Taxi zum Klo

Post-WW2 Germany has produced a wealth of homosexual auteur filmmakers, but – for better or worse – none quite compare to Frank Ripploh aka Peggy von Schnottgenberg (Miko - aus der Gosse zu den Sternen, Taxi nach Kairo); the Berlin schoolteacher-turned-filmmaker who felt no shame in simultaneously grading papers in tearoom toilets while sucking cock through a less than glorious glory-hole. Ironically, recommended to me by my beautiful girlfriend, Taxi zum Klo (1981) aka Taxi to the Toilet (or "Taxi to the John", etc.) directed by and starring Mr. Ripploh in an embarrassingly semi-autobiographical role in a work that is not exactly the sort of homophile arthouse film one would expect from a master kraut-queer auteur like R.W. Fassbinder (Fox and His Friends, Querelle) and Werner Schroeter (Malina, This Night), but it does offer a spiked comical cocktail of ridiculously raunchy candid carnality of the debauched public educator sort. Relatively conventional and somewhat amateurish in narrative structure in part due to the shoestring budget it was shot on, Taxi zum Klo is a wild work of ‘camp realism’ that derives most of its entertainment value from its goofy and often gross domestic gay zaniness An eccentric elementary school teacher by day and a public pervert by night, Ripploh – who is hardly a prancing queen – does a swell job living a double life, at least in the beginning. Seemingly like some sort of laidback, hippie sociology professor in both appearance and character, Ripploh’s general lack of outward effete gayness makes him all the more interesting of a character, especially when sharing slobber and semen with other homely homo men and being tested (positive) for STDs in a most crude and compromised manner. After all, I doubt many filmmakers would direct themselves while will passively receiving a metal medical phallic probe in the fag end. Unflinchingly charming, comical, and capricious from beginning to end, Taxi zum Klo is a film that – despites its intensely intimate and often downright revolting subject manner – would probably appeal to most viewers, even those that feel a bit overwrought by the image of a swarthy man’s asshole being penetrated by a peculiar fellow in leather chaps.

 Like many controversial films, especially the sort featuring real-life (homo) sex, Taxi zum Klo was banned in Britain upon its initial release, which should no surprise to those that have already watched this penis-prominent cinematic work. Opening with backboard collage containing some of Ripploh’s most penetrating personal obsessions, including artwork by Salvador Dalí and Tom of Finland, a photo of queer German New Wave auteur Rosa von Praunheim (Neurosia: 50 Years of Perversity, The Einstein of Sex) and a family member in a Hitler Youth outfit, and homocentric pins with cutesy quips like “No More Heteros,” one immediately gets more than a clear idea as to the director’s personal proclivities and wacky Weltanschauung. Similar in theme to a lot of gay films of the 1970s/1980s from Europe and America – like William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band (1970), Wolfgang Petersen’s Die Konsequenz (1977) aka The Consequence, Ron Peck’s Nighthawks (1978) and Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986), Taxi zum Klo is a film that ultimately portrays the unfulfilling and self-destructive nature of homosexual subcultures during that era as vividly portrayed in Larry Kramer's gay-community-inflaming novel Faggots (1978) and von Praunheim's documentary Positive (1990), yet unlike many of the characters featured in similarly related works, Frank Ripploh does demand pity from the audience but only shits and giggles, thus managing to retain whatever is left of his personal dignity. Always maintaining a reasonably positive attitude, even when learning that genital warts are invading his putrid poop-chute, Ripploh merely expects the viewer to laugh at his and his butt-buddies rather grotesque bare-skinned bodies and abject personal failures in life. After meeting the man of his dreams – a movie theater attendant with a creepy mustache typical of the loony leather boys featured in Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) – Ripploh’s life begins to pick up momentum, but due to his wandering wienerschnitzel and jokester wisecracking, he soon learns that it is much easier and far more sexually fulfilling to blow random twinks and bears in public restrooms. Although initially contemplating a pseudo-marriage featuring an urbane lifestyle of leisure and male-on-male monogamy with the possible addition of an adopted 'mongoloid child' (his own words) after beginning a steamy relationship with his new boi toy, Ripploh inevitably realizes that such bourgeois lifestyle changes could impede on his secret life of lecherous latrine lovemaking; a nature high of the thoroughly bestial sort that, that like most addictions and compulsions – once initiated into – one can never divert from partaking in.

Described by The Village Voice as, “the first masterpiece about the mainstream of male gay life,” Taxi zum Klo – like must cinematic works of its kind – features a far from a flattering portrayal of homosexual lifestyles, especially when compared to a movie as relatively tame as Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005), yet it does ultimately humanize its protagonist because it reveals him to be a flawed individual with a thirst for vice, and dreams and hopes that, despite the repellant nature of his public sexual relations, most people can relate to. In spite of directing a sequel to the film entitled Taxi Nach Kairo (1987) – a work that is virtually impossible to obtain a copy of, even in Germany – Frank Ripploh would never direct another film as influential and critically revered as Taxi zum Klo, although he would be immortalized in the pages of queer cinema history by playing the role of a drunken legionnaire (with fellow German filmmakers Wolf Gremm and Robert van Ackeren also playing this symbolic role) in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982); the arguable 'Citizen Kane of gay cinema' and the only fiercely homoerotic film to have received a large degree of success at that time upon its initial release (selling 100,000 tickets in the first three weeks). Although Taxi zum Klo seems comparatively insignificant when compared to a film as artistically refined and iconic as Querelle, it does feature a certain artistic scrupulousness and integrity that most films – whether gay-themed or not – ultimately lack, hence why it has remained a favorite among fans after over three decades.  Featuring excerpts from Christian and His Stamp Collector Friend (????) – an impossible-to-find anti-pedophile PSA with unfathomably distressingly pedophiliac imagery – Taxi zum Klo is a film that will indubitably have you second guessing your child's seemingly normal elementary school teacher.

-Ty E

Ticket of No Return

As much as I would like to deny it, I am fond of Germanic lesbian surrealist flicks, especially of the secretive and semiotic yet borderline psychotic sort, especially those directed by butch blonde Aryanness Ulrike Ottinger (Freak Orlando, Joan of Arc of Mongolia); the daredevil dame director who seems to have better taste in women than her fellow male New Wave kraut compatriots Fassbinder, Herzog, and Volker Schlöndorff, and more an imagination than lady auteur filmmakers Margarethe von Trotta and Monika Treut. Recently, I had the pleasure of viewing Ottinger’s audacious alcoholic arthouse flick Bildnis einer Trinkerin. Aller jamais retour (1979) aka Ticket of No Return, a fashion keen surrealist odyssey about one lovely lady’s lunatic drunken antics as she cruises Berlin-Tegel, Germany in search of booze, boobs, and bodacious bustle while dressed to impress (mostly herself) in immoderately chic new romanticist style. Predating the succulent sci-fi fashion of Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky (1982) and the frantic lesbo lunacy of A. Hans Scheirl’s Dandy Dust (1998), Ticket of No Return is a marvelous cinematic passport with a big aesthetic return if you’re looking to see a highly cultivated form of cinematic degeneracy. Opening with the following narration, Ticket of No Return only gets more incoherent as it develops: “... She, a woman of exquisite beauty, of classical dignity and harmonious Raphaelesque proportions, a woman, created like no other to be Medea, Madonna, Beatrice, Iphigenia, Aspasia, decided one sunny winter day to leave La Rotonda...” Starring Tabea Blumenschein – who previously co-directed Laokoon & Söhne (Laokoon & Sons), Die Betörung der blauen Matrosen (The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors) and Madame X – Eine absolute Herrscherin (Madame X: An Absolute Ruler) with Ottinger and would later star in her work Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press) – Ticket of No Return is a work that is more than easy on the eyes due to its beauteous, if often belligerent and balmy, lead actress. Also featuring appearances from such great German New Wave actors as Magdalena Montezuma, Kurt Raab, Volker Spengler, Eddie Constantine, Günter Meisner, Nina Hagen, and Paul Glauer (one of the taller merry midgets from Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small), Ticket of No Return is a film that will interest any serious fan of post-WW2 German cinema, even if you’re not a lesbian or alcoholic.

