Marie, the Doll

Although later best known for his sex comedies and work in television, French auteur Joël Séria would make one more film in the shuddersome spirit of his debut heretical arthouse-exploitation masterpiece Don't Deliver Us from Evil (1971). Also starring his lush lover Jeanne Goupil, Marie-Poupée (1976) aka Marie, the Doll is another sombre yet sweet film about unhealthy obsession, little girls and the dirty old men that love them. After the relative commercial success of his sex comedy Cookies (1975) aka Les galettes de Pont-Aven, Séria would take the opportunity direct what would arguably be his most artistically ambiguous and prestigious effort Marie, The Doll; a minor masterpiece of 1970s French cinema. Innately minimalistic, nicely nuanced, and less sensational and gratuitous, Marie, the Doll is ultimately a more mature yet significantly dismal and disheartening work than Don't Deliver Us from Evil. Centering around a unsuspecting woman-child named Marie – a cute and cutesy teenager that strives for moral perfection and believes in the innate goodness of mankind – who makes the drastic mistake of marrying a man that she doesn’t even remotely know how to begin to understand due to her gross naïveté and social ineptness, let alone seriously love, Marie, the Doll is a splendid, diacritic heart-breaker of a film, akin to watching a litter of puppies being drowned at a scenic lake, where one gazes on as a young, softhearted girl slowly but surely perishes as she progressively glowers like a wilting flower until her inevitable date with the blue hour. Throughout Marie, the Doll, Goupil is featured in a variety of comprised and often unclothed positions, thus leading the viewer to conclude that Joël Séria was very serious about filmmaking to treat his lover that way for the sake of art; that or he is some sort of sneering sadist (I like to think the former). Either way, Goupil herself is quite the tiny trooper, but one wouldn’t expect anything less from the girl that read Comte de Lautréamont and was subsequently inspired to commit self-immolation with her blonde gal pal in Don't Deliver Us from Evil. Instead of not being unshackled from pernicious forces, Goupil is unknowingly delivered to it in Marie, the Doll; a work that tests one’s endurance where cinematic work itself acting as a bittersweet torture device.

 Marie, the Doll centers around a quasi-autistic 17-year-old orphan girl named Marie (played by then-25-year-old Jeanne Goupil) who was raised by her amorous but detrimentally old-fashioned grandparents and seems to have never advanced past her toddler years in terms of erotic and emotional maturity and love of baby dolls. One day, merry Marie meets a respectable and debonair bourgeois shop owner named Claude (André Dussollier) who shares her odd obsession with dolls, thus leading to their swift and headlong marriage. Vaguely resembling the perverted Jewish-Polish auteur Roman Polanski during his younger years in appearance and startlingly foretelling the filmmaker's arrest for statuary rape 1-year later – one can only wonder where Séria got the inspiration for the character of Claude – as Marie, the Doll is surely a work that would both titillate and terrify the Rosemary’s Baby (1968) director due to its themes of pedophilia and master-slave relationships. Upon first marrying him, Marie seems quite jubilant with her relationship with Claude as they share a similar distinct fanaticism for dolls, but it soon becomes blatantly apparent that the older man sees the girl as just another one his objects that he can dress up however he wants whenever he likes. On the night of their wedding, Claude gives Marie her first doll-dress and forces her to play a roleplay game where she must pretend to be inanimate as he carefully undresses and subsequently bathes her. Initially, this scene may seem like a tender and intimate moment capturing Claude’s gentlemanly and loving adornment of Marie, but it is far from it. Quite agitated and hurt by Claude’s sexual disinterest in her and accelerating authoritarian demeanor, Marie begins to entertain the seedy sexual propositions of a low-class farmer – who she also doesn’t seem quite able to understand – due to her overwhelming feeling of rejection and abandonment and her unquenchable desire for intimacy. Undoubtedly influenced by the early works of Italian Marxist-Freudian auteur Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist, 1900), the two men act as archetypes for extremes of male sexuality: Claude, being a mostly impotent and hopelessly perverted member of the decadent bourgeois and the farmer, symbolizing the virile sexuality and rampant heterosexuality of the proletariat. Of course, both of these men prove to be too much for supersensitive Marie – who due to her latent sexuality and lack of emotional maturity – seems too infantine for any man.

Almost like a modern (albeit erotic) fairy tale in theme and style, Marie, the Doll is a remarkably original film that is impossible to classify. Far too restrained and genteel to be considered a exploitation work, Marie, the Doll is an aberrant arthouse film with a typically French, nihilistic ending which although unsettling, fairly abrupt, and menacingly melodramatic, acts a perfect puissant testimony to the loss of one girl’s innocence, which is quite a dramatic shift for director Joël Séria, who in Don't Deliver Us from Evil, persuaded the viewer to root for Satanic teenage lesbian lovers with a penchant for torturing holy men. In Marie, the Doll – a work that neither fits in nicely with the genre conventions of horror nor drama – a suave and physically unintimidating man who is fond of dolls becomes the most contemptible of human monsters, which has a lot more to do with the actuality of real-life predatory archfiends than a retard in a hockey mask and a choleric, terminal cancer patient.  I do not think it would be a stretch to say that Marie, the Dolls is the cinematic equivalent of Stuart Gordon's Dolls (1987), Child's Play (1988), and Puppetmaster (1989) for Truffaut and Fassbinder fans.

-Ty E

Arrebato

There are many great works of reflexive cinema in respect to “movies-about-movies” and “films-within-films”, including such diverse cinematic works as Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), Watkin’s Last House on Dead End Street (1977), Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), Schlingensief’s The 120 Days of Bottrop (1997), and Kaufman’s Terror Firmer (1999), but none of these works quite compare to the stark, angst-ridden essence of the utterly unrivaled Spanish arthouse flick Arrebato (1980) aka Rapture directed by Ivan Zulueta; a metaphysical quasi-vampire flick where film itself (or in literal terms, a Super 8 camera) is the life-draining monster. Barely acknowledged upon its original release due to its pathetically brief theatrical run (lasting only a couple days at a mere Barcelona theater) and still relatively unknown today (despite obtaining a steady cult following over the past three decades), Arrebato was an absolute commercial failure that would ultimately lead to auteur Ivan Zulueta being restricted to the ignoble bottomless pit of television and movie posters (creating art for films by Pedro Almodóvar), henceforth never directing a single feature-length film again, which is most unfortunate when one considers the ingenious and wantonly intimate artistic tenacity he displayed with the formative work. Originally around 3 hours in length as a workprint, Zulueta decided to shorten Arrebato by 30 minutes, and with another 40 minutes of the feature being subsequently cut against his will, the film that exists today, although seemingly taintless, is hardly a director’s approved cut. Fundamentally, Arrebato is an avant-garde arthouse film disguised (quite nicely) as a ‘horror’ flick that is altogether cognizant of genre conventions yet wallows in cinematic experimentation, as it was designed especially with cinephiles and filmmakers in mind as indicated by its less than flattering portrayal of the more calamitous side of cinematic obsession where, in a similar vein to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), the contrived reality of the virtual image perpetually replaces reality itself. As the character José states in a matter-of-fact (but in reality, totally delusional) manner at the beginning of Arrebato, “It’s not that I like cinema…It’s cinema that likes me.” Like the steady dose of sex and drugs consumed by the three main characters in the film, cinema becomes a baleful, life-shattering addiction that steadily eats away at ones' soul. One only has to glance at the pitiful, frivolous, and platitudinous pop-culture-obsessed postmodern movies of philistine filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and Eli Roth to observe this relatively recent phenomenon progenerated by vaudeville and eventually Hollywood, but unlike the would-be-cool works of these three stilted middle-aged fanboys, Arrebato is a staunchly visionary and unprecedented expression of refined (as opposed to revoltingly regurgitated) style.
 

