Monique

If some sadomasochistic sodomite like Andy Milligan, except slightly more technically gifted as an auteur, remade Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) and set it in the leather-fag metropolitan netherworld of Cruising (1980) directed by William Friedkin, it might resemble Monique (1978) aka New York After Midnight aka Flashing Lights directed by French art-sploitation auteur/gay pornographer Jacques Scandelari (Macédoine, Homologues ou La soif du male aka Man’s Country). A superlatively sordid, maliciously melodramatic, and absurdly anti-romantic celluloid work based on a real-life case history reported in the April 1974 publication of ‘Le Journal de l’Association des Psychologistes (Lyon, France), Monique is a seemingly totally trashy yet totally serious film about a 35-year-old French spinster who is rather desperate to get married and conceive a child, but the problem is that she is slightly insane due to a repressed childhood memory and when she does end up meeting up with a seemingly marvelous man, he turns out to be as straight as a circle as a gold-digging, butt-darting schemer who has nil interest in producing kin folk, thus resulting in serious trouble of the homo-homiciding sort. Starring sub-diva Florence Giorgetti of Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973) in the title role, Monique is essentially a rather restrained hodgepodge of director Jacques Scandelari ‘greatest’ films. Featuring the disco and S&M faggotry of his NYC hardcore leather-fag celluloid magnum opus New York City Inferno (1978) aka Cock Tales, the grotesque Hans Bellmer-esque baby doll art featured in La philosophie dans le boudoir (1971) aka Beyond Love and Evil, and the dark and shadowy noirish sexual sadism of Vice Squad (1978) aka Brigade mondaine, Monique is a rare work of considerably competently assembled exploitation cinema that actually takes itself seriously, even if the ‘true story’ the film is apparently based on seems like the subplot of some sort of subpar Troma direct-to-video garbage. Misleadingly advertised as a generic slasher flick under a number of dubious titles, Monique follows in the trend of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), which was also attempted later by Ulli Lommel of all people via Olivia (1983) aka A Taste of Sin and countless other less successful filmmakers, in depicting a beauteous yet deranged debutante who suffered a childhood trauma and cannot help herself from killing men, especially those she is romantically involved with.  Featuring gay porn star turned disco singer turned AIDS victim Wade Nichols (aka Dennis Parker) giving a Village People-esque performance of his deplorable disco song "Like an Eagle" and a number of female-perpetrated disco bloodbaths, Monique is what happens when highbrow celluloid trash meets crappy cocksucker kitsch.

 Monique Raymond (Florence Giorgetti) is a relatively successful 35-year-old French professional with a trust fund who lives in relative luxury in New York City and even has a second home in Long Island, but her personal life is a sad joke, or at least she constantly tells her bitchy Jew-y therapist Dr. Charles Mandel (Barry Woloski). Feeling like an old spinster who has no chance of ever getting married, Monique is more than ready for Prince Charming to roll by, but more than anything, she wants a baby of her own. Indeed, a certain Prince Charming does arrive for Monique in the form of a hack artist named Richard Lewis (John Ferris) who constructs infantile ‘infant art’ (or what he calls ‘erotic art’ as if deformed babies have some sort of sexual appeal) that, as a rival/ex-lover reminds him, is a total rip-off of German degenerate artist Hans Bellmer’s pubescent female doll work, but he is a little too charming and his motivations seemed to be rather dubious to say the least, especially considering he is much younger and less rich than his professional trust-fund babe. Believing she has met the more than marvelous man of her dreams, Monique does not think twice about marrying Richard on a random and semi-secret whim Las Vegas-style, but problems soon arise when Richard decides he would rather spend his spare time creating vulgar art, exploiting and leading on his hyper horny manager/mentor Helen Kahn (Robyn Peterson) to further his career, hanging out at hip gay discos at night, and having an affair with someone else—another man and an exceedingly effete one at that. On top of the fact her husband is a two-faced twink of the terribly temper-tantrum-throwing sort, Monique regularly has debilitating childhood flashbacks of when her mother was killed right before her weary eyes as a fragile froggy toddler, so before she knows it, she is wandering the semen-soaked streets of NYC and slaughtering salacious sodomites left and right, and only her prissy therapist has enough insight to stop her. When a jealous ex-lover of Richard’s—a pole-smoking poof of a polak named Karl Zebrowski (Rayner Wallwork)—reveals to Monique that her hubby is a well known player on the pink team, and even—rather inexplicably—attempts to rape her, she bludgeons him in the gut with a butcher knife in a Norman Bates-esque fashion. Of course, when Richard has the audacity to bring his secret boyfriend to their scenic beach house in Long Island for Christmas, Monique gives him a bit of a fatal fag-bashing that he will never forget. Apparently, Monique’s French father is also a fag, thus proving like husband like father-in-law.  Monique’s mother was accidentally killed in a scuffle with her father and his handsome male lover, so it was only natural that the French girl would grow up to be an anti-gay serial killer of sorts, thus eliciting metaphysical vengeance for her dear mère. In the end, Monique spends 8 years in a facility for the criminally insane for her murderous acts of involuntary homophobia, but later devotes her life to teaching Yoga in what is a semi-happy conclusion to an unhappy, childless life. 

