The Raspberry Reich

If I was forced to name Bruce LaBruce’s most obscenely overwrought and aesthetically asinine cinematic works, the honor would go to the culturally-mongrelized German-Canadian pornographic production The Raspberry Reich (2004) aka The Revolution Is My Boyfriend (the uncut version edited by kraut gay porn company Cazzo) – a work marking the abberosexual auteur filmmaker’s second ‘adult film’ following the satirically sexually sadistic skinhead-exploitation pic Skin Flick (1999) aka Skin Gang – as I cannot think of another film that bombarded me with such a grandly grating combination of positively putrid politics, perversion, and pictorialization of the tongue-in-twink patent pansy persuasion. Of course, no LaBruce film is without sardonic satire of the oftentimes severely self-deprecating sort as the Canadian filmmaker has framed his filmmaking career around hyper-intellectual yet seemingly idiotic filmic mockery, and The Raspberry Reich is most certainly far from an exception to this scatological auteur signature, as the anti-arthouse pornographer tackles two very personal yet universal themes: sex and politics. As a homo-kultur-hating-homo and a lapsed leftist of the formerly philo-Semitic Freudian-Marxist pedigree, it was only natural that Bruce LaPoof – an undeniably masochistic fellow who spent his college years keeping his mind firmly in the gutter by reading works by Judeo-Marxist "Father of the New Left" Herbert Marcuse and carnal commie sexologist Wilhelm Reich – would direct a film parodying the terroristic political germs of Germany, the Red Army Faction (RAF), and as one can expect from the homo-core auteur, The Raspberry Reich contains a crude collection of crazed cocksuckers for communism. Indeed, with his previous work Skin Gang, LaBruce tackled the forbidden realms of fierce fags for fascism where bodacious buggering bootboys with shaved heads pound mixed race bourgeois couples with their dicks, even portraying the limp-wristed men of miscegenation as more ill-natured and humorless than a brutal brigade of backdoor bombarding, boner-worshiping neo-brownshirts, so it was only natural that the filmmaker creamed out a curious cynical commie celluloid cumshot of sorts via The Raspberry Reich. Although the punk fairy filmmaker ultimately ditched the pussy politics of his youth, the production of the film would, in a sense, be the closest LaBruce ever got to be an urban guerilla, describing the creation of The Raspberry Reich as follows in an interview: “When we were making The Raspberry Reich, I got the sense of what it might be like to be in the Baader-Meinhof gang. It was “Guerrilla filmmaking.” We had to make everything on the cheap, on the fly, without permits, running around the city with guns, trying to be secret, getting found out, and then getting kicked out of places. In one location where we shot, a bunch of kids found out that it was a porn set, so they climbed the trees to peer in the windows. It felt like we were under surveillance. Even on that level, the whole thing felt like a terrorist act. Just to manage to make a porn film about terrorism and get it shown at major film festivals feels like a coup.” Indeed, LaBruce certainly speaks the truth when he uses the word “terrorist” because if anything is a work of “aesthetic terrorism,” it is The Raspberry Reich; a magnificent celluloid mockery of Marxist intellectual masturbation and male emasculation.  Of course, in the politically, socially, and sexually retarded realm of The Raspberry Reich, "masturbation is counter-revolution" and "Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses."

Arguably, the most fundamental distinction between Marxism and Fascism, especially of the post-WWII blend, is that while the latter is a mostly a male-lead and masculine movement that espouses honor, taking pride in one's work, and a master mentality, the former is an innately effeminate political persuasion that sees work as the height of human degradation, worships the weak majority over the superior minority, is rooted in jealousy and a need for vengeance against the successful (the Marxist messiah himself, Karl Marx, was a failed bourgeois who never worked a day in his life and lived off the generosity of others, including Engels), promotes equality (i.e. collective mediocrity) and a decided disdain for the patriarch, so it should be no surprise that women were prominent in the Red Army Faction, among countless other far-left groups before and after them, and the case is no different for The Raspberry Reich; a film about a commie cuntress who leads her biologically 'male' cuckold compatriots into sucking cock against capitalism. Led by a less than ladylike egomaniacal gyno-supremacist Gudrun (Susanne Sachße) – a rather warped and wacky bitch suffering from sort of acute nympho-nihilism who justifies her all-consuming moral corruption and childishly contrived criminality by spouting absurd pan-sexual-neo-marxist slogans like "Out of the bedrooms into the streets!" (while engaging in sex in front of elderly people in a public elevator) and "Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses" (when trying to force her heterosexual male comrades, including her suffering boyfriend, into cum-guzzling) – the so-called "Sixth Generation of the Baader-Meinhof Gang" aka “The Raspberry Reich” haphazardly plots to kidnap the son of a rich wealthy industrial named Patrick (Andreas Rupprecht); a recently out-of-the-closet sodomite who supremely sucks at skateboarding and likes to suck cock. After forcing her boyfriend Holger (Daniel Bätscher) to fuck his friend Che (Daniel Fettig) – a chronic masturbator who gets off to skimasks, handguns, and images of Che Guevara – Gudrun has her seemingly braindead band of terrorist underlings capture poof Patrick and, to the delight of the dick-loving hostage, perform homosexual acts on him so as to join the "The Homosexual Intifada". Little does everyone know that Clyde (Anton Z. Risan) – the weakest twin in the sexually subversive Sixth Generation – has already started a butt-pirate bond with Patrick. When it is revealed to the female Führer of flaming firebrand fag-scism that Patrick is a poofter partisan who agrees with the terrorist group’s perverted political ideology, Gudrun declares him the Raspberry Reich’s “Patty Hearst” and a “prisoner of love,” which he happily accepts as a faggy fan of force-entry fornicating. Although originally intending to send Patty boy’s fag-bashing father a video of his sperm burper son being sodomized by the turd-burglar terrorist so as to obtain ransom money, the revolutionary plans go awfully awry when love, betrayal, and megalomania get in the way of things.  Ultimately, the intemperate terrorists become victims of their own political dogma due to their full-force fanaticism for flesh and dicks becoming bigger than petty politics.

