New York City Inferno

 

With Interior. Leather Bar. (2013) – Hollywood-actor-turned-homophile-arthouse-auteur James Franco and his cinematic compatriot Travis Mathews’ reimagining of the 40 minutes or so of eternally lost footage cut from William Friedkin’s sadomasochistic sodomite 'slasher' flick Cruising (1980) – it is a better time than ever for fetishistic French filmmaker Jacques Scandelari’s heretical hardcore porn flick New York City Inferno (1978) aka Cock Tales aka From Paris to New York to be rescued from ostensible celluloid obscurity. Directed by the man (yet credited under the pseudonym ‘Marvin Merkins’) who brought the world Beyond Love and Evil (1971) aka La philosophie dans le boudoir – a super sensual and severe surrealist arthouse flick based on the memoirs of the Marquis de Sade – and penned by American journalist/historian Elliott Stein (who worked with Kenneth Anger on his 1965 tabloid masterpiece Hollywood Babylon), New York City Inferno is like a pornographic art-exploitation film from the prospective of one of the many real-life boot-and-ass-licking, shit-chowing homo-fascist leather-fag extras from Friedkin’s Cruising and shot in a exceedingly seedy and glaringly gritty cinéma vérité style that makes it quite clear to the viewer that what they are witnessing is a boner-fide depiction of wild rectum ranger wantonness. Featuring an aberrant army of underground urinal urchins who – not unlike the poofter performers of Interior. Leather Bar. – had no qualms about being credited by their real-life Greenwich Village streets names, New York City Inferno is a foolishly filthy film that needs to seen to believed. Somewhat similar in theme to the fellow frog fag flick Johan aka Johan – Mon été 75 directed by Philippe Vallois – a work about a lonely Parisian lavender cowboy who enters the unsavory underbelly of various sod subcultures of anonymous sex and S&M sacrilege while waiting for his bent boy toy to get out of prison – New York City Inferno follows Paris-born pansy Jérôme (played by Alain-Guy Giraudon, but credited as 'Christopher Dock') as he travels to the horribly hostile human sewers of NYC to be reunited with his rebellious lover Paul (Bob Bleecker); a flaming fellow who has fallen hopelessly in love with the big rotten apple’s leather-fag subculture. Featuring complimentary and highly stereotypical skin-diver tunes by queer musical icons the Village People, itself the brainchild of a fagola Frenchmen, as well as punk art noise performances in the same gay gutter garage where penetrating poofer orgies take place among the popper-possessed, ass-munching audience members, New York City Inferno is a positively potent remainder as to why AIDS if oftentimes described as 'gay cancer.'

 If Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964) signaled in the arrival of militaristic libertine leather-fags in NYC, New York City Inferno announced the Sodomite SS world revolution where not a single anal or oral orifice is spared. Jaded gentleman Jérôme is quite curious as to why his cock-consuming comrade-in-asses Paul never returned from what was only suppose to be a week-long trip to the STD-stricken and semen-stained homo cesspools of New York City, so he decides to take a trip to the superlatively shitty city himself in the hope of finding his buggering beau. Through a series of letters he wrote to Jérôme each day, Paul cryptically detailed his hyper-hedonistic sex-capades in NYC, henceforth remarking in his final letter that he would never be returning to the supposed city of love. More resembling gutter auteur Andy Milligan – a sadistic scatman himself who derived immense pleasuring from sexually squandering his fellow fairies – than the archetypical swarthy Frenchman, Jérôme already looks the part of a 42nd street semen demon and he is about to find out that he fits right in with the fist-fucking bottomless pit of his most perverse pecker probing pipedreams. Jérôme wants to know why the sin-ridden city is “so magical” as he heard it was a “wonderful place for gay people,” so he ultimately has two objectives planned for his trip: to get fucked and to find his fuck-buddy. Upon arriving to NYC with Paul’s letters in his pockets, Jérôme speaks with a French-speaking taxi-driver who studied medicine in Belgium, thereupon learning about the various ‘cruising’ spots around Greenwich Village, including Christopher Street (home to 4 or 5 homo hang-outs), which he wastes no time visiting. During his first sexual encounter, the froggy fairy ritualistically packs a random man's (with a matching mustache to boot) meat in a literal meat-packing plant while the mutilated carcass of a farm animal acts as a sick sex object of sorts. After meeting “a strange man, half-sorcerer, half-fortuneteller,” who eventually reads his fortune via his ejaculatory seed, Jérôme is finally on the true path to finding Paul, but he must prowl the streets for “good-looking boys” with “violent tendencies” and venomous but vital juices before reuniting with his sissie soul mate. As Jérôme learns after a number of ballum rancum bumfests and leather-laced ring-piece-licking man-jams, to get Paul back, he must become the “Master of his Master” or face Dorian love disgrace. 

 Most likely the film from where “Dutch Fassbinder” Edwin Brienen (notice the guy in the upper right corner of the poster/banner at the top of this review with the pink shirt and blue hat) developed his signature auteur look, New York City Inferno is indubitably a hardcore leather-fag flick with ferocious style and severely subversive spirit and certainly one of handful of man-meat movies that – not unlike the early films of Fred Halsted (The Sex Garage, LA Plays Itself) – that vanilla-sex-inclined heterosexuals can get hip with, if not for all the wrong reasons. The virtual missing celluloid link between Scorpio Rising and Cruising, New York City Inferno is an essential piece of leather-fag sinema history that deserves a larger cult-following; be it among copulating cock-suckers and/or otherwise. New York City Inferno is the film that Night of the Occultist (1973) directed by 'Kenneth Andrews' – a patently pathetic pornographic Kenneth Anger-wannabe directed by a man whose pseudonym is as transparent lack of artistic originality – wishes it was, as a strikingly salacious cinematic work where 'Scorpio' rises form hell and is sucked up and down by the most sordid and subversive street of NYC’s secret Sodom. Created at a time before the total homogenization of homos via Hebraic Hirschfeld-inspired Hollywood, New York City Inferno is a fag flesh flick with a soul, albeit a surpassingly sleazy, seedy, and scatological sod one.  More masculine than the bromide boys featured in contemporary Judaic Tinseltown 'bromance' movies like Wedding Crashers (2005) and I Love You, Man (2009), as well as anything that nauseating negrophile queen Quentin Tarantino has ever directed, New York City Inferno is a gay Grindhouse flick on steroids that, aside from a scene featuring an interview with a theology student who hopes to promote pro-gay propaganda among Christian churches, never demands shallow acceptance from the viewer, but, instead, a strong stomach of steel.  Featuring both punk pansies and punk rockers (and a peculiar combination of both), New York City Inferno is a highly heretical piece of hidden homosexual film history that features more shadowy trick-turning than Francis Delia's Nightdreams (1981) and a more intricate narrative than Jonas Middleton's Through the Looking Glass (1976).  If you ever doubted a horny homo's keen ability to fetishize and/or fuck billiard balls, meat-racks, defecating negroes, work boots, lonely police officers, fortunetellers, terrible tattoos, and over-educated taxi-drivers, look no further than New York City Inferno; a rare erotic French film with an actual pair of testicles, albeit covered in scabies, shit, semen, and sanguine fluids.

-Ty E