A rare work of ‘fag noir’ with a sort of ‘gay male femme fatale,’ Monique is like William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) for fag hags minus the cop drama. To be quite honest, I would not be surprised if director Jacques Scandelari did the casting for Monique at a sleazy NYC leather-fag bar as virtually every single male character, including the ostensibly heterosexual therapists, looks virtually the same as they are all skinny, tall white men with Village People-esque mustaches that seem like extras from the director's homo hardcore flick New York City Inferno, albeit minus the leather and fetishistic cop uniforms. Although not Jacques Scandelari’s greatest flick, Monique is a consistently entertaining, if not sometimes unintentionally so, prototype for the sleazy and seedy artsy exploitation flicks Abel Ferrara would later specialize in. The fact that the protagonist is a woman who kills male homos as opposed to heterosexual rapists like in Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981) makes Scandelari’s Monique all the more sweetly scandalous, especially considering the politically correct climate of today where any negative portrayal of a limp-wristed fairy is considered a virtual sin. A debauched depiction of what Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most dreaded nightmare might have been like with an aesthetically disgusting Discotheque backdrop in a pre-AIDS time before hysteria and death hit the gay world with the force of two fists to the ass, Monique is indubitably from an era best left forgotten, but thankfully it is full of blood and bitterness. Of course, Monique also brings murder, melancholy, and mayhem to the world of the NYC bourgeois and Dorian love discos, which is worthy of any exploitation fan’s time, though I would not recommend the film to mothers-to-be or sad French spinsters suffering from childhood traumas. Probably the only film ever made where a gay group of disco-delighting leather-fags attempt to gang rape a nearly-middle-aged woman, Monique is a piece of morally retarded sinema with style and an inkling of substance that reminds one why everyone needs a dose of trash celluloid in their lives.

-Ty E

Elevator Girls in Bondage

The exceedingly putrid psychedelic drag queen troupe The Cockettes are indubitably one of the most aesthetically displeasing collectives of quasi-humans in humanoid history, but members of the culturally malicious group did manage to star in a couple worthwhile flicks, including the spoof Tricia's Wedding (1971), which spoofed Richard Nixon's daughter’s wedding ceremony by adding LSD and flagrant fags to the mix, as well as the Kenneth Anger-esque arthouse flick Luminous Procuress (1971) directed by Steven Arnold (The Liberation of Mannique Mechanique, Messages, Messages), yet Elevator Girls in Bondage (1972) directed by Michael Kalmen is indubitably their most accessible cinematic work, even if it is not their greatest. An absurdly amateurish celluloid work that wallows in its own cinematic incompetency as part of the ‘big joke’ that is its celluloid low-campiness, Elevator Girls in Bondage, as one would probably infer from the rather ridiculously risqué Meyer-esque title, is an exploitation work that actually transcends to the level of stupid surrealist pornography, featuring a number of ambiguous genitals in various states of arousal, including swarthy cocks busting loads on famous paintings. An aesthetically abhorrent tranny Marxist spoof of capitalism and heterosexuality, Elevator Girls in Bondage (1972) is also the virtual cinematic adversary to Women In Revolt (1971) directed by Paul Morrissey and produced Andy Warhol, and as members of the Cockettes admitted in the somewhat recent documentary The Cockettes (2002) directed by Bill Weber and David Weissman, the West Coast weirdoes in drag were not exactly too keen on the Factory trannies as they found their attitudes to be a bit too prissy, pompous, and less than positive. With its curiously crude commie cock-sucking and cast of radically retarded Trotskyite trannies, Elevator Girls in Bondage is thankfully a celluloid work so lecherous and ludicrous in its poofter political persuasion that it manages to marvelously discredit any sort of scathing sociopolitical message it autistically attempts to make, but not in such a penetrating fashion as self-described ‘right-winger’ Paul Morrissey’s intentionally anti-leftist work Women In Revolt, a farcical film where “leftist liberation” ends in scatological self-sacrifice of the excess-ridden enslaving sort. Like the ungodly hippie homo celluloid hate-child of Andy Milligan and John Waters, Elevator Girls in Bondage is campy celluloid excess on anti-orgasmic overload that reminds the viewer how truly ugly and vulgar certain members of humanity really are on both the inside and outside. Featuring countless hairy beavers, skinny unshaven asses, and tiny titties, Elevator Girls in Bondage is a rather odd and semi-straight flick for a campy celluloid work featuring the Cockettes in that it features more cunts than cocks, but they are just as intrinsically unappetizing all the same.