Citing Serbian auteur Dušan Makavejev’s W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) – a work the Canadian director once claimed he “literally stole entire scenes from” – as the primary cinematic influence for The Raspberry Reich, Bruce LaBruce proved he was able to turn an esoteric Reichian/anti-Stalinist Slavic work into a MTV-esque porn flick of the aesthetically crappy kraut sort, which is certainly not a small ‘accomplishment,’ if you can call it that. Whereas in German New Wave auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979) – an absurdist work the director described as satirizing the third generation (following the ‘68ers and the Badder-Meinhof Group) of commie terrorism in West Germany, “which simply acts without thinking, which has neither a policy nor an ideology and which, certainly without realizing it, lets itself be manipulated by others, like a bunch of puppets” – LaBruce’s The Raspberry Reich depicts a degenerate establishment of so-called anti-establishment terrorists that has been spoon-fed since birth played-out leftist political swill taught to them in public schools and universities, thereupon being the very thing they claim to hate; mindless automatons who ultimately champion crude theoretical caricatures of relatively mainstream ideas, hence why Gudrun ends up a bourgeois mother after all, even if she continues to rape the minds of passive individuals by regurgitating sterile political statistics via her infant child. After all, what is more trendy today among college students than being effete feminist, cultural Marxist cock-suckers whose idea of liberation is fucking as many people as possible, especially members of the same sex and/or of a different race (the darker the better), getting abortions on demand, dressing like sexually confounded prostitutes, quoting Jewish and other non-white leftist authors, and donating corporate-earned cash to dubious non-profit organizations like the SPLC and ACLU? Indeed, the would-be-radical-revolutionaries in The Raspberry Reich cannot even make enough money to feed themselves, let alone spark a global revolution, hence why they hypocritically rationalize stealing from private proletarian-owned grocery stores, despite having plenty of time to swipe STD-contaminated fluids and adorn their walls with communist corporate icons like Angela Davis, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, and Che Guevara. Ironically, Jürgen Brünning – the self-described Marcuse-inspired producer of The Raspberry Reich – lost a court case against the daughter of Alberto Korda, photographer of the famous Ché Guevara portrait, thereupon causing a ban of screening the film by a Paris court, on top of the producer having to pay a fine of 17500 Euros because of “copyright and trademark issues.” Needless to say Marxism has been dying a slow and deserved death for some time now and The Raspberry Reich – a work that is just as much of a product of the anti-Occidental far-left Weltanschauung it superlatively satirizes – makes for an audacious allegorical digital-video epitaph of the debauched dick-devouring sort that is guaranteed to aesthetically nauseate individuals from all ends of the political spectrum. 

-Ty E

Der Verlorene Sohn

If any National Socialist ‘propaganda’ succeeded in expressing the völkisch metaphysical feeling that permeated throughout various parts of the German-speaking world during the early 20th century, it is most certainly Der Verlorene Sohn (1934) aka The Prodigal Son written, directed, and starring South Tyrolean (Austrian-Italian) adventurist auteur Luis Trenker (The Mountain Calls aka Der Berg Ruft, Love Letters from the Engadine aka Liebesbriefe aus dem Engadin), yet the filmmaker was by no means a full-fledging fascist, let alone a Hitlerite as some might expect. While The Prodigal Son was exploited by the National Socialists as a work expounding the Faustian gospel of blood and honor in its dichotomous portrayal of the city as an unhealthy human zoo that spawns unnatural corruption, thievery, and starvation, and the country as a magical and majestic place of purity and bloody mysticism where one’s soul is rooted in the soil, Luis Trenker – a genuine man’s man and trained architect who not only directed films on dangerous mountain tops, but also performed his own stunts, including height altitude mountain-climbing and skiing – decided to move to Rome so as to avoid artistic subversion by the Nazi government. Incidentally, Trenker’s The Prodigal Son would act as a forerunner to Italian neorealism, as the film had a major influence on Italian auteur Roberto Rossellini (Europa '51, Journey to Italy) and would ironically direct arguably the most important post-WWII Italian film trilogy (Rome, Open City (1945), Paisà (1946), Germany, Year Zero (1948)); three anti-fascist war films utilizing the real ruins of war torn Europa. Although Trenker got his start in filmmaking in 1921 by working on Mountain films with the pioneer of the distinctly Germanic film genre Arnold Fanck (The Holy Mountain, The White Hell of Pitz Palu) and Leni Riefenstahl (The Blue Light, Triumph of the Will), the 'German Guido' – a filmmaker while mostly Germanic culturally, but also displaying a certain Italian sentimentalism – would eventually become a filmic Renaissance man in his own right with The Prodigal Son being his most unique and standout auteur piece. As film historian William K. Everson once wrote, “The mountain film was to Germany what the Western was to America, and Trenker, as its leading practitioner, was in a sense Germany’s John Wayne and John Ford rolled into one.” Doing his own death-defying stunts on the snowy Alps, traveling to the United States and directing scenes illegally guerrilla-style without permission in Great Depression era New York City, displaying a deeply religious faith in an idiosyncratic yet totally organic form of Germanic Pagan-Catholicism not unlike the sort of 'positive Christianity' espoused by Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg (although firmly anti-Catholic himself) in his tome The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), and expressing a genuine oneness with his nation and kultur, Luis Trenker single-handedly proved real honorable and masculine men could apply the same sort of dedication and integrity that one would invest in commanding an army or building a skyscraper.

As a sort of Stroszek (1977) of its time, albeit by no means nihilistic and pessimistic in its concluding message, The Prodigal Son centers around protagonist Tonio Feuersinger (Luis Trenker), an adventurous Tyrolean logger and mountaineer who travels to the United States to climb the American Rockies, but he never quite gets there as the merry mountain-man's innate romanticism is to overwhelming for his own good and causes him to have a delusional vision of the supposed land of the free and home of the brave. While also inspired by the idiom “he who never leaves never returns,” to the dismay of his faithful lady friend Barbl Gudauner (Maria Andergast), Tonio also has his Tyrolean Teutonic eye on wealthy American beauty Lillian Williams (Marian Marsh) – a cosmopolitan lady more Aryan in appearance than his Tyrolean sweetheart – thus making for a secondary reason for leaving his small village. Far from the sort of negrophiliac barbarian typical of modern Hollywood action heroes with no sense of comradeship, Tonio is an old school male who takes pride in his hard work, even while working on Saturdays and singing the verse, “The merriest folks are the woodcutting folks,” while jollily busting his ass with his logger compatriots, as well as playing a fair good game of roughhousing with his friends. Tonio also puts family first above all else, finishing the work of his father (Eduard Köck) so as to help the old man with work that is getting harder and harder to do as he ages. A dual sun-worshipper and spiritual son of a Freyja-like Virgin Mary, Tonio has no idea that he is going to land on a virtual hell on earth full of beggars, degenerates, and racial mongrels of the superlatively American ‘melting pot’ sort. While dreaming of traveling to America and New York City, Tonio speaks too soon when he states, “God, I imagine living in a city must be a hundred times more beautiful than here,” as he feels like a “caged fox” and claims he does not, “like the mountains anymore,” but then again, as a son of the sun and blood and soil, the especially enthusiastic Aryan adventurist has yet to experience the distinctly inorganic manmade realms of crime-ridden cement metropolises of misery, which contain no natural beauty, free natural resources, or earthly adventure, but are instead teeming with distinctly human social abstraction and alienation, poverty and starvation, and rampant yet outlawed vagrancy; the sort of story that can turn a healthy farm boy into an HIV-positive tranny in no time.