Seemingly an esoteric artsy fartsy cinematic essay campaigning for the acceptance of debauched alcoholism of the active sightseeing sort, Ticket of No Return is a film that will not only discombobulate most viewers with its heterodox fidelity for booze and lilly-licker hermeticism, but also its unequivocally avant-garde nonlinear structure. Although unmistakably female in appearance and in fashion sense, “She” is a stoic yet smashed street warrior with a proclivity towards older proletarian women, as expressed with her relatively unsuccessful bath and sleepover with a considerably less attractive and seemingly more mature lady. In fact, aside from a monotone chorus trio of statistic and fact spouting ladies in futuristic yet mundane grey flight attendant outfits named “Social Question” (Magdalena Montezuma), “Accurate Statistics” (Orpha Termin), and “Common Sense” (Monika von Cube), “She” never has any sort of steady esprit de corps, but instead merely meanders around like a perennial wandering Jew that is deracinated from all land and all human company. Of course, Ms. She doesn’t exactly need friends as she has no problem finding formidable fun, which includes – aside from her delightful drunken buffoonery – a not-exactly-high-wire balancing act and riding on the hood of a daredevil driver’s stunt into a wall-on-fire. Fitting somewhere in between Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) minus the nostalgia and Werner Herzog’s early realist-surrealist masterpiece Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) in terms of narrative (or lack thereof) and its ostensibly absurdist aesthetic, yet a work of undeniable idiosyncrasy all of its own, Ticket of No Return is one of those rare works that reminds the viewer that the artistic medium of film is not exactly as limited and played-out as latest American ‘indy’ film would leave us to believe.

Ultimately, I think the strangely delectable she-devil anti-heroess of Ticket of No Return is sort of what Marcello Mastroianni is to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 ½ (1963), as a sort of vivid express of Ulrike Ottinger’s ideal alter-ego; a lady of stunning beauty with an exquisite fashion sense (which the director certainly lacks), but also aloof, venturesome, and wholly autonomous (fitting more in tune with the lady auteur’s predilections, at least as an artist). Of course, she’s ‘inner self’ and butch doppelgänger – a leather-clad man-boy akin to the unsavory fellows featured in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964) and William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) – reminds her that despite how beautiful and stylish she is on the outside and no matter how shitfaced she is, an instinctive masculinity consumes her soul. Personally, I cannot think of anything more unappealing in a prospective lover from the fairer sex than an aggressive alcoholic with an acute case of muteness yet with the help of Ottinger’s curious yet calculating direction and the films fashion designer, Tabea Blumenschein is nothing short of seductive as “she,” even if she seems like she might bite. Always climbing to a literal and figurative stairway to some sort intangible heaven of sorts, “she” is inevitably lost in a human storm of metropolitan lunacy and absurdity. Indubitably, a semi-autobiographical cinematic work of the decisively obscured and transcendental sort, not unlike works by fellow queer kraut auteur filmmakers Werner Schroeter (Day of the Idiots, Malina) and Rosa von Praunheim (A Virus Knows no Morals, Anita: Dances of Vice), Ticket of No Return is a one-way ticket to somewhere in between lesbian life-everlasting and limbo in the lower world. 

-Ty E

The Body Beneath

After completing his typically wretched work Torture Dungeon (1969), low-camp auteur Andy Milligan (Vapors, Guru, the Mad Monk) would make a deal with British producer Leslie Elliot and move across the pond to England. During his exile in England, Milligan directed two of his “greatest” and most original films: Nightbirds (1969) and The Body Beneath (1970). Once presumed-lost, but now found thanks to dandy Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn (Valhalla Rising, Drive), Nightbirds is arguably Milligan’s most mature and artistically-merited yet strikingly stark and maliciously misogynistic work that – not unlike his debut featurette Vapors (1965) – takes a more audacious and uncompromising look at the frailty of the human condition, especially among sexual degenerates; a subject the debauched director knew all too well. Being a sadomasochistic sodomite with a terribly torrid and troubled personal life, Milligan ultimately opted for directing escapist exploitation flicks and bloody bad period pieces, but with The Body Beneath, the technically-incompetent visionary created a more serious and – dare I say – more classy film in the Grand Guignol-esque cinematically fantastic style he is infamous for. “Filmed in the graveyards of England” in “bone-chilling color” and featuring "sexually rampant ghouls, depraved souls...and blood-red roses," The Body Beneath is a modern vampire flick with traditional folklore elements about an ancient family of inbred bloodsuckers that is looking for some new, mortal inter-family blood, so as to rejuvenate their current degenerating state. Led by a charismatic yet physically unremarkable “Reverend” who likes to quote Oscar Wilde (although forgetting his name due to his advanced undead age) and protected by a fearsome threesome of green-faced barbarian Barbarella-like lady vamps, the frightfully fabulous Ford family takes residence in the Carfax Abbey; a Gothic monastery with an ancient graveyard that is haunted by the bloodsucking ghoul gals. Reasonably paced and surprisingly coherent in structure for an Andy Milligan monster movie, The Body Beneath is a welcome relief from the emotionally and aesthetically sterile Hammer horror films that were flooding the British film market at that time.