The boney, boner-loving girls of Elevator Girls in Bondage are feeling rather oppressed living during the so-called “depression 1972” as sub-erotic ‘elevator girls’ who spend all day and night going “up and down” for the low-paying customers of a superlatively seedy, semen-soaked hotel. When not working or hardly working, the elevator girls powder their pussies and take unglamorous bubble baths together as they are lascivious lesbos of the ultra unglamorous sort. Of course, when one of the girls, Trish (played by Johnny McGowan, a female fellow that was described as “The prettiest one” of the ugly drag troupe) is hogtied and ‘bound for pleasure’ by one of the pernicious patrons of the hotel and the fascist Divine-esque owner of the hotel, bald-headed Sally (Kreemah Ritz) refuses to get the ‘pigs’ involved, the elevator girls begin to reconsider their jobs and ultimately agree that revolutionary pussy politics is the answer. While one of the girls, Rita La Rantz (Reid Larrance), decides to quit and work at a ‘soy sauce factory,’ the feisty Führer of the oppressed elevator girls, Maxine (played by Rumi Missabu, an alpha-Cockette), decides to form a campy commie club to trample persecution as persecuted proletarian perverts. Luckily, a seemingly autistic blond-haired revolutionary named Bun E. Hug (played by director Michael Kalmen), a faggy flowerchild Maxine describes as follows, “He’s brilliant. He knows all about Karl Marx and The Grapes of Wrath…a stunning weirdo,” schools the sassy gay gals in political and social subversion and they form a maniac Marxist union, “The Pussy Protection Club.”  Before the girls know it, they have an iconic portrait of the Marxist messiah himself, Karl Marx—the famous photo where he looks like a Talmudic negro, like a more bloated version of slave-turned-sage Frederick Douglass—hanging on the hotel wall and begin singing crude and campy renditions of commie propaganda songs like “Bread and Roses – Dump the Bosses Off Your Back.” Not long after, the elevator girls are maliciously manhandled and anally probed via a phallocentric gun for being pinko poofs by a corrupt cop. Additionally, the perverted policeman tears up the elevator girls' beloved Karl Marx poster and when the girls complain about their property being destroyed the officer of the law makes the extremely valid point of rhetorically stating, “since when do you believe in private property?!” Realizing they make cruddy commie intellectuals, the elevator girls get their revenge by gang rapping the fellow who hogtied Trish and the guy busts an ample amount of saucy semen on the 1871 oil-on-canvas (and now cum) painting “Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1” aka “Whistler's Mother” by American-born painter James Abbott “art for art's sake” McNeill Whistler, thus 'battling bourgeois art' in the process. Maxine is ultimately arrested for her misguided Marxist shenanigans and the rest of the elevator girls threaten to strike as members of the disenfranchised rank-n-file who have “the right to strike.” In the end, the elevator girls plan to buy the hotel and pay for Maxine’s bail, but a couple gigantic iguanas wearing tophats nonsensically appear and thankfully destroy San Francisco and all the putrid people in it, including the evil capitalist bitch Bald-headed Sally, who is devoured by one of the radical reptiles.

A pure and unadulterated piece of impure celluloid psychedelic-exploitation retardation, Elevator Girls in Bondage provides a better case for staying away from drugs than any after-school special and a more mocking attack of Marxism than any National Socialist propaganda movie, which was certainly not the intent of the commie cocksuckers of the Cockettes, thus making the work all the more unintentionally enjoyable in an ironic sort of way. With the terrorist trannies of the film interpreting Marxists maxim like “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” as “you can do whatever what you want when you get what you need,” it is easy to see why the dildos dudes of the Cockettes subscribed to a hippie form of communism, even though Soviet icons like Maxim Gorky made such scathing anti-sodomite remarks as “Destroy the homosexuals—Fascism will disappear.” Of course, Elevator Girls in Bondage is certainly a somewhat accurate, albeit decidedly degenerate, depiction of the sort of slave-morality-driven debauchees that claim to subscribe to ‘the gospel according to Karl Marx’ today in the homophilic USA. A patently perverse piece of innately intentional celluloid trash that has as much artistic merit as a Polaroid of a turd taken by a toddler with Down syndrome that was directed by a feeble filmmaker with less skills than the average drunken frat-boy film school student, Elevator Girls in Bondage still manages to be a constantly entertaining exercise in campy cinematic excess, which probably is in part due to the fact that the film only has a 56-minute running time, as well as its all-morally-retarded cast. In fact, Elevator Girls in Bondage is more captivating than virtually anything ever directed by commie frog Jean-Luc Godard, but it is undoubtedly second to Luminous Procuress (1971) in terms of Cockettes cinema.  A magnificently mediocre piece of Marxist moronism, Elevator Girls in Bondage has hopelessly saved at least one young man or woman, from adopting a worthless Weltanschauung like communism and/or trannyism.  If you're too much a victim of left-wing vice to understand Morrissey's Women in Revolt, give Elevator Girls in Bondage a try and it might save you from contracting AIDS, wearing a $20.00 Che Guevara t-shirt, and/or going to a gay pride protest.