When Tonio arrives in NYC, his senses are overwhelmed as he is bombarded with a curious cosmopolitan cocktail of pollution, claustrophobic atmosphere, stylistically sterile skyscrapers that block his view of the sky, unemployed Negros and other racial groups he has never seen before, pawn and cigar shops, and the endless lines of cars in traffic, which is in stark contrast to the relatively quiet and wide-open area of his mountain village where one need not worry about having too little personal space. Although he intended to meet up with the wealthy benefactor Mr. Williams (F.W. Schröder-Schrom) – a man who funded the prizes for a local ski competition in his hometown and would have provided the young man with financial security had his resources run dry – Tonio soon learns that the man is away for the winter, thus he must fend for himself without a dime to his name in a foreign city that eats people and spits them out in no time. Out of desperation, Tonio pawns all his belongs for a mere $1.50 and resorts to sleeping on park benches, where he is hassled by local police. Eventually, the Germanic immigrant finds work at dangerous job doing welding on a skyscraper in scenes that have a startling resemblance to the iconic photographs of American sociologist/photographer Lewis Hine, and, needless to say, Tonio is soon daydreaming about taking a boat back to his hometown. Despite working hard for virtually nothing, Tonio begins to resemble a degenerate drunken hobo of sorrowful sorts and even resorts to the previously seemingly unthinkable by stealing food and standing in foodlines, which a local police officers catches him for, but lets him go out of compassion for the immigrant's decidedly destitute state. Tonio ends up making one mere friend, Jimmy (Jimmie Fox) – an off-white Italian/Jewish type funnyman, not unlike a character from an early Fellini film like I Vitelloni (1953) – who is constantly in trouble with the law, but someone with whom down-and-out Tonio can identify due to his equally degraded and despairing position in American society. Eventually, by happenstance while interfering with a boxing match, Tonio becomes a successful prize-fighter and hooks up with wealthy Mr. Williams finally, even making his friend Jimmy successful in the process, but Tonio ultimately longs for the place of his birth and having experienced everything America has to offer, decides to go back home, where he is crowned the “Rauhnacht King” during the ancient Germanic pagan celebration of Rauhnacht where all the spirits rise from the earth (meadows, fields, fire, wind, etc.), in the from of the locals dressed in eerie and phantasmagorical costumes and masks, to worship the Sun-God, whereupon he is given the opportunity to choose between 12 Raunhnacht girls wearing masks to be his wife.

 Ironically, immediately after the conclusion of the Second World War, The Prodigal Son was banned in both Western and Eastern Germany, because whereas the American military occupying forces believed the film was innately anti-American in sentiment, the Soviets felt the film was an advertisement for Americanism and the American way of life. Indeed, the film is certainly not nearly as American as one would expect because while The Prodigal Son portrays NYC in a most unflattering light, it also depicts the cultureless country as a place where one can truly go from rags to riches virtually overnight with a little good luck and, of course, if one is willing to work hard enough, which is indubitably one of America’s ‘noble’ attributes, if not a mostly unrealistic one for most people. With its partial quasi-Mediterranean sentimentalism for the importance of friends and family, as well as its concluding setting during the holiday Rauhnacht celebration – an event that usually takes place during the 12 days of Christmas – The Prodigal Son is somewhat surprisingly in good company with Frank Capra’s Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946); a work also featuring a man who has to go on a spiritual journey of sorts, only to realize the intrinsic and irreplaceable value of friends and family in a small community and life itself, is infinitely more important to material gain. Unlike most films of its epoch, The Prodigal Son holds up quite well after all the years, so much so that I was rather surprised by how fast it went by in its immaculate editing, striking action sequences, and surprisingly ‘modern’ direction, so much so that that I can see myself watching it next Christmas season, but I cannot say the same about It's a Wonderful Life; a work I can tolerate viewing every decade or so.  Combining some of the best elements of the German Mountain film genre with proto-Italian neo-realist/Cinéma vérité imagery that depicts the bowels of the Great Depression era big rotten apple in an audaciously authentic manner like never seen before, as well as featuring Germanic Pagan and Aryanized Catholic imagery and costumes that would chill the most coldhearted of atheist's souls, The Prodigal Son is both an important piece of cinema and cultural history that makes one question who were the real barbarians during the Second World War.  Personally, I would rather celebrate Rauhnacht during a cold winter night than rage at an ecstasy-addled rave, but maybe I am just old fashioned.

-Ty E

Wundkanal

If any filmmaker dedicated his life and art to the seemingly pathetically paternally pathological by belittling his father in oblivion and acting as the repellent archetype of the self-loathing post-WWII kraut, it is Thomas Harlan; the rather regretful son of German auteur Veit Harlan, who is best known for his National Socialist melodramas Jud Süß (1940) aka Jew Süss and Opfergang (1944). As for his son Thomas, if he is remembered for anything, at least as far as cinema history is concerned, it is his bewilderingly incriminating Baader-Meinhof Group-deifying quasi-docudrama work Wundkanal (1984) aka Gun Wound aka Wound Passage that involved the decidedly dishonest and arguably demented director into conning an ex-SS officer named Alfred Filbert – who like Veit Harlan was charged with war crimes – to go under interrogation under patently false pretenses about his involvement with the death of around 11,000 Jews in Eastern Europe. As a crew member for Wundkanal explained in the documentary Our Nazi (1984), he deeply felt that Thomas Harlan and the production crew were, "doing really monstrous things and he has no idea; he doesn't know what the purpose of this movie is.  He feels he has a truth to tell and we won't let him," in regard to how Dr. Filbert was treated during the direction of the "war criminal-exploitation" film. Of course, as it become quite clear while watching the film, Wundkanal was made as a sort of warped pretext for Thomas Harlan to channel his lifelong loathing of his father Viet, who had already been dead about two decades upon the release of the film. Although Veit Harlan was acquitted of “crimes against humanity” for his role in directing the notorious Nazi propaganda melodrama Jud Süß, it seems that son Harlan was not happy with the outcome so he finds his father guilty by proxy via Dr. Filbert in his venom-laced work of sicko son celluloid patricide Wundkanal. Although Thomas Harlan had the rare honor of meeting Adolf Hitler when he was 8-years-old and would, unlike most Germans of his time immediately following the absolute devastation of his Heimat during the Second World War, grew up relatively comfortably due to his father’s success as a filmmaker, the fortunate son would spend the rest of most of his adult years dwelling on his contempt for his father and Fatherland’s legacy. One can only guess where this radical resentment of the patriarch began, but it probably starts with the fact that Thomas’ father divorced his actress mother Hilde Körber due to political reasons relating to his dedication to National Socialism and married Swedish actress Kristina Söderbaum – the buxom blonde star of Opfergang (1944) and Kolberg (1944) – not long thereafter. Not unsurprisingly, Thomas was not the only one to prove that hatred and biological resentment ran deep in the Harlan family as his sister Susanne Körber converted to Judaism and married a holocaust survivor and would inevitably kill herself in 1989. Needless to say, I doubt brother Thomas’ film Wundkanal did much to stifle her hatred of the infamous man who sired her. 