Reverend Alexander Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed) is quite the charming bloodsucker in a religious sheepherder’s clothing, as he has a wonderful way with words as displayed early on in The Body Beneath when he declares in the most grand pomposity that, “I know everything dear boy!” and “it isn’t easy being right all the time” and, indeed, it would seem that he does, especially when it comes to his family’s extensive genealogical records. Looking to recruit some fresh mortal for the immortal vampiric Ford family that goes back no less than 21 centuries, the good Reverend aggressively recruits long-distance mortal relatives against their will and is especially interested in female Fords as he will use them – not unlike the National Socialist Schutzstaffel Lebensborn breeding program – to sire a rejuvenated generation of immaculate god-men that the Rev fervidly describes as “godlike in appearance.” To help him with the less glamorous work associated with kidnapping, torture, and murder, the Reverend uses a slavish, shy, and seemingly half-retarded hunchback named Spool (played by Berwick Kaler of Milligan’s Nightbirds). Spool may be a ridiculously repulsive monster-man that does dastardly and dirty deeds for vampires, but that does not stop him from being hopeless romantic that eventually falls prey to the temptations of a beauty mortal girl that the Reverend has held captive. Featuring less than erotic gratuitous sex scenes, violent yet exceedingly schlockish death scenes, and mind-numbingly maladroit melodrama, The Body Beneath is a film of unintentionally delightful distinction. Undoubtedly, the greatest part of the film is when the entire Ford family congregates into a giant crypt and engages in a Dionysian orgiastic feast of blood and debate as to whether they should move to America. Bearing a suitably campy resemblance to the faggy and fairy varmints of Jack Smith’s revolutionary and sexually-ambiguous featurette Flaming Creatures (1963), except filmed in a quasi-psychedelic and notably atmospheric color that further accentuates Milligan’s costume design talents, The Body Beneath – although inferior to the auteur’s other British trash masterpiece Nightbirds – concludes in a sinisterly climatic fashion.

Sneeringly attacking his nation of origin, Milligan decided to present the land of the free as a virtual hellhole inhabited by the “scum of the earth”; full of socially and physically defective pimps, prostitutes, vagrants, and medieval religious fanatics, but I guess that is what one would expect from the miserable, misanthropic auteur who gave us Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1972). In the rather risible realm of The Body Beneath, ghastly bloodsucking ghouls are the most valiant of heroes and all things pure and untainted are determinedly defiled. That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised is if the persnickety Reverend Ford was an alter-ego of Andy Milligan and the rest of the vamps being symbolic of his off-Broadway performers. As Milligan fanatic Nicolas Winding Refn once stated regarding the schlockmeister filmmaker’s horror works: “They have these strange scenes of violence, poorly done but so charming and campy, and all conveyed with such sincerity.” Indeed, one of the main appeals of Milligan’s marginal cinematic works, especially Vapors, Nightbirds, and The Body Beneath, is that – unlike the similarly incompetently directed gore flicks of Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast, Color Me Blood Red) – they have a distinct and blatant wholehearted essence behind their direction, hence the gutter-auteur’s posthumous popularity in the underground. With The Body Beneath, Milligan was indubitably at his most preeminent, which might not mean much in context with his mostly wholly worthless filmography, but as contemporary alpha-auteur Nicolas Winding Refn sentimentally declared regarding the ghastly filmmaker: "Few filmmakers can boast of having a recognisable style, but when you see a Milligan movie, you are in no doubt whose film it is."

-Ty E

Weininger's Last Night

With possibly the exception of Ulrike Ottinger’s carnivalesque surrealist lesbian epic Freak Orlando (1981) and Christoph Schlingensief' Mutters Maske (1988) – a loose remake of Veit Harlan's National Socialist arthouse masterpiece Opfergang (1944) – there is no other film that I have been more obsessed with seeing than Paulus Manker’s Weiningers Nacht (1990) aka Weininger's Last Night, not least of all because of having been enamored and intrigued with the film's tragic subject for a number of years. Described by fellow Austrian anti-Semite Adolf Hitler in the following manner, “Dietrich Eckhart once told me that in all his life he had known just one good Jew: Otto Weininger, who killed himself on the day when he realized that the Jew lives upon the decay of peoples,” Weininger's Last Night is about a youthful genius who was plagued with dire inconsistencies and whose own ethno-masochistic proclivities would ultimately lead to his own self-inflicted premature demise at the age of 23 in 1903. Weininger proposed the controversial thesis that the archetypical Jew and the archetypical woman are one in the same: passive, unproductive, unconscious, and amoral. The son of a strict yet cultured Viennese Jewish goldsmith, the physically unremarkable Otto Weininger grew up to receive a Ph.D. degree in philosophy and finished his marvelous magnum opus Sex and Character: A Fundamental Investigation (1903) aka Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung less than a year later – a work that would make the young genius more popular in his day than Sigmund Freud – yet he would not live to see this fame as he committed suicide in the same house Beethoven died in shortly after the book’s publication. 100% Hebrew by blood yet highly influenced by proto-Nazi racialist writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s best-selling work The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), one could argue that Weininger’s suicide was merely the act of a logical man carrying out his own thesis, as he argued that Judaism is "the extreme of cowardliness" and “The Jew has no really strong will.” Indeed, it was not converting to Protestantism that freed Weininger from his innate ‘Jewishness’ but a desperate act of self-annihilation. As fellow anti-Semitic Semite and celebrated Jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon stated in his recent work The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (2011) about Weininger: “He hated women and Jews because he was a woman and a Jew. He adored Aryan masculinity because he probably lacked that quality in any significant amount in his own being. This revelation probably led Weininger to kill himself…he had managed to understand what his book was all about.” For those who have studied Weininger’s work and life, Atzmon’s thoughts might not seem like much of a revelation, as Paulus Manker seems to draw the same conclusion in his minor masterpiece of celluloid theatre Weininger's Last Night; a film that is both an efficacious introduction to the forlorn philosopher and an audacious piece of Austrian autocratic cinematic art.

No stranger to the curious case of Otto Weininger, Austrian theatric auteur Paulus Manker (Schmutz aka Dirt, Der Kopf des Mohren aka The Moor's Head) directed and starred in the 1982 work Weininger's Night (The Soul of a Jew) written by Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol, which proved to be his greatest triumph as a thespian, henceforth inspiring him to adapt it into the film Weininger's Last Night. Of Jewish ancestry himself (he dedicates the film to his Jewish father), Manker brings a certain authenticity and intense intimacy to Weininger's Last Night that is further exemplified by some of his casting decisions, notably the inclusion of his own mother Hilde Sochor to star as Otto Weininger’s overbearing mom Adelheid. Virtually channeling the spirit of the suicidal Judaic man of immense genius, Manker would also play Weininger in the Hungarian film My 20th Century (1989) aka Az én XX. Századom directed by Ildikó Enyedi – a work that earned its director a Caméra d'Or ("Golden Camera") at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival – but no other acting role can compare to his performance and direction as immortalized in Weininger's Last Night; a work I would humbly consider the greatest celluloid ‘tribute’ to an intellectual figure ever made. A fabulous quasi-Freudian expressionistic psychodrama set almost entirely in one mere opera house theatre room, Weininger's Last Night is a tragicomedic window into one young genius’ seemingly schizoid mind. Haunted by a female doppelganger (a virtual Jungian shadow), his overbearing parents, and historical intellectual figures of his day, including Sigmund Freud, August Strindberg, and Paul Julius Möbius, the Otto Weininger of Weininger's Last Night is propelled into hysterical states ranging from morbid megalomania to maniac depression, yet he is mostly able to prevail due to his intellectual sternness; a trait that English-language Weininger biographer David Abrahamsen (The Mind and Death of a Genius) argued was the only thing keeping the young genius from completely breaking with sanity. As is vividly expressed in the film, even during his untimely suicide by way of a firearm to the chest, Weininger was able to separate his visceral emotions from his domineering intellect, arguing that self-slaughter was no more of a physiological act than sneezing or coughing as described by controversial Italian-German psychiatrist-turned-avant-garde-writer Oskar Panizza. Despite its saturnine subject matter, Weininger's Last Night is ultimately a black comical work of the decidedly snide and cynical persuasion, but not so much so that the viewer is not introduced to Weininger’s complex weltanschauung and his thoughts on Judaism, Aryanism, Zionism, Protestantism, and gender. If Woody Allen’s character in Zelig (1983) was less sentimental and had more testicular fortitude and came-of-age in Fin de siècle Vienna, he would probably resemble the innately neurotic yet intellectually dynamic Otto Weininger featured in Weininger's Last Night.