-Ty E

Pin

When I was an angry young man with a unrefined sort of visceral hatred, I listened to a lot of punk/hardcore bands from the late-1970s/early-1980s like Black Flag, Minor Threat, The Misfits, and the Youth Brigade. Not to be confused with the less popular Washington D.C. hardcore band of the same name, Los Angeles-based Youth Brigade was comprised of Jewish (non-racist) skinhead brothers named the Sterns, who even had their own pseudo-fascistic Hitler Youth-esque organization entitled BYO (Better Youth Organization), which also served as their record company, as well as a promoter of their 'Peter Pan Punk' Weltanschauung that used such slogans as “youth is an attitude, not an age” and “every generation has a responsibility to change what they feel is wrong in the world.” Anyway, not until a couple years ago would I realize that the Stern brothers of the Youth Brigade had a Canadian-born filmmaker father named Sandor Stern who among other things, wrote the script for the original The Amityville Horror (1979) and was the winner of the 1979 NAACP Image Award for “best screenplay” for the now all but forgotten basketball flick Fast Break (1979), but more importantly, he was the director/screenwriter for the absurdly aberrant Canadian cult horror-thriller Pin (1988) aka Pin: A Plastic Nightmare. A patently perverse horror flick in the tradition of the Pinocchio legend, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Magic (1978) starring Anthony Hopkins, and WASP unfriendly horror Hebrew Larry Cohen horror flicks that is based on the 1981 novel of the same name written by V.C. Andrews’ ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman (Child’s Play, The Devil's Advocate), Pin is a patently contrived horror flick with a Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark?-esque (incidentally, both are Canadian productions) aesthetic with a cast of characters wearing anachronistic, dandy-like Ralph Lauren wardrobes of the perennial preppy sort, yet it has something curiously captivating about it as a sort of perverted propaganda of the conspicuously kosher variety. Featuring a wayward white bread bourgeois family comprised of individuals that all have striking and seemingly artificial blond hair and blue eyes, Pin is a peculiar pseudo-Freudian assault on the Aryan middle-class that is full of sexual impotence, incest, sexually-depraved schizophrenia, frigid housewives, agalmatophilia, fascistic fathers, and just about every other libelous attack that Judaic Freudo-Marxist maniac Wilhelm Reich made against the goys of Germany. A rather simply assembled and easy-to-follow flick that was clearly made to be palatable for young children, Pin is a piece of accidently absurd aesthetic terrorism geared at influencing the most impressionable and innocent of minds, even if it features fathers giving daughters abortions, mothers molesting life-size anatomically correct medical dummies, brothers controlling their sisters' sex lives, and nephews intentionally giving their bitchy aunts heart attacks, as director Sandor Stern assembled himself a putrid piece of hypnotic Hebraic propaganda that is more complex and intricate than it would seem upon a mere superficial glance as the kind of work that psychologically debased and destroyed an entire generation of the Occident. 

 Dr. Frank Linden (Terry O'Quinn)—a stoic man of ostensibly Germanic descent—is a creepy authoritarian WASP who teaches his children about the ‘birds and the bees’ and other unflattering bodily functions via ventriloquism through a human-size anatomically correct medical dummy named “Pin” that looks like a real skinless human on superficial glance in the spirit of Clive Baker’s Hellraiser (1987). Unfortunately, Linden’s son Leon (David Hewlett) believes that Pin is a living and breathing guru of immense and all-knowing wisdom, but his little sister Ursula (Cynthia Preston) is certainly not so naïve. On top of the fact that he has no friends because his acutely anal retentive mother reprimands him for playing outdoors and “getting dirty” (all furniture in the Linden household is encased in plastic), Leon is also apparently an undiagnosed schizophrenic with traits of disassociative personality disorder, thus Pin makes for the ultimate plastic imaginary friend. Needless to say, Leon is totally traumatized when he accidentally witnesses his father’s nurse raping the anatomically correct dummy Pin, which apparently has a protruding plastic pecker. Just like any serial killer or wicked sex fiend, little Leon naturally grows up to be a much more deranged young man and his ultimately malicious mental illness does not do his sexually active little sister any favors. 