At the beginning of Arrebato, the viewer is introduced to the character of José Sirgado (Eusebio Poncela), a hack horror director who is on the verge of completing his latest work; an overdue sequel to his debut vampire film. José lives and breathes celluloid as expressed by the many movie posters that act as wallpaper for his apartment and by his unmitigated ecstasy when he drives by movie theaters (playing works ranging from Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter to Don Coscarelli's Phantasm) as if performing some sort of sacred religious ritual, yet despite all of his film fetishism, he is not exactly the most gifted auteur. Upon reaching home after a relieving day from work, José is bombarded with potent remnants from his past: the unexpected presence of his ex-girlfriend Ana (Cecila Roth) lying on his bed in an opium-induced trance and a mailed package containing audio tapes and processed Super 8 film reels from his long lost protégé Pedro P. (Will More); an erratic, epicene young man suffering from celluloid-obsessed neurosis. José and Pedro act as dichotomous symbols of the two archetypical extremes pertaining to filmmakers: the former being an unambitious hireling who is to afraid to take chances as a filmmaker and the latter being a diehard maverick auteur that will do anything to realize his ever evolving vision as a creator of celluloid art. While listening to the tapes and watching the film footage sent to him by Pedro, José relives the bizarre bisexual love triangle (with Ana and Pedro) of decadent drug abuse, soulless (yet utterly erotic) sex, and cine-mania that consumed and almost destroyed his life a year ago or so. As Arrebato progresses, Pedro and his masturbatory experimental auteur pieces begin to become the lead character(s), as a sort of an out-of-control, all-consuming monster on the brink of self-annihilation. Like the psychotic and suicidal anti-hero Claudio from Alberto Cavallone’s Blue Movie (1978), Pedro has a critical need to fulfill a personal internal void and he uses the creative, pseudo-godlike power of filmmaking to do so. As he explains via audio recording, “All my life, back then, was like a huge wank without cum. Although I, deep down, thought that was to come. How far was I from understanding the sense, the function, the part, the game, that making cinema represents.” Indeed, Pedro’s foremost goal with cinema is to reach the ultimate “high”, “climax”, “transcendence”, and “rapture” (hence, the title of the film) and he firmly believes that, like a drug addict in denial and despite the deterioration of his physical body and voice (as expressed by his new raspy 'mad scientist' voice on the audio tapes), that his celluloid alchemy is truly messianic. Like all great auteur filmmakers (not that he is great but his films are certainly interesting) and unlike lazy filmmaker lackey José, Pedro is a dynamic and domineering eccentric who is never completely satisfied with his art, hence his monotonous productivity, increasingly nonexistent social life and dwindling health. Always a more dedicated and intransigent filmmaker than his filmic father figure José, it is finally Pedro who has the last laugh at both men’s expense (which, unsurprisingly, the latter is happy to pay).

Displaying a true sense of restraint and humility, Ivan Zulueta stated of Arrebato, “It was not my intention to make an avant-garde, elitist film, because my deepest wish is to communicate with my audience the most intensely I can. I know this picture may be disquieting and bewildering at first, but that was absolutely unintentional on my behalf.” More captivating and provocative than Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and over-and-above the psychosexual horrors of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Arrebato is indubitably in a class by itself as a work of lucid and uncompromising cinema, thus the fact that Zulueta never got to direct another feature is nothing short of a tragedy; at least as far as film history is concerned. As an unrepentant cinephile always looking for the next cinematic high, I can honestly say I cannot think of another time a film has resonated with me so thoroughly and penetratingly as Arrebato – a rare and singular work about cinephilia that also manages to be a landmark cinematic achievement in itself – that is simultaneously hypnotic, erotic, distressing, and exotic yet startlingly intimate.  Forget J.J. Abrams' groveling love letter to Steven Spielberg, Arrebato is an unfeigned Super 8 tribute to cinema and the art of filmmaking.

-Ty E

Zoo zéro

When not feuding with fellow mixed-blood German Werner Herzog on their various classic film collaborations – simultaneously playing the role of actor and as the filmmaker's own personal Rasputin – Polish-German actor Klaus Kinski appeared in a number of Euro-Sleaze exploitation and arthouse flicks, a good portion of which are forgotten and rightfully so, yet there a couple exceptions. Undoubtedly, the more irregular and incoherent the film, the more interesting Kinski’s performance tended to be as he always accentuated the already aberrant aura of the film. Personally, one of my favorite obscure Kinski flicks is the sorely neglected dystopian sci-fi arthouse flick Zoo zéro (1979) directed by unsung French auteur Alain Fleischer (Dehors-dedans, Rome Roméo), who would later (and somewhat ironically considering the nature of his previous works) have a relatively successful career in documentary filmmaking (Bernard Rapp's Un siècle d’écrivains TV series, Morceaux de conversations series). In a typically typecasted role, Kinski plays Yavé, a kinky megalomaniac who moonlights as a cabaret director at a post-apocalyptic night club/zoo. Undoubtedly a mental and verbal cripple, Yavé speaks through a vocoder, thus evoking the ambiance of a suavely dressed, Kraftwerk-esque fascistic dictator as a result. Opening with a narrated passage regarding the Noah’s Ark myth from the Book of Genesis and other (and eventually inaudible) esoteric gibberish, Zoo zéro hereafter begins with images of a dim, destitute, and drizzly street of a futuristic French neo-noir metropolis (that more resembles a necropolis) featuring a dark cabaret club named “Noah’s Ark.” On this night at the curious club, an androgynous cabaret singer named Eva (played by Catherine Jourdan) with a neon-orange butch cut gives a performance that is like a cross between Marlene Dietrich’s in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) aka Der blaue Engel and Charlotte Rampling’s deranged topless performance of a Dietrich song for concentration camp guards in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974). Emotionally detached and literally robotic in her movements, Eva attempts to drown her sorrows by drinking wine straight out of the bottle and watering plants in her dressing room as an effete negro friend looks on with the most gravest concern. A mysterious, mumbling fellow named Ivo comes to visit Eva and reminds of her less debauched days as a dignified singer of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute in Salzburg, Austria but her wee midget manager “Uwe” (played by Pieral of the Cocteau-penned 1943 flick L'Éternel retour aka The Eternal Return and Buñuel final 1977 effort That Obscure Object of Desire) reminds her that the past is best left forgotten, especially when you’re questionable future is perpetually rotten.