On top of inspiring thinkers and artists as great as August Strindberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, Alfred Kubin, Robert Musil, Gertrude Stein and Stefan Zweig, Otto Weininger and his work Geschlecht und Charakter would also inspire quasi-fascist thinkers like Austrian völkisch mystic Lanz von Liebenfels, Heimito von Doderer, Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, and Sicilian Radical Traditionalist Baron Julius Evola, as well as the German National Socialists who edited the parts of his writing they did not agree with. Although Weininger's Last Night is arguably the greatest introduction to the life and ideas of Otto Weininger, one must have at least a basic understanding of the intellectual and political climate of late 19th century/early 20th Vienna to fully appreciate the film. At a time when so-called self-loathing Jews (Weininger, Karl Kraus, Egon Friedell, Arthur Trebitsch, etc.) and racially-conscious Jews (Max Nordau, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Theodor Lessing, etc.) battled one another in the intellectual world, it is probably hard for modern viewers to accept such a seemingly absurd scenario, thus Weininger's Last Night makes for a strikingly singular and aesthetically extravagant awakening to this seemingly peculiar phenomenon in Austrian history. Despite being a man of overwhelming contradictions, Otto Weininger offers the following telling insight in the film: "Antisemitism is a Jewish invention."  Like Jesus Christ – another great 'self-loathing Jew' of history – Weininger wears a crown of thorns and his is ultimately resurrected via the posthumous popularity of his work Geschlecht und Charakter; a work that will inevitably inspire the goyish antisemitism of the Third Reich. With potent yet preposterous scenarios of absurdist anti-Semitic puppet shows, castration-anxiety-fueled culinary circumcision, menacing Mel Brooks-esque musical numbers, and psychoanalytic psychodrama, Weininger's Last Night is a wonderfully wicked (un)love letter to not only to the film's subject, but a particular time and place in Europe before the rise and fall of Hitler, the death of European imperialism, and the founding of the State of Israel, thus it should be not surprise as to why, although Freud is still a darling of contemporary academics, Weininger has been conveniently disposed of in the kosher dustbin of history.  

-Ty E

Population: 1

As much as I despise musicals, especially those made during the decisively dreadful and innately soulless 1980s, I cannot help declare my forbidden love for the melodious and misanthropic dystopian punk rock sci-fi musical Population: 1 (1986) directed by Dutch auteur Rene Daalder (Habitat, Hysteria) and starring Tomata du Plenty, an early member of the ultra-campy psychedelic drag-queen troupe The Cockettes and singer of the seminal synthpunk band the Screamers. Although I have known for some time that Daalder is an eclectic and multitalented filmmaker due the stark contrast between his early Meyer-esque exploitation flick Massacre at Central High (1976) and his more recent documentary Here is Always Somewhere Else (2007) – a very personal work about the director’s forlorn friend Bas Jan Ader – it was not until I viewed Population: 1 that I realized that the flying Dutchman should have a much more illustrious and popular filmmaking career, at least among dedicated cinephiles. Essentially, like The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) meets Liquid Sky (1982) meets Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) meets The Running Man (1987), except on an expertly-disguised micro-budget, Population: 1 is probably the best (and only) example of an 'arthouse punk' flick. Utilizing a surprisingly peachy pomo potpourri of utterly new and then-high-tech video technology, archived concert footage, animated nudes, and vintage silent film and newsreel clips, Population: 1 is a positively punchy postmodern punk rock musical that – when compared to the ‘artistic integrity’ of punk movie classics like Ulli Lommel’s Blank Generation (1980), Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia (1984) and Zale Dalen’s Terminal City Ricochet (1990) – seems like a misunderstood masterpiece among mindless mediocrity. Originally encountering the punk scene after his teacher Russ Meyer asked him to work on the never-made film Who Killed Bambi? (1978), a cinematic work intended as a punk rock equivalent of The Beatles’ A Hard Day's Night (1964) and a quasi-sequel to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) that was also co-written by Roger Ebert, Daalder set-up “Sex Pistols USA” headquarters in his house in LA and eventually ended up meeting and befriending Tomata du Plenty and the two decided to collaborate on a conceptual 'music-video album' and a post-apocalyptic arthouse flick entitled Mensch in the style of German expressionist works like Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920); none of which came to fruition. Picking up the scraps from the aborted music-videos and footage Daalder filmed for The Screamers concerts at the Whisky and Roxy in LA and working fast after du Plenty was diagnosed HIV positive, the two eventually assembled the 60-minute semi-futuristic feature Population: 1, which is quite arguably the most ambitious and experimental punk film ever made and a vivid and witty piece of early video art.

Population: 1 is a virtual one-man show that stars Tomata du Plenty as the satirically narcissistic host, a typically nauseating product of the 1980s and a positively positive (even when complaining) yet uniquely uncivil civil servant (a defense contractor) and the purported last man who earth who describes his coming-of-age as being chronicled in the novels Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and the classic Hollywood film East of Eden (1955) starring James Dean. Population: 1 essentially consists of du Plenty going on an erratic and somewhat preachy yet pleasantly peculiar spiel about his life and memories, and an iconoclastic history lesson about the United Sates, hence why the films features a picturesque pastiche of concert footage and old newsreel excerpts.  Indeed, long before Robert Zemeckis ever chronicled the history of social change in twentieth century America through the countrified eyes of a cutesy Alabama-born mental-invalid via Forrest Gump (1994), Rene Daalder was able to superimpose images of modern actors over seemingly ancient historical film footage. Like Mr. Gump, du Plenty is a hopeless romantic at heart that that is most impassioned when speaking of his steamy love affair with his sometimes hostile girlfriend Sheela Edwards. Although not particularly beautiful nor elegant, Edwards – who looks like should could be Alla Nazimova's more vicious, long-lost great-granddaughter – is a seductive singer and a ferocious femme fatale as especially exemplified by her cover of Marion Harriss’ 1920 hit “I’m a Jazz Vampire.” A proudly emasculated American male in the tradition of Rudolph Valentino, but nowhere near as attractive and charming, du Plenty sings feminist duets with Ms. Edwards and allows her to physically pummel him when not on stage, thereupon sparking mass effiminization in American males; or so he says in an awfully proud, pussified manner. Showing his dedication to the American anti-fascist cause, du Plenty, although a cowardly draft-dodger, also shares his scarlet lady with American troops during the Second World War. Of course, not all of du Plenty’s memories are as fond as he would like them to be, especially in regard to his stay with fellow chosen “elites” in a New Wavish cabaret-like atomic bomb shelter. The final 1/3 of Population: 1 also happens to be one of the most interesting segments of the film, featuring appearances from Beck (then-12-years-old), Vampira (Maila Nurmi), El Duce (The Screamers, The Mentors), Penelope Houston (The Avengers), members of the Chicano rock group Los Lobos, and Dutch actor Carel Struycken (“Lurch” of The Addams Family film series), among others. On top of playing an acting role in the film, The Screamers drummer K. K. Barrett also worked as the art director for Population: 1. Barrett’s spectacular work in the film must have gotten someone’s attention, as he went on to be a production designer for such big name Spike Jonze and Sofia Coppola films as Being John Malkovich (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), I ♥ Huckabees (2004), and Where the Wild Things Are (2009). Needless to say, aside from being a outstandingly ostentatious and totally outlandish pioneering work of vivacious video art, Population: 1 is a virtual who’s who of popular and not-so-popular American musicians and artists, thus it should be no surprise that MTV would subsequently borrow its audio/visual aesthetic from the film.