 Now an angst-addled 18-year-old senior in high school, Leon becomes rather enraged when he discovers a couple of wisecracking jocks have written “if you want an easy screw, Ursula will do!” on his locker and not long after he discovers his 15-year-old sister fornicating in a car with a gentlemen that the teenage schizophrenic brutally beats up to a bloody pulp. Naturally, Leon gives his sister an ultimatum, stating to her, “I don’t want a sister who's a tramp. If you ever do it again you can forgot I’m your brother.” Being a loyal sis, Ursula ultimately abides by brother Leon’s demand, but unfortunately she is already pregnant. Leon recommends that they go to Pin for advice as they did as children and the dummy, which the schizo teen now acts as a ventriloquist for after learning the trick from his father, states, “The doctor is a truly scientific man. I don’t think morality will affect his attitude. You made a mistake and it must be rectified.” Indeed, doctor dad Frank Linden rectifies the mistake by personally performing an abortion on his own knocked-up daughter, even asking his son “Aren’t you going to observe, Leon?” in regard to his sister’s first child being ripped out of the womb by its physician grandfather. Dr. Linden may be an emotionally vacant fellow who seems to suffering from socially-retarding Asperger syndrome, but he has enough sense to get rid of Pin when he finally figures out the perturbing degree of his son Leon’s penetrating psychosis and rather ridiculous relationship with the doll, but unfortunately the good doctor and his wife are killed in a car accident en route to a medical school (where the doc planned to leave the dummy) where the man of the house was to give a speech. Being a martial wasp of the pathologically clean-cut and ultra-conservative kind, Dr. Linden hated being late and was driving rather fast and erratically to get to the medical school on time, hence why they crash, but while the Linden parents perish, Pin naturally survives and soon takes over the Linden household.

 At first, the Linden children, especially Leon, feel rather liberated by their parents' deaths and immediately take the plastic off the family furniture and Ursula jokes that, in regard to her mother, “I bet she is telling god to take off his shoes.” Unfortunately, the fun is short-lived as Leon and Ursula’s bitchy and nosey aunt Dorothy (Patricia Collins) moves in, but luckily Leon realizes that she has a heart condition and literally scares her to death via Pin. Ursula takes a job at a library and soon meets a nice and sensitive gentleman named Stan Fraker (John Pyper-Ferguson), which infuriates her brother Leon, who firmly believes the new boyfriend wants to swindle the Linden family inheritance and institutionalize the boy shizzo in a sanitarium. Leon, an aspiring epic poet, also does not take kindly to Stan’s negative critique of his novel-in-progress about a “modern day Beowulf” named ‘Testes’ who “creates as much progeny as he can” and uses rape (including against his sister “Ursula”) to do so. Jealous and lonely due to his little sister's hot and steamy relationship, Leon feebly attempts a date with a girl named Marcia Bateman (Helene Udy), but he can only think and talk about Pin when the gal gets undressed and attempts coitus with the schizophrenic sexual coward. Extremely jealous and wanting to keep his sister for himself, Leon drugs Stan and bludgeons him with a wooden statue when he attempts to fight back. Leon concocts a bullshit story about Stan leaving town to altruistically visit a sick friend, which Ursula initially believes, but it does not take long for her to discover her brother's loony lies and she eventually attacks him with an axe as if haphazardly attempting to impersonate Jason Voorhees. In the end, Leon enters a comatose state and takes the identity of Pin. 