Somewhat peculiarly but undoubtedly working in the film’s favor, Zoo zéro has a striking aesthetic resemblance to Ridley Scott’s Tech-noir masterpiece Blade Runner (1982) though more subdued, as do many of the lugubrious yet expressionistic characters in the film, but contained within such a relentless realm of Weltschmerz-inspiring dreariness that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the British director’s younger brother Tony watched this obscure French flick before jumping off the Vincent Thomas Bridge. Zoo zéro even concludes with a sort of “tears in the rain” sequence that anticipates the ending of Scott's classic Hollywood cyberpunk flick. Even more strangely, many of the indoor sequences with exotic zoo animals and soulless nihilistic erotic scenarios resemble and invoke a similar atmosphere to those featured in Tony Scott’s comparably stylized yet more slapdash, postmodern deathrock-inspired vampire flick The Hunger (1983), but Zoo zéro – with its sparse dialogue, lack of sympathetic characters, and deep-seated discordant structure – is ultimately a much less accessible work that does more to capture the spiritually and culturally-cadaverous apocalyptic zeitgeist of post-industrial Europa as foreordained by the likes of Spengler and Evola as opposed to infatuating over a couple of ancient aristocratic supernatural degenerates. Zoo zéro also contains an infecund fictional forthcoming that makes the dystopian reality featured in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) seem relatively modern and even quite tame, so it should be no surprise the film concludes in a manner echoing the iconic opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the ending of Planet of the Apes (1968), albeit with all the more forlornness and unsentimentality. Like Ludwig van Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his work The Magic Flute, one of German composer’s most beloved achievements in his operatic repertoire, becomes a vague cultural remnant and a symbol of a moribund continent’s lost glory and complete and utter collective devitalization, hence why the lead protagonist merely reworks tired and decayed cabaret acts from (presumably) over a century ago in a New Wave form.

It goes without saying that Klaus Kinski looks quite dapper as Yavé, le directeur du zoo, as if he is the direct progeny of decadent German horror author Hanns Heinz Ewers, but like most people in the city, his future is predestined to desperation as mother nature and her animals reclaim the world for themselves. In a vague sense, Zoo zéro features a glimmer of hope and prospect for rebirth, at least as far as the earth in its entirety is concerned. Humans, the most conscious and cancerous of God’s creations, through their deluded self-worship and grandiose greed, have ushered in their own mass suicide so it is only fitting that Klaus Kinski would be directing an allegorical dirge for humanity’s (and his own) funeral; a theme he would later return to in his last film and directorial debut Kinski Paganini (1989). Transcendental, nonlinear, and nightmarish in structure like the kindred obscure (but somewhat inferior) French surrealist horror flick Clash (1984) directed by Raphaël Delpard but especially reminiscent of the nearly immaculate post-apocalyptic French-Canadian sci-fi short The City Without Windows (2002) aka La dernière voix directed by Julien Fonfrede and Karim Hussain, the postmortem bluish blends of Agustí Villaronga’s of In a Glass Cage (1987), as well as capturing the carnivalesque characters and wayfarer wandering essence of Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979) and Enzo G. Castellari 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982), minus the mindless action and street gangs, Zoo zéro is a rare and wildly idiosyncratic (and consequently flawed) arthouse entry in the unofficial existential dystopian neo-noir subgenre. Probably in part due to its unwaveringly artiness and absurdness, as well as its staunch somberness, Zoo zéro – a demanding and dispiriting Delphian odyssey with a tolerable tinge of zoophilia that is bound to inspire profound ennui in the everyday filmgoer – has been plagued by obscurity since its release in 1979, but, I for one, can say that I am one of the film's greatest admirers. 

-Ty E

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

Inspired by classic iconic fairy tales like Alice in Wonderland and Little Red Riding Hood and based on the 1935 novel of the same name by avant-garde Czech writer Vítězslav Nezval, who was influenced by themes and settings explored in novels like M. G. Lewis' The Monk: A Romance (1796) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) aka Valerie a týden divů directed by Jaromil Jireš (The Cry, Incomplete Eclipse) – a phantasmagorical and psychosexual surrealist work that manages to seamlessly blur the line between fantasy and Gothic horror – is indubitably one of the most magnificent and mystifying works of celluloid thaumaturgy ever assembled. Not unlike American auteur Richard Blackburn’s devalued Lovecraftian vampire flick Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (1973), Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a striking and often sinister cinematic work that follows an innocent 13-year-old girl on the verge of sexual awakening as she is ambushed by a 7-day virtual carnival of unsavory humans, lighthearted lesbians, vicious vampires and ambiguous anthropomorphic creatures. Also, like Lemora (as well as many of the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft), Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a work where the virginal protagonist must come to terms with the yet uncovered reality of her dubious ancestry and seemingly odious forebears. Featuring perfectly contrasting sequences of angelic achromatic daylight scenes and chimerical twilight scenarios, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a fanciful filmic phantasy that provides even the most cynical and rationalistic of adults with a remainder of the marvel and enchantment of their less pessimistic childhood years. Of course, with its stirring scenes of frolicsome lesbian sexuality and magical menstruation, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is not the sort of film one should show to immature adolescents, even if many of these saturnine and sensual scenarios are portrayed in an ethereal and enigmatic fashion. In short, it is no exaggeration for me to say that Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is one of the most pulchritudinous and enrapturing films that I have ever seen, but I guess that it is no surprise when one considers that it was created in the same nation that produced such aesthetically-titillating cinematic masterpieces as Fruit of Paradise (1970) aka Ovoce stromů rajských jíme directed by Věra Chytilová and Jan Švankmajer’s direful yet dippy Slavicized adaptation of Goethe’s Faust (1994). 