Not unsurprisingly, Population: 1 is far from every The Screamers fan’s favorite film as the work is regarded as the motivating factor behind the band's messy and irreparable breakup. Originally, Tommy Gear – the keyboardist, vocalist, and co-songwriter of The Screamers – was supposed to compose the musical score for Population: 1, but he inevitably walked off the set of the film midway through its production in a most histrionic fashion after getting in a number of back-and-forth cavils with Tomata du Plenty. Some blame director Rene Daalder for this, as it has been claimed by certain individuals that he pitted the band members against one another so as to have greater artistic control over the production. Whatever the reality behind this claim, one would have a hard time denying that Population: 1, even with its many famous/infamous actors and megalomaniac lead character, is essentially an auteur-piece created by a filmmaker with a very specific and utterly uncompromising vision, henceforth it would also be misleading to describe the film as mere ‘punk rock musical.’ Indeed, Population: 1 has pioneering punks as actors and memorable musical numbers, but it is barely the sort of work that can be appreciated, let alone adequately gauged by the average glue-sniffing philistine with a retarded haircut. 

-Ty E

The Last of England

Partially inspired and named after a painting by English Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England (1987) directed by British auteur Derek Jarman (The Garden, Wittgenstein) is an epic non-narrative cinematic poem shot on Super 8 that acts as an aesthetically-enrapturing obituary for traditional English culture and customs. Although his father was born in New Zealand and his mother was ½ Jewish by ancestry, Jarman – with the possible exception of Peter Greenaway – is arguably the most eclectically “English” director from the last couple decades of the twentieth century as testified by the distinctly Anglo-Saxon nature of his films that often tended to delight in Elizabethan, Shakespearean, and Victorian themes and aesthetics while also capturing the troubling and apocalyptic zeitgeist of his foreordained age. That being said, The Last of England – a work featuring themes of English decline that were examined in his early (anti)punk flick Jubilee (1977) and an aesthetic and narrative structure similar to his film The Angelic Conversation (1985) – is undoubtedly the grand culmination of Derek Jarman’s life as an artist and a filmmaker. Originally under the working titled The Dead Sea, The Last of England was once described by Jarman as a poetic allegorical work about, “the sinking of the Titanic, the Titanic being Great Britain.” Dissatisfied with the original, more esoteric title The Dead Sea, the lead actress of the work, Tilda Swinton, confessed to Jarman that, “You can’t call it that. It’s the most vibrant film I’ve ever seen.” Indeed, lady Swinton was positively correct in her assertion as The Last of England is one of those rare and ideally idiosyncratic films that – not unlike F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), and David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) – seems to do the seemingly impossible by totally transcending the typical constraints of the film medium, at least in a metaphysical sense. Akin to a hallucinatory drug and out-of-body experience, The Last of England was constructed by Jarman in a similar semi-unforeseeable, journey-like fashion. Shot in a random experimental manner with specific scenarios and themes outlined but with nothing resembling a 'proper' film script, the artistically-bantam British auteur was not able to fully realize the film until after spending endless time viewing and analyzing the footage he shot, thereafter dividing the work into 15 distinct sections. In fact, the film’s poet, Derek Jarman, guides The Last of England through the comfort of his somber, skull-adorned writing desk. Featuring torrid and sometimes terrifying scenes of junkies getting their kick, terrorists and tyrants turning the streets into urban battlefields, cold executions, marriages formed and irrevocably broken by state persecution, and the tiny Island state in flames, The Last of England is a penetrating and unforgettable work that was meticulously assembled by one of the Queen’s last great artists.

Taking its name from Ford Madox Brown painting of a Victorian husband and wife aboard a tightly crowed ship which is headed for a new life abroad, The Last of England is undoubtedly a more pessimistic and misanthropic work than the Pre-Raphaelite artwork that inspired it. While the couple featured in Brown’s painting may be physically cramped and wearing frowns of discontent on their faces, they – unlike the eternally damned citizens of Jarman’s The Last of England – have a potential future, even if not an ideal one. Featuring unknown non-actor Mark ‘Spring’ Adley – the debauched son of a British MP and Jarman’s onetime-lover – in the starring role, The Last of England is a film that, although decidedly avant-garde in style and sentiment, does offer a certain uncompromising gritty realism of England (and most specifically London) under “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher’s rule. Although Mr. Spring would have the nonpareil opportunity of starring in what is arguably one of the most masterly and unmitigated English films ever made, he felt that Jarman’s brand of filmmaking was completely and utterly “pointless” and instead preferred trashy popular American soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty. Of course, with the exception of narration by Nigel Terry (written by Jarman) and sound-clips from radio news and historical bigwigs like Uncle Adolf Hitler, The Last of England does not feature a single line of dialogue and certainly none of the sort of dastardly Dallas-esque melodramatic verbal quibbling Spring (whose role in the film is entirely voiceless) was keen of. As a real-life unrepentant drug-addict and perennial “wild boy,” Spring essentially plays himself in The Last of England. In fact, many of the scenarios featured in the film having a strikingly resemblance to those featured in alpha-Beat writer William S. Burroughs’ dystopian/utopian (depending on who is reading it) novel The Wild Boys (1971), which is no revelation when considering the influence the book would have on various British artists/musicians (David Bowie, Duran Duran, Joy Division, etc), including Jarman who included the junky icon in his short film Pirate Tape (1983). In fact, Jarman once remarked that as far as those individuals who inspired his brand of filmmaking, “Anger, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Rauschenberg were the influences – Andy (Warhol), the court jester.” In a film where the lead protagonist shoots dope, masturbates over Baroque artist Caravaggio’s painting Profane Love, and feverishly plays the pipes of pan in London's burning post-industrial badlands, it is easy to see that with The Last of England, Derek Jarman both reveled in and transcended his artistic influences, henceforth leading the way for the despair-laden and seemingly ethnosuicidal Super 8 arthouse works of anomalous Aryan auteur Jörg Buttgereit (Nekromantik, Der Todesking) and – to a lesser extent – the experimental homoerotic arthouse-trash works of Bruce LaBruce (No Skin Off My Ass, The Raspberry Reich).

