The Kingdom of Naples

If one needed to see indisputable evidence that German New Cinema dandy auteur Werner Schroeter (Eika Katappa, Der Rosenkönig aka The Rose King) was more than a morbidly depressed diva addict with an immaculate and wildly idiosyncratic knack for communicating his campy cognitive dissonance on screen in a solely tableau-obsessed manner, one just needs to see his kraut-Guido neo-neorealist flick Nel regno di Napoli (1978) aka Neapolitanische Geschichten aka The Reign of Naples aka The Kingdom of Naples—a decidedly decadent yet refined Teutonic look at the Southern Italian proletarian soul over a three decade period created by a German man who spent enough time in the city of Naples as a student to appreciate the most forsaken families of the intrinsically impoverished post-industrial wasteland. Schroeter’s first feature shot on 35mm film stock and a work that would earn the filmmaker the 1979 German Film Prize for “Best Direction” in a country that thought of him as a "art cut," The Kingdom of Naples depicts a brother and sister from a poor-as-dirt family from their births at the time of the end of fascism in the city to the equally dystopian early 1970s, otherwise known as the “Bourbon era” of Naples, when it seemed liked there was no hope for the hopeless in the spiritually devitalized, increasingly Americanized South Italian metropolis. Essentially beginning where Italian Freudian-Marxist auteur Bernardo Bertolucci’s sickeningly sentimental and superficial com-symp epic 1900 (1976) aka Novecento left off, albeit using all Italian actors (both professional and non-professional), The Kingdom of Naples brings a certain ‘pessimistic pep’ via Schroeter's sharp operatic direction and dandy colorfulness to the seemingly static neorealist genre, thus giving the destitute characters of the film a certain sense of dignity that even eclipses the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Mamma Roma, Teorema), but without portraying them in a soulless, idealistic and propagandistic Marxist manner. While German New Cinema alpha-auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder found his friend Schroeter’s second excursion in quasi-neorealism, Palermo oder Wolfsburg aka (1980) Palermo or Wolfsburg, to be one of the “most disappointing” films of Teutonic cinema, he regarded his celluloid compatriot's flick The Kingdom of Naples as one of the best of the post-WWII Fatherland, even writing a highly flattering essay in tribute to the film and filmmaker behind it. In his 1979 essay “Chin-up, Handstand, Salto Mortale—Firm Footing: On the Film Director Werner Schroeter, Who Achieved What Few, Achieve, with Kingdom of Naples,” Fassbinder wrote: “A great and important film. Incredible, after the terrible years of waiting, always on the verge of simply drying up. A film that without hesitation can be classed with Ossessione by Visconti, La Strada by Fellini, Mamma Roma by Pasolini, Rocco and His Brothers by Visconti, Les bonnes femmes by Chabrol, Le diable probablement by Bresson, The Exterminating Angel by Buñuel, and others like that.” Indeed, The Kingdom of Naples is indisputable proof that at least one German filmmaker, Werner Schroeter, was able to do the seemingly impossible by getting inside the most miserable pockets of the Mediterranean soul and exposing it for the entire world to see, thus illustrating that the Third World is not the only place where people are literally starving, but also ancient old world Europe. 

Although a largely narrative-driven work with a fictional linear plot (albeit based on real-life events director Werner Schroeter personally read in newspapers) told in sixteen episodes, The Kingdom of Naples also acts as a seamless documentary film-within-a-film that chronicles the history of events that took place in Naples from 1943-1972 and that ultimately acts as the chronicled skeleton of the film. Beginning in 1943, the viewer learns that Naples was the first Italian city to be liberated by Italian fascism (apparently, they literally killed German soldiers for food, thus forcing the troops to abandon the city) and, naturally, by 1946 there were virtually nil jobs for men, but that is the least of the people’s problems because as a bold and beautiful yet bitchy middle-aged lady named Valeria Cavioli (Liana Trouche) states—thus symbolically illustrating the matriarchal essence of Italian society—to a group of jobless men after the birth of baby named Vittoria Pagano, “What idiots, these men. During the war, all they can make are girls.” Vittoria has an older brother named Massimo and like their parents—the father (Dino Mele) being a fiercely fanatical anti-Catholic and the mother (Renata Zamengo) being a dearly devout Catholic—they are quite the opposites and they will grow further apart in political and social persuasion as they come-of-age in war-torn Southern Europa. Next door lives a callous widow named Valeria and her dainty daughter Rosa (Laura Sodano), whose malicious mother trades her damned daughter’s virginity to a chocolate-wielding black U.S. sailor for a mere bag of flour with “U.S.A.” stamped on it, thus irreparably destroying the innocent girl’s sense of person dignity for what will be the rest of her miserable life. Indeed, such dehumanizing acts are the norm in the impoverished ghettos of post-WWII Naples, where rich pedophiles conspire to lure in proletarian children with their exotic pet fish and fat cat Catholic priests wallow in their own gluttony as their followers starve in a ghetto right next door to the church. As narrated in The King of Naples, by 1948, “a progressive economic model, which turned out to be extremely reactionary in nature. Free reign for the employer who exploits the workers. Repression and exploitation in the factories…The Pope also prays to the Holy Mother to bring about a miracle, so the people vote for the Christian Democrats.” Of course, the potential “miracle” is not of a Christian Democrat persuasion, but an atheist Marxist sort. Not unsurprisingly, when mother Pagano dies in a martyr-like manner as she allegorically bleeds from her womb, her children inevitably respond to it in rather extreme manners, with Vittoria dreaming of being a nun, while her brother Massimo dreams of being a Marxist revolutionary. 

 When radical Spanish Marxist refugee and Franco opponent Alessandro Simonetti (Swiss auteur Daniel Schmid’s one-time boyfriend Raúl Gimenez)—a student of Italian far-left revolutionary Antonio Gramsci who seems to worship the Italian Marxist martyr and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy like a Catholic would worship Christ—arrives in Naples, he inspires hope in the hapless folk in the Guido ghetto, including Massimo, who goes on to work for free at the communist revolutionary’s party headquarters, and Valeria, who marries the charismatic would-be-messiah of leftist materialism. Vittoria attempts to be a nun, but her sternly anti-pope pop puts a quick end to that dream. Meanwhile, Massimo finds a surrogate mother figure in a French nurse turned prostitute Rosaria aka “Frenchie” (Pasolini regular Margareth Clémenti )—a family friend who was at the birth of Vittoria—who makes him pay to play with her voluptuous body. Vittoria herself almost becomes a prostitute at the age of 16 when a conspiring redhead bitch named Pupetta Ferrante (Ida Di Benedetto) who looks like a witchy drag-queen and owns a metal factory, hires her under the false pretense of being a cleaner and eventually offers the poor girl to move in her home to better job where she will meet countless “first class people.” Desperate and against Marxist Massimo’s wishes, Vittoria’s father persuades his daughter to move in with Ferrante, but the teenage girl soon learns that she has been hired as a prostitute and thus she flees the nefarious bourgeois bitch's house. An all around con of a cunt, Ferrante refuses to pay her overworked factory laborers, which results in a scuffle that leaves the men dead and the quasi-femme fatale boss a coldblooded murderer. Valeria also attempts to whore out her daughter Rosa to seemingly gay, mama’s boy attorney  and Christian democratic big wig named Palumbo (Gerardo D'Andrea), but instead she calls her manipulative mother a “whore” and gets extremely sick, eventually pointlessly dying because there are no antibiotics in Naples. Enraged, Valeria blames and kills her failed Marxist revolutionary husband Simonetti for Rosa’s premature and easily avoidable death because he promised a glorious Bolshevik worker's utopia, but failed to deliver anything but false promises and cheap charisma. Although Valeria only serves a short prison sentence, she is institutionalized in a mental hospital, where she admits to Massimo and Vittoria that she was gang raped by four men during the Second World War. Although Simonetti is dead, Massimo remains a stern communist and is ultimately arrested for his subversive political affiliations. In year 1970 as the narrator of The Kingdom of Naples states, “We have returned to a climate of uncertainty. Massimo has served his prison sentence. Will he still be a dreamer?” Now a husband and father of meager means who after about two decades of unflinching dedication to Marxism, is no closer to the commie dream, but instead witnesses the death of his beloved Frenchie and his holy sister settling for a career as a flashy flight attendant, Massimo leaves with the words of wisdom, “With so much sulphur in the air, people are destined to die. They dig from morning to evening in this filth. And the work robs you of all joy. What kind of a life is that?” 