 Long before directing Wundkanal and physically degenerating into what would resemble a bitter old obese lesbian, Thomas Harlan began his highly personal campaign of obscenely obsessed ‘intellectual Nazi hunting,’ which quite possibly began with a symbolic trip to Israel with Klaus Kinski of all people in 1952. Although Thomas was given the opportunity to collaborate with his father on a screenplay for the the cinematic work Verrat an Deutschland (1955) aka Betrayal to Germany – a surprisingly symbolically titled work that would make for a great biography title for the third-rate arthouse director's contribution to Teutonic cultural history – which Viet Harlan also directed, the two battled over the content of the script and the son’s contributions to the written work were distorted to some degree, thereupon probably putting the final nail in the coffin for their ill-fated father-son relationship. By 1959 hysterical Harlan was being sued left and right by various ex-Nazi-turned-West-German-politicans for libel and by 1960 had moved to Poland to do fanatical research on concentration camps and as a feverish and forbidding far-left activist ultimately collected enough information on undetected war crimes to help bring about over 2,000 criminal proceedings against fellow Germans, but proving his commitment to personally heedless, needless, and senseless self-destruction, the self-stylized would-be-revolutionary was put under house arrest for one year for breaching Polish state secrets and would also be denied a German passport for ten years and was not allowed to enter the Federal Republic of Germany for using classified German interrogation records in Polack publications. A decade after suddenly giving up his research on the holocaust, Harlan displayed his ever so erratic and all-consuming ethno-masochism by traveling to the Amerikkkas and hooking up with a number of Marxist and far-left terrorist groups, including joining the Chilean resistance movement against anti-Castro Chilean president Augusto Pinochet, but it would ultimately be Wundkanal that would prove to be the ‘high’ point in his artistic career and the root to the failed artists' perverse paternal-based pathologies. As explained by American film professor Anton Kaes in his left-leaning book From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (1989) in regard to the demented 'daddy-deprecating' dialectic of Wundkanal: “the more we become aware of the hatred and vindictiveness of the son, the more we pity the father; his vulnerability engages our interest more than the moral rigor of the son, whose violent revenge scenario proves ultimately to be self-destructive.” 

 To get the whole picture in regard to the production of and intent behind Wundkanal, one must watch the companion documentary Notre Nazi (1984) aka Our Nazi directed by American Jewish documentarian Robert Kramer; a man who despite being of the Judaic faith, shows more sensitivity and compassion to the elderly old Jew-killer than the seething sadomasochistic son-of-a-Nazi who directed it. Aside from physically and emotionally torturing ex-Nazi Dr. Alfred Filbert, exquisite ethno-masochist Thomas Harlan explains to an orthodox Jew on the film set in a groveling manner regarding the SS man while in a fit of hysterical hatred that: “this movie has been made to burn into the earth and in the heavens the fragment of truth that we can find inside this barbarian, who remained a barbarian. You’re not facing a human being. You see the earthly remains of a man who no longer exists, and who never existed as a man.” Naturally, Thomas Harlan, no doubt a hopelessly naïve humanist whose discordant moral compass is dictated by a victim-based mentality, goes on to describe Dr. Filbert as one of the worst humans in history to earn kudos points from the seemingly apathetic Hebrew, but unlike the much more objectively assembed work Our Nazi, one does not get a true sense as to what extent the father-hating would go to such cowardly and pathetic extremes while watching the slickly assembled yet aesthetically vapid minimalistic work Wundkanal; an unbelievably wicked work of exploitation of the elderly and self-glorifying masturbation of the worst phony leftist kind where the deranged director even taunting that the old man commit suicide via asphyxiation with a plastic bag supplied to him (which, he in fact wraps around his head), on top of having the man put a handgun at the back of his head self-execution style (apparently, many of Filbert's victims died under dubious suicides). Such torture of old terminally ill war criminals, both in film and real-life, has become quite trendy as of recently as displayed by Israel’s decades long hounding of Ukrainian-American John Demjanjuk (a man who was deported to Israel in 1986 and falsely found guilty and sentenced to death there in 1988, but was eventually released due to mistaken identity), among countless other naughty 'no spring' Nazis, who was wheelchair bound and on his deathbed when he died while facing dubious charges based off Soviet falsified evidence, as well as the would-be-quirky-and-cute Hollywood cryptic-holocaust-propaganda drama This Must Be the Place (2011) directed by Paolo Sorrentino where a seemingly autistic and gender confused ex-rock star modeled after Robert Smith of the Cure named Cheyenne (played by far-left mischling Judaic Sean Penn; a master of playing filmic retards and psychopaths) forces an elderly former SS Officer to strip naked and run in the snow in a scene not unlike the sort you find in Steven Spielberg's showy shoah epic Schindler's List (1993), all because the man caused the half-retard rocker’s father – an apparently miserly and hateful man who left his son a socially inept bastard – to inadvertently piss his pants while in a concentration camp. 

 Of course, if Thomas Harlan can be credited for any ‘cinematic innovation,’ it is utilizing the medium of film as a morally dubious method for exploiting the elderly in a precarious manner so as to dastardly denigrate one’s father as translucently depicted in Wundkanal; a film that proves artistic talent is not always inherited by sons. While Veit Harlan’s films featured vivid Technicolor, themes of love and sacrifice, an appreciation for beauty, nature, and kultur, and love for life, his son Thomas made visually unprepossessing, aesthetically and thematically mechanical, and ultimately lifeless films not unlike contemporary Hollywood action and sci-fi flicks with contrived moralizing and megalomaniacal preaching that would probably only appeal to the singularly and unsoundly self-indulgent filmmaker himself. Interestingly, scenes from Veit Harlan’s films featuring the director’s wife Kristina Söderbaum (the woman that replaced Thomas’ mother) are featured in Wundkanal and are reminisced on fondly and nostalgically by the old SS officer, thereupon linking Thomas Harlan's with the propagation of genocide as tools for entertaining and providing therapy Nazi facing the stresses of war. At one point in Wundkanal, the old Nazi cries when recollecting the dubious death of his brother in a Buchenwald concentration camp and the complete and utter incineration of his sister-in-law in an allied firebombing campaign, which Thomas Harlan vehemently concludes is a totally disingenuous display of emotions and that the elderly man was merely weeping for himself due to the fact he didn’t get a promotion while in the SS. I found this scene to be especially relevant as Harlan’s assumptions seem to be a symbolic projection of his own ‘artistic’ career and leftist crusade as a man who claimed to be exposing evil Nazis and bringing them to justice and fighting the good fight for the Jews and other disenfranchised folks, when in reality it is quite apparent that he had ulterior motives and that his guiding motivation was seeking revenge against his infamous/famous father who, on top of divorcing his mother, brought irrevocable shame to his family name due to Germany’s defeat in the Second World War.