It was not until Derek Jarman finished directing and editing The Last of England that he was able to offer the following semi-ambiguous description of the film: “The poet wakes in a visionary landscape where he encounters personifications of psychic states.” And, indeed, The Last of England is a sui generis cinematic work that, unlike virtually every other film made in the history of cinema, is endowed with a trance-inducing essence that has the aesthetic dynamism to transfer viewers to various seemingly unconscious cerebral states. Needless to say, The Last of England makes for a psychoanalyst’s most sodden yet sensual wet-dream as it is a work that metaphysically expresses what mere literature is incapable of articulating; the raw and self-scathingly scrupulous vivid visual depiction of one artist’s torn, tragic, and tormented soul. Luckily, Jarman also wrote a book of the same name (later retitled Kicking the Pricks) to accompany The Last of England. Unlike the film, The Last of England book is a fairly literal and illuminating work where – in the tradition of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida – Jarman discusses everything from his troubled relationship with his father (a Lancaster bomber pilot who suffered from depression due to his involvement with so much death during the Second World War) to the increasing disintegration of traditional English society, kultur, and art. As explained by his friends in the documentary Derek Jarman: Life as Art (2004), Jarman had a disaccording dichotomous perspective on England’s dramatic cultural shifts during the second of the twentieth century. Although a politically-active gay man with AIDS who welcomed the increasingly liberal views in regard to unconventional sexual persuasions, Jarman also felt that these social changes came at the price of the once-glorious traditional English society that he held so sacredly, henceforth making his films, most specifically The Last of England, all the more pertinent and potent today than when they were released decades ago as these cinematic works act as a cultural 'missing link" between the traditional 'land of the Angles' and the increasingly less English, technocratic multicultural England of today. While although an extremely personal work featuring the virtual dissolution of his childhood and the traditions that came with it (as portrayed in inter-spliced vintage home movie clips), The Last of England also depicts an entire nation of people who are plagued by terrorism, racial discord, substance abuse, nihilistic hedonism, and a deluge of ever escalating moral and culture decay, thus making for a wonderful post-Spenglerian nightmare sprinkled with nostalgia for a people and culture lost long ago. 

-Ty E

Women in Revolt

On June 3, 1968, schizophrenic lesbian Valerie Solanas – the radical feminist who penned the laughably ludicrous SCUM Manifesto that urged the apparently-fairer sex to, "overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex" – arrived at the Warhol factory in atypically feminine attire and like the cowardly woman she was, shot the ultra-effete pop-artist Andy Warhol while he was preoccupied with the telephone. Although Solanas ultimately failed in her attempt to assassinate a man as physically frail as Andy Warhol with a loaded weapon, not least of all because she was an exceptionally mentally unhinged female with an innately irrational case of debilitating hysteria and delusions of grandeur, she continued to harass and stalk the supposedly misogynist artist after her release from New York State Prison for Women in 1971, of which she was once again arrested for not long thereafter. As Solanas told journalist Robert Marmorstein of The Village Voice, "[s]he has dedicated the remainder of her life to the avowed purpose of eliminating every single male from the face of the earth." Of course, Andy Warhol took these threats very seriously and lived in fear for the rest of his life that the SCUMbag butch broad with an extra big dick-less chip on her shoulder would attempt to assassinate him again. Thankfully, Warhol still maintained his sense of humor during all of this as demonstrated by the film Andy Warhol’s Women in Revolt (1971) directed by Paul Morrissey (Trash, Blood for Dracula). Not only would the film be the last production where Warhol himself got behind the camera, but Women in Revolt is also a parody of the so-called Women’s Liberation Movement, most specifically targeting saucy psycho Solanas and her hubris-driven SCUM Manifesto. Starring Candy Darling (Flesh, Der Tod der Maria Malibran), Jackie Curtis (Burroughs, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism), and Holly Woodlawn (Trash, Night Owl) – three of the Warhol factory’s most legendary transvestites – as the women leading a mindless and ultimately failed revolution against a mostly imagined patriarchal society under the acronym PIG (Politically Involved Girls), which is undoubtedly a sardonic snipe at Solanas’ sordid SCUM ("Society For Cutting Up Men"), Women In Revolt is one of the greatest and most campy anti-feminist works ever made and a film that would only be rivaled by John Waters’ later work Female Trouble (1974).

Although missing the always delightful Joe Dallesandro, Women in Revolt has much in common with the "Paul Morrissey Trilogy” (Flesh, Trash, Heat) that the iconic junky hunk starred in due to it also being produced Andy Warhol and its unmistakable pseudo-cinéma vérité anti-aesthetic. A lifelong opponent of liberalism and self-described "right-winger" of the Irish Roman Catholic persuasion, Paul Morrissey has consistently mocked those with less restrained bleeding hearts consistently throughout his filmmaking career and with Women in Revolt – an audacious attack on the more preposterous trends associated with Second-wave feminism – the Warhol factory auteur assembled one of his most contemptuous and facetious attacks to date. According to the most articulate of the tranny trio, Jackie (Jackie Curtis) – a feisty virgin suffering from an acute case of sexual repression – the fierce feminists are, “tired of being exploited.” Not allowing her idealism to get in the way of her instinctive female narcissism and jealously, Jackie has no problem proudly declaring that, “Candy’s after pussy, Holly’s after cock…What I’m after is something – intangible.” Indeed, like a “True Believer” in the sense outlined in German-American social psychologist Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book of the same name, Jackie – who keeps a slavish houseboy (Dusty Springs) to do her nails and tidy her apartment while incessantly torturing him physically and emotionally – is a woman who romantically dreams and somewhat actively aspires for a female-ruled future due to her absolute discontent with her own plush and privileged personal life. Like the failed-bourgeois communist revolutionary that scapegoats the abstract and impersonal “capitalist” for his personal failure, Jackie and her girls hold men and their pesky peckers responsible for their own (at least partially) self-induced misery. In the heat of passion, Jackie declares to her floppy-cock houseboy that, “Don’t you know there’s something more beautiful in this world than – that thing – between your legs? Haven’t you heard of Women’s liberation?...Cunt is beautiful…You know that males are inferior to females.” To her credit, the houseboy’s flaccid cock is quite unsightly, hence why she eventually ‘cheats’ on him by buying sex from a male prostitute named Johnny Minute (Johnny Kemper), thus embezzling the funds (which were conned out of a senile, elderly woman) of PIG and betraying and hereafter absconding from the feminist cause in the process. Unsurprisingly, the other two bro-broads of PIG also desert their newfound fascistic-feminist ideology. Candy Darling is initially recruited for PIG to help launch the movement due to her glamorous status as a “society deb socialite" (as described by a hostile bull-dyke reporter). Of course, Darling’s intentions were never savory to begin with as she hoped to use PIG as a dubious means for launching a film acting career. Darling eventually becomes a talentless international actress with mostly non-speaking roles in Jules Verne adaptation filmed in Yugoslavia and Italian sexploitation films, including a fictional Roman epic work entitled The Fornicon by allowing film directors to, “fuck the daylights out of her.” Considering she was raped by her brutish, closet-case husband Marty (Martin Kove), Holly’s conversion to feminism is more reasonable than the other two, but she inevitably forsakes her femininity by bestially molesting any man that passes her general radius, thus eventually degenerating into a homeless wino wench by the conclusion of Women in Revolt. Needless to say, by the end of Women in Revolt, the PIG ladies have not only failed to get anywhere without the help of the by-now-fairly-greasy fried bacon between their legs, but have also blundered every superficial attempt at being uniquely ‘liberated’ as a woman via contrived female empowerment.

Before Andy Warhol succumbed to a botched gallbladder in New York City at 6:32 a.m. on February 22, 1987 (maybe death via assassination would have been a more glorious way to go out?!), two of the three stars in Women in Revolt would also perish tragically. On March 21, 1974, at aged 29, Candy Darling died of Lymphoma, of which s/he commented in a melodramatic letter sent to Warhol and friends, "Unfortunately before my death I had no desire left for life . . . I am just so bored by everything. You might say bored to death. (D)id you know I couldn't last. I always knew it. I wish I could meet you all again." Although Jackie Curtis would appear in the films Underground U.S.A. (1980) and Burroughs (1983), s/he eventually died of a heroin overdose at the age of 38 in 1985 that was eerily foretold in Lou Reed’s popular song “Walk on the Wild Side” in the following verse, "...Jackie is just speeding away - Thought she was James Dean for a day... then I guess she had to crash, Valium would have helped that bash."  As revealed in the documentary Superstar in a Housedress (2004), Curtis was receiving a blow-job from a woman when she died in what was 'her' first heterosexual liaison, which is assuredly an ironic and biting way for a drag-queen to croak. Even though Holly Woodlawn gave up on the fabulous life of an actress in 1979, thereupon cutting her hair and becoming a butch busboy after moving back home to Miami with her parents in the process, she would go on to play cameo roles in films like Twin Falls Idaho (1999) and as herself in the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2006). Although Women in Revolt may not offer a strong argument for the equality nor superiority of the fairer sex, the brief and tragic lives of two of three of its anatomically-male stars makes for a worthy argument that – relatively speaking – biological females may in fact be stronger than the typical tranny.  Of course, as the estrogen-deprived lesbo reporter at the conclusion of the film states, "The people want filth" and – thankfully – Women in Revolt is overflowing with it.

-Ty E

Water Power

I wouldn’t call myself an enemy of enemas, at least when it comes to proper medical uses, but I certainly cannot see how anyone would be sexually stimulated by such toxic and downright terribly repulsive material in pornographic form. After watching the cult porn flick Water Power (1977) aka The Enema Bandit directed by Shaun Costello (Midnight Desires, Dracula Exotica) – a decidedly politically-incorrect adult hardcore work loosely based on a real-life “enema bandit” and his manure-phile mania – I haven’t changed my mind about defecation as a distinctly deplorable aphrodisiac, but I must admit it was a gratifying and especially exhilarating X-rated work that most certainly transcends the usually fine line between pornography and a gritty cult flick. Starring avant-garde porn legend and AVN Hall of Fame member Jamie Gillis (Through the Looking Glass, Nighthawks) in a typically fitting sleazy role (although there is nothing 'typical' about the role itself) as “Burt – The Enema Bandit," Water Power is indubitably as nasty, nauseating and aesthetically nefarious today as it was upon its original release over three decades ago. As far as vintage pornography is concerned, Water Power is undoubtedly one of the most – if not the most – brutal work of the Golden Age of Porn, even beating Shaun Costello’s previous, aptly-titled effort Forced Entry (1973) to a shitty and bloody pulp in terms of its loony lewdness, spunky libertinage, and unsightly urban austerity. In short, Water Power, like Bacchanale (1970) directed by the Amero brothers, The Sex Garage (1972) and LA Plays Itself (1972) directed by Fred Halsted, Through the Looking Glass (1976) directed by Jonas Middleton, and Café Flesh (1982) and Dr. Caligari (1989) directed by Stephen Sayadian, is one of those rare embarrassing erotic works that one does not need to be necessarily turned-on by to fully appreciate, thus making it deserving of recognition in the pages of film history, alongside the audacious metropolitan early works of Robert John Downey Sr. (Chafed Elbows, Putney Swope), Martin Scorsese (Who's That Knocking at My Door, Taxi Driver), and Abel Ferrara (Driller Killer, Ms. 45). 

 Very loosely based on the eminent enema escapades of real-life serial enema-ist Michael H. Kenyon – a fecal felon who managed to get away with forcibly cleaning the colons of around two dozen unsuspecting female college students for over a decade – Water Power was made under almost similarly morally “dirty” circumstances. Propositioned by Sid Levine, the front-man of the porn division of the infamous Gambino crime family, the mafia family felt that Shaun Costello – their largest and most distinguished supplier of pornography – was the right man for the sensitive and surly scatological job. Always displaying a true professionalism as a pornographic performer like a true method actor in the spirit of Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, Jamie Gillis even attempted to meet the real Michael H. Kenyon, the man that Water Power was based on, in preparation for the ambitious role, but he was unfortunately turned down. Similar in character to sexually debauched loser ‘anti-heroes’ like Harry Reems as the Gas Station Attendant (Forced Entry), Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver), Jimmy Fingers (Fingers), Reno Miller (Driller Killer), and Frank Zito (Maniac), “Burt – The Enema Bandit” (Jamie Gillis) is a socially alienated and inept degenerate who discovers his love for flying feces after happening to catch a pseudo-doctor performing an erotic enema at brothel he frequents in what is easily one of the most fiercely frolicsome scenes even captured on gritty 16mm celluloid. Undoubtedly a life-changing experience as exemplified by his absolute state of ecstasy as he wanks off to high-pressure fecal matter as if he is Dr. Frankenstein watching the reanimation of his creature, Burt is no longer satisfied with $10.00 blow-job special from homely hoes of his local whorehouse and decides to dedicate his already dastardly life to the misunderstood art of anal-induced “water power” so as to ceremonially purify the “filthy whores” of Manhattan in an ostensibly ‘spiritual’ manner as if he some sort of ultra-reformed messianic Rebbe. Like most real-life pathological fetishists and assorted perverts, Burt has self-deceptively convinced himself that his actions are not only morally justified, but also have an otherworldly purification property that only he is aware of and ordained to administer. In preparation for his eccentric excremental excursions, Burt scans issues of faux-porn mags like “Water & Power” to find worthy dirty dames, mumbling to himself that he plans to, “Clean em’ out…shove it all the way up their ass and get all that shit out.” With a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Burt also engages in masturbatory socophilia by spying on a neighbor in the apartment building across from his. A staunch true believer and rebel-with-a-reprehensible-cause, bombastic Burt stalks Manhattan is a more sinister and body fluid manner than big brutish boy Jason Voorhees ever could.  After all, unlike Mr. Voorhees, Burt knows what to do with a beautiful defenseless woman.