 The first thing most viewers would probably notice upon watching Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is the youthful and undefiled beauty of Czech actress Jaroslava Schallerová who plays the title role of Valerie. Although Schallerová would later become a popular actress in Eastern Europe, later appearing in works including The Little Mermaid (1976) aka Malá mořská víla directed by Karel Kachyňa and Zaklęte rewiry (1975) directed by Janusz Majewski, it would be her debut performance at the ripe age of 13-years-old in Valerie and Her Week of Wonders that would secure her lasting fame in the international film world. During the film, Valerie’s torment seems to begin when a drop of her blood falls from her body and lands on a lily white flower, thus despoiling the bud's color and symbolically signaling her new status into biological womanhood. During the beginning of the film, Valerie encounters a nerdy thief named Eagle (“Orlík” in Czech) who steals her sacred earrings, but subsequently returns them out of guilt. Despite his seemingly delinquent intentions early on in Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Eagle ultimately becomes a passionate watchful protector of Valerie who warns her of a cadaver-like cloaked monster named “Weasel” who wears a grotesque weasel mask (to hide his even more malformed and sepulchral face) and acts in a weaselly by stalking and teasing the bewildered girl throughout the film. Valerie – whose parents were apparently honorable church leaders (a bishop and a nun) that are now long dead – soon discovers that her deathly pale but conspicuously beautiful blonde-haired and svelte grandmother is hiding pertinent information to her family’s seemingly shadowy history. Valerie’s grandmother – an intrinsically puritanical woman who religious fanaticism is obviously a translucent shield to cover her degenerate erotic past – has not gotten over her love for her ex-beau, a sadistic and hedonistic priest named Gracian. On her often macabre but equally majestic week of wonders, which includes rape via profane priest and being burned alive for an adoring peasant audience like a common witch, Valerie eventually discovers the root of her grandmother's perennial suffering (and her eventual treacherous betrayal), as well as the true and surprising identities of her family members. Naturally, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders – being a surrealist postmodern fairy tale of sorts – unfolds in a phantasmal fashion equipped with a sort of delirious and daunting yet delightful dream-logic that defies any semblance of realism, but nonetheless making perfect sense on the metaphysical level because, unlike similarly ambitious avant-garde 'parables' (e.g. Henri Xhonneux's 1989 film Marquis), it is certainly not a film that will make you feel hopelessly restrained by an overwhelming aesthetic-onslaught and cheated out a full and engrossing story. 

 Undoubtedly, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is one of the most elegant, culturally-refined, and spellbinding works of cinematic blasphemy ever assembled; where religious leaders are the most unholy of Satanic fiends and where nature in its most raw form is the height of sacrosanct. But then again, few, if any, things are more immaculate and mysterious to the eye of a child than nature at its most organic and unsullied; be it the decomposing corpse of a stillborn kitten or the unkempt hair contained within an adult's odorous ordure-stained underwear. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is such an extraordinary and transcendental cinematic work that even manages to make sibling incest and menstrual blood seem miraculous and downright divine, which is no small feat by director Jaromil Jireš; an adult auteur whose imagination is not by any means less developed than a prodigious (if peculiar and oversexed) child genius. Of course, seeing as it features the peeled tiny teats of 13-year-old Jaroslava Schallerová and the real-life death of a live animal, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a film that is sure to desensitize any child who has the premature honor of viewing it.  Although a fairy tale story about a feisty flower-child, I would not recommend Valerie and Her Week of Wonders to faeries; figurative or otherwise, as it is a work that is not hip to frivolous ideals of peace, passivity and empty epicureanism (even if the images might lead one to assume otherwise), but struggle and self-sanctification in an increasingly hostile world of persuading pleasures and retrogressing morality.  Needless to say, for fans of fateful fable films like Maurice Tourneur's Carnival of Sinners (1943), Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973), Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984) Robert Sigl's Laurin (1989), and Michele Soavi's The Church (1989), Valerie and Her Week of Wonders makes for the most categorical celluloid allegory.

-Ty E

Sukkubus – den Teufel im Leib

As someone who is quite fond of the Teutonic mysticism of the mostly forgotten and often stigmatized German Mountain (bergfilme) of the 1920s and 1930s, I am always interested in seeing contemporary takes on the mostly forgotten film genre. Obsessive Scandinavian-Canadian auteur Guy Maddin (Tales from the Gimli Hospital, My Winnipeg) was somewhat artistically prosperous in his noble attempt at paying tribute to the Mountain film – albeit in a most absurdly and sardonically satiric fashion – with his work Careful (1992); a film that managed to bring oedipal incest and a kaleidoscope of charismatic colors to the typically morally pristine and black-and-white genre. The modern German movie North Face (2008) directed by Philipp Stölzl (Baby, Young Goethe in Love) was also an interesting contemporary take on the Mountain film, notwithstanding the blatant and clichéd ethno-masochistic message tacked on at the conclusion. Undoubtedly, one of the most outlandish, original, and sensational post-WW2 takes on the Mountain film is Sukkubus – den Teufel im Leib (1989) aka Succubus – Devil in the Flesh directed by Georg Tressler; a Vienna-born auteur who previously assembled works ranging from Nicholas Ray-inspired teenage drama flicks (Teenage Wolfpack) to episodes for Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color (The Magnificent Rebel) to trashy yet tempting science-fiction sex comedies (2069: A Sex Odyssey). With his last major film (the director would end his filmmaking career in the undignified realm of TV-movies) Sukkubus – unlike with many of his previous Hollywood-inspired films – Tressler got more in tune with his Germanic roots by deriving it on the myth of the "Sennentuntschi"; a tale about a doll that morphs into an evil and vengeful female demon that was traditionally told throughout the German-speaking Alps (from Bavaria to Switzerland), but was most popular on the Swiss side of the mountain, which also happens to be the setting of the film. Set in the early 19th century on a remote slope high up on the Swiss Alps, Sukkubus opens with the following ‘fairly tale’ introduction, “A Swiss legend tells of three herdsmen who let themselves in for the powers of evil and were punished gruesomely for their outrage.” Such generalized and less than detailed words offer a frank but (thankfully) understated hint as to the oddly eccentric and equally exploitative yet classically atmospheric (at least in the German Mountain sense) essence of Sukkubus; probably the world’s only German Mountain-Horror hybrid and one of Germany’s few decent post-WWII horror films.

Admittedly, my initial interest in Sukkubus came from the fact that German absurdist auteur Christoph Schlingensief (Terror 2000, Mutters Maske) acted as the assistant director for the film. Indeed, although the Sukkubus seems like it could have only been sporadically directed by Schlingensief, it does feature some sprinklings of exquisite exploitation, sneering sexual perversity, and a risqué roast of German kultur. Sukkubus centers around three very divergent peasant herdsmen: Senn (Peter Simonischek); the stoic and notably Aryan leader of the threesome who seems to be in his mid-30s, Hirt (Giovanni Früh); a slothful and sexually degenerate fellow who has a proclivity towards Schnapps and young boys despite being middle-aged, and Hüterbub (Hüterbub); a thirteen year old boy who – aside from deriving great satisfaction from the dubious act of having his favorite cow “Bruni” lick salt from his body – seems like a rather normal, if often petrified, lad. After a night of indulging in one of the Germanic people’s greatest vices (aka alcohol), the two elder men decide to built a primitive sex doll out of an odd face-shaped root found by the boy in a cave. To their ecstatic and intoxicated amazement, the rather dull woodpile morphs into a voluptuous lassie’s ass, thus beginning the ferocious fecund curse in seemingly female form that plagues the three sexually-repressed fellows for the rest of the film. Swarthy but also stunning and alluring in appearance, the female apparition more resembles the Salome of Christian folklore than the sort of statuesque Nordic beauty one would expect to be living on the mountaintop. While also protecting themselves from the unclad succubus (played by Pamela Prati of Umberto Lenzi's Ironmaster and Andrea Bianchi's Io Gilda), the three men also battle each other, as well as the hallucinations brought upon their own wandering minds due to living in abject isolation. Needless to say, Sukkubus is far from being as holy as Arnold Fanck’s Holy Mountain (1926) nor as aesthetically delectable as Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (1932), but it does keep up with the tradition of metaphysical Germanic mysticism typical of the Mountain film genre, albeit in a manner also palatable to culturally unrefined horror fans.