A nearly immaculate marriage between realist melodrama and documentary collage, The Kingdom of Naples achieves what German New Cinema co-founder Alexander Kluge has been trying to accomplish his entire career, but whose sterile and pedantic Marxist intellectualism, seeming lack of artistic spirit, and pomo posturing have always prevented him from realizing. Indeed, The Kingdom of Naples is a true proletarian flick, yet executed with the sensitivity and nuance of a true maestro and aristocrat of aestheticism with a genuine love and respect for an alien people. Of course, where The Kingdom of Naples is different from the Italian neorealist films, especially those by Pasolini, that inspired it is that Schroeter seems to have no love for communism nor the Catholic church—both of which are portrayed in The Kingdom of Naples as parasitic entities that make endless promises of salvation and an utopian future yet never deliver anything aside from false hope—but only the people of the region, whose survival is totally based on their desperate will to live and nothing more, hence why a mother gives away her virginal daughter away to a Negro American sailor for a mere bag of flour and a young girl grows up to be a stewardess instead of the holy nun she always dream of being. Indeed, The Kingdom of Naples has the sort of uncompromising cultural pessimism that could have only been assembled by a German filmmaker lacking a certain Mediterranean flamboyance and pomposity, so it should be no surprise that the film was not very popular in Italy as it was in Germany, even inspiring Schroeter’s friend Fassbinder to state of his cinematic compatriot's first big commercial and critic hit, “So Germany has not only three, or five, or ten film directors to show off; it has now acquired another one who was certainly needed. One with a great deal to say. A great one, to put it simply.” And, indeed, Schroeter says as much as an Ausländer can say about a strange foreign land in The Kingdom of Naples, to the point where I asked myself whether or not the poverty plagued population would have been better off with the fascism that once made the trains run on time, or simply being nuked into oblivion as few other films get at the heart of collective misery and tragedy, and stoically and unsentimentally let us know there is not a cure, despite what the communist party or Catholic church promises with their pseudo-altruistic verbal swill.  Indeed, the Teutonic king of German celluloid kitsch proved with The Kingdom of Naples that every ghetto has its revolutionaries and divas, but instead of killing wealthy aristocrats and performing for sold-out operas, they are dumping trash into the sea and peddling their pussies for pennies on the dollar.  With the economic crisis in Europe hitting the Mediterranean countries the hardest, The Kingdom of Naples might not make for the most inspiring film for contemporary Southern Europeans to watch, but it will certainly make them second guess worthless intellectual abstractions some messianic Marxist demigod is peddling like a glorified whore on a city street corner.

-Ty E

Straight to Hell

When I first saw British cult auteur Alex Cox’s anarchistic surrealist slapstick Western Straight to Hell (1987)—a work titled after the 1982 Clash song of the same name—I thought it was one of the most incomprehensible cinematic failures of the director’s career (I had yet to see most of the filmmaker's post-El Patrullero (1992) oeuvre), especially when compared to his debut feature-length masterpiece Repo Man (1984), but I have given it a couple subsequent viewings since then and the film has grown on me like a juicy cyst that is just waiting to be popped. Co-written by Dick Rude (A Cox regular who played protagonist Otto’s skinheaded criminal punk friend “Duke” in Repo Man) and Cox over a mere three day period of apparent coffee addiction and sexual tension (apparently, the two writers were entranced by a woman sunbathing in a hotel room nearby their own) and shot over a four week period in Almería, Spain—the place where many great Spaghetti Westerns were filmed, including a number directed by Dago master auteur Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)—Straight to Hell was not originally intended as a film, but a concert tour of Nicaragua of all things in support of the quasi-commie Sandinistas against the USA (like most ethno-masochistic whites/Europeans, Cox has had a lifelong obsession with leftist Latin American revolutionary movements), yet things fell through due to lack of funds and political reasons, and it was also probably decided that it would be much easier to raise money by making a feature-length with rock stars being cinematically killed opposed to being literally killed at concerts very few people would probably attend. With all the musicians already around that were supposed to support the unofficial “Rock for Communism” festival, including Joe Strummer of the Clash, Elvis Costello, and Grace Jones, as well as members of the The Pogues, Amazulu, and The Circle Jerks, Straight to Hell already had a punk rock star cast for a punk rock parody of Spaghetti Westerns in the spirit of Repo Man (1984), albeit with much less pre-production planning. An extremely loose remake of the criminally underrated Spaghetti Western Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot! (1967) directed by comp-symp auteur Giulio Questi—a gothic surrealist Western featuring a gay gang of fascistic blackshirt bandits—Straight to Hell is all the more nihilistic than the film that inspired it in its loving antagonism of the Guido cowboy genre that it is pathologically obsessed with. Advertised with the more than literal tagline, “A story of blood, money, guns, coffee, and sexual tension,” Straight to Hell is the closest in spirit to Cox’s masterpiece Repo Man, aside from possibly Walker (1987), albeit all the more uncompromisingly cynical, misanthropic, aesthetically malicious, and thematically anarchic, yet that does not also necessarily make it the lapsed punk filmmaker’s greatest film either, but it does not make a bad way to waste about 80 minutes or so. A torrid and sardonic pseudo-Spaghetti Western about four innately ill-starred and incompetent hit men/bank robbers who hide out in a peculiar desert town inhabited by the decidedly deranged and degenerate, Straight to Hell—a work director Alex Cox once described as an “anti-capitalist, anti-world trade, political parable”—is a classic story of what human beings do best, killing each other, and the altruistic big businesses that support them doing it. 

 Straight to Hell opens with the introduction of three goofy hitmen, Willy, Norwood, and Simms (played by co-writer Dick Rude, Cox regular Sy Richardson, and the Clash frontman Joe Strummer) as they prove from the get go they are incompetent criminals by botching a hit against an ostensibly Jewish businessman named Mr. Greenberg by oversleeping after an all-night alcohol binge. Norwood—a swag-driven middle-aged black man who happens to the oldest and wisest, if not equally self-destructive of the criminal clan—also has brought along his brazen and bitchy pregnant old lady/bride Velma (played by pre-Hole Courtney Love) for the wild and reckless ride. In fear for what might happen to them after their suavely-dressed employer Amos Dade (played by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch) learns they really fucked up the job, the four fiercely fallible felons rob a bank and head for the desert, but their car breaks down so they bury their money and head for a seeming ghost town “till the heat blows down,” where they are silently greeted by a turned over car that looks much like their own with a dead man still in the driver's seat, thus offering a potent premonition of their dubious futures. The next day, the goofy hit men have a bloody showdown with a gang of outlaw bandits named the McMahon clan (made up of Celtic punk band the Pogues) who are addicted to killing and coffee. After mindlessly killing a couple of people, the hit men earn the respect of the mad and murderous McMahons and their crudely charismatic leader Frank (Biff Yeager), thus resulting in a dubious truce for the next couple days in the rather treacherous tradition of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Not long after, Simms and Willy fall in love with two local women from the town, Fabienne (Jennifer Balgobin)—the French wife of an insanely paranoid ex-war veteran turned hardware shop owner—and Louise (Michele Winstanley)—a British bitch that is quite adamant about finding out where the hit men’s money is buried as opposed to what is hidden in the horny hit man's pants. When the McMahons' respected patriarch, a disgruntled old man, is killed by his own deranged granddaughter Sabrina McMahon (Kathy Burke), who pops her pop-pop over the head and knocks him off a roof just for the hell of it, the blood gets flowing and starts flying. Naturally, with Straight to Hell being a spoof of the Spaghetti Western genre, a quasi-metaphysical and festive funeral is held where a friend of Amos, Whitey, makes the mistake of showing up at the wrong place at the wrong time as he is looking for the renegade hit men and is subsequently hanged as he is blamed by the bloodlusting and vengeful McMahons for being a “stranger” and, naturally, the death of dear old grandpa. Not long after, a supposed house manufacturer named I.G. Farben (Dennis Hopper) and his genteel wife Sonia (Grace Jones) show up to the town and delivers a number of high-tech weapons that everyone in the town will inevitably use to exterminate one another in one of the most erratically eccentric and needlessly nonsensical battle scenes ever filmed in cinema history. When Amos Dade shows up at the town, the cat is finally let out of the bag in regard to the hit men's deceit and the bullets begin flying in a less than civil, civil war between the townspeople, the hit men, and Amos’ criminal crew. Frank McMahon inevitably sides with Amos in reconciliation for mistakenly hanging Whitey for the death of grandpa McMahon and the hit men are essentially all by their lonesome, including among themselves as treachery reigns.  Velma proves that Courtney Love was always a whore and Willy and Simms put holes in a holy man and one of the two men eventually betrays the other. In the end, only Norwood—whose wanton wife has cheated on him and ultimately pays the ultimate price via a karma-based car explosion—and a couple cute prostitutes are left standing. In the end, only the mysterious I.G. Farben and his big oil company win. 