 Needless to say, Water Power is one of few quasi-slasher flicks where the victim would have been better off dead. Equipped with a better-than-average ‘horror’ score (stealing shamelessly from Bernard Herrmann's musical compositions from Hitchcock’s Vertigo) and creepy yet inadvertently comical narration, Water Power – much like a lot of Costello’s pornographic works – is a discernibly ‘cinematic’ film directed by a man who seemed to know more about mainstream movie history than the typically amateurish pornographic works. Like any classic cult/horror film, Water Power is a wildly engrossing work that demands constant replaying, as epitomized by highly quotable lines like, “I know it sounds simple, but giving an enema is an important responsibility. After all, its my job.” and “I need to clean out these bitches as much they need to be cleaned.” Although essentially unclassifiable, I would describe Water Power is a violently sardonic and misanthropic blacker-than-a-firebombed-Dresden-housewife black comedy that is conscious of horror and action conventions that is disguised as an ultra-adulterated hardcore porn flick. After all, most fans of the film seem to agree that the sex scenes are unequivocally anti-erotic and even downright despicable, which is no surprise when one considers the odious and toxicant nature of human dung, especially when flying gloriously through the air while a mischievous maniac ejaculates simultaneously, but most proponents of Water Power tend to agree that it is an awfully facetious and sometimes satirical work that lampoons similarly-themed works like John G. Avildsen’s Joe (1970) in its overblown absurdity of sexual violence and grotesquery. In an era where scatological pornography is easily accessible to elementary school students via the internet and flaunting aberrosexuality is considered a badge of honor and the height of personal liberty, Water Power makes for all the more relevant and biting work.  Alfred Hitchcock may have ruined the showering experience for an entire generation of women with Psycho (1960), but Water Power is probably the only film that makes showering seem like a frightfully grimy and vomit-inspiring prospect.

-Ty E

Vapors

Out of the 27 or so films gay gutter-auteur Andy Milligan directed, Vapors (1965) – his first featurette – is quite possibly his most honest, intimate, and damning work. Written by Hope Stansbury – who would later star in subsequent Milligan efforts like The Degenerates (1967) and The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972) – Vapors is a work “From the Tearoom to the Steamroom” (poster tagline) about a couple qualm-ridden queers as they get-on in a homo-hotspot; a steamy yet mostly static steamroom full of hysterical and horny queens. Glaringly more serious and melodramatic than most of Milligan’s subsequent works, aside from his once-lost-but-now-found British masterpiece Nightsbirds (1969) – the director’s last black-and-white film – Vapor is a suitably gritty and amateurishly directed 32-minute 16mm b/w short that gives the viewer a pithy yet punchy glimpse into Milligan’s stunted artistic potential as the director that would later focus almost exclusively on crazy and crappy camp as opposed to the omnipresent debauchery that consumed his personal life and inevitably led to his demise via AIDs during the early cockcrow hours of June 3, 1991, thus resulting in an ignoble burial in an unmarked grave somewhere in Los Angeles. With unflattering black comedies like Bruce Kessler’s The Gay Deceivers (1969) and William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band (1970) being quite prevalent during the late-1960s/early-1970s – works that expressed the self-loathing trials and tribulations a homo in a pomo world – Milligan’s Vapors proves to be a more brash, glum, and dispiriting work that is scantly side-splitting but often unintentionally silly, thus it is no surprise to me that the exploitation director chose to focus his filmmaking career on the exceedingly degenerate (at least, for the time) world of sexploitation and dimestore horror like his better known works The Ghastly Ones (1968), Guru, the Mad Monk (1970), and Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973). Originally getting his start working on sadomasochistic, hyper-camp renditions of players like Lord Dunsany's The Glittering Gates and Jean Genet's The Maids with the Caffe Cino – a small café-based theatrical group composed of an assortment of aberrosexuals – Milligan also owned and operated a clothing boutique named Ad Lib; both of which activities would act as a crucial source of inspiration and training for the hapless filmmaker. Of course, arguably the greatest influence behind Vapors – a work set in New York's St. Mark's bathhouse – was Milligan’s own personal erotic exploits in tearooms and steamrooms that involved anonymous, unprotected sex, which he would ultimately pay for with his life and dignity. 

 As someone who grew up with a physically and emotionally abusive alcoholic mother of a hefty, bovine build, it is no surprise that Vapors features the following line from a streamroom attendant early on in the film, “Well, you can’t trust your own mother these days. How ya gonna trust..uh..a recent acquaintance?” The steamroom employee must have gotten to know his customers very well as foreboding paranoia and distrust, especially of women, act as deep-seated themes of Vapors. As the sometimes prissy and always pessimistic protagonist Thomas (Gerald Jaccuzzo) states early on in Vapors to his prospective lover Mr. Jaffee (Robert Dahdah), “Do you get the strange felling someone is staring at us?” To his credit, indeed, a virtual parade troupe of queens and sexual inverts are watching the two men in a viciously voyeuristic fashion as they snidely giggle like a pack of Pop-Rocks-addicted toddlers at a nudie bar, thus making it seem as if the viewer of Vapors is in on the same sleazy action with them. Although a totally different film with an inherently different agenda, Vapors often feels like a neurotic and anti-erotic adaptation of Jean Genet’s sole (and disowned) cinematic effort Un chant d'amour (1950) aka A Song of Love. Like the hypnagogic libertine short directed by the gay ex-con frog writer, Vapors is a work that would anticipate the sexually-charged films of Andy Warhol. Of course, gay-ghetto-based homoeroticism is not the only indulgent ingredient of Vapors that would later appear in the works of Warhol, as Milligan packed the short with a bitter cocktail of misogyny and misery. For instance, during Vapors Mr. Jaffee discusses in detail his disdain for his wife’s less than dainty feet and her abiding inability to throwaway soiled menstrual sanitary pads. Jaffee also fondly reminisces to Thomas about his prematurely deceased son, a handsome and soft-skinned high school football player that the man speculates may not have been his actual progeny due to his lack of physical resemblance who died in a freak drowning accident and whose corpse was subsequently mutilated by hungry snakes. Needless to say, Vapors concludes in an appropriately anti-climatic manner, as if Kenneth Anger’s celluloid wet-dream Fireworks (1947) merely feebly fizzled instead of exploding in a most fiercely phallocentric fashion.

 Ultimately, Vapors is a bleak yet puissant testament to the emptiness and humiliation of gay life during the pre-Stonewall era, henceforth acting as an unofficial fictional meladramatic supplement to the real-life anonymous sexual excursions featured in the William E. James presented document Tearoom (1962).   Thus, it is shame that Milligan, a misunderstood man whose film The Ghastly Ones (1968) was described by popular hack horror author Stephen King as, "..the work of morons with cameras," never fully bloomed into the "sort of a Douglas Sirk figure" that Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn (Valhalla Rising, Drive) so cordially described him as, yet Vapors and Nightbirds, which also unfortunately happen to be two of the trash-auteur filmmaker's least-seen films, are a testament to the fact that underneath all the fairy dressmaking and illegally solicited sodomy was a serious cinematic artist with something truly ghastly to express.

-Ty E