 A virtual pseudo-psychoanalytic celluloid catalog of stereotypically Jewish diagnosis of Nordic pathologies in the form of a seemingly humble horror-thriller, Pin brings to life in ridiculous melodramatic form scatological Semite Norman Mailer’s analysis, “The mind of the Wasp bears more resemblance to the laser than the mind of any other ethnic group… To wit, he can project himself 'extraordinary distances through a narrow path. He's disciplined, stoical, able to become the instrument of his own will, has extraordinary boldness and daring together with a resolute lack of imagination. He's profoundly nihilistic. And this nihilism found its perfect expression in the odyssey to the moon—because we went there without knowing why we went.” Indeed, while the only normal member of the Linden family is Ursula—a ‘progressive’ girl who has sex with a number of men at a young age before marriage—everyone else in the family, especially father Frank Linden and Leon, both suffer an unhealthy detachment from reality and communication with other people. While Dr. Linden lacks emotional connection and sexual maturity to such a degree that he must teach his children about sex by proxy through a medical dummy as opposed to speaking directly to them like a normal and loving father would, Mother Linden is a sexually repressed wench who suffers from such a bad case of obsessive compulsive disorder that she prevents her son from developing friendships, thus helping to lead to his debilitating psychosis and dumb dummy fetishism. As originally theorized by late 19th century Viennese Jewish intellectuals like psychoanalyst ‘soul doctors’ like Sigmund Freud, Sandor Stern depicts Dr. Linden’s brilliance as a physician and Leon’s talent as a perverted poet in Pin as the result of unhealthy mental pathologies and not as true genius, which are the sort of libelous claims that have become rather absurd clichés in modern academia that speak more about the mental state of the intellectual than the person being ‘analyzed.’ Indeed, Mailer’s description of the Wasp mind being more like a “laser than the mind of any other ethnic group” is certainly readily apparent in the character of Dr. Linden and his son Leon in Pin—a virtual work of celluloid Kabbalah black magic unleashed on the soul of Faustian youth, just as multicultural merry shows like Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? worked in a similarly malicious anti-Occidental fashion, albeit to a less gratuitous and perverse degree that does not feature nurse-on-dummy action and father-on-daughter abortions. Undoubtedly, if there is anything ‘scary’ about Pin, it is not its psychological horror show about an unhealthy boy with a curious relationship with a dummy, but the degree to which director Sandor Stern goes to metaphysically defile traditional Nordic man and his culture, religion, and achievements.  Featuring a villain with an archetypical Hitler Youth-like appearance and haircut that fantasizes about impregnating as many young ladies as possible in the spirit of the SS Lebensborn in a totally white world of physically immaculate blond and blue-eyed people with something ugly and incestuous yet sexually-repressed hiding just underneath the surface, Pin is what happens when an Aryan-hating Hebrew does Hitchcock and creates something unintentionally enthralling as if directed by Woody Allen's humorless, horror-movie-loving third cousin.  If one is looking for a more objective approach to Jewish versus Aryan families, compare the fictional Nordic family depicted in Sandor Stern's Pin to the real-life Hebraic pedophile ring of foul family in the documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003) directed by Jewish auteur Andrew Jarecki.  Admittedly, I had a lot of fun watching Nordic lunatic Leon going deranged with his dummy comrade in Pin, but the film did not even remotely horrify me like the child-deflowering father-son duo in Capturing the Friedmans.

-Ty E

Exposed

The greatest flop of NYC provocateur auteur James Toback’s rather uneven yet reasonably consistently interesting filmmaking career, Exposed (1983) starring Nastassja Kinski (Tess, Cat People), Rudolf Nureyev (Romeo and Juliet, Valentino) in his last feature film role, and Harvey Keitel (Mean Streets, Toback's Fingers), was certainly assembled with the grand and notable intention of being an international filmmaking masterpiece but was ultimately destined for the celluloid dustbin of history, with only a couple individuals, including alpha-fan-boy Quentin Tarantino, being an advocate of the film. A sleazy but suavely stylized coming-of-age turned pseudo-European crime-thriller about an ambitious Wisconsin farm girl (played by Nastassja Kinski, a woman not exactly fit to play the role of an American peasant) who becomes a high-profile international fashion model featured on the cover of Cosmopolitan and eventually the lover of a seemingly demented stalker violinist with an unhealthy hatred of both Nazis and Marxist-Leninist terrorists, Exposed was immaculately described by its director James Toback as follows: “Exposed is an especially significant title for a story that moves through different circuits of revelation. Elizabeth [Nastassja Kinski] learns about herself, and about the breadth of her capacities - which turn out to be wildly beyond her initial awareness - through a series of increasingly shocking events. But it is also a romance about the fatal attraction a charming, talented and obsessed musician has for the girl.” Indeed, anyone watching Exposed for a mere second would never believe that Nastassja Kinski is the naïve girl she is portraying yet she, Rudolf Nureyev, and Harvey Keitel give potent performances that make Toback’s thriller thrilling, even if it is ultimately a marvelous celluloid abortion and total artistic failure with all the proper ingredients of a masterpiece that never seems to fully come together. To make Exposed all the more absurd, the film features a hollow holocaust subplot of sorts expressing James Toback’s heated desire to exact heated Hebraic revenge against the antisemitic goyim, which takes the form of a Jewish protagonist sexually debasing beauteous German-Polish Shiksa Nastassja Kinski, as well as killing an anti-Semitic terrorist (ironically, played by strikingly masculine alpha-Jew Keitel). A classic work of Tobackian sinema with a 'no bullshit' attitude that is marinated in gall and wit, Exposed features hysterical females with big balls, creepy stalker males of the ridiculously romantic persuasion, catchy 1960s pop music, miscegenation of the unadulterated Hebrew-on-goyim sort, and a tragic ending in the post-WWII European spirit of the dispiriting variety that most American audiences seem to love to hate, thus demonstrating why James Toback is the virtual Jewish Abel Ferrara. 