 The key to the anti-capitalist/anti-globalist ‘message’ of Straight to Hell is the character I.G. Farben played by Dennis Hooper. Hooper's character is named after the German chemical industry conglomerate of the same name that had the patent for the Jew-iciding gas Zyklon B which was found guilty of war crimes and seized by the Allies in 1945 and liquidated in 1952 (now only existing as an asset-less shell that pays ‘reparations’ to its victims). I.G. Farben was also in cahoots with John D. Rockefeller's United States-based Standard Oil Company and possibly had ties with DuPont, a major investor in and producer of leaded gasoline, United States Industrial Alcohol Company and its subsidiary, Cuba Distilling Co., as well as countless other “Allied” companies, but the kraut company would ultimately act as the scapegoat for all the other cancerous corporations who have only become all the more powerful and world-conquering today. Straight to Hell points to the fact, using a maniac microcosm of the pseudo-Spaghetti Western as the context, that while big corporations on opposing sides were getting rich together exploiting their nation’s war effort, the civilians of each respective nation were the ones that ultimately paid the price for an illusionary war (or the ‘Grand Illusion’ as famed French auteur Jean Renoir once called it) established to do one thing and one thing only—to make the rich even richer at the expense of everyone below them, especially the philistine peasant. Indeed, the overall ‘message’ of Straight to Hell is a bit preachy in the quasi-punk fashion, even if few viewers of the film actually seem to notice it, thus making for one of the many reasons why the film just cannot compare with Cox’s celluloid magnum opus Repo Man—a celluloid goldmine of nihilistic ideas and absurdist comedy—but the two together do make for an ideally idiosyncratic double-feature (and a triple-feature with Walker (1987) makes for all the more farcical fun). Although Straight to Hell concludes with promise of a sequel with the inter-title “COMING SOON: BACK TO HELL,” Cox would never get around to making it but he did create a rather pointless ‘director’s cut’ of the original film. Inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s disastrous “Redux” version of Apocalypse Now (1979), Cox released a director’s cut of his Spaghetti Western parody entitled Straight to Hell Returns (2010) a couple years back, which features a couple deleted scenes, new CGI scenes of skeleton wolves and dogs, and a slightly upgraded soundtrack. Considering Alex Cox’s filmmaking career has plummeted to unimaginable depths of celluloid ineptitude with the marvelously mundane anti-Western melodrama Searchers 2.0 (2007) and his blasphemously bad non-sequel to Repo Man, Repo Chick (2009), one can only assume he needed to find a way so his electricity would not get cut off and Straight to Hell Returns was the rather unfortunate answer.  Still, I found Straight to Hell Returns to be infinitely more enjoyable and inventive than a masturbatory pomo fanboy porn flick like Quentin Tarantino's negrophiliac celluloid defecation on Spaghetti Westerns, Django Unchained (2012).  After all, where Alex Cox admits he is a pussy "pacifist" (he even had the gall to personally tell Neutron bomb inventor Samuel T. Cohen this), which Straight to Hell fully illustrates in a meaty manner that actually has testicular fortitude (even if the director has none in a real world context), Tarantino, despite his incessant celluloid licking of black and brown butts and women's feet, has yet to fully embrace his inner beta-male and direct a two-volume piece of big budget interracial cuckold porn.  In short, I will always prefer going Straight to Hell to seeing Django Unchained.

-Ty E

Repo Man

Undoubtedly, if I were to guess what film that I have seen the most times, it would surely be Alex Cox’s absurdist and sardonic dystopian punk sci-fi masterpiece Repo Man (1984)—a work that I have no problem admitting that I watched at least twice a day for about a month a couple years back. Although I first saw Repo Man when I was around 12 or 13 years old, it would be a decade before I developed the deep admiration and obsession with the film that I have today, which is rather odd considering my teenage appreciation for early 1980s punk/hardcore has all but totally fizzled out since then yet Cox’s film is one of the very few ‘punk’ films that actually has the authentic attitude as a fiercely farcical work where legendary “man’s man” John Wayne—the Irish-American draft-dodger who provided the countless American males with enough romancing of battlefields to fight it in virtually every war of the second half of the twentieth century—is described as a fag and where Emilio Estevez sings the Black Flags ‘blues.’ With uniquely unhinged references to UFOs, Jungian psychology, rabid Reaginism, Televangelism, Scientology and other chic cults, the ‘Reconquista’ of California by Mexico, psychotic yuppie materialism, crackpot conspiracy theories, nuclear war, youthful middleclass nihilism, and the apocalypse in a world of aberrant spirituality, pathological paranoia, and all out cultural chaos, it is nothing short of absolutely amazing that Repo Man was ever released by Universal Studios—a studio that stands for everything that Cox’s film is against as a work with an unlikeable anti-hero as a protagonist and a cast of totally corrupt characters, an anti-romantic subplot, and an unwaveringly anarchic, misanthropic, and pessimistic essence where the American dream has been replaced with a pleasantly pernicious punk rock nightmare of the tragicomedic sort. Released in the fitting Orwellian year of 1984, Repo Man features a world all the more negative and nihilistic than that of the Orwell novel as the characters of Cox’s are far too apathetic and infantile to have thought-crimes and are far more interested in beer, money, drugs, joyless sex, infantile rock n roll, television, and pseudo-religions/cults to get involved in any sort of humanistic people’s revolution. Featuring a punk/hardcore soundtrack that acts as an imperative ingredient of the film, including songs from Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, Iggy Pop, Suicidal Tendencies, and the Plugs, Repo Man, despite being directed by a Brit, probably does the best job out of any film of its time at portraying its particular zeitgeist because it depicts all groups and subcultures that Hollywood never gave a 'serious' voice, including braindead punks, mischievous mestizos, middle-aged ex-hippie burnouts turned Christian burnouts, trendy cult groups, and members of various loveable lunatic fringe groups. Indeed, the genius of Repo Man is that by using absurdist Buñuel-esque satire and anarchic sardonic slapstick of the very vaguely Italian Neorealist and Spaghetti Western sort, Cox was able to hysterically and humorously highlight everything that made the 1980s one of the most repugnant eras of the twentieth century, even if it sired a timeless cult classic like Repo Man as a result of such culturally crappy circumstances. 

 Dullard punk rock dude Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez) has one of the worst days of his rather mundane and aimless life after he is fired from his job as sales clerk at a grocery store and later walks in on his beauteous yet bitchy dark-skinned punkette girlfriend Debbi (Jennifer Balgobin) making out with his dumbass small-time crook best friend Duke (Rick Rude) at a suburban punk rock party hosted by his nerdy ass-kissing friend Kevin (Zander Schloss)—a goofy fellow who bears a striking resemblance to Napoleon Dynamite. With neither a job nor a girlfriend, Otto aimlessly walks through a Mexican ghetto and is approached by a corpse-like conman named Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), who offers him $25.00 to drive ‘his’ other car to another location and becomes a repo man in the process after unwittingly repossessing the car of a deadbeat Hispanic for an absurdly generically titled repo company called “Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation.” Although initially ambivalent to brazen bitter bastard Bud and his motley crew of wisecracking repo men, and only deciding to take the job after finding out his ex-hippie pothead parents donated all his graduation money to a megalomaniacal televangelist, Otto eventually comes to appreciate the fact that “the life of a repo man is always intense.” Otto becomes the protégé of Bud, who teaches him the “Repo Code,” and the two subsequently snort coke, battle a rival gang of Hispanic repo men named the Rodriguez Brothers (Del Zamora and Eddie Velez), get involved in “real-life car chases” and repossess countless cars together. A sassy (and apparently Sapphic) black chick named Marlene (Vonetta McGee) also works at the repo company, but she is a secret traitor in cahoots with the Rodriguez brothers as a Marxist revolutionary of sorts from people varying from pompous preppy pricks to kindly old black grandmothers. Otto also learns the trick of the trade from a pimp-like black repo man named Lite (played by Cox regular Sy Richardson)— a man who literally breaks every segment of the "Repo Code"—and reluctantly takes spiritual advice from deranged junkyard guru named Miller (Tracey Walter) who promotes pseudo-Jungian theories, including “the lattice of coincidence” and something he calls the “cosmic unconsciousness,” which is clearly a bastardized take on Jung’s psychoanalytic theory of the collective unconscious. Meanwhile, Otto’s ex-best friend Duke, ex-girlfriend Debbi, and another Mohawk-sporting punk named Archie (Cox regular Miguel Sandoval) have formed a criminal punk gang that commits a number of armed robberies against various convenience stores and factories. Otto also starts a rather ridiculous non-romantic relationship with a bat-shit crazy and exceedingly annoying bitch named Leila (Olivia Barash) who is part of a “secret network” under the aptly titled named “United Fruitcake Outlet” that is dedicated to exposing the U.S. government’s cover-up of UFOs and space aliens. Leila also tells Otto about a mysterious 1964 Chevrolet Malibu from Roswell, New Mexico that contains four dead yet decidedly deadly space aliens in the truck. Although Otto thinks the little lady has more than a couple screws loose (despite screwing her), the next day he learns there is a $20,000 reward for the recovering of the Malibu, which is being driven by a determinedly deranged dude named J. Frank Parnell (Fox Harris) who stole the alien corpses from a Los Alamos National Laboratory and whose acute cognitive dissonance is the result of a lobotomy, as well as extraterrestrial radiation that is seeping out of his truck. 

 Naturally, a number of parties start searching for the radioactive Malibu, including Otto and Budd, the Rodriguez brothers, Leila and her loony friends, Debbi and Duke’s gang (who actually just steal the lucky car by happenstance), but also a group of all-blond Aryan federal agents led by a frigid fuehrer bitch with a bionic New Romanticist-style hand named Agent Rogersz (Susan Barnes), whose character seems to be modeled after fashion designer Anna Wintour and who rightfully proclaims, “No one is innocent,” at least in the ridiculous realm of Repo Man where everyone is looking out for #1. Even loveable bastard Bud begins to break his own code when his ever growing fanaticism for obtaining the hefty monetary reward for the Malibu gets the better of him, thereupon leading to his inevitable demise, but leaves with the sagely words of wisdom, “I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees.” In the end, it is the wildly idiosyncratic, idiot savant crank Miller—the man who stoically proclaims “John Wayne is a fag” and “the more you drive the less intelligent you become”—who is the only person who has the power to master and maneuver the extraterrestrial-fueled Malibu and Otto—the formerly apathetic yet nihilistic and hateful suburban punk—has finally found a calling in his life, thus also enabling him to take a ride in the alien automobile, thus concluding on a rather positive note for a film that restlessly wallows in cultural pessimism of the apocalyptic sort. 

 In an interview featured in the book Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (2010), Repo Man director Alex Cox stated, “I was certainly interested in punk, but as a revolutionary movement rather than a fashion thing. In that sense, as Buñuel said about Surrealism, the movement completely failed. But it was inspiration for a while.” And, indeed, while being the indisputable quintessential ‘punk film,’ Repo Man makes a mockery of the fact a good percentage of punks are spoiled middleclass morons who have no real reason to wage a mindless war against society, especially since Mexicans and hobos are literally dropping like flies in the gutter in the film. As for the protagonist of Repo Man, Cox stated, “Otto is more a blank page than an everyman, I think. What I found interesting in his character was how a supposedly “counterculture” character like a punk rocker could be quickly assimilated into a reactionary and hierarchical system—in this case the repo business, but it could also be the military, say—without even changing his appearance; the Suicidal Tendencies T-shirt was replaced by a suit jacket but the haircut remained the same.” Rather ironically, despite Cox’s talk of a “reactionary” system, it is only when Otto learns the “Repo Code” from Bud and learns to master his job that his life develops meaning and that he is able to shed his uncultivated hatred and nihilism, hence why he later symbolically states later in the film “I can't believe I used to like these guys,” in regard to the alpha punk group the Circle Jerks, who have now degenerated into a goofy lounge act (in real-life, the band actually devolved into a second-rate metal group). On top of that, it is through supposed wack-job messiah Miller that he develops the sense of spirituality that he so bitterly fought against throughout Repo Man. Indeed, it seems that while punk rockers always glorify disorder, mindless and fruitless libertinism, and anarchy, their innate inner need to rebel against society is a direct result of their hatred for the spiritually degenerate and cultureless society full of chaos and dysfunction that makes up the modern world, where nothing is sacred and those that claim to be are carny frauds and false prophets who like to earn large profits like the televangelists and Scientologists. Indeed, it is only the biggest losers of losers who never grow out of punk as it is a sign of a sheer and utter lack of maturity and self-control, hence why Otto's punk friends meet grizzly and patently pointless ends. 

 Released the same years as the other big LA punk rock flick, Suburbia (1984) directed by Penelope Spheeris, Cox’s Repo Man topples over its cinematic counterpart in aesthetic, sentiment, and attitude. While Suburbia has a slave-morality-driven, victim-based attitude of ’Tis a Pity We Are Poor Punk Who Get Beat Up By Rednecks,’ Repo Man takes a look in the figurative punk rock mirror and reevaluates the whole Weltanschauung for the disastrous dead-end drive into a dilapidated ghetto brick-wall that it is. That being said, Repo Man is one of the few artifacts of punk—be it film or otherwise—that has aged quite gracefully as a potent piece of charmingly cynical celluloid that totally philosophically destroys the degenerate subculture it depicts, while having more of a punk attitude than the majority of things that are labeled ‘punk,’ including the bands featured on the film's soundtrack.  As much as I absolutely loath automatons who incessantly quote stupid Hebraic Hollywood comedies and other culture-distorting swill, I would be lying if I did not admit that Repo Man is one of the most compulsively quotable films ever made as one would be a pretentious poof not to admit that such lunatic lines like “Goddamn-dipshit-Rodriguez-gypsy-dildo-punks” and “You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too,” are words of charmingly crude, comedic genius. Indeed, director Alex Cox must have been an alchemist during a previous life, as he turns everything that is American Kulturscheisse into jarringly jocular celluloid gold via Repo Man, so it is a shame that his long-in-the-make non-sequel Repo Chick (2009) is one darkly retarded piece of undignified digital diarrhea that should be absolutely avoided at all costs, especially if one values their personal integrity and/or god given right to think. As a proto-X-Files except all the more mirthful and conspiracy-driven, a hysterical history lesson in conman counterculture spirituality, a jaded jukebox of the best of 1980s LA punk rock, a celluloid rehab program for dumb young punks everywhere to reconsider their worldview, a politically incorrect lesson in Yank class and racial relations, and a rare, highly quotable comedy that does not result in the cinematic equivalent of a lobotomy, Repo Man is indisputable proof that the death of the West can be looked at as a tragicomedy that one can learn many lessons from, at least until an apocalypse or space aliens wipe us out. 

 As psychoanalyst C.G. Jung wrote, whose theories are not playfully parodied in Repo Man for nothing, “Our present day observations of Saucers coincide – mutatis mutandis - with the many reports going back into antiquity, though not in such astonishing frequency as in these times. But the possibility of the destruction of a whole continent, which today is in the hands of politicians, has never existed previously.”  One of the first major thinkers to take the post-WWII UFO phenomenon seriously and actually study it, Jung ultimately came to the conclusion that, although not completely rejecting the idea of real-life little green men from outer-space, UFOs might have a primarily spiritual and psychological basis as he believed modern Occidental man was suffering from a crisis of the mind and soul. Indeed, when maniac Miller seemingly schizophrenically states, “There ain't no difference between a flying saucer and a time machine. People get so hung up on specifics they miss out on seeing the whole thing,” he is essentially pointing to the fact—whether he knows it or not—that all these weird phenomenons and alien sightings have a common origin; an all-encompassing Weltschmerz and deadlock of the Western collective unconsciousness.  That being said, it would not be an exaggeration to say that every Western man is seeking to obtain what Otto achieves by the conclusion of Repo Man as a middle-class nihilist man who achieves spiritual and emotionally ecstasy by finally riding in the radiation-run Malibu spaceship/time-machine as opposed to merely getting a mere passing glimpse of it. Of course, as Miller once so famously stated, “The life of a repo man is always intense.”

-Ty E

Der Bomberpilot

If anything remotely resembling a Nazisploitation flick was ever sired by a filmmaker of German New Cinema, it is most certainly dandy auteur Werner Schroeter’s salacious yet satirical exercise in swastika excess, Der Bomberpilot (1970) aka The Bomber Pilot—a wanton work about three exceedingly eccentric revue divas that make up a National Socialist cabaret that has about as much respect for historical reality as Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974) and The Gestapo's Last Orgy (1977). Of course, unlike the average, rather worthless and aesthetically nauseating Nazisploitation flick, Der Bomberpilot is a bawdy piece of high-camp celluloid that, not unlike naughty Nazi-themed arthouse flicks like The Damned (1969) directed by Luchino Visconti and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974), albeit to a more heightened degree, wallows in aesthetic indulgence and kinky yet cultivated kitsch, and contains a certain perverse passion for misery and tragedy that would put National Socialist auteur Veit Harlan to shame. A decadent and disconcerting work that features a titillating trio of sensual yet scatterbrained Nazi cabaret performers who face personal struggle and crisis after the annihilation of the Third Reich and decide to see how they will fair in the racially mongrelized USA, Der Bomberpilot is a rare Nazi-themed film that quite literally makes nil mention of concentration camps, Jews, or Nazi war crimes, but instead acts as a sort of apolitical and operatic, tableau-ridden equivalent to works like The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) or Germany, Pale Mother (1980) in its depiction of the Nazi wartime and Adenauer eras. An audaciously anarchistic and anachronistic cinematic work featuring a variety of eclectic songs from Verdi, Strauss, the musical West Side Story, Bruckner, Sibelius, Elvis, Richard Wagner, and various German and American pop songs of the 1960s, Der Bomberpilot is a wonderfully vexing variegation of discordant and oftentimes disposed of aesthetic ingredients from the post-holocaust ash heap of history that makes no excuses for completely ignoring the less flattering yet most infamous facts of German mid-twentieth century history all together. For example, one of the female protagonists of Der Bomberpilot sings a version of the racially charged Johann Strauss II waltz “Wiener Blut” ('Viennese Blood' or 'Viennese Spirit'), yet Schroeter’s intentionally tainted version of the song is all the more ‘nazifed’ and concludes with the rather telling line: “What’s done is done…The past is past…One doesn’t discuss it…” A ridiculously wayward piece of campy celluloid revisionist history of the thankfully quite reprehensible sort, Der Bomberpilot is Werner Schroeter at his best and most blatant as a work, not unlike most of his oeuvre, that stresses aesthetic refinement of both high and lowbrow kultur over 'official' historical reality, as well as kitschy tableau over a linear storyline. Forget a bunch of pedantic professors and jailed and elderly historical revisionists like Ernst Zündel, Der Bomberpilot—with its rather ridiculous and raunchy Nazi revue girls that are in stark comparison to what everyone thinks they know about the Third Reich—is the real road for Germans and other Europeans to take back their history as an exaggerated anti-tribute to National Socialist kitsch and the culture-less American conquerors who destroyed it and replaced it with piss poor pseudo-Kulturscheisse.

 As three beauteous yet erotically bodacious ladies who salute the swastika flag in a totally disorderly and narcissistic, half-nude fashion in devilish black and red corsets and black fishnet stockings, it is amazing the lewd and lecherous ladies of Der Bomberpilot have yet to be detained indefinitely in a concentration camp for their less than Aryanness-like ways. When wild child Mascha (played Mascha Rabben of Roland Klick’s Deadlock (1970), Robert van Ackeren’s Harlis (1972), and Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (1973))—a feisty redhead who likes to get buck naked in the woods as a sort of nymphomaniac Nazi fairy who is far too untamed to belong to any official Wandervogel group, let alone be a member of the League of German Maidens—has a heated nervous breakdown that seems more like a childish temper tantrum of the superlatively selfish sort, the three hot and hedonistic divas have to quit their dream jobs as campy cabaret girls and go somewhat 'underground' in Nazi Germany. The other two luxurious ladies of the three person risqué Reich are Magdalena (Schroeter’s muse Magdalena Montezuma)—the aunt of Mascha and the most ‘professional’ and mature one in the group—and Carla (early Schroeter regular Carla Egerer of Eika Katappa (1969) and Fassbinder’s Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1971)), who is a tiny blonde beastess who is constantly plagued by personal tragedy and heartbreak due to her weakness for Viennese choirboys. While Mascha and Magdalena receive jobs as ‘church restorers’ who paint religious temples with Fidus-esque völkisch kitsch art, Carla splits off from the group and goes to Sopot to star in a Viennese tragedy and work at a pastry shop, where she faces personal tragedy after a gentleman caller (played by Schroeter himself) commits suicide after she blows him off. After Magdalena hears on the radio that “Our Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen in war,” she attempts suicide via drowning herself in a lake, but by happenstance, her nubile, nature-loving niece Mascha spots her in the act and saves her life as a hilarious song plays in the background, with the lyrics, “...that an angel can be black? Many small negroes look pleadingly at you. Whether we are rich or poor we will all die. That shows that we’re all the same when we stand at heaven’s door.” Indubitably, the strangely seductive song lyrics seem to be a premonition of sorts, as the erotic enfant terrible trio eventually decide to go to the multicultural United States of America and try their lot at racial integration mixed with Teutonism after smoking a filtered marijuana cigarette. 

 After the Second World War, the three gals take jobs as stenographers and attend a Bruckner concert where they debate a possible move to American, but Carla, “can only think back to the successes of 1943, to the Viennese operetta, with the choir boys.” Carla's statement is especially telling as it shows her total ignorance to history because during the beginning of February 1943, the German army was defeated during the Battle of Stalingrad and the 6th Army had completely capitulated, thus marking the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. Young Mascha is convinced that women’s liberation, writing manifestos, and America are the way of the future, stating to her friends, “We three, who went through so much in Adolf Hitler’s Reich, we could certainly formulate a manifesto and as a lecture series at a college or an American university, for the concept of Germanism…combined with racial integration…and recreate it for ourselves.” Of course, the three have clearly never seen Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977) and as Carla states, “in sheer desperation, after breakfast we smoked a filtered marijuana cigarette and saw the possibilities of racial integration in a new light” and thus decided to immigrate to the Negrophiliac USA as visiting teachers to “stake their claim.” Although initially suspected of being communists as many foreigners in the U.S. were at that time, the group’s “credibility was undermined” after a German-American cook gave Nazi era pictures of the wild women during their “best days” to the American media, but it is ultimately “Mascha’s affair with a bomber pilot” that puts an end to their residence permit. Due to their rejection in the ‘land of the free’ and philistines, the girls decide to embrace their past and get back into the cabaret act at an American officers' club in Landshut, albeit for the exploitative pleasure of American occupying forces, where Carla performs opera solos with filmmaker Daniel Schmid (Tonight or Never, La Paloma)—the one-time lover and lifelong friend of Werner Schroeter who also acted as the assistant director for Der Bomberpilot—on piano and another one as a transsexual sailor in the style of Genet’s Querelle, Magalena does a topless and seemingly possessed ‘snake dance,’ and the three do kitschy avant-garde cabaret acts with mannequins. Unfortunately, all good things come to end and after Mascha’s Amerikkkan bomber pilot boyfriend does the unthinkable by boning Carla, thereupon getting her pregnant which ends in a miscarriage that plagues her with a bad hip, the cabaret trio is tragicomedically crushed, thus signaling the total end for naughty Nazi revue girls everywhere in a world now dominated by American hegemony and the cult of multiculturalism. 

 Assuredly one of Werner Schroeter’s most accessible, if not typically aesthetically and thematically discordant, works, Der Bomberpilot also happens to be one of his most distinctly ‘German,’ if rather reluctantly so, as well as (a)political works, as a carnal and campy kitsch piece that contradicts the Allies' version of history (as well as the Nazi version) through the exaggeratedly wacky and wanton antics of three politically ignorant girls whose sole passion is being highly desirable divas in spite of what regime happens to reign where they live. After one of the girls confesses after their failed attempt of freedom in the land of the free, “Our past also proved unfortunate during the legal proceedings, in which we were accused of almost everything. An auto-da-fé,” thus demonstrating the unmentioned social repression Germans faced due to the fact that they have Aryan blood (or in Carla’s case, “Viennese Blood”). Indeed, the girls, especially Carla, cannot get over their nostalgia for the Nazi era, but not because of the slaughtering of Jews or their experiences as former Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM) girls, but because they found personal happiness via past romantic flings. A trio of tragic philistines, the three women, being self-centered exhibitionists at stark contrast with the martial order of the Third Reich, are nothing more than mere victims of circumstances who, despite their decided decadence and hyper hedonism, ironically face more persecution from the 'peace-spreading' Americans than the authoritarian Aryans, thus acting in antagonistic contradiction, albeit in a cleverly campy form, to the ‘official’ history of the Second World War, thus making Schroeter's Der Bomberpilot, aside from the Wagernian celluloid epics of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King, Hitler: A Film from Germany), one of the most politically subversive works of German New Cinema as a film that makes nil groveling apologies for the infamous legacy of the Third Reich, but, instead, seeks to discredit history altogether via preposterous personalization of through three women who care more about their hair than how many Jews Uncle Adolf had liquidated in Auschwitz.

 Originally made for television, Der Bomberpilot was apparently a huge hit among kraut leftists, but director Werner Schroeter, who was not a huge fan of the film himself, was rather apathetic by the positive response to his subversive Nazi revue girl flick, even if it stands, at least in my opinion, as one of the most underrated and relatively unconventional films in the filmmaker’s cinematic oeuvre as an incendiary indictment of American's fond memory of turning the Fatherland into its cuckold bitch boy.  Indeed, it's no coincidence that an American bomber pilot sexually defiles two of the girls in Der Bomberpilot, even symbolically severely injuring one of the girl's wombs after suffering a miscarriage caused by the alien seed of what would have been a racial bastard of a baby, as America has yet to recognize its never discussed war crimes of firebombing the cities of Dresden and Hamburg—an act with no military objective that was done solely to kill large percentages of the German civilian population—which like the holocaust, Schroeter makes no mention of in the film.  Indeed, it is no coincidence that towards the end of his career that Schroeter would direct the documentary Die Königin - Marianne Hoppe (2000) aka The Queen—a documentary about the bisexual German actress Marianne Hoppe who was quite popular during the Third Reich due to her perceived Nordic beauty—as the subject of the film, not unlike the protagonists of Der Bomberpilot, was a victim of circumstance and her own genetic pulchritude who, despite her personal disdain for the Third Reich and lecherous libertine lifestyle and affinity for degenerate art, would always be remembered as a 'Nazi actress,' just as Schroeter would suffer the undesirable fate of being regarded as a post-Nazi 'German director.' In fact, Schroeter even once went so far as stating, “I have no intention whatsoever of playing a leading part [in the New German Cinema], and submit to the expectations of producing Kulturscheisse [literally, Cultureshit], even if it may be true that I carry around with me and into my films the past of this Kulturscheisse,” and no other film in his oeuvre better expresses this ambivalent attitude than Der Bomberpilot—the director's first and final statement on the National Socialist question and how such historical infamy has weighed down heavily on every German, not just filmmaker's, lives.  As the girls of Der Bomberpilot learned, no matter how 'American' they tried to be (something Schroeter's cinematic compatriot Wim Wenders spent his entire life trying to achieve but ultimately failed doing), the average American still sees a Nazi in every kraut.  After all, who can differentiate between a German and a Nazi after watching a Mel Brooks film like The Producers (1968) or a Steven Spielberg flick like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or Saving Private Ryan (1998)?!

-Ty E

Death Laid an Egg

I would not exactly call myself a “giallo man”, especially considering my favorite films from the great Guido genre tend to be works that defy convention or barely belong to the genre at all, including Eyes Behind the Wall (1977) aka L'occhio dietro la parete directed by Giuliano Petrelli, Bloodbath (1979) aka Las flores del vicio directed by Silvio Narizzano, A Quiet Place in the Country (1968) aka Un tranquillo posto di campagna directed by Elio Petri, Order of Death (1983) aka Copkiller directed by Roberto Faenza, Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) aka mosche di velluto grigio directed by Dario Argento, and last but certainly not least, Death Laid an Egg (1968) aka La morte ha fatto l'uovo directed by Giulio Questi. Directed by the man who assembled the quasi-surreal gothic western Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot! (1967) aka Se sei vivo spara—a film of no direct relation to Django (1966) that only took its rip-off name due to the financial success of the Franco Nero vehicle despite, in my opinion, being a superior and more multifaceted cinematic work—Death Laid an Egg would ultimately prove to be the greatest celluloid achievement of criminally underrated auteur Giulio Questi's rather brief filmmaking career as a completely unclassifiable pop-arthouse, proto-giallo sardonic sci-fi work of the misanthropic, anti-technocratic, and quasi-Marxist (indeed, the director Questi was a commie, albeit of the rather now-unconventional 'masculine' variety) sort. Featuring a deranged dystopian psychedelic essence and a delightfully discordant score, Death Laid an Egg—a film with indubitably one of the greatest titles in film history—is centered on an all around sexually perverse Ménage à trios comprised of one man and two women who, on top of sharing carnal knowledge, also co-operate a high-tech Faustian chicken farm where they hope to become God and sire a mutant race of futuristic fowl that will bring them massive profits as technocratic prophets, but, unfortunately, mutual deceit of the dark romantic variety gets in their way and the unhinged untermensch of the house seems to have an unhealthy obsession with brutally murdering pretty prostitutes by slitting their throats in a sleazy hotel room. With eccentric and erratic editing by Franco Arcalli (who also acted as the film’s co-writer, as well as the co-writer of virtually every other Questi film and one of the co-writers of the Sergio Leone epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984)) that seems like a Soviet montage on acid and a jarring avant-garde soundtrack by Bruno Maderna (who provided some music to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)), Death Laid an Egg is a trying and—some would say—aesthetically torturous trip that will only appeal to a certain sort of cinephile, but surely not every jaded giallo fan. An absolutely aesthetically and thematically loony labyrinth of the lurid celluloid libertine variety that keeps the viewer simultaneously discombobulated yet hypnotized from the intriguing beginning to its eremitic end, Death Laid an Egg is the thing delectably decadent and dead celluloid daydreams are made of and with a tagline like, “See them tear each other apart. Then see what they do with the pieces” it is all but impossible to resist such a film's cynical charms. 

 Although being the sole male in a bizarre love triangle with two beauteous women might seem ideal to most men, it is certainly not that way for handsome yet weak beta-male Marco (Jean-Louis Trintignant)—a man so dissatisfied with his sex life that he feels the needs to regularly buy cheap hookers and ritualistically slit their throats at the same hotel room, or so things seem from the very beginning of Death Laid an Egg—a biting attack on the sexual and social perversions and pathologies of the bloated bourgeois. Like the protagonist played by Franco Nero in Hitch-Hike (1977) aka Autostop rosso sangue directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile, Marco must live with the fact that he is an intrinsically impotent man-whore who married a woman who, although unquestionably dropdead gorgeous, he no longer loves, thus he daydreams of breaking free from the sheer and utter banality of his contrived and unnatural bourgeois life. Indeed, as the sole owner of the high-tech chicken farm where Marco works, wife Anna (Gina Lollobrigida) certainly wears the pants in the relationship, even if she is always taking them off for the much younger babe Gabrielle (Swedish blonde bombshell Ewa Aulin)—the temptress of a third wheel of the terrible threesome that will end in abject tragedy. A somewhat older woman than Gabrielle and most certainly past her physical prime, Anna seems to have a sexually charged, yet jealous infatuation over the young blonde beauty and discusses dismembering her with husband Macro, albeit in an eroticized and figurative fashion. Sort of like the cute yet creepy young lily-licker from Chloe (2009) directed by Atom Egoyan, Anna sees Gabrielle (who even admits “my mother was my only happiness”) as an unspoken rival and perverse mother figure and has a sort of lesbian Oedipus Complex (although, in the end, it seems like she really had a lesbo Electra complex). An ultra-paranoid lady with a rather guilty conscious, Anna—a bourgeois babe and capitalistic enemy of the working-class—is paranoid that her ex-workers, who she fired and replaced with state-of-the-art machinery to save money, are out to kill her as they stare at her behind a fence near her chicken factory, but little does she know that she has more ‘personal’ romantic acquaintances that are out to kill her, albeit for different reasons. Marco is also the rather reluctant adviser/representative of an arcane organization called “The Association” that wants to push the visibility of chickens to the forefront of mankind as the bald chicken-phile Führer of the group believes, “The difficulty we face is that nobody knows poultry.” The members of the Association don’t seem to know shit about chicken shit either as they feel the fowl should be promoted in an aberrant advertising campaign as the “principal actor in the drama of modern life,” by promoting degenerate quasi-Warholian pop-art of chicks as doctors and poultry playboys and proletarians. The Association also hooks Marco up with a suave Svengali character named Mondaini (Jean Sobieski), who begins to conspire with Anna for dubious reasons. Marco, Anna, and Gabrielle have it easy at the chicken factory as they have a magic all-purpose poultry machine called “The Machine” that, on top of feeding and slaughtering chickens, plays acoustic avant-garde music. The Machine, which uses radioactive chemicals, is also being prepared to create mutant headless, wingless, and boneless chickens of the future that will cut expenses and dramatically increase profits. 

 A man stuck in a loveless relationship with a domineering wife who desperately desires love, Marco attempts to convince Gabrielle to run away with him as he hates his job, life, and wife, and with the young blonde he wants to, “find something permanent.” Unfortunately, Gabrielle is from a younger, more machine-like and psychopathic generation, thus she only has her eye on the money and the archetypical ‘modern man,’Mondaini will help her, telling his co-conspirator that they are “much stronger” than miserably married couple Marco and Anna. Gabrielle and Mondaini plan to frame Marco for a murder that he has ironically been fantasizing about committing, but while the married man has deep-seated reasons for wanting to commit the crime and escape his hopelessly humdrum life, the two psychopathic schemers are merely motivated by money. When Marco’s cute little doggy “Blackie” is grinded up in the Machine, he begins to lose his mind all the more, realizing that his life is literally being grinded up by the monster appliance. When the Machine actually ends up successfully churning out living and apparently breathing headless chickens, Marco freaks out and smashes the grotesque miscreations to death, which infuriates the Association and Anna. Before killing them, Anna—in a heated attempt to save their dying marriage—pleads to Marco, “Can’t you see how very important it is?! It's something I always wanted, something we could share between us, something that was ours, something that’s mysterious and now that it has finally come you reject it. You’re too weak to accept it. You’re a coward if you kill them…I WARN YOU!” Of course, Anna’s plea to her husband has the opposite of her desired results and Marco brutally bludgeons the mutant chickens to death, thus symbolically exterminating his marriage and riches in the process. Meanwhile, Anna goes incognito as a pseudo-prostitute so as to surprise Marco face-to-face when he goes to pick up his weekly whore to use and abuse, but Gabrielle and Mondaini have hatched a more malicious conspiracy that will inevitably usher in the end of a Ménage à trios and a marriage. 

 During one especially symbolic scene towards the conclusion of Death Laid an Egg, the leader of the Association verbally chews out Marco for killing the mutant chickens, ironically stating, “Your behavior seems to me outside the realm of any human standard,” as if playing God and creating ungodly freak fowl for monetary profit is a morally glorious thing. Totally breaking with every convention of the giallo aside from the 'whodunnit?' angle, Death Laid an Egg is an aberrant avant-garde assault on modernity, attacking consumerism, the sexual revolution, feminism, technocracy, and Faustian man’s eternal need to conquer, subjugate, and control nature in what is a neo-Grand Guignol hen Hades. As German philosopher Oswald Spengler wrote in his short work Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life (1931), one of the first books written on technology, “As once the microcosm Man against Nature, so now the microcosm Machine is revolting against Nordic Man. The lord of the world is becoming the slave of the Machine. Their strength is bound up with the existence of coal,” and that can certainly be said of the world featured in Death Laid an Egg, but unsatisfying sexual degeneracy and moral retardation also reign in the film in an apocalyptic depiction of humanity that only sees pessimism for the future. Featuring the celluloid pop art aesthetic and phantasmagorical playboy perversity of works like The Laughing Woman (1969) aka Femina ridens directed by Piero Schivazappa and with the avant-garde wild and wanton weirdness of A Quiet Place in the Country (it should be noted that both film’s had the same production designer, Sergio Canevari, hence the aesthetic similarities), Death Laid an Egg is a curious celluloid work of its time that, although poorly aged in parts, still holds up quite aesthetically and thematically as a work that is more politically pertinent today than it was upon its initial release, even if has been deep fried in psychedelic psychobabble. After all, no one who has ever eaten at McDonalds could deny there is something rather off about their disgusting chicken meat with dubious pink and black chunks in it and after watching Death Laid an Egg, I doubt I will ever be able to eat such fried filth again. Indeed, the film brings truth to Werner Herzog's words, “Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world,” but as Death Laid an Egg demonstrates, humanity, especially members of the bourgeois, are much worse in a world where men are cowardly chickens and chicks want to be men.

-Ty E

Otomo

A number of German New Cinema auteur filmmakers made great, if not ludicrously left-wing, films about German-foreigner relations, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder with Katzelmacher (1969) aka Cock Artist and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) aka Angst essen Seele auf, Werner Schroeter with Palermo oder Wolfsburg (1980), Helma Sanders-Brahms with Shirins Hochzeit (1976) aka Shirin's Wedding, and Alexander Kluge with Vermischte Nachrichten (1986) aka Miscellaneous News, so—at least cinematically speaking—the Teutons are not exactly new to tackling contemporary social issues like multiculturalism and the (mostly imaginary) reality of race hate, yet if one were to judge by the rather recent kraut melodrama Otomo (1999), it would seem that the contemporary filmmakers of the Fatherland have began to drastically degenerate in their thinking and artistic prowess or lack thereof, as if the vital lifeblood had been drained from their hearts, minds, and souls. After all, Fassbinder hated his countrymen, especially the bourgeois and was a pathological partaker in homo miscegenation yet he realized that, at least if we were to judge by his work Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, that racially mixed romantic relationships are doomed to failure and that a master-slave relationship is the natural order in any sort of so-called 'multicultural' society, no matter how much "tolerance" is thrown down one's throat. Additionally, Fassbinder’s friend Werner Schroeter demonstrated in Palermo oder Wolfsburg that, typically, the foreigner would always be a perennial untermensch in Deutschland, bound to serfdom, subjugation, exploitation, and a sort of mentally crippling culture shock that leads to violent and irrational criminality and the same rabid race hate that leftists, rather idealistically, believe they can exterminate. In Otomo directed by German director/producer Frieder Schlaich—co-owner of Filmgalerie 451 and producer of films by kraut greats like Christoph Schlingensief and Werner Schroeter—one gets a more cultural Marxist friendly message on the need for Aryans everywhere to be more sensitive and sexually inviting when dealing with the Ausländer because, after all, a lack of cultural sensitivity can result in a multicultural pile of dead Aryans and dead Negros if a simple misunderstanding occurs due to the sort of 'lost in translation' communication that occurs in culturally schizophrenic multicultural societies. Loosely based on a true story (virtually all the details and drama of the film were invented in a caculated and propagandistic manner) about a so-called “asylum-seeker” (aka illegal alien) named Frederic Otomo who was shot death after stabbing two cops and injuring three others during one terribly tragic day in Stuttgart in 1989, Otomo is one of those fundamentally formulaic, modern ethno-masochistic and slave-morality-driven cinematic works that attempts to inspire Stockholm syndrome in more weak-minded and emotionally-inclined white viewers, while further instilling a sense of guilt and moral superiority in the sort of wily and wimpy white liberal scum that promote and create such fabricated celluloid feces. Borrowing gritty realistic aesthetic techniques from German lone wolf auteur Roland Klick (Supermarkt, White Star)—who director Frieder Schlaich once made a documentary about—Otomo is the cuckold kraut equivalent to Crash (2004) directed by Paul Haggis, minus the 'passion,' as the sort of patently pointless and socially pernicious cinematic work that accuses everyone, except the noble non-white viewer of course, of being a crypto-racist with the capacity for indirectly killing a good bible-reading and seashell-collecting Negro man.

Sensitive yet stoic illegal alien Otomo (played by Ivorian actor Isaac de Bankolé of Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (1991) and The Limits Of Control (2009)) lives a rather pathetic and destitute life in Stuttgart, Germany as a jobless wanderer who is on an aimless journey to find meager employment, but it seems not a single kind kraut soul exists to help him as all good, groveling white people should. When Otomo is denied employment at a dilapidated temporary employment agency because has neither an ID nor a proper pair of working shoes (he wears a pair of vintage slippers with holes in them that one of the Germans mockingly calls “Jungle Stompers”), he makes the unwitting mistake of riding in a subway train and is eventually hassled by an ostensibly 'racist' prick of a ticket-collector for not having the right ticket. After the ticket-collector attempts to cite Otomo and stop him from leaving the train, the agitated black man makes the genius decision to headbutt the anally retentive kraut and runs away like a rebel slave on a confederate plantation. Naturally, the ticked off ticket-collector, who now has a broken nose for technically doing his job (even if he is an asshole about it), reports Otomo to the police, thus leading to a super Schwarze mensch-hunt against the angry African. A young and married Nordic cop named Heinz (Hanno Friedrich) and his goofy rapping beta-male partner Rolf (Barnaby Metschurat) hope to be the ones to catch Otomo as they hope to receive job promotions. Meanwhile, a corrupt truck driver offers to smuggle Otomo to the Netherlands if he can come up with the cash, so he hassles a young 46-year-old grandmother named Gisela (ex-Fassbinder Superstar Eva Mattes in a terribly degrading role) and her toddler granddaughter for money in a quasi-threatening manner that makes little sense, but luckily she is a sexually desperate xenophile who is in a weekly African dance class and finds the angry African’s aggressiveness to be rather arousing, so she makes the wise decision to take the fugitive back to her daughter’s apartment. Unfortunately, Gisela’s daughter Simone (Lara Kugler) shows up to find her blonde baby daughter dancing with a strange black man and the police eventually close in on Otomo. Although Gisela, like a true white sugar mama, gets Otomo the money, the truck driver has already left for the Netherlands, thus leaving the hapless African stuck in Stuttgart under the racially-charged radar a bunch of evil Teutonic devils whose Nazi grandparents supported Uncle Adolf. When Heinz, Rolf, and three other policemen finally reach Otomo and try reason with him, he merely stares blankly as a tear falls down his face, only to stab all of the cops when they, rather gently, attempt to take him into custody, thus leaving three men dead, three men injured, and at least one woman widowed; all because a scared foreigner who was illegally in the country in the first place did not want to go to jail.  To top things off, while Otomo's funeral is only attended by Gisela and an obese hotel clerk with a grotesque case of heterochromia who looks like he could be Austrian actor Peter Kern's slightly more slim brother, the fallen policemen are given festive public funerals, thus clearly illustrating the innate 'racism' of Deutschland! (or something). 

 Otomo is surely the sort of film that could have only been made in contemporary Europe as a pathetic piece of minimalistic ‘realist’ propaganda ridden with poverty porn, groveling ethno-masochistic xenophilia, naive ‘noble savage’ worship, innate anti-nationalist sentiment, aesthetic dreariness and deadness, hokey hip hop beats, and a general artistic and philosophical impotence. If it were not for the film's patently politically correct, Negro-martyring message, Otomo would be regarded as just another banal, soulless, and forgotten contemporary German film, if acknowledged at all. Ironically, director Frieder Schlaich included a scene of ‘unconscious racism’ (at least as far as limp-wristed leftists are concerned) in Otomo in an unintentionally hilarious allusion to Frankenstein (1931) directed by James Whale where the black protagonist—standing in for the creature—plays with flowers with a little blonde girl next to a lake. Indeed, it seems Schlaich was guilty of the same pathetic and futile ‘finger-pointing’ that he condemns the everyday German of in his absolutely odious work Otomo—a virtual ‘how-to’ guide in being a cultural commie kraut without cock, balls, and a sense for artistry and logic. The essential message of Otomo is that in every ‘asylum seeker’ is a misunderstood man who can potentially discuss the bible for hours, lovingly dances with little Aryan girls, be a ‘noble savage’ and ‘exotic primitive’ for sexually desperate German grandmothers who are fed up with impotent Aryan men to enjoy, and a morally-endowed man who rightfully puts anally retentive, authoritarian civil workers in their place by headbutting them like an animal, even if he is a coldblooded murderer who kills out of the juvenile fear that he might have to spend the night in one of the many majority non-German jails. Indeed, after watching Otomo, I have come to the natural conclusion that director Frieder Schlaich does not even deserve to lick the postmortem assholes of kraut cinematic greats like Schlingensief and Schroeter, so it baffles me that such a horrendous hack ever had the opportunity of working them. Featuring homely German New Cinema diva Eva Mattes in the decidedly degrading role of a mindless mudshark of a grandmother that is described by her own daughter as being a dreaded “old hippie,” Otomo is a perfect example of the slow and steady decline that is German and European cinema in general by casting a woman who starred in works by greats like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog as a rather retarded and reprehensible woman who would risk the life of her granddaughter just so she can be manhandled by a muscular Mandingo. Winning such coveted and wonderfully titled prizes as the particularly prestigious “Diversity in Spirit Award,” Otomo is undoubtedly indisputable proof that contemporary German filmmakers no longer have Faustian souls, but some of them, like Frieder Schlaich, wish they had Negro ones, even if they have the artistic swag of an eunuch with autism.

-Ty E