 In Europe, there is a saying that Germans will never forgive the Jews for what they, the Germans, did to them. Had Germany won the war and Viet Harlan retained his respectability as one of Germany's greatest filmmaker's during that period, it is highly doubtful that Thomas Harlan would have turned out the way he did, just as it is doubtful that a peculiar national phenomenon like the Red Army Faction – a group of morbidly ethno-masochistic ‘rock star’ terrorists who hated their fathers' generation for being Nazis and thus rebelled via mostly directionless and meangingless murder and mayhem – would have ever been spawned, as such individuals are undoubtedly akin to symbolic spiritual syphilis of a defeated nation with a severly suicidal collective unconscious. Despite the physical and emotional torment he faced at the hands of the innately manipulative, manic, and malicious Thomas Harlan via Wundkanal, Dr. Filbert would apparently go on to state that his “experience with the movies had been the greatest moment of his life,” which is an outcome that the director was surely not hoping for, thereupon making the ex-Nazi seem like a more rational, warmhearted, and reasonable person than the perturbed person who shamelessly tried to ‘expose’ him under dubious conditions of contempt. Although Dr. Filbert spent 18 years in prison for his alleged war crimes before being released due to poor health and working on Wundkanal shortly thereafter, his conscious was certainly more clear than Thomas Harlan; a man whose own family members concluded he wasted his whole life dwelling on his overwhelming malice for his father as depicted in the documentary Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss (2008) directed by Felix Moeller.  Of course, I guess it should not be that big of a surprise Thomas Harlan led the loser life he did as he was one of the few personal friends of the infamously crazy actor Klaus Kinski; a German national of Polish descent who was ambivalent towards his homeland after making the conscious decision to desert his soldierly duties in the German Wehrmacht, whereupon he was subsequently caught, court-martialed, and sentenced to death, but eventually escaped and intentionally had himself captured by the British and remained a POW for the rest of the Second World War.  It is often said that the Jews were the greatest victims of World War II, but one only has to watch Wundkanal and countless other German films to see that it was probably the Fatherland's sons that have suffered the most, especially in regard to the soul.  After all, I cannot remember the last time I saw a film directed by a Jewish filmmaker depicting the slaughter of millions of white Russian Christians by Jewish bolshevik hangmen, nor an Israeli auteur directing a work about the liquidation of Palestinian children by IDF men.  

-Ty E

Lola and Billy the Kid

Turbulent Turkish trannies, raging cock-sucking skinheads, homophobic Turk leather-fags, brother-raping fagola family men, dapper ass-bandit Aryan aristocrats, and Turk tonk twinks just make some of the more sexually and socially confused characters of the culturally and racially mongrelized German film Lola and Billy the Kid (1999) aka Lola und Bilidikid directed by queer Turkish auteur Kutluğ Ataman (Karanlik sular, 2 Girls); a work that wonderfully, wildly, wantonly depicts the trouble German-born Turks face in the Fatherland that is not their own father's. A uniquely unhealthy yet undeniably provocative convergence of seedy and sometimes superficial melodrama and skin-deep sodo-mania, an astute study on fag-on-fag fag-bashing, mischievously macabre ultra-low-camp carnal comedy, ridiculous yet relevant race hate, and an endearing ending fit for a sentimental eunuch, Lola and Billy the Kid is the sort of flick one would expect was directed by a cosmopolitan yet racially-conscious foreigner who was at some point in his life deeply influenced by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), the films of Pedro Almodóvar, personal political science, and the most deleteriously debauched drag shows in little Turkey, Berlin. In terms of engrossing entertainment, Lola and Billy the Kid is a near Memetis mud-packer masterpiece, but as a work of stoically serious celluloid art, one might say that the film leads one to conclude that director Ataman does not deserve to lick crusty kraut queer auteur Rosa von Praunheim’s pretty pink shoes, although it is a work that will surely appeal to fanatical fans of New German cinema, if only for the fact that there has been a void in Teutonic cinema for a number of decades now, so it is ironic that a foreigner would fill it to some extent. Although featuring a number of standout characters and an engaging plot and subplots that could be easily followed by the typical pedestrian American filmgoer, Lola and Billy the Kid – a work featuring politically incorrect puffs and a celluloid call to castration anxiety – is not exactly the sort of film that will appeal to mainstream audiences, let alone entire families, despite the fact that perturbing family matters are an innate characteristic of the plot. Although I certainly cannot vouch for them, I seriously doubt the average Turk would be a fan of Lola and Billy the Kid as it makes it seem like every Turkish man is a turbulent self-loathing turd-burglar or tormented masochistic shemale and that every Turkish mother is a fervent fag-enabler. Needless to say, these Turk Teutons are not in Istanbul anymore, but a nation that trashed their own culture and customs after losing two cataclysmic World Wars and replaced it with a degenerate dedication to hyper-hedonism, senseless self-indulgence, and any human weakness for pleasure that would could imagine of.

Seventeen-year-old street-rat Murat (Baki Davrak) has one warped Turkish sodomite family as it is full of incestuous semon demon secrets that would even shock kraut queen von Praunheim, if not influence to stalk gay bars on Turkish ghetto section of Berlin. For starters, Murat’s older brother Osman (Hasan Ali Mete) – who is apparently a lapsed limp-wrister himself despite now having a family of his own – wants to set his young bro straight by various methods, including treating him to strippers and statuesque German prostitutes, which he firmly turns down as he rather takes his chances giving away tricks in tearoom toilet stalls located at the Berlin Olympiastadion (Olympic Stadium; site of the 1936 'Nazi' summer Olympics) while on school field-trips, even if his male suitor – a novice neo-nazi in training – is compelled to smear the queer at the insistence of his Turk-terrorizing friends. Unbeknownst to Murat, he has another brother named Lola (Gandi Mukli) who was disowned by his family because he is an unrepentant member of the prissy pink team who once showed up in his Islamic homestead wearing a female neon red wig, thereupon resulting in his permanent banishment (with Murat being as a result of his father's need to 'replace' his exiled son). Lola’s boyfriend Bilidikid aka Billy (Erdal Yildiz) – a homo-hating, ultra-masculine iron hoof poofter who earns his living by allowing guys to blow him in bathroom stalls with semen stains covering the wall – wants his buttercup boi toy to cut his cock off so the two can go back to Turkey and form a ‘proper family’ as man and wife and not live a openly gay life like "German fags." Meanwhile, a degenerate German aristocrat named Friedrich von Schmidt (Michael Gerber) begins a relationship that starts with a bought blow-job in a public park with Turk hustler Iskender (Murat Yilmaz), who also happens to be a colon-choking compatriot of reluctant bent boy Bilidikid. An anachronistic aged aristocrat who is in denial about her less prestigious position in society, Friedrich’s mother Ute (Inge Keller) cannot get down with her son’s brown beau. On top of dealing with insanely inflamed flaming inter-gay Turkish relations, the ripped rectum realm of the Turkish ghetto is stalked by a group of hostile and, in some cases, homosexual, German skinheads who especially have a desire to smash and gay bash Lola while s/he is dressed in drag. Beginning with absurd but highly hilarious incendiary verbal insults like “camel fucker” and “go back to Bagdad” at the Turkish sods, it is only a matter of time before the two had a shadow that makes for some sort of hyper-degenerate postmodern globalist West Side Story from multicultural hell.

Despite being directed by a Turk, Lola and Billy the Kid makes no attempt to portray his people in a pristinely positive light nor does he layer the film with pathetic politically correct puffery as is typical of similar racial ‘outsider’ films in ethno-masochistic Europa.  After all, I doubt any sane person would find it normal to see a nearly elderly Turkish peasant woman giving her son a bath in an archaic washtub. Indeed, while portraying Turks and Teutons as fatally flawed individuals trying to retain their dignity in a state of impenetrable racial and cultural chaos. While a whole family of Turks has produced a family of all flaming fairies who would have otherwise lived rather conventional lives had they grown up in their homeland, even if buggering adolescent boys on the side, the everyday blue-collar Germans – fed up with a nation that has nothing to offer them yet harbors mostly illegal ‘refugees’ – takes out their hatred on the foreign other; individuals, who when especially dressed in flamboyant drag, stick out like sore brown thumbs.  Somewhat nihilistic in its message, Lola and Billy the Kid is certainly not the kind of liberal feel-good sentimentalist drama that left activists would praise as artistic evidence of the oxymoronic statement that "diversity is our strength."  Directed with a distinctly Turkish and queer persuasion, Lola and Billy the Kid reveals that auteur Kutluğ Ataman has seriously studied the kultur of the nation he depicts, most obviously with references to morbid melodramas of New German cinema Über-auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, especially Katzelmacher (1969), In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) and Lola (1981) without assembling an inept gross accidental parody of these films.  For an enthralling if not overly ambitious look at multicultural Germany after Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and Fassbinder from a positively personal and peculiar perspective, Lola and Billy the Kid makes for an audacious cinematic affair with the culturally, socially, and sexually abstracted ausländer that might make one think twice about visiting bathrooms in the Turkish sector of town. 