Considering that Switzerland is the nation that produced “Aryan Christ” (or so he was once dubbed by one of his most determined detractors) Carl Gustav Jung – the German-Swiss man who coined the phrase “collective unconscious” (a collective, impersonal unconscious of archetypes inherited by members of the same race) – it is most fitting that Sukkubus – den Teufel im Leib, a work of atavistic-exploitation cinema, would be set in the same country. It should also be noted that the dialect of German spoken in the film is an idiosyncratic mix of German and German-Swiss, thus lending a certain cultural authenticity to the film that further compliments its austere Alpine atmosphere. Indeed, like the vintage German Mountain films, the setting itself of Sukkubus gives off the feeling that something that is omniscient is foreboding within the mountains, but what makes Georg Tressler’s hodgepodge horror work different is that nature and bare-skin become nefarious as opposed to rapturous, and as a consequence, the films acts in direct opposition to the sanctified view of the natural outdoors held by prominent völkisch movements (Wandervogel and National Socialists), artists (Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Fidus, Ivo Saliger) and thinkers (Hermann Hesse, C.G. Jung) during the early twentieth century throughout the German-speaking world. Of course, being of a deliberately debauched and sexually suggestive nature (e.g. cow milk mimicking cum) throughout, Sukkubus is a work that is more likely to inspire erotomania than ideas of lebensreform among viewers.

-Ty E

Flaming Creatures

You would be hard-pressed to find a film ‘gayer’ than Flaming Creatures (1963), at least when looked at within its historical context, but don’t tell that to the thoroughly emaciated, AIDS-stricken ghost of director Jack Smith (Buzzards over Baghdad, Normal Love); an overtly outrageous outsider artist that denied his, indeed, blatantly flaming homophile persuasion had any influence on his fiercely flamboyant celluloid brainchild. Although virtually unknown nowadays, even among camp keen cinephiles, Flaming Creatures – a 43-minute satire of Hollywood B-movies and tangling tribute to once-popular 1940s Dominican-born actress Maria "The Queen of Technicolor" Montez – would inevitably be a crucial influence on works of ‘high’ and ‘low’ camp, including Federico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965) and Satyricon (1969), the patently perverse micro-budget works of Mike Kuchar (The Pervert, Sins of the Fleshapoids), the celluloid claptrap of Matthew Barney (The Cremaster Cycle), the early Dreamland movies of John Waters (Mondo Trasho, Pink Flamingos), and especially the primitive factory films of Andy Warhol. In fact, Warhol – who co-directed the assumed-lost film Batman Dracula (1964) with Smith – superficially aped and bastardized the 'cardboard camp' aesthetic essence invented by the now virtually unknown artist, so it should be no surprise that prolific jazz/noise musician John Zorn (Naked City, Masada) once stated, "Jack Smith was the real Warhol." Always more proficient at appropriating, selling and promoting art assembled by greater artists than actually forging it himself, Warhol also stole Smith’s invention of the B-movie ‘Superstar,' as the Flaming Creatures director was befriending and casting gutter-level, cum-guzzling drag queens, fickle fag hags, and heftily hung hunks long before the pompous pop-artist utilized them in an imperative, career jump-starting manner that would further contribute to the much undeserved quasi-mystical legacy of his hand-me-down fantasy factory. Described by Jack Smith himself as, "a comedy set in a haunted music studio," Flaming Creatures is an intrinsically incoherent avant-garde trash piece full of images of pesky flaccid peckers (appearing everywhere from inside wine glasses to firmly relaxing on the shoulders of drag queens) and massive mammary glands (the are constantly manhandled by anonymous hands), therefore one could argue it is a forerunner to ‘body horror,' as it is certainly a film that reminds one how truly malodorous and consternating the human body can be, particularly when genders are brazenly blurred. Considered pornographic by certain authorities (a NYC criminal court) and later mentioned by name in contra-porn speeches by racist race-mixing senator Strom Thurmond, copies of Flaming Creatures were confiscated up its debut screening and the work was subsequently banned (and still is to this day), hence the extremely poor quality of most transfers of the film available today. John Waters may tend to exaggerate during his countless appearances on various TV shows and documentaries, but he wasn’t puffing his perverted mentor when he stated that Jack Smith was, "The only true underground filmmaker” as it is a toilsome task to think of another filmmaker whose aesthetic influence was so pivotal and pioneering, yet only the most rabid and resolute of cinephiles have seen Flaming Creatures. 

 Unfortunately, Flaming Creatures – with its blatantly amateurish direction and nonexistent production values; and relatively tame homo-centricity (at least by today’s standards) – is, lamentably, not as interesting as the story behind the film, thus the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2006) makes for an essential companion piece to the infamous featurette. Although generally used as a slur against homos nowadays, Jack Smith used the word “flaming” as a positive adjective for his favorite things, hence the title Flaming Creatures; a very personal (and undoubtedly masturbatory) auteur project featuring some of the late director's favorite self-invented drag queens, including Mario Montez (a Puerto Rican Maria Montez-clone who later became one of Warhol’s Superstars) and bountiful, boffo costume designs. Flaunting a number of unspeakable scenarios from mundanely masturbating trannys/hermaphrodites to a brutish and criminally aggressive “cunning linguist," Flaming Creatures is an ostentatious orgy of loopy aberrosexuality that demands the viewer to leave their moral compass elsewhere for 43-minutes or so. As a master photographer and subversive saint of scopophilia, Smith’s greatest accomplishment with Flaming Creatures was dreaming up a variety of meticulously constructed mise-en-scènes (mainly composed of lavishly dressed/undressed bodies) as the autocratic auteur certainly had nil interest in developing any sort of cohesive narrative for the film. As a lifelong committed anarchist, Flaming Creatures is the artistic expression of a man who disdained gender roles, heterosexuality, cinematic convention, Judeo-Christian mores, and, probably most of all, mainstream America as depicted by pre-1968 Hays Code Hollywood. In our post-post-modern era where a considerable portion of the American populous shares Smith’s sentiments, especially in regard to Hollywood and the 'artistic' world, it is easy to forget why Jack Smith and his celluloid chef d'œuvre Flaming Creatures – a decidedly undaunted work of Dionysian derangement – is such an important contribution to the progression of campy cinematic libertinage. 

-Ty E

Shirley Pimple in the John Wayne Temple of Doom

 

After 18 years in the making, Greek-Canadian auteur Demetri Estdelacropolis finally completed his conspiracy theory-ridden anti-John Wayne/anti-action camp-masterpiece Shirley Pimple in the John Wayne Temple of Doom (2000); an innately absurdist cinematic meta-essay that was certainly worth the belated wait, even if very few people, including dedicated cinephiles of the cinematically strange, were there to take notice.  It came as sort of a revelation to me that Armenian-Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan (Exotica, Chloe) acted as an associate producer for this well-nigh unknown film, but like most cinematic works by the critically acclaimed director of The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Shirley Pimple is an uncompromising piece of celluloid daredevilry that examines the more seedier side of sexuality and human motivation, but from a vehemently tragicomedic camp angle that can even be appreciated by the most prudish purveyors of philistinism.  Shirley Pimple resembles what Andy Milligan probably would have assembled had he spent a couple semesters in film school, relished in a week-long John Wayne movie marathon while high on marijuana, and attempted to direct a thematically/aesthetically transposed remake of John Milius' unintentionally farcical anti-Soviet action-thriller Red Dawn (1984).  Set in the year nineteen hundred and thirty (give or take 30 years), Shirley Pimple is a film about an effervescent little girl on the verge of complete biological womanhood who describes herself as a, “11 year old, surreal serial killer, heroin addict, and B-movie star” with “a selective hearing process; otherwise known as deafness" that physically resembles Shirley Temple, but considers her true doppelganger to be John Wayne; the Hollywood screen legend that has been a uncontested symbol of indomitable masculinity amongst the American male public for over ½ a century. At 7 years old, Shirley Pimple became the lead attraction of the propaganda film factory The John Wayne Institute for the Preservation of American Ideals – a quasi-Warholian neo-fascist and ameri-ccentric spreader of the hokey Republican metapolitical doctrine of “John Waynism” that initially exploited and eventually enslaved the little sass by getting her addicted to Cocteau’s kick – but as she grew older, the increasingly sadistic sweetheart adopted a counter-revolutionary weltanschauung and established soldierly solidarity with The Psychotic Weaklings; a group of pants-wetting, child molesters and little girls who use real live babies (described by Pimple as, "eating, shitting, sucking machines") as exploding terrorist devices. Needless to say, Shirley Pimple is probably the most conspicuously ‘campy’ action film ever made and the sort of ostensibly outlandish work that Troma co-dictator Lloyd Kaufman wishes he had made, but lacked the preternatural intellectual aptitude, drug-inspired discipline, and bona fide wacked-out creative obsessiveness to do so. Apparently, penned by ‘Marion Morrison’ (which, being John Wayne’s ironically effeminate real name, is obviously a tongue-in-cheek pseudonym) and featuring many of the ‘superstars’ (Esther Vargas, Rick Trembles, Estdelacropolis himself, etc.) from his debut feature-length film Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh (1984), Shirley Temple is another (and his only other) auteur-piece from the delightfully deranged director Demetri Estdelacropolis; a procrastinating semi-perfectionist who clearly consumed a wealth of heroin and film history books during the nearly twenty year production of this highly cinema-reflexive and Hollywood-repellant action-packed trash epic that features everything from interminate infanticide to pornographic Uncle Sam-inspired graphic art propaganda. 

 Right from the beginning of Shirley Pimple, one is blitzkrieged with a charming yet schizophrenic crash course in the history of Hollywood movies. As the viewer learns early on in the film by Ms. Pimple's monotone narration, the real Shirley Temple was dethroned by puberty and John Wayne (most specifically, his performance in John Ford’s 1939 film Stagecoach). Although unofficial adversaries as legendary American cultural icons, Shirley Pimple makes the reasonable (if patently offensive) argument that both stars shared the same audience composed of R&R and R&R (Republican, Retarded and Right-Wing, Reactionary). Although John Wayne was seemingly sexless in his preposterous posturing stoicism, bipolar English writer Graham Greene (during his more obscure days as a film reviewer) argued in his 1938 review of John Ford’s Wee Willie Winkie (1937) starring Shirley Temple that little lead actress was a sex icon among perverted old men; a claim that would get the author sued for libel by 20th Century Fox and cause him to flee to Mexico so as to escape a prison sentence. Being a butch brat with homicidal tendencies and suffering from heroin withdraw, Shirley Pimple is hardly a sex symbol, but that does not stop her from joining up with The Psychotic Weaklings; a militant anti-Wayne revolutionary group that finds John Wayne’s legacy and manhood to be quite dubious, as expressed most humbly by one its leaders' most potent political rants: “despite the fact as a war hero, a soldier’s soldier, a cowboy’s cowboys, John Wayne was the most repressed closet queen and panty-waisting beta-pussy of them all.” Although an active Republican (though a self-described “socialist” during his college years) who influenced many young American males to fight in wars ranging from World War II (starring in 13 films during the war) to Vietnam (even starring in the 1968 film The Green Berets; the only film made in support of the war), Wayne was a draft-dodger (obtaining 3-A status, "deferred for [family] dependency reasons”) who never fought in an authentic battle in his entire life with the only real-life live bullet ever shot at him being from his second wife Esperanza Baur; a mentally unstable Mexican actress (undoubtedly another unsavory biographical detail for patriotic Wayne fanatics). With the exception of the highly quotable scene from Alex Cox’s cult classic Repo Man (1984) where the character Miller announces that, “John Wayne was a Fag” who “come to the door in a dress”, Shirley Pimple is very possibly the only film to characterize the true reality behind Wayne’s magnified and mythical legacy. In fact, aside from being the most anti-Wayne flick ever made, Shirley Pimple in the John Wayne Temple of Doom, as given clear evidence in its decisively screwy postmodern title, is a work that wages total war, maliciously mutilates, and ultimately deconstructs the moviemaking magic of Hollywood. Estdelacropolis’ incorrigible anti-Hollywood ethos ultimately reaches its climax in Shirley Pimple when John Wayne in zombie-like form is liquidated via ‘commie piss’ in a western-style showdown scene with Shirley Pimple that perversely echoes the especially eccentric chaffed essence of the satirical suicide of ultra-nationalist true believer General Jack D. Ripper (due to his insistence that his “precious bodily fluids” were tampered with by Reds) in Stanley Kubrick’s classic cold war era spoof Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). 

 As mentioned early on in Shirley Pimple, the real John Wayne eventually died in an undignified manner after losing a battle with cancer; the same fate his character feared in his final screen role in The Shootist (1976) directed by Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dirty Harry). Many believe that Wayne contracted cancer while ill-advisedly playing Mongol leader Genghis Khan in the critical and commercial failure The Conqueror (1956); a work filmed near a Nevada nuclear testing ground that resulted in 91 individuals of a 220 person film crew contracting various forms of the malignant neoplasm disease by 1981, thus one could argue that the Hollywood legend was ultimately a (unconscious) victim of the cold war he so gallantly promoted with his lackluster acting. Shirley Pimple may featuring tons of explosions and senseless brutality but it is as far as one can get from a John Wayne flick; portraying little girls and child molesters as the most menacing and malevolent of coldblooded of killers, henceforth boldly underscoring the strabismic romanticized view of war in classic Hollywood propaganda films, most specifically those starring “The Duke” himself. Shirley Pimple concludes in a manner comparable to Sidney Pollack’s satirical “pro- and anti-war” flick Castle Keep (1969) with an extravagant 20+ minute battle between the pugnacious pedos of the Psychotic Weaklings and the wimpy Waynites at the John Wayne Temple of Doom; a militaristic building with a “Joseph Mengele Search and Destroy” wing. Undoubtedly, a much less intimate and personal work than Estdelacropolis’ previous effort Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh, Shirley Pimple in the John Wayne Temple of Doom is an equally unhinged and unconventional expression of the auteur filmmaker's particularly warped yet wonderful psyche, thereupon it is a work that demands a cult following that it currently has yet to obtain. After all, the world still has a legion of individuals watching the films of Shirley Temple and John Wayne in a notably onanistic fashion.

-Ty E

Dementia

Somewhat embarrassingly, I never got around to seeing the phantasmagorical film noir (advertised as a ‘beat-noir’) flick Dementia (1955) written and directed by Bruno VeSota (but often falsely attributed to producer John Parker) until fairly recently. Maybe it was because I got the film mixed up with Francis Ford Coppola’s inferior, early Roger Corman-produced horror flick Dementia 13 (1963) and assumed it was another conventional and equally forgettable 1950s/1960s horror film, but, regardless, I am glad that I actually took the time to view it. Antagonistically transcending the usually fine line between free-form avant-garde art film and bodacious B-movie, Dementia is a rather ridiculously overlooked work that is quite like no other. Originally only available in its butchered cut version (at 56 minutes as opposed to the original 61 minutes) as Daughter of Horror with redundant and artistically proposterous narration by (then-unknown) comedian and game show host Ed McMahon, Dementia is now widely accessible in its original abstract necromantic form. Shot MOS ("Motor Only Sync" aka without synchronous sound) and equipped with an eerie and seductive soundtrack by German-American avant-garde composer and inventor George Antheil and sung by Marni Nixon, Dementia is a strictly cinematic work that has more in common with great films of the silent era than horror films from its own epoch. Quickly forgotten upon its initial 1955 release, Dementia would not gain the cult following it always deserved until the late 1970s, thus earning a (still somewhat marginal) reputation as one of the most strikingly strange and idiosyncratic films ever made. Sharing aesthetic influences from both German expressionism and film noir, but of an especially proto-Lynchian nature in its portrayal of a weird girl in trouble in a viperous seaside post-industrial netherworld, Dementia is a hypnotic hypnagogic journey through one less than cuddly colleen’s afflicted and overwrought mind. Dementia often has a sinister and surreal semblance comparable to Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962) – a work noted for its entrancing organ score by Gene Moore and sepulchral, otherworldly essence – but to a more pronounced, penetrating, and perturbing degree. The relentless phantasm realm of Dementia fits in somewhere in between Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1917), F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), Curtis Harrington's Night Tide (1961), and David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), but one can only get a true aesthetic articulation of the film by actually viewing it. 

 Dementia begins in the seedy hotel room of the film’s austere anti-heroess aka 'the Gamin' (played by unknown/forgotten actress Adrienne Barrett) who has just awakened from a less than blissful beachside nightmare. Although some reviewers have described this young lady as “sexy” and whatnot, I found her to be quite androgynous in both appearance and affectation as she could have easily played Sal Mineo's role opposite of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Adorned around the cadaverous gal’s neck is a necklace and sphinx-like amulet as if she is an initiate in some sort of arcane occult tradition. Soon after awakening from her somber slumber, the girl grabs a switchblade out of a dresser drawer and leaves the apartment for the shadowy alleys of the menacing metropolis. Encountering a number of curious human creatures on her seemingly aimless but remarkably eventful journey, including a minatory midget, abusive husband, delirious drunk, pestering pimp, and a rich hedonistic fat cat, the girl is clearly stirred and frightened by the less savory elements of the male gender. The girl begins to realize that her past has come back to haunt her when she buys a newspaper from the midget with the headline, “Mysterious Stabbing.” Eventually, the girl is brought to a lonely graveyard somewhat resembling the one featured in Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outerspace (1959) by a faceless entity. Incidentally, Dementia cinematographer William C. Thompson would later film Wood’s less than artful 1959 ‘masterpiece’, as well as the cross-dressing horror hack's infamously atrocious works Glen or Glenda (1953) and Night of the Ghouls (1959). While at the graveyard, the daunted debutante recollects the life-shattering night when her abusive father sadistically slaughtered her trashy, trifling mother. The scenic cemetery scene is probably best remembered for appearing in the popular independent sci-fi/horror flick The Blob (1958) during the movie theater sequence when the blob attacks, but it also happens to be one of the most poignant and illuminating moments of Dementia as it reveals the source of the lead anti-protagonist’s debilitating mental sickness; dementia. 

 Although barely recognized and instantly forgotten upon its original release; and still relatively underrated today, Dementia has gone on to inspire various subsequent cinematic works. Some have argued that the film influenced Orson Welles' nearly immaculate direction of his chimerical mystery masterpiece Touch of Evil (1958).  Somewhat fortuitously (or not), the obese fat man featured in Dementia also resembles Welles' repulsive character police Captain Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil. The esoteric hardcore porn flick Bacchanale (1970) directed by the Amero brothers also seems to be heavily inspired by (if not an extremely loose remake of) Dementia. Like Dementia, Bacchanale follows a young girl (this time played by a voluptuous bombshell blonde) as she awakens in her hotel room and wanders pell-mell through the city, henceforth encountering faceless spirits in graveyards and other exceedingly debauched, eccentric, and erratic beings. Also, like Dementia – which features a variety of Kerouac-esque beatniks – Bacchanale is a marginal yet uniquely revealing work of its time, featuring hapless hippies and loose morals that reflect the degenerate zeitgeist of the hyper-hedonic counter-culture movement. Needless to say, Dementia is a decidedly nihilistic work with nil redeeming characters, including the foreordained lead character, thus making it an audacious aberration of 1950s American cinema. Not even the more surly and sardonic works of the so-called “American New Wave” of the late 1960’s to early 1980s can compare to the ever-present apocalyptic and amphibological persuasion of Dementia; a celluloid tribulation of the most terrorizing yet transcendent sort.  In 2001, carny noise musician and perennial dilettante Boyd Rice (with the help of Dwid Hellion of the 'metallic punk/hardcore' band Integrity) composed a new score for Dementia and performed it live at the 17th annual L'Etrange Festival, which is unequivocally a comme il faut tribute to a work that was heavily inspired by the more morose films of the silent era; a lamentably lost period of cinema history when image was everything and a live orchestra acted as an accentual ritualistic sound procession of sorts. One can only wonder whether or not a version of the film featuring Rice's score will be released, but I doubt it will add anything to Dementia; a hyperphysical and hallucinatory cinematic expression of hopeless female hysteria. 

-Ty E

In a Glass Cage

 A number of years ago, I made a valiant attempt to hunt down and see every sexually perverse Nazi-themed arthouse film ever created in post-WWII Europa. Naturally, I viewed and savored Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), but none of these films compared to the antipodal aesthetically-pleasing unsightliness, thematic depravity, and overall solemn gloominess of the Spanish film In a Glass Cage (1987) aka Tras el cristal directed by Balearic auteur Agustí Villaronga (Moon Child, Black Bread). Without a doubt, Villaronga is the greatest director of stark and ruthless coming-of-age films, but none of his subsequent works quite compare to the grim, emotionally-draining and uniquely uncompromising nature of his directorial debut In a Glass Cage; a work that John Waters – the Baltimorean auteur who once directed a pot-addled and unflatteringly overweight drag queen eating steaming dog feces – once described as, “a great film, but I’m scared to show it to my friends.” In a Glass Cage focuses on a pedophiliac ex-Nazi doctor named Klaus (Günter Meisner) who is permanently constrained to an archaic iron lung (the 'glass cage') due to being paralyzed after a botched suicide attempt. Upon a superficial glance, Klaus – a robust and impeccably dressed family man with a wife and a daughter – seems quite bourgeois, but underneath his clean exterior lies a soul modeled after infamous child murderer Gilles de Rais heart. In fact, Villaronga was partly inspired to create In a Glass Cage after reading Georges Batailles’ book on the Breton knight leader and companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc turned prolific serial killer. Instead of setting the film during the Hundred Years’ War, Villaronga decided to study Nazi concentration camp experiments on child, which inevitably inspired the script for In a Glass Cage; a work that makes Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) seem like a mundane melodramatic television mini-series on monetary-steroids. Despite being easily one of the most emotionally grueling and unsettling films ever made, Villaronga’s film features less nudity and violence than Spielberg’s artless and overly sentimental zio-ganda epic, thus, unlike The Damned and The Night Porter, one can hardly make the argument that In a Glass Cage is a work of exploitation masquerading as art. Needless to say, do not watch In a Glass Cage if you’re looking to gratify a fetishistic compulsion for images of gratuitous torture or hoping to find a kinky masturbation aid, as you will be certainly disappointed, unless you happen to be someone like Albert Fish or Victor Salva.

Ultimately, In a Glass Cage is a tale about the vicious circle of abuse where the victim become victimizer; a relatively common and unfortunate occurrence that few people want to recognize. Klaus has had many victims over the years but few probably compare to Angelo (David Sust); a seemingly angelic boy who shows up to the ex-Nazi doctor’s house anonymously as an adult to volunteer as a nurse. Immediately upon arriving at the pedo's pigpen, Klaus’ neurotic wife Griselda (María Paredes) treats Angelo as a contemptible nuisance with dubious motives. Indeed, grizzly Griselda – a less than delightful lady whose ever-present resentment seems to be the result of extreme sexual repression – is correct when it comes to her female intuition, but little does she know that Angelo plans to become the new man of the house and he is not looking for a nagging wife. Out of all those living at the house, Klaus’ daughter Rena (Gisèle Echevarría) – being a highly impressionable prepubescent girl with a rather pathetic, physically immobile and suicidal father – is most impressed with Angelo and his intriguing, haunting aura. After the Second World War, Klaus went into exile with his family in Catalonia, Spain and continued to molest and murder young boys; an aberrant addiction he must have had an overwhelming guilty conscious about, hence his bungled attempt at self-slaughter via jumping off a tower. Sometime before attempting suicide, Klaus sexually tortured and eventually murdered a young boy with a mere blow to the head, which was witnessed by adolescent Angelo; another victim of the good doctor who escaped from and stole the pathologically perverse pedophiles incriminating diaries and torture photographs. Clearly physically (as signified by a scar over his eyebrow) and emotionally scarred by the odious ordeal of his childhood, Angelo – who is incontestably now more mentally deranged than Klaus – begins bringing young boys to Klaus’ haus and murdering them before his very weary eyes while reading fiendish excerpts from the stolen experiment diaries, thus both ironically horrifying and further compounding the irrevocable guilt of the stiff Nazi doc in the process. As his already fragile sanity wanes and his coldblooded ruthlessness becomes more pronounced, Angelo’s appearance changes dramatically as he goes from looking positively pusillanimous and wearing drab clothing to looking like some sort of stoic New Wave Nazi chic dictator. Of course, with Griselda gone and with Rena under his spell, Angelo is now indeed the Führer of the house and he celebrates by interior decorating the place in a strikingly complimentary fashion; adorning the now almost-phantasmagorical abode with tons of barbed wire and gloomy blue wallpaper, henceforth making it seem like an extravagent post-apocalyptic art deco concentration camp for deathrockers. It is quite apparent as In a Glass Cage progresses that Angelo is in the midst of completing his metamorphosis from petrified child to prudent perpetrator. In the end, Angelo's self-prophesying future looks bleak, but he has an accidental protege of sorts to take his place.

Not unsurprisingly but certainly unfortunately, In a Glass Cage has been often compared to Apt Pupil (1998) directed by Bryan Singer and based on a novella by Stephen King, yet unlike its predecessor, the propagandistic Hollywood film is not the least bit artful nor subtle. As an obscenely candid and unsentimental work of celluloid art, In a Glass Cage, like in deplorable crimes of similar nature in the real world, offers no sort of reconciliation, thus leaving the viewer with a paralyzing feeling of fretfulness that haunts one literally years thereafter. Despite its disconcerting persuasion, In a Glass Cage is also an aesthetically dynamic work that has aged most gracefully since it was released about ¼ a century ago. In short, there is no other film in existence that is quite like In a Glass Cage that has the ability to both dazzle and dishearten the filmgoer in a most penetrating and audaciously austere manner. It should be no surprise that In a Glass Cage, much like the considerably inferior American homosexual serial killer Frisk (1995) directed by Todd Verow, was met with ample animus when it was screened at various gay and lesbian film festivals upon its initial 1987 release. Thankfully, unlike Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) – an American arthouse work based on the real-life thrill killing of a child by infamous rich gay Jewish homosexual lovers Leopold and Loeb – In a Glass Cage does not feature any sort of sociopolitical message, hence the controversy it stirred amongst certain overly prissy politically correct aberrosexuals. Considering its often hardboiled portrayals of child abuse and murder, In a Glass Cage is not a film I would recommend to real-life victims of similar craven crimes. In fact, although it has been nearly a decade since I first saw the film, I am still baffled that In a Glass Cage – a work that is like a cross between the dolorous stock-footage featured in the HBO documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996) and the high camp of German New Wave auteur Werner Schroeter’s Der Rosenkönig (1986) aka The Rose King – even exists, yet it does as a brutal and beauteous work of cinematic bliss.

-Ty E