a serene and scenic beach. This whole scenario is witnessed by black American female protagonist Uta (Cunningham) as she hides in terror behind a bush like a wild bushwoman. Not long after seeing one of her brothers literally losing his manhood, Uta is welcomed with literal open-arms in a absurdly sympathetic manner by her white female lover Ursula (Schürer); a Swedish-American photographer with lady-licking proclivities. Apparently, this direful and sardonically symbolic dream-sequence, as well as the rest of Le salamandre was inspired by Cavallone’s reading of French-Algerian philosopher Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary work The Wretched of the Earth (1961); a volatile pseudo-Freudian/Marxist tirade that blames African male impotence on the (apparently) psychologically-emasculating brutality of colonizing white man. Considering the epidemic of rape and AIDS in most modern Africa nations, as well as starvation-stirring population booms, one can only assume the white devil’s super sterilizing powers have only swayed since the decolonization of the dark continent. Despite the sometimes anachronistic nature of the film, Le salamandre does offer some seemingly moldy food for thought that most filmmakers in our toddler-like times of authoritarian political-correctness would barely consider, especially in regard to the still somewhat prevalent phenomenon of master-slave relationships between whites and blacks.

Starting on the first draft of Le salamandre in 1967 with collaborator Sergio Lentati, the film – ultimately for commercial reasons – became notably more erotic and increasingly less political when the finished product was completed, yet the political subtext is still quite potent and an intrinsic attribute of the work. In a most antagonistic manner, Cavallone described the message of Le salamandre as follows: “You came to see this film just to see two naked women… you have a colonialist mentality. Nothing’s changed, the only way to change things is to kill you.” Indeed, Le salamandre ends on a murderous and sadistically psychosexual note that is bound to offend certain superficially liberal folks who see the antidote to centuries of hostile race relations as skin-deep physical love and miscegenation. The character of Uta learns everything she needs to know about whitey through her sexual relationships with Ursula and later psychologist Henri Duval (Antony Vernon); an intellectually inquisitive middle-aged man who randomly meets the twosome on the beach (when Ursula is topless, of course), thus eventually forming a torrid and tumultuous threesome. However different each white lover may initially seem to Uta, she discovers that most of them view her as nothing more than an exotic and sexually stimulating novelty of sorts and not as an individual with any inkling of personal merit. While watching Le salamandre one learns that Ursula 'rescued' and brought up Uta from being a penniless nothing to a renown international model. Ursula also fails to hide her overwhelming feeling superiority and sense of ownership over Uta, as if the black girl owes her body to her rescuing and ever so resourceful master. Initially, Uta is afraid of Henri and his psychoanalytic speculations, but she eventually comes to realize some less than flattering things about herself and her melanin-deprived lovers via these theories, to the eventual detriment of the good doctor. Cavallone also spliced in real stock-footage of executions as ghostly symbols of the colonial past that Uta seems to feel in a metaphysical manner (it seems Cavallone envisioned the mystical 'supernatural Negro' idea long before films like The Green Mile and The Legend of Bagger Vance were ever created), but fails to affect her perfectly comfortable and always hedonistic white compatriots. It is only when all the discommodious emotions brewing within her soul become intolerable that Uta is able to collect herself and take action in a seemingly unbecoming style that is no less audacious than the ending featured in Melvin Van Peebles’ revolutionary work Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971). Like Van Peebles' socially influential and economically successful film, Le salamandre was not intended as a ‘feel good’ exploitation work, but as a serious ‘call to arms’ of the violent nation-imploding persuasion.

Despite its abrupt and unduly unpleasant ending (at least for white folks), Le salamandre also concludes with the revelation by Cavallone that the viewer is watching a mere work of fiction created by a filmmaker in a fashion not unlike the one featured at the conclusion of fellow Italian auteur filmmaker Federico Fellini’s late masterpiece E la nave va (1983) aka And the Ship Sails On. Although one of Cavallone’s earliest works, Le salamandre is also certainly one of his most complex, mixing discordant phantasmagorical dream-sequences, hyper-realist stock-footage of authentic mass murder, and sleekly stylized scenes of sensational lesbian erotica in a film that – in terms of execution and overall quality – totally eclipses the director’s later Africa-based post-colonial work Afrika (1973). Unsurprisingly, few of the filmgoers who originally saw Le salamandre upon its original premiere cared for its keen socio-political complexity. Although a film producer offered Cavallone the job of directing another film in the spirit of Le salamandre starring Florinda Bolkan, the Italian auteur declined and instead directed Dal nostro inviato a Copenaghen (1970) aka From Our Copenhagen’s Correspondent; a patently anti-American work about two U.S. army deserters who try to survive while taking refuge from the Vietnam war in Copenhagen. Of course, one of Alberto Cavallone’s greatest attributes as a filmmaker was his uncompromising artistic vision, even if he sometimes failed in his cinematic experiments, thus Le salamandre is an especially must-see work as it comes as one of the Italian filmmaker’s most adept efforts. 

-Ty E

Afrika

Forget the revolutionary films of Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène (Mandabi, Xala) and mainstream Hollywood philistinic liberal swill like The Constant Gardener (2005) and The Last King of Scotland (2006), criminally neglected Italian auteur Alberto Cavallone’s Afrika (1973) is the ultimate dark romance flick set on the dark continent. Influenced by reading Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon’s unintentionally hilarious and preposterously overrated pseudo-Freudian/Marxist political diatribe The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and having previously directed the relatively successful work Le salamandre (1969) – a politically and racially-charged post-colonial work disguised as an erotic tale about an interracial lesbian love affair – artistically courageous Cavallone was more than prepared to direct one of the most downright peculiar and hopelessly repellant works set in the horn of Africa. As the director stated himself, the world of Cavallone’s Afrika is a contemporary Little Big Horn where white men act as General Custer’s soldiers. Of course, one would barely notice this if it were not for the film’s brutal opening scene featuring sexual mutilation and coldblooded murder against two suspect rebel women, as Afrika is essentially an often exploitative tale about a pitiable homosexual Italian boy named Frank (Andrea Traglia) who travels to Ethiopia to reunite with his fleeing gray-haired truelove; a self-loathing (and married) homo professor named Philip Stone (Ivano Staccioli) who has failed as both a painter and as a lover. To prove his undying devotion to Philip, Frank has undergone a drastic sex-change and has changed his/her name to Eva so as to be a 'proper woman' and thus (in his mind) legitimize their relationship in the eyes of sneering homo-haters, but the elder man is not impressed, henceforth culminating into the heartbroken lady-lad’s violent bedside suicide. Afrika was edited in a nonlinear fashion that is as spasmodic and unorthodox as the film's story and features a series of flashbacks from various character’s (Frank, Philip, and Frank's sister Jeanne) perspectives that tell the histrionic story that led up to Frank’s impending suicide. Although the socio-political themes featured in the film might seem strikingly modern upon reading a superficial synopsis of Afrika, the film is certainly on par with Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s mondo classic Africa Addio (1966) aka Africa Blood and Guts or Farewell Africa in terms of being ‘culturally sensitive’ or lack thereof.

 During Afrika, it is revealed that Frank and Philip first bumped into each other as both were searching for a copy of French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud’s work Illuminations (1874); an uncompleted collection of prose poems. Like Rimbaud himself and many other decadent European degenerates, Philip would also travel to the third world in a futile attempt to escape the existential crisis that consumes his soul. Not unlike decolonized Africa, Frank and Philip are going through big changes in their lives and the final outcome is quite questionable to say the least. Somewhat oddly, Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2009) often feels like an extremely loose, polished remake of Cavallone’s Afrika. Like Cavallone's earlier work, A Single Man follows a gay professor as he recollects over the past couple years about his deceased lover. Also, like A Single Man, Afrika depicts the professor’s failed past relationship with a female lover, but unlike the former film, Cavallone’s work does not hold back in showing the fairer sex’s absolute and utter detestation for male-on-male buggery. Even Frank’s seemingly sympathetic sister Jeanne is revealed to be completely revolted with her brother’s unconquerable vice as revealed in Afrika’s forthright ‘surprise’ ending. To cure his brother-in-law of his ingrained apathy towards woman, Jeanne’s husband contracts a group of teenagers to rape Frank (by a male and a female) in a scene that predates but is notably less effective than a similar scenario featured in Dutch auteur Paul Verhoeven's Spetters (1980). In the end, Frank – a self-eunuchized freak – has more testicular fortitude than his miserable, middle-aged and emotionally-broken boy toy. Like most of Cavallone’s films, Afrika is an unflinchingly nihilistic, pessimistic, and misanthropic work that leaves no group spared and that includes many of the nameless Africans in the film who merely act as militant Uncle Tom’s that are willing to kill their own kinfolk just so they can have a larger bowl of rice to eat at night. 

 If you’re like me and find yourself tantalized by the prospect of “Fassbinder meets meets exploitation" (or in this case, Afroexploitation), Afrika – as well as most of Alberto Cavallone’s filmography – makes for an uniquely enthralling cinematic affair. Admittedly, you won’t learn much about the continent of Africa by watching the film nor discover the solution to hostile race relations, but you will find yourself laughing ecstatically at some of the most absurdly melodramatic scenarios ever shot on celluloid. Of course, Afrika – like virtually of Cavallone’s work – is an acquired taste that, as a rule, generally leaves most viewers divided. If the spectator learns anything by watching Afrika it is that the white man should stay out of Africa and should have never entered the dark continent in the first place just as married professors should refrain from invading the murky nether-regions of flaky young men. 

-Ty E

The Angel’s Melancholia

Admittedly, German auteur Marian Dora’s arthouse exploitation flick Cannibal (2006) – a deadly serious reconstructed depiction of the intimate cock-chomping antics of real-life gay cannibal Armin Meiwes and his willing lover/dinner – left a notably profound impression on me. Opening with images of miscegenating cannibalistic serial-killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the Third Reich and featuring some of the most audaciously aberrant ‘love’ scenes ever captured on digital video (and that includes hardcore pornography), Cannibal is a delightfully deranged tribute to the wild and wonderful cryptic world of homo-cidal sadomasochism. Needless to say, I was quite excited when I learned about Marian Dora’s second feature-length film The Angel’s Melancholia (2009) aka Melancholie Der Engel; a 165 minute neo-pagan cinematic nachtmahr of dreamy Dionysian depravity that features a bombastic blitzkrieg of expressive and sometimes strikingly therapeutic portrayals of coprophilia, urolagnia (aka watersports), genital mutilation, animal cruelty, and melodramatic left-wing hero worship. Including music by swarthy American-born Israelite David A. Hess of The Last House on the Left (1972) infamy and featuring lonely scenic walks through Auschwitz concentration camp by the film’s two lead anti-heroes, The Angel’s Melancholia is a vehemently visceral window into the post-WWII German psyche and the death-drive-afflicted mania and scatological perversity that such ethno-masochistic self-loathing entails. Following in the aesthetic and thematic footsteps of his fellow countrymen Jörg Buttgereit (Nekromantik, Der Todesking) and Andreas Bethmann (Der Todesengel aka Angel of Death: Fuck or Die), as well as Italian auteur Ruggero Deodato (Waves of Lust, Cannibal Holocaust), The Angel’s Melancholia is an unflinching work of noisome and loathsome yet lavishly assembled cinematic artistry that wholly transcends its influences, thus sailing subversive sicko sinema to a new uncharted sea of sadistic and satyric extremity. Forget Siegfried Kracauer's neo-Marxist psychobabble on the German expressionist films of the Weimar Republic, The Angel’s Melancholia is a truly sordid spectacle of a spiritually devitalized, emotionally demoralized, and self-flagellating people that worships death and strives unceasingly for self-annihilation; or at least one would be led to believe that is the case after watching such an innately intemperate and inimical post-völkisch work. 

 During the beginning of The Angel’s Melancholia, we are introduced to two loving yet loony friends: Katze; a slightly overweight Nordic degenerate with a keen fondness for warm urine and Brauth; a seemingly Semitic Christ-like/Satan-like messianic figure who initially gives off the impression of being the more dominant of the two fiendish confidantes. These two bodacious bros of brutality haven’t seen each other in years, but they are eternally united due to their past communal excursions in debauched perversity. On their way to achieving abyssal Arcadia, the two cunning comrades pick-up three girls who have nil inkling as to what sort of vicious licentiousness the mysterious men will force them to partake in. Katze and Brauth initially cruise an amusement park to find potential female concubines. I found this segment of The Angel's Melancholia to be especially effective in setting the tone for the rest of the film. Echoing the foreboding phantasmagoric atmosphere of Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962), but especially Curtis Harrington’s cult masterpiece Night Tide (1961), the early carnival segment of The Angel’s Melancholia lets the viewer know that they are about to go on a riveting ride with Brauth acting as a overly extroverted and mesmerizing lead carny/magician of sorts who guides the show and with Katze as his introverted crony who helps carry things along behind the scenes. The deranged dynamic duo is later turned into a threesome when an older but equally demented artist named Heinrich joins the group. The clique eventually settles in an old dilapidated house where they commence their quasi-spiritual journey that includes physical and metaphysical pandemonium, hedonistic degradation, ritualistic torture of a sexually swinish nature, and heathenish animal sacrifices. When not smearing his feces on vaginas, Katze seeks to obtain final transcendence through the defilement, mutilation, and – eventually – the total disintegration of his earthly body, thus becoming – or so it would seem – the much idealized ‘Melancholy Angel.’ 

 What makes The Angel’s Melancholia particularly enthralling and singular, especially for Germanophiles and Germanophobes alike, is the consciously and distinctly Teutonic nature of the film, most specifically within a post-Nazi era context. During his often erratic exploration of mind and body, Katze reflects somberly while visiting the graveside of leftist German New Wave alpha-auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the memorial burial ground of Red Army Faction members Jan-Carl Raspe, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader; individuals whose piercing hatred of the National Socialist era Germany – the epoch of their parents and grandparents – played a cardinal role in ultimately leading to their total self-destruction. In one notably symbolic scene in The Angel's Melancholia, Katze's corpse can be seen firmly gasping a copy of controversial German novelist Wolfgang Koeppen’s last major work Der Tod in Rom (1954) aka Death in Rome; a novel that sparked nationwide controversy upon its release in Germany due to its uncomplimentary and uniquely critical portrayal of a German family set only a couple years after the Nazi era that does not shy away from holding the entire Fatherland accountable for the sins of its fathers. Katze and Brauth also take a hallucinatory pilgrimage to Auschwitz as if it is some sort of Holy site in a brief but pivotal allegorical scene that symbolizes the internal reasoning behind the characters' deleterious compulsions and self-debasement: the burgeoning burden of guilt of a people that has yet to come to terms with its unscrupulous history and debilitating defeat. While certain Judaic psychoanalysts absurdly described the archetypical National Socialist as an individual that was compelled by the death drive ("Todestrieb"), one can certainly argue that is the case for many German citizens of the post-WWII era as exemplified by popular historical figures like Fassbinder and Badder, thus The Angel’s Melancholia acts as an extremely lucid, veracious, and uncompromising expression of a nation on the brink of collective suicide. This phenomenon becomes especially obvious when one examines modern Germany’s steadily declining birth rate and the sort of sadomasochistic (and, in turn, innately antinatalist) pornography that is popular there nowadays. I do not think it is any coincidence that many of the scenic nature scenes featured in The Angel’s Melancholia come off as some sort of grotesque parody of illustrations created by the prestigious völkisch scientist Ernst Haeckel. Needless to say, The Angel’s Melancholia brings new meaning to the National Socialist phrase Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil).

 I think it is safe to say that The Angel’s Melancholia is a film that is not for everyone and that even includes certain individuals from the already marginal subculture of thoroughly desensitized gorehounds due to its artsy fartsy portrayal of fetishistic bloodlust and hermetic view of German history. The film can be best described as a glimpse into the German collective unconscious that illustrates a Ragnarök within the Germanic soul, but it is quite dubious as to whether or not the two lead characters reach any sort authentic rebirth, therefore The Angel’s Melancholia also acts as a sort of metaphoric tombstone for the Fatherland, henceforth giving meaning to the Goethe inspired narration (featured near the conclusion of the film), “All evanescent is but a parable….here, it’s done. The eternal feminine pulls us down.”  Despite featuring some of the most ridiculously repugnant scenes ever concocted in celluloid history, The Angel’s Melancholia – in its overwhelming and often odious entirety – is a work about the liberation of mind and soul through self-sacrifice of the body, therefore it would not be absurd to describe the film as a intrinsically spiritual effort, even if it is of an exceedingly nihilistic persuasion.  Christ, Crowley, Nietzsche and Wotan may be long dead, but their historical influence lives on in The Angel's Melancholia as exhibited in many scenes featured throughout the film.  After all, only with death can Katze truly rid himself of the necrotic spiritual syphilis that has corroded his sin-ridden soul. One can only speculate in regard to Marian Dora's personal motivations for directing such a fiercely idiosyncratic work, but I think most people will concede that The Angel’s Melancholia is – for better or for worse – one of the most exceedingly emotionally enervating films ever made. Indeed, in terms of aesthetic malignity, the film indisputably eclipses the cinematic works of Pasolini, Buttgereit, Hussain , Cerdà, and Spasojević. Whether or not The Angel’s Melancholia has as much artistic merit as the films of these compatriot auteur filmmakers of the carnal and callous is quite debatable, but I unequivocally found it to be worthwhile as it is a work that I will never consign to oblivion, especially when comparing it to overly stylized and superficial modern German films like Run Lola Run (1998) and Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). At worst, The Angel's Melancholia is a potent work of incandescent decadence and barbarous yet beauteous bliss that offers a crude but uncommonly charming cinematic experience that one might expect to see at a concentration camp in purgatory. 

-Ty E

Heilt Hitler!

A couple years ago, I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with an elderly German mensch named Dieter who came of age during the rise and fall of the Third Reich. To this day, this kindhearted – if often thoroughly inebriated –Teuton, is an unrepentant true believer of the long vanquished National Socialist cause.  During one of our talks, he told me how, "Hitler would be in the American White House" had history gone in the direction he thought it would as a young Hitler-Jugend recruit from Frankfurt. Naturally, his American-born children and grandchildren found his nostalgia for Nazism to be a tad bit bothersome due to growing up in a nation that places Steven Spielberg films as the height of cinematic perfection and thus write-off the aged Aryan’s hysterical Hitlerism as a sign of mere elderly eccentricity and naivety. Recently, I had the opportunity to watch the fiercely farcical German arthouse epic Heilt Hitler!: A German Motion Picture (1986) aka Heal Hitler! directed by Herbert Achternbusch (Das Gespenst aka The Ghost, Servus Bayern aka Bye-Bye Bavaria!); a film that – somewhat peculiarly but not unsurprisingly – reminded me of my seemingly surreal conversations with the unusually charismatic German old-timer. Heilt Hitler! follows a German soldier with a Little Richard/John Waters mustache named Herbert (played by director Herbert Achternbusch) who has become so disgruntled with the war effort in the Battle for Stalingrad that he rather turn himself into a human statue than waste time combating endless swarms of untermensch russkies. Forty years later, Herbert wakes up at a war memorial in Munich thinking he is still in Stalingrad and that the Thousand Year Reich has secured final victory. Like the Dieter I knew personally, Herbert is a living relic trapped in a world he is not mentally (and to some extent, physically) equipped for. At over 2 hours in length, Heilt Hitler! is an absurdist super 8 saga that is like Back to the Future Part II (1989) meets the consciously and satirically German films of Christoph Maria Schlingensief (Terror 2000, The 120 Days of Bottrop). Seemingly plot-less in structure, Heilt Hitler! takes an anti-nostalgic and less than sentimental look at twentieth century German history in the structure of a freeform cinematic poem. In Achternbusch’s Germany, Aryan women become quite jubilant at the prospect of offering their minds and bodies to American G.I.s in return for cartons of cigarettes and even attack one of their own men to protect an exotic enemy soldier (aka American Negro), yet such seemingly deplorable scenarios are portrayed in such a curiously caricatured and pleasantly preposterous fashion that one can only respond by smiling jovially; be the viewer a German nationalist or second-generation holocaust survivor. 

 Despite its many incessant esoteric digressions, nonsensical poetic ramblings, and satirical situationist scenarios, Heilt Hitler! is ultimately a film about family and everything it entails (e.g. incest, bickering, philandering, etc), most specifically Herbert Achternbusch’s own dysfunctional rural Bavarian kith and kin. In the film, the female characters have quite a hard time discerning who the father of their child is. One genius of a Bavarian peasant even convinces an American Negro that he should breed with racially pure German woman so they can, “tell their kids apart. If one of them has a little of your color….these women have looked alike for generations…..No one can tell them apart. Not even the authorities. There’s got to be some form of order.” Indeed, in Heilt Hitler!, the rationalization for miscegenation comes down to the stereotypical Germanic love for order. As much as I disdain dysgenic and nihilistic race-mixing, I think most Fassbinder fans will agree that the world would be a better place with a couple more mulatto Bavarian fellows like Günther Kaufmann (R.I.P.). One can only assume that Heilt Hitler! is Achternbusch’s own kooky way of discrediting National Socialism and the generation that passionately and unwaveringly supported it. Bastard babies or not, one cannot argue that the illegitimate children of Heilt Hitler! are the product of racial mingling and thus – to Achternbusch's blatant and hypercritical disgust – are in league with the National Socialist ideology of Blut und Boden. When Herbert is transported into the future, he is lucky enough to be just in time for a wedding that may or not be for his own child.  Although some things have changed in the peasant countryside in Heilt Hitler!, other things, like incest and family secrets, are perennial, henceforth leading the viewer to believe that the blood-on-the-hands of previous generations is innate and passed on through the blood with each new generation of Germans.  Like fellow German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer over a century before him, it seems that Herbert Achternbusch is a staunch antinatalist.

 At the war memorial in Munich’s Hofgarten, the inscription “They Will Rise Again” is engraved. In Heilt Hitler!, a Munich couple mocks the memorial and remark that the soldiers died for nothing. Undoubtedly, after viewing the film there is quite clear that Herbert Achternbusch concurs with this ostensibly cynical sentiment. Ironically, Herbert does rise again, but only to eventually realize that the familial discord that plagued his personal life before the war has only been compounded and that Germany has been dealt the ultimate defeat; being conquered by semi-Asiatic Slavic hordes. While wandering around Munich in a daze, Herbert is quite startled to realize that the world no longer has Kotzis and Nazis, but only money; too much money or not enough money. Like the old German man named Dieter that I conversed with a couple years ago, Herbert is a man from a despised generation that time has forgotten. Not even his own progeny (whoever they may be) are interested in honoring his legacy, even if he has been quasi-supernaturally resurrected in a fantastic sort of way. It is most apparent while watching Heilt Hitler! that Achternbusch has no empathy for the pain and struggle suffered by his fellow Bavarian countrymen of the past, thus the film comes across as an especially sardonic tragicomedic romp that takes no prisoners; blood relative or not. With jocular lines like, “just imagine how boring it is in a concentration camp? Dead Boring,” it is not hard to see why Heilt Hitler! is an exceedingly facetious family affair of the most meretricious and batty kind that proves that the international tribe that was Germany's enemy during the Second World War are not the only Kings of Comedy. As for Dieter, he went on to produce five or six different children with four different women (one being of the non-Aryan sort), although most of his family members seem to agree that one his sons – who is apparently really his grandson – was the product of a borderline incestuous relationship between his eldest son and his second wife. 

-Ty E

Dandy Dust

As far as quality films/filmmakers go, very few works by lesbian and transgendered 'ladies' are at the top of my list of important flicks as it seems oftentimes such emotionally and politically-driven works are merely a temporary outlet for the bush-league agitator to 'sass and harass the cis', but not much else, at least where artistic merit is concerned. After all, one would have to be a master of pussy-licking puffery to argue that critically-revered American lesbian films like Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994) and Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996) have any sort of aesthetic or artistic assets aside from lipstick lezy g Guinevere Turner’s ass. It was not until about a month ago after being introduced to the unyielding low-budget trans-lesbo sci-fi epic entitled Dandy Dust (1998), a British-Austrian co-production directed by sexually anomalous Aryan auteur A. Hans Scheirl (now known as ‘Angel Hans’) that I reconsidered my mostly generous assessment of contemporary dyke directors. Whatever Scheirl’s true objective with the film was, Dandy Dust feels like the Germanic lipstick mafia equivalent of Shinya Tsukamoto’s classic homoerotic Japanese cyberpunk flick Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), except featuring an aberrant kaleidoscope of colors and an even more incoherent and antagonizing plot. Starring director Scheirl in the title role as ‘Dandy Dust’ (and he/she  certainly has the dandy wardrobe and demeanor to live up to the name), Dandy Dust is a decidedly deranged cinematic nachtmahr where sexual perversity – and especially degenerative hermaphroditism – is a norm of the future inter-sexual inter-galaxy. Filmed over a 5 ½ year period using a variety of film formats and techniques, including (but not limited to) Super 8 film stock, black-and-white film stock, early video, stop-motion animation, and digital animation; and eventually blown-up on 16mm for the finished cut, Dandy Dust is a carnal collage of meticulously constructed images that potently permeate a certain loopy and many times schizophrenic idiosyncrasy that – for better or for worse – few, if any, other films can claim.

Dandy Dust follows the cosmic cunt-licking journey of Dandy Dust, a "split-personality cyborg of fluid gender" whose memory has been erased, but to its dismay, is randomly reappearing in his/her arenose mind. After crash-landing on the hermaphroditic and inorganic manmade sphere of 3075, Dust who – through a series of real and/or imaginary childhood flashbacks during her upbringing on the Planet of Blood and Swelling (a menstruating matriarchal planet, perhaps?) – comes to realize that he/she was sexually used and abused by her incestuous father who was, in turn, murdered by the guy/gal’s Xanthippe mother during a jealous and prepossessed crime of passion. The orgasmic sphere of 3075 features a variety of gaudy and gay characters that include, lesbo-Negro identical twins Mao and Lisa; scientist sistas with an aptness for reanimating phallic-like mummies, surly and sadistic Super-Mother Cyniborg; a ghoulish and (unfortunately) unclothed being obsessed with constructing a heretical hermaphrodite army that includes Dust, and father Sir Sidore; a sexually-repressed yet remarkably decadent 18th century aristocrat with a prudish and pompous persona. Of course, Dandy Dust is such an overwhelming overload of audacious aesthetic debauchery that it is nearly impossible to make any sense of the film’s plot, at least upon an initial viewing of the film. Admittedly, it took me a couple tries to actually finish the film due to its tumultuously condensed and compacted cluster of unflattering intersexual nudes, frightful lesbian fetishism, and overall deluge of eclectic seizure-inducing neon polychromasia.

Like the more inaugural films of the silent era (especially, German expressionist works) and the equally masturbatory works of contemporary Canadian auteur Guy Maddin, Dandy Dust is primarily a visual experience that reminds the viewer why that film is a virtually unlimited artistic medium that has been barely explored, at least as far as narrative structure (or lack thereof) and the mise-en-scène is concerned. Although a low-budget effort shot in a quasi-dilettantish and embarrassingly intimate manner not unlike James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus (1971), David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), and E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten (1990), Dandy Dust, like the previously mentioned films, is a flick that venturesomely pushed the envelope of filmmaking, thus making its paraded status is a work of ‘Queer cinema’ of only secondary and circumstantial importance.  As a result, the film will be ultimately more appealing and rewarding to ardent cinephiles than the confused teenage tomgirl who just got her first taste of her friend's meat-curtain.  Like any meritorious work of art, Dandy Dust is a candid and uncompromising – if non compos mentis – expression of the filmmaker; a dignified quality that few modern celluloid works strive for, let alone possess.

-Ty E

Blow Job – Soffio erotico

Worthwhile works of Gothic horror-core are quite hard to come by, thus Alberto Cavallone’s phantasmagoric porn flick Blow Job - Soffio erotico (1980) – although intrinsically inferior to the Italian filmmaker's previous films – comes as notable exception. Directed by the nearly forgotten arthouse smut auteur who brought us such mostly unsung cult classics as Zelda (1974) and Blue Movie (1978), Blow Job signified the steady artistic and monetary decline of Cavallone’s – at best – marginally successful film career. The production of the film was cursed from the beginning as one of the film’s producers committed suicide (as if he was an anti-hero in one of Cavallone's films) during the filming of Blow Job, which is indubitably a shinning, albeit tragic (at least as far as the film's budget was concerned) example of life imitating art, at least for those individuals that have seen the film. Essentially divided into two halves, Blow Job begins as what initially seems to be a generic Italian smut flick and later morphs into what is one of the most ridiculously wanton and discombobulated Gothic horror films ever created. Following in the delightfully despoiled footsteps of the Amero brother’s gothic LSD trip Bacchanale (1970) and anticipating Stanley Kubricks’ final effort Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Blow Job is a spasmodically sleazy yet swimmingly surreal cinematic wet dream where everything is not as it seems; at least, for the film’s oversexed and mentally obscured protagonist; a flagrant fellow who could pass as Jim Morrison’s swarthy and less attractive Italian ½ brother. Like the poetry and lyrics of Mr. Morrison, Blow Job is a haunting expression of an erotically-obsessed and esoteric escapist mind that is thematically naughty and aesthetically nice. Cavallone stated of Blow Job, "the whole film was focused on the possibility of escaping from our own bodies, by modifying sensorial perceptions through the use of drugs or self-concentration,” thus, it should be no epiphany that the film is best viewed while one’s intellect is totally tuned out; or at least when one is reasonably inebriated. 

 Blue Job begins with the introduction of actors/lovers Stefano and Diana frolicking around stark-naked in a scarcely furnished hotel room that they do not even enough money to pay for. Although Diana makes quite the first impression when she crawls on the floor while in the bare like a seductive sex kitten on the prowl, she cannot compare to the various nefarious nymphomaniacs who will eventually ransack Latin lover Stefano’s crotch. Naturally, Stefano and Diana find themselves in trouble when they fail to pay their hotel bill, but they manage to escape unscathed after a woman randomly falls to her death from the balcony of the building. The couple’s luck seems to change for the better when they encounter an eccentric middle-aged woman named Angela at a racetrack who has a keen eye for foretelling the winning racehorse. After profiting from the fruitful predictions of lady luck, Stefano and Diana follow Angela to her lavish countryside villa, a somewhat chilling yet chimerical spot with seemingly shady characters whose dubious intentions appear less than savory. Not long after arriving at this majestic maniac mansion, Angela’s put Diana under an incapacitating spell that ultimately uncouples her from Stefano. After being separated from his inamorata, Stefano enters through a series of literal and figurative doors of perception that become increasingly nonsensical and indiscreetly erotic. Among other things, Italian stallion Stefano encounters a quaint she-devil on wheels with a kitschy totenkopf mask who rides her motorcycle in the mansion during a lunatic's ball; and a one-eyed erotomaniac who enjoys teasing the man with her grotesque facial deformity and devouring his body. In the divinely demented Gothic delusional realm of Blow Job, nothing is as it seems, thus making for a rare quasi-porn flick that concludes in an abrupt and fantastic fashion that is worthy of being compared to such cinematic classics as the German expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Herk Harvey's extremely influential cult horror flick Carnival of Souls (1962). 

Compared to Alberto Cavallone’s previous works Man, Woman and Beast (1977) and Blue Movie (1978), Blow Job – despite its various scenes of hardcore and not so hardcore sex – is a relatively harmless yet sporadically tasteless work directed by a once politically and socially concerned man who – like many creative and revolutionary individuals of his era – settled for escaping in his own manifestly tainted psyche via irrational metaphysical mumbo-jumbo and mind-altering chemicals as testified by the film. Of course, Blow Job is a much more artistically ambitious, campy and erotically-charged work than the Andy Warhol 1963 short it was inanely named after. Additionally, Blow Job seems like an immaculate masterpiece of erotic arthouse cinema when compared to the awfully artless yet somehow more popular works of fellow Mediterranean libertine filmmakers Joe D’Amato and Jess Franco.  Watching Blow Job may not be as gratifying as receiving actual fellatio, but it does feature an oftentimes entrancing diacritic Arcadia all of its own.

-Ty E

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things

Undoubtedly, Asia Argento is one of the most interesting and idiosyncratic female filmmakers/actresses working today; and her emotionally afflicting white trash arthouse coming-of-age flick The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004) is one of the best examples as to why. Starring and directed by the exotic Italian auteuress, the film is a much more mature, artistic, and controversial work than her previous autobiographical feature-length work Scarlet Diva (2000). Indeed, Scarlet Diva may open with footage of Ms. Argento being pounded doggy-style by a bestial Negro (played by her ex-boyfriend) in a most crude and repulsive (and apparently unsimulated) manner, but The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things features a young child named Jeremiah who is repeatedly drugged, sodomized, and otherwise abused in a variety of appalling ways by a number of true blue American degenerates, including his own mother Sarah (played by Asia Argento). Taking its name from King James Version of the Bible, Book of Jeremiah, chapter 17, verse 9 and based on a novel of the same name by JT LeRoy (a fake identity taken by American writer Laura Albert who was sued for fraud right before the release of the film due to her gross literary dishonesty), The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things is a minor masterpiece of independent film with an all-star cast of ambitious actors; both young (Jeremy Renner, Michael Pitt) and old (Peter Fonda). Clearly inspired by the films of Harmony Korine (who is a personal friend of Argento), The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things is like Gummo (1997) meets Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004), except ultimately more degrading and emotionally damaging. Asia Argento’s maternal great-grandfather Alfred Casella may have been a notable and respected fascist composer, but she is certainly an exponent of exceedingly decadent, degenerate, and hopelessly nihilistic art, as so brazenly expressed in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things; a cruel cuming-of-age film with such a sadistically sordid tale of a childhood-gone-askew that Henry Lee Lucas probably could have personally identified with it.

After being taken away from his loving and caring foster parents, 7-year-old Jeremiah is reunited with his drug-ridden and sex-crazed biological mother Sarah; a bleach blonde gutter-level harlot who has been long since disowned by her extremist Christian family due to her exceedingly unruly and sinful behavior. Not long after taking him in and causing him to wet his bed due to her innately deplorable lack of mothering skills, Sarah abandons Jeremiah with a melancholy pedophile (Jeremy Renner) – a pathetic man she briefly married but soon dumped after the honeymoon – who shows no mercy in his despicable deflowering of the boy. Needless to say, Jeremiah – who is in a state of absolute confusion that results in out-of-body hallucinations – ends up in the emergency after the ruthless life-altering attack, thus eventually transpiring in his Christian cult grandparents taking him in. Despite only being in the company of his mother and her many drug-addicted delinquent lovers for a short period of time, Jeremiah – to the dismay of his hyper stoic and strict authoritarian grandfather (Peter Fonda) – already shows glaring signs of being exposed to psychedelic drugs and anti-social punk rock music, as displayed by his random impromptu performance of songs by The Sex Pistols and propensity for spitting on indoor floors. Somewhat surprisingly, Jeremiah does quite well at his holier-than-thou Christian grandparents cult compound and even becomes an eager propagandist for the church, but, to his misfortune, Sarah comes back to reclaim him when he is 11-years-old. Now dating a country-loving reprobate redneck truck driver named Kenny who hates her favorite music genre of punk rock, Sarah takes her son on a relentless road trip where she prostitutes herself out to various rustic would-be-cowboys at an assortment of truck stops so she can support her steady drug consumption. Naturally, country boy Kenny gets tired of Sarah’s Subhumans (UK anarcho-punk band) cassettes so he abruptly ditches her and Jeremiah at a less than delightful roadside diner. In what seems to be a dubious attempt to get her son to follow in her slapdash footsteps, Sarah encourages Jeremiah to be her 'little sister' and dresses him in drag. Clearly already mentally unsound due to a lifetime’s worth of anomalous personal trauma, Jeremiah embraces his feminine side and seduces his mother’s latest boyfriend Jackson (played by a hillbilly-attired Marilyn Manson), henceforth resulting in Sarah erupting into a jealous rage of sorts that involves the throwing of piss-poor beer cans and feeble excuses from Mr. Manson. By the end of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, Jeremiah is once again in the hospital due to his mother’s insistence that he drink ipecac while she is in a frantic meth-induced psychosis. Once again, Sarah’s proves her dedication as a mother by kidnapping her son and taking him on what one can only assume is another exciting and chemical-driven magical mystery tour. 

To say that The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things is an extraordinarily appalling and decisively disheartening film would be a bit of a distortion as it is easily one of the most dehumanizing flicks I have ever seen, yet a barbarously brilliant, aesthetically dynamic, and undeniably captivating work nonetheless. Unlike her friend Harmony Korine’s directorial debut Gummo, Asia Argento does not seem to be mocking the poor human rabble that she so keenly and calculatedly depicted. Asia also deserves much praise for her performance as crackhead concubine Sarah because despite her Italian background, she is totally convincing as a thoroughly debauched and awfully abominable Amerikkkan white trash darling with an array of undiagnosed mental illnesses and pathologies. As someone whose own father suspiciously directed her in the bare (Dario Argento’s Trauma), one can only assume that Argento is desensitized to do just about any and everything on camera as displayed by her unmitigatedly unflattering but acutely enrapturing performance in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things; one of a handful of films that has the capacity to give the viewer spiritual syphilis. In fact, she once stated of acting, "I always thought it was sick to choose looking at yourself on a big screen as your job. There has to be something crooked in your mind to want to be loved by everybody. It’s like being a prostitute, to share that intimacy with all those people," so there should be no doubt as to the sort of dauntless and unhampered mind-set Asia had when approaching the role of Sarah. Her father may be regarded as a (once) legendary master of fantastic horror cinema, but his talent pales in comparison to his daughter’s ability to direct true to life domestic terror and torment. After nearly a decade of reflection upon my initial viewing of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, I can honestly say that Asia Argento is one of a handful of filmmakers – and the only female filmmaker – whose career I eagerly follow. 

-Ty E

The Bloodthirsty Fairy

Sophisticated and worthwhile fairy flicks are doubtlessly hard to come by because – let’s face it – miniature flying nymphs are mostly of interest to little girls and sexually frustrated middle-aged wiccans and not many other people. The conspiring female fays on HBO’s True Blood are somewhat tolerable due to their seductive sex appeal, but their baroque male counterparts certainly put to shame those real-life effete estrogen-driven fellows who feel it is a bold political statement to wear nothing but pink thongs at homo-rights parades. Additionally, the sort of little winged imps featured in the British film Photographing Fairies (1997) directed by Nick Willing are about as appealing as CGI fireflies due to their miniscule size, lack of character, and seemingly asexual nature. It was not until I saw the Belgian arthouse-exploitation short The Bloodthirsty Fairy (1968) aka La fée sanguinaire directed by Roland Lethem (La Ballade des amants maudits, In Memoriam Alfons Vranckx) that I felt I found the superlative and definitive fairy flick, albeit of the lavishly lecherous and preternatural avant-garde persuasion. As a student of early surrealist master filmmakers such as Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel and Japanese auteur directors like Seijun Suzuki and Ishirō Honda, Lethem is certainly a filmmaker with imperative and contradistinctive influences, thus his cinematic works are – quite unsurprisingly – strikingly singular and ostensibly original accomplishments in a class all of their own. With the aesthetically and thematically merciless and incendiary poetic 15-minute short The Sufferings of a Ravaged Egg (1967) aka Les souffrances d'un oeuf meurtri (1967) – in a fashion worthy of Georges Bataille at the height of his demiurgic depravity – the Belgian auteur proved that maggots in postmortem vaginas make for sapient symbolic social commentary against the Catholic church. With his admittedly sometimes repetitive but undeniably hypnotic thaumaturgical 22-minute short Le Vampire de la Cinémathèque (1971), Lethem turned his camera on fellow Belgian physician and mathematician Joseph Plateau’s 1832 invention of the phenakistoscope (an early animation device made from a spinning disk) to create an optical illusion of an exquisite and statuesque lady degenerating into a hideous archetypical witch. Out of all of his curiously corporeal cinematic efforts, The Bloodthirsty Fairy seems to be his most erotically potent yet venomously vulgar, as well as politically and thematically transgressive work.  In short, Lethem's fairy tale makes the less-than-erotically-charged films of Richard Kern (You Killed Me First, Fingered) seem like failed pastiche experiments in softcore dandy dilettantism by comparison.

 During the beginning of The Bloodthirsty Fairy, a relatively young intellectual who resembles a stereotypical late-1960s pretentious French leftist twat notices a barrel on his front doorstep that was recently delivered by two swarthy-looking hippie bastards. Upon opening the seemingly humdrum barrel, the man discovers a beauteous unclad woman submerged in water inside. Not long after making this particularly stunning discovery, the comely human-sized fairy without wings emerges from the barrel and begins performing beguiling gestures, much to the noticeably intrigued pundit's delight. In no time, the young intellectual finds himself turning into a hopeless romantic and impulsive philistine of sorts, giving the fairy sensual bubble bathes while gently massaging her feet in a dainty manner, but little does he know that his quasi-supernatural Madonna is a brassy black-hearted butcher in the spirit of the soulless darling from Hanns Heinz Ewers' Alraune with a keen and unquenchable addiction to politically-motivated bloodlust. On top of beating police to death in a most jubilant manner just for kicks and choking nuns into purgatory before finding her latest gentleman suitor as depicted in a series of flashbacks in The Bloodthirsty Fairy, the pitiless puck also has pernicious plans for her new infatuated Romeo. As someone who initially thought that Jörg Buttgereit made totally commensurately prodigious cinematic works, I think I have to change my assessment of the aberrant Aryan auteur after discovering the works of Roland Lethem, most specifically The Bloodthirsty Fairy. Packed with equal doses of iconoclastic beauty and brusque yet seemingly comical brutality, The Bloodthirsty Fairy – much like the works of blond beast Buttgereit – is a rare work that can be enjoyed by both thoroughly desensitized/deranged gorehounds and adventurous arthouse cinema addicts. 

The Bloodthirsty Fairy also features a political subtext that was somewhat lost on me due to my version of the Belgian film’s lack of English subtitles. Essentially, the perturbed member-dismembering pixie seems to be a lone wolf anarchist (another possible nod to Bataille) of sorts as she collects the castrated cocks of famous/infamous assassinated political leaders ranging from Civil Rights Christ Martin Luther King, Jr. to American Nazi Party Führer George Lincoln Rockwell (whose Aryan-American member is noticeably uncircumcised) to apartheid-advocating South African Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd. Unfortunately, the genital-gnawing fairy was unable to eunuchize Henry Kissinger, thus his special kosher Johnson jar remains empty, but one must admit that this fierce fay has quite the eclectic and prestigious political penis pile!

-Ty E

Sweet Angel Mine

It is not often that one watches a film that carries an aura that feels like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) meets the TV-series Northern Exposure (minus an ample dose of the quirky humor) meets The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) with Lynchian undertones; as such an ideally idiosyncratic work – for better or for worse – certainly sticks out in one’s mind. Last week, I had the random luxury of sharply gazing at such a work – Sweet Angel Mine (1996) directed by Curtis Radclyffe and co-scripted by Sue Maheu and Tim Willocks (Swept from the Sea, Sin) – and I was certainly not left with a feeling of chagrin, even if the film was not exactly up to par with seemingly equipollent works like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Philip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin (1990). In terms of quality, aesthetic, execution, and essence, Sweet Angel Mine is in agreeable company with Garth Maxwell’s equally underrated and unseen film Jack Be Nimble (1993). Like Jack Be Nimble, Sweet Angel Mine is a work that although sometimes extremely violent and vulgar in regard to imagery and sentiment, features a certain metaphysical dream logic that further accentuates its quasi-mystical rural setting and the menacing mystique of its mentally-imbalanced characters. Sweet Angel Mine follows a bodacious and sometimes bratty twenty-something Brit named Paul (Oliver Milburn) who has traveled to Nova Scotia, Canada in the hope of finding his long vanished father. While keenly cruising around on his crotch-rocket (a 1973 T140V Triumph Bonneville), Paul eventually encounters a visibly hesitant, awkward, and somewhat feral-like yet pulchritudinous country girl named Rauchine (Margaret Langrick). Although Paul takes an instant liking to the sub-literate little lady and her young, voluptuous body, he has yet to realize that her mother Megan is a homicidal maniac who has intimate conversations with ethereal beings. In an attempt to get closer to Rauchine and what lies beneath her virginal white skirt, Paul convinces the always confrontational Meg to hire him as a laborer on her farm; a place where hogs engage in comical carnal knowledge and where many formidable family secrets lay in plain sight. Not long after taking residence on the farm, Paul begins to have less than wet erotic dreams about the atypical mother and daughter that eventually evolve into a real-life nightmare that inevitably leads him to solving the mystery of his father's unexpected disappearance and the bounty in Rauchine's panties.

As someone who has personally encountered the detrimental effects that mentally ill matriarchal mothers have over their physically and mentally abused daughters, I found Sweet Angel Mine to be an especially eerie yet radiantly-stylized cinematic work. In Hitchcock’s Psycho, one learns that exceedingly bitchy and overbearing mothers can spawn sexually depraved homicidal lunatic sons, but the calamitous side-effects of a unhinged wench on a daughter is a subject that has been rarely explored in cinema, thus Sweet Angel Mine comes as a notable and mostly worthwhile exception, even if it does not feature the same psychological depth and wholly convincing acting one would expect from an Ingmar Bergman film. Upon first appearing in Sweet Angel Mine, it is quite apparent that Rauchine has virtually nil self-esteem and barely even a distinguishable personality of her own. After Megan initially appears it is obvious as to why Rauchine seems to have a glaring hole in her emotionally-ravaged soul, as the girl's callous and cunning mother dictates every thought and action of her grown daughter’s life.  It is only when she meets and swoons over Paul that Rauchine begins to form an identity of her own, thus resulting in a quasi-schizophrenic break in her psyche between her new organic self and the old one formulated by Meg's nefarious nurturing. Being a chivalrous and charming British chap, Paul is wholly willing to deal with Meg’s backwoods megalomania and Canadian-peckerwood pomposity during his precarious mission to win Rauchine’s heart. Of course, Paul also encounters hostility from local would-be-vikings yokels that are far from welcoming when compared to how the North American Nordics from Northern Exposure dealt with the ill-disposed and whiny Judaic fellow from NYC. In short, Paul is a strange young man in a strange sullen land, but he stays committed to the philosophy of ‘love conquers all', in spite of it threatening his very existence. Although Paul is the lead protagonist of Sweet Angel Mine, Megan is ultimately the most complex and multifaceted character and a lot of this is owed to actress Alberta Watson’s (La Femme Nikita, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) erotically and psychotically-charged performance. To say that Meg makes Paul seems like a bitch-that-eats-fish-n-chips would be a reckless underestimation. As Paul lets her know, Megan is certainly a cold cunt incapable of true love and human companionship, but she certainly knows how to (literally and figuratively) crucify a virile young man and handle a loaded firearm due to what seems like 2+ decades worth of steadily seething sexual repression.

After appearing briefly on VHS, Sweet Angel Mine all but disappeared (only to be recently unearthed via Netflix instant-viewing) from the world and has henceforth remained a rarely seen work with a virtually nonexistent cult following, but I have a feeling that will change as the years pass as the film will certainly appeal to fans of Philip Ridley (Sweet Angel Mine is a virtual "sister film" to The Passion of Darkly Noon) and the less pretentious admirers of David Lynch's work. Unfortunately, director Curtis Radclyffe would go on to direct the rather mundane and fundamentally formulaic British horror flick The Sick House (2008), thus one can only wonder if Sweet Angel Mine is a fluke of sub-masterpiece psychosexual filmmaking; or a sound and succulent synchronistic marriage between director, screenplay, and actors (I would assume the latter). Either way, Sweet Angel Mine is undoubtedly one of the most audaciously ambitious and perversely gratifying works about a disintegrating derelict matriarchal family gone awry.  If any film has the potential to inspire an individual to second-guess a relationship they have with a girl (or guy) who has a bats in the belfry mother, it is indubitably Sweet Angel Mine.

-Ty E