-Ty E

Rocker

Forget Easy Rider (1969) and the popular multicultural-friendly popular FX TV series Sons of Anarchy (2008-present), those crazy krauts did it better with mediocre medium of mere German television with Rocker (1972); a biker flick with actual brazen balls and a brutal body without the cowardly cop-out of a bullshit hippie message. Directed by agile Aryan auteur Klaus Lemke (Paul, Finale) – a self-proclaimed ‘anti-intellectual’ filmmaker known for his sometimes offensive personal opinions – whose debut feature-length film 48 Stunden bis Acapulco (1967) aka 48 Hours to Acapulco was described by German New cinema König Rainer Werner Fassbinder as one of the “most important” German films of its time, Rocker is no less an important film, even if it was made for the idiosyncratic social and culture climate of early 1970s Hamburg, Germany where long-haired blockheads in scratched leather jackets and fueled by deep visceral hate, active nihilism, and unhinged hedonism roamed the streets on their motorcycles and blessed the crooked concrete city with blood, piss, and liquor. If anyone wonders where Austrian martial music musician Albin Julius – a man with an identity crisis who went from being a pseudo-Goth to a ersatz fascist to a retro retard – copied his latest look from, look no farther than Rocker; the indisputable real deal when it comes to masculine men with muttonchops, motorcycles, merry misanthropy and murderous Männerbünde. The sons of German soldiers who were the first to display Schutzstaffel (SS) insignia on their totally killer choppers, the raging and riotous renegades of Rocker are dedicated to blood and honor, even if not in the same manner as their fierce forefathers, but among an urban ghetto of daring delinquent friends. Utilizing amateur actors and real bikers, including “Die Bloody Devils” motorcycle gang, Rocker lends itself to a certain gritty realism that most films of a similar persuasion lack, which director Klaus Lemke utilized in his later film Die Ratte (1993). For those who have to have their biker flicks featuring classic rock ‘n’ roll tunes, Rocker also features an iconic soundtrack, including hits by Led Zeppelin, Santana, Them, The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison and a couple others that put the soundtrack to Easy Rider to shame, but just like any other decent cinematic work, Lemke did not need the gimmick of popular counter-culture music to make a classic cult film. In a rich and reckless Teutonic tradition of stark street trash cinema that was followed by Supermarkt (1974) directed by Roland Klick and The End of the Rainbow (1979) aka Das Ende des Regenbogens directed by Uwe Frießner, Rocker shits on high kraut kultur and does a splendid job doing so, but it was only reflecting a degenerate zeitgeist that plagued the Fatherland during the post-WWII years. 

 Things were looking up for charismatic street criminal ‘Rocker’ Gerd (Gerd Kruskopf) after getting out of jail and being warmly welcomed back by his biker buddies, but a lot has changed since his life-idling imprisonment, including his girlfriend, who went from being a biker babe to a would-be-bourgeois bitch now working in a dapper department store. Somewhere else in town is a degenerate car thief named Uli (Paul Lys) with a certain seedy scumbag swag and misleading boyish good-looks, sort of resembling a German Jim Morrison except minus a marvelous way with words that allows him to trash talk random girls into allowing him to prod their meat curtains. One day, Uli gets mixed up with the wrong kraut pimp with a fucked up pseudo-chic bleach blond hairdo and is beaten to death one night while in a drunken stupor in front of his impressionable yet intrepid 15-year-old brother Mark (played by Hans-Jürgen Modschiedler who also starred in Lemke’s 1975 TV movie Teenagerliebe). Naturally, Mark, although a wee lad that could easily be mistaken for girl, vows revenge against the flesh-peddling mensch who killed his bro and he eventually meets up with rough Rocker Gerd to help him carry it out. Given grief by his blue collar father because of his noisy rock music and eventually having his house burned down by phantom rival gang members as he is beaten senseless while tied to a tree, barely escaping with his life, Gerd basically loses everything he has left, so he humors the young boy Mark when he comes to his local bar, teasing the boy for his pronounced “purity” and ignorance towards the more wanton and reckless ways of the world. Although neither realizes it at first, Mark’s brother Uli was a friend of Gerd’s ex-girlfriend, thus the union between the bodacious biker and the young buck seems to be the result of a rather romantic yet certainly sleazy storybook fate in a cinematic work that has more in common aesthetically with Cinéma vérité works than some sort of fantasy knight tale. After Gerd casually cons some American drug dealers into buying a suitcase that they assume is full of drugs but is instead full of junk and not the sort you shoot into your arm, he buys a new motorcycle with his sweetly swindled deutschmarks and hits the road with little Mark. On the way, they face some misfortune, including the destruction of the newly accorded motorcycle by a disgruntled, morbidly obese trucker that Gerd heckles, but ultimately the two down-and-out misfits have a showdown with the prick of a pimp and his homo-like hoods who was responsible for brother Uli’s premature death.

 A gorgeously gritty and exceedingly exciting piece of anti-rational German proletarian neo-romanticism, Rocker – a rough and tough cinematic work that is far from immaculate in terms of technical direction and having a clandestine plot, but never settles for anything less than aesthetically abrasive imagery and lovely lowbrow entertainment – is a film that deserves more recognition than the cult status it has in the marginal Teutonic ghetto of Hamburg. Not settling for the ‘victim mentality” that Easy Rider wallows in, especially during the conclusion nor pathetic political propaganda of the quasi-hippie sort, Rocker presents the timeless story of “us versus them” without resorting to pathetic moralistic preaching nor promoting acceptance of the wild 'other' as just fine with the obscurity of his blood brotherhood. Innately influenced by a Hollywood-contrived foreign culture that they seem to only understand superficially as demonstrated by Gerd’s poster of Marlon Brando from the iconic rebel motorcycle gang flick The Wild One (1953), the brassy blockhead bike boys of Rocker have fashioned a sinful and subversive subculture all of their own that demands loyalty before death and death before loyalty.  Rocker ends with the face of teenage troublemaker Mark, who just got involved with his first gang fight, staring into the distance of a future that may be less than fruitful in terms of monetary gain and social prestige, but he can now sleep in safety knowing that his ill-fated brother has been avenged and that he will be regularly devouring the fruit that made man wise with fierce fast-fucks and moonlight motorcycle rides, even if he has an old lady heckling in the background to get a job at the local convenience store.

-Ty E

Beware of a Holy Whore

By no means one of German New Wave auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s greatest films, Beware of a Holy Whore (1971) aka Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte – an anecdotally embarrassing semi-autobiographical based on the filmmaker’s virtual hell on foreign earth while filming the wacky and tacky kraut anti-western Whity (1971) only a couple months before – is a virtual “who’s who” of New German cinema, features acting performances by Fassbinder himself, Werner Schroeter, Margarethe von Trotta, Ulli Lommel, Kurt Raab, Hanna Schygulla, Ingrid Caven, Harry Baer, Magdalena Montezuma, and countless others. Marking a break in Fassbinder's oeuvre and an unofficial start to the cinematic works associated with the director's “avant-garde” Anti-Theater (antiteater) – the troupe of pre-film actors that the director lived with and made his original films with – Beware of a Holy Whore is probably the closest as one will ever get to understanding the “controlled chaos” of the auteur’s filmic family and frenzied filmmaking process. Indeed, some of Fassbinder’s collaborators have less than fond memories of the film, including celebrated cinematographer Michael Ballhaus who stated in an interview: “Some of the films we did together, such as Beware of a Holy Whore, I find pretty awful when I see them today.” Undoubtedly, I would be lying if I did not admit that Beware of a Holy Whore made me feel a bit ambivalent toward the Fassbinder family, including the director himself, as the emotionally sterile (although intentionally so) yet sin-ridden cinematic work is like François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) aka La Nuit Américaine meets Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963) aka Le Mépris from insanely inane inhospitable hell where unadulterated narcissism fuels a fickle furor of nihilistic sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll that would ultimately take a tragic toll on the filmmaker behind it in the long run. As actor-turned-director Margarethe von Trotta explained in an interview regarding Fassbinder: “When we were filming Beware of a Holy Whore in Sorrento, he would go on three or four hours of sleep. Like Pasolini. There are people like that – often people who freely, almost obsessively, give rein to their sexuality, without becoming intellectually or artistically drained. They derive special spiritual and creative power from their excesses…I sometimes wonder if those people know that their lives will be short and therefore need to burn their candle on both ends, frantically living for the moment.” With its various scenes of unsanctified girlfriend-swapping, brutality against girls and girly men, brazen bisexual affairs, dubious money handling, crippling cocktail of alcoholic and other unidentified controlled substances, and all around hostile human ugliness, Beware of a Holy Whore left me with the unforgettable impression that Rainer Werner Fassbinder needed real-life manic melodrama to fuel him with enough tenacity and vigor to crack out celluloid melodramas works so quickly as a sort of king of psychic vampires of the artistically driven sort.

If any film displays the passive arrogance of post-war Germans, especially of the ostensibly anal Aryan ‘artiste,’ it is most certainly Beware of a Holy Whore; a work of penetrating “pornographic pretentiousness” and "narcissism-exploitation" where every single character has their head so far up their own ass that it brings a new meaning to Uncle Adolf’s quote, “Those who cannot see past their own nose deserve our pity more than anything else.” Of course, one will have a hard time feeling even the most measly morsel of sympathy for the most characters in the film as their film-wrecking wretchedness of douche-bag dandy decadence, shifty and seedy sexual secretion sharing, prissy prima donna pomposity, and vehement vulgarian vanity is just about enough to make a speed-driven Warhol Superstar (it should be noted that Beware of a Holy Whore has the feel of a slick and professionally directed early Factory film) feel consumed with decided disgust, but one must respect Fassbinder for having enough whorish humility to reflexively resort to the most unflattering of self-criticism and self-parody. Waiting for the patently pretentious and audaciously arrogant auteur filmmaker Jeff (played by Colombian-born actor Lou Castel whose blond boyish looks are a far cry from Fassbinder’s semi-Mongolian schoolboy appearance), as well as the production money and film stock to show up and start filming, the cast and crew featured in Beware of a Holy Whore find themselves sulking in self-isolated corners of cumbersomeness, but things only get worse with the arrival of the dickhead dictator of a director who can’t find happiness in cock, cunt, or caviar, hence his pathological need to create films. Only the always cool Eddie Constantine, who plays himself as the international lead star, can keep his cool around a band apart of 20-30-somethings who seem more interested in contriving poses for their contemptible contemporaries than utilizing their “method acting” for the silverscreen. Indeed, tons of “whoring” goes on in Beware of a Holy Whore, pitting fag against fag hag with notable harlot heartlessness from Margarethe von Trotta who, despite being engaged to the production manager Sascha (played by Fassbinder), has no problem philandering with director Jeff; a switch-hitting softcore sadist that enjoys physically, sexually, and verbally abusing both boys and girls, especially the emotionally needy sort.  Jeff also has a jealous actor boy toy named Ricky (played by Marquard Bohm) who looks like an inbred version of Mick Jagger and is plotting revenge against his deceitful dick-sucking director lover. Ulli Lommel – who would direct his first feature Haytabo (1971) around the same time as Beware of a Holy Whore using many of the same actors, including charismatic Constantine in the lead role – plays the role of a set manager that, like in real-life, dreams of becoming a director in his own right and seems to utilize any opportunity he can get for Jeff to degrade him. In one of the more standout performances, Magdalena Montezuma plays “Irm,” a thinly disguised pseudonym for Irm Hermann (who seems to have dubbed her own voice for "Irm" later), who like the real woman, was deeply in love and financially supported the director during his early years of poverty as a novice filmmaker and was repaid for affection with physical and verbal brutality. In a scene that totally seems to capture his essence, Werner Schroeter plays a photographer with a graceful passivity that allows him to escape from the renegade film production rather unscathed just as he did the New German cinema scene. Although a marginal role, Kurt Raab plays a character whose grotesque yet gut-busting gayness and crude cross-dressing makes for a rare moment of comic relief in Beware of a Holy Whore that is more than needed. If Fassbinder achieved anything with the film aside from depicting the downright despicableness of everything that went on during his early film productions, it is that he was able to juggle an ungodly number of inciting idiosyncratic characters in a film that essentially takes place in a handful of rooms.

In The 120 Days of Bottrop (1997) – a work the director described as the last modern “German New Wave” film – effortlessly erratic enfant terrible auteur Christoph Schlingensief would go on to parody Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore with stunning sardonic sharpness that can only be absolutely approached by watching both films as a double feature.  Needless to say, Schlingensief's satirical scat film does not feature an inkling of the intrinsically irritating pretense that plagues Fassbinder's flick. Although opening with the inter-title “PRIDE GOES BEFORE A FALL,” Beware of a Holy Whore really seems to be full of characters whose self-control and social sanity is the only thing that “goes.” The characters in the film are so arrogant that they make a Roman blonde beast – a tall Nordic man that looks like an albino straight out of a National Socialist propaganda poster – think that that he is “subhuman” and that they treat him “like a black” because they are all “Übermenschs” from Munich who “all belong together.” Of course, the godforsaken Guido could not be further from the truth, as these Bavarian Aryans are quite the miserable motley crew whose contrary physical appearances are only rivaled by their personal rivalries. Concluding with the Thomas Mann quote, “I tell you that I am often deadly tired to represent human kind without to participate in human kind.,” Beware of a Holy Whore certainly gets across – for better or worse – that Fassbinder was going to portray the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, thus it is no surprise that filmmaker Jeff states, “I guess I won’t be content until I know…he’s been completely destroyed,” as the very last word spoken in the film. The “he” presumably being Fassbinder himself, who inevitably destroyed himself with the behind-the-scenes chaos he dealt with on a day-to-day basis with filmmaking being the only part of life he could control, thereupon sacrificing himself for cinema.  More an important artifact of his filmmaking career and his brand of filmmaking, Beware of a Holy Whore lets the viewer know that although actors may be the worst of whores, we as spectators are nothing more than passive Johns.

-Ty E

Christmas Evil

If there is any Christmas-themed slasher flick that would inspire Santa to put steamy reindeer turds in stockings of all crew members involved with film, it is most certainly the superlatively sleazy low-camp anti-Christ-mass classic Christmas Evil (1980) aka You Better Watch Out aka Terror in Toyland; a rather wretched full-fledged assault on Christmas of grand aesthetic futility that the “pope of trash” John Waters claims to be “hopefully its #1 fan” and was praised in the Balti-moron's book Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters (1987), thereupon adding to its 'cult credibility' in the long run. On the surface, Christmas Evil seems more like a hokey Chanukah honoring flick considering its notably anti-nostalgic take on old Saint Nick and the countless Hebraic folks (names like Pressman, Rubinstein, Levine, etc.) that were involved in creating the sneeringly festive film. Christmas Evil is ultimately more of an idiotic half-attempt at invalidating Christmas spirit with a tacked on "Pro-Claus" message than a serious malicious attack on those who wish you a merry Christmas, thus making it the celluloid equivalent of a store-bought gingerbread man; cheap and tasteless, but undeniably palatable. Akin to the patently perverse cult porn flick Water Power (1977) directed by Shaun Costello in the seriousness or lack thereof in its depiction of an aberrant anti-hero whose all-consuming holiday season pathologies are too penetrating to keep under control when certain triggers arise (in this case, Christmas lights, delinquent prepubescent children, and mistletoe), Christmas Evil is best looked at as a crappy yet charming crude camp black comedy with nil serious artistic merit, despite the fact that would-be-auteur Lewis Jackson, the man who directed this bittersweet celluloid candy-cane claims the film was heavily inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (thus influencing him to paint all the set walls "institutional green"), as well as the German New Wave auteur filmmaker's hero Douglas Sirk, of all possible directors! In reality, Christmas Evil is the sort of Xmas film Herschell Gordon Lewis (the smut-peddling Semite did direct a film shot on a high school stage entitled The Magic Land of Mother Goose (1967) to which he later added random excerpts of Santa and re-titled it Santa Visits the Magic Land of Mother Goose) might have assembled had he had a slight interest in somewhat discernible technical competency, sensible narrative construction, and character development as opposed to mere less than sexy sexploitation scenes and grating gore galore that bores. Jackson said that he got the initial idea for Christmas Evil in the 1970s while smoking a joint, henceforth causing him to visualize a random image of sadistic Santa holding a knife in his hand and built the film’s killer kitsch Claus script around this supremely stupid image. Centering around a particularly perverted psychopathic Santa-phile that probably wet dreams of a white Christmas and reams and ravages red-rectum reindeer, Christmas Evil – not unlike Paul Morrissey’s depiction of Dr. Frankenstein Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Dracula in Blood for Dracula (1974), but to a more severely unsophisticated degree – will, for better or worse, make you never look at Santa Clause the same way. 

 After seeing Santa Claus (which, in reality, is really his father in a Santa outfit) paw his mother’s legs with his jolly Christmas claws during one fateful Christmas Eve in 1947 in some stereotypical suburban neighborhood in New Jersey, hardheaded Harry Stadling (Brandon Maggart) is never quite the same again and grows up to be a marvelously mundane maniac man-child who has dedicated his life to meticulously checking his list as to whether the kids in his neighborhood have been naughty or nice with a special emphasis on punishing those who have been extra naughty. Like Saint Nicholas, hysterical Harry – a most extreme judge of character with a peculiar proclivity towards perverse power trips – has a most meticulous moral compass that never fails, albeit a decidedly deranged and discordant one, that works without fail; degenerates and perverts who have forgot the meaning of Christmas are mangled, mutilated, and murdered and good little Santa-saluting boys and girls are treated to his obsessively assembled handmade toys. Despite his aversion to all forms of sexual perversion, Harry – who talks to and stalks (via Rear Window-style with binoculars) little children like a seasoned saint of unsavory scopophilia – seems like a latent pedophile and a man after Michael Jackson's own heart in his particularly perturbing Peter Pan syndrome, as he keeps personal photographs of neighborhood elementary school children at his desk and sees them as "spiritual" equals of sorts. Described as an “emotional cripple” by his own brother Phil (Jeffrey DeMunn) and treated with tormenting scorn, contempt and/or disrespect by everyone he knows, Harry strives for an intangible youthful innocence that only grows stronger as it is trampled on by his fellow adults who he cannot relate to in the slightest, which eventually causes him to see red, and not just the color of his much beloved Santa Claus outfit, as many unfortunate people end up dead as a result of their sacrilegious Santa-shunning indiscretions. Essentially living a double life as a result of a split personality, Harry, now Thirty-three years older since that debauched XXXmas night in 1947 that forever changed him, has "a lousy position" as a manager at a toy factory where he reluctantly rules over a group of blue-collar workers who constantly besmirch his Christmas toy fetishism. Of course, Christmas Eve is Harry’s night; a time where the loony loser takes on the self-appointed role of both Saint Nicholas and Black Peter (even putting mud on his face at one point in an act of ritualistic blackface where he marks one bad boy’s house for carnage in the tradition of nefarious Negro Pete) and he certainly knows who has been naughty and who has been nice.

Claiming to be more influenced by the shadows of German expressionism than the colorful lights of any cinematic Christmas classics, Lewis Jackson ultimately managed to assemble one of the most darkly comedic, yet rather retardedly so, X-mas flicks ever made, thereupon making it seem less dated in retrospect compared with the similarly themed Chris Killer flick Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) that spawned an ungodly number of needless sequels. Along with Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972) and Black Christmas (1974), Christmas Evil offers some of the best nostalgia for negativity as the sort of sardonic holiday season film one watches for therapeutic reasons after having to meet up with relatives and family friends one would never see under any circumstance, especially on Christmas.  Concluding on an absurdly 'positive' happy note not all that dissimilar from Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984), Christmas Evil, despite its many scenes of nonsensical depravity and satirical violence, ultimately has a positive message against the cheap commercialization of Christmas (even if the movie itself is a product of such monetary motivated phenomenon) and promotes a message of remembering the true meaning of Christmas, even if the morally dubious maniac promoting such a once-sacred message is far from a role model Santa Claus.  Of course, most people watch Christmas Evil because they want to see a seasonal slasher flick with Santa as a blood-soaked sadist slicing up red ribbons of human flesh.  Personally, I would prefer a satirical Black Peter splatter flick, but you can't always get everything you want for Christmas.

-Ty E