 Wisconsin farm girl Elizabeth Carlson (Nastassja Kinski) has big dreams and when her sleazy and stereotypically Jewish English professor/boyfriend Leo Boscovitch (symbolically played by James Toback himself) slaps her in the face and calls her a “cunt,” she decides it is time to drop out of college and to move to the rotten Big Apple and fulfill her potential as a positively pulchritudinous young lady looking to make a big name for herself and possibly fall deeply in love in the process. During her first night in NYC, Elizabeth finds herself in for a rude awakening in regard to the shitty city when she is robbed by a nefarious Negro and his swarthy partner-in-crime, who steal the little money she has to live on. Although hoping to be a performance pianist (she has a knack for playing tunes by Bach), Elizabeth has to settle for a slave-wage waitress job, but luckily while working one day she is discovered by a prestigious fashion photographer named Greg Miller (Ian McShane), who guarantees to make her a worldwide superstar model in under three months in a big promise he ultimately makes good on. Due to her miserable existence in NYC and the seemingly endless swindlers and crooks she has encounter, Elizabeth finds Miller’s offer to make her a star model to be quite dubious to say the least and makes a sardonic remark about menstruation, but he proves good on his offer and before she knows it, she is a world-class model, eventually even landing on the cover of Cosmopolitan. Indeed, rather magically and absurdly, Elizabeth’s desire to be rich, famous, and glamorous is fulfilled, but she is missing one very important ingredient, Mr. Prince Charming. Luckily, a weirdo who also happens to be a professional violinist (thus sharing her love of classical music) named Daniel Jelline (Rudolf Nureyev) begins to stalk her, stating odding things like, “You’re very beautiful…but you should never wear make-up, especially lipstick…Your lips are full and generous without it…Don’t call attention to what is already lovely on its own” and then immediately disappearing just as he randomly appears. Despite knowing nothing about the mysterious man in black, Elizabeth begins to immediately fall in love with him. After Daniel breaks into her apartment, she finally begins to learn that he is a professional violinist who does dirty work for an independently wealthy holocaust survivor looking for revenge against evil Nazi goyim and anti-Zionist towelheads. Later, after Daniel convinces her to come to Paris with him, Elizabeth finds out the hard truth that Daniel’s name is not really Daniel Jelline and that he is indeed the holocaust survivor that he claims to work for and he wants to use her to get next to a terrorist he wants to kill, a fellow named Rivas (Harvey Keitel) whose character is modeled after Latino Marxist/Muslim terrorist Carlos the Jackal, who once made a failed attempt to assassinate Joseph Sieff, a Jewish businessman and vice president of the British Zionist Federation. Rivas uses beautiful female models and effeminate gay men to help him carry out his terroristic jihad and Elizabeth gets close to him by befriending one of his female soldiers, a beauteous Nordic blonde babe named Bridget Gormann (Marion Varella). Rivas takes an instant liking to Elizabeth, but he finds her motivations to be rather dubious. Of course, radical terrorist Rivas has reason to suspect everyone as one of his soldiers—a French fag named Vic (arthouse star Pierre Clémenti)—sells him out to an enemy, so the terrorist leader makes an example out of him by stabbing him to death with a dagger in front of Elizabeth, which greatly disturbs the Wisconsin wonder girl. Elizabeth runs to Daniel after witnessing the murder of Vic and not long after the holocaust man has a run in with Rivas and his girl model terrorist that ends rather tragically. In the end, Elizabeth is exposed to more than she bargained for, including gaining and losing her first love in the process. 

 During the beginning of Exposed, director James Toback’s sleazy college professor character Leo Boscovitch states quite eloquently (in rather gross contrast to his grotesque appearance and character): “The Western world is breaking down. Socially, politically, economically, morally, aesthetically and psychologically. Really, if you look into your own lives there are only two routes of escape from this dark claustrophobic trap: art and romantic love.” Indeed, Exposed attempts to be epic celluloid art of the apocalyptic sort containing an equally ambitious depiction of romantic love, yet, rather unfortunately, the film is no minor masterpiece like Toback’s directorial debut Fingers (1978), but instead, a dauntless celluloid abortion with all the ingredients and gall of a masterwork that just does not make the cut. Of course, like most of James Toback’s films, Exposed has a certain charisma and charm to it that makes it worth coming back to. For fans of either Nastassja Kinski or Rudolf Nureyev, Exposed will also prove to be a true celluloid favorite as both of the real-life sexual deviant stars deliver mystifying and mesmerizing performances that are rather hard to ignore, even if it seems like their full potential is never reached. Although Ms. Kinski might not have the acting chops of her depraved papi, she certainly has a wildly idiosyncratic allure that beauteously bleeds through every scene of Exposed. As a Harvard graduate and unrelenting ‘pick-up’ artist who has been known to hit on underage girls with the line “make them a star” (which the photographer character played by Ian McShane literally does in Exposed), James Toback undoubtedly made the same offer to Nastassja Kinski in regard to Exposed and unfortunately he was unable to deliver on it. A film featuring a vengeful eye-for-an-eye-driven Judaic who has a greater passion for bloodlust than beautiful women and his violin, Exposed, quite thankfully, does not resort to the sort of Spielberg-esque kosher clichés that are typical of similarly themed works. Unlike the high-profile Hebrews in Hollywood, Toback is a sleazy Semite with an unhealthy fixation with goy gals who has never been afraid to show it, hence why his works are highly entertaining art-sploitation pieces as opposed to mere superficial smut on monetary steroids. With Exposed, Toback displayed his fantasy of defiling Aryan beauties, exterminating murderous anti-Semites, and expressing himself through delightful degenerate art, which is certainly something I cannot blame him for. Undoubtedly, James Toback is a Hebrew fit for the front-page of National Socialist propagandist Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer as a fiercely foul racial specimen, but I doubt the Führer himself could fault him for Exposed, an enthralling piece of personalized Zionist propaganda with a seedy and salacious soul, but a soul nonetheless. 

-Ty E

LA Plays Itself

I know about as much about gay porn as I do about black scholars, but I can state without hesitation that Fred Halsted (Sextool, A Night at Halsted's)—an ultra-masculine leather-fag who once advocated a form of fierce fag fascism and once directed a homo hardcore flick with an all punk soundtrack—is easily the greatest queer pornographer who has ever lived, with his debut feature LA Plays Itself (1972) being his celluloid magnum opus. A virtual blue-collar Kenneth Anger with a muscular physique, working-class ethic (he once worked as a gardener for Vincent Price!), and a brutal and predatory sexuality, accidental arthouse auteur Fred Halsted would express all of these things and more in LA Plays Itself, a naughty and no-nonsense piece of gritty celluloid nature worship and severe sexual sadism that is known to repel even the most unrepentant of sodomites, especially of the sack-less sissy sort. Described by none other than literary outlaw himself, Mr. William S. Burroughs, as follows, “This film breaks all the stereotypes! I recommend it for all audiences!” LA Plays Itself is certainly like no other porn flick made before or after it and it is certainly not for the faint of heart or those that subscribe to the modern politically correct LGBT lunacy that pervades throughout mainstream American society. Beginning as a sort of celestial Californian völkisch flick of a lonely hiker spotting and blowing a naked hippie blond boy and concluding as a homoerotic horror nightmare where a naïve young pretty boy is bound and takes a large fist to the rectum, LA Plays Itself is ultimately an aberrant arthouse shocker, so it makes it all the more strange that auteur Fred Halsted described the film as an, “autobiographical homosexual story.” A man that was routinely anally raped by his own stepfather while a mere adolescent and who would apparently later be raped again as a muscle-bound macho man adult, Fred Halsted was the real deal in terms of the sort of sadomasochistic leather-fags depicted in William Friedkin’s sodomite slasher thriller Cruising (1980). Indeed, LA Plays Itself even left alpha-surrealist Salvador Dalí thunderstruck, apparently stating regarding the fiercely fetishistic flick that it was “new information for me,” but it also left politically active leftist fag poofs irrevocably disgusted, which is indubitably a good thing when it comes to art. As Fred Halsted described for the San Francisco publication Kalendar regarding an East Coast screening, “In New York City, I invited all the gay liberationists, writers and other artists. I thought, 'Jesus, here I’ve made this great gay liberation film, L.A. Plays Itself. They can’t help but love it.' I was there and I was happy and then the curtain went down and they started to boo and hiss and stomp their feet. I thought, 'my god, is this a gay, liberated audience?'” Indeed, probably the only gay porn flick that will strike fear and disgust in both homos and heteros, as well as males and females, LA Plays Itself is the seemingly magical, if not blatantly somewhat amateurishly assembled, result of an audacious novice artist who has no pretensions about going all the way, fist in ass and all. 

 The Los Angeles featured in LA Plays Itself is quite different from the largely Mexican metropolis that exists today. Opening with a shot of a sign for the city limits of Los Angeles, boasting a population figure of a mere 2,535,700 (as opposed to 3,792,621 in 2010) lost souls, LA Plays Itself soon scans the seemingly exotic forests of the the Los Angeles area that seem in stark contrast to the polluted and festering concrete jungle one typically imagines. Off-screen narration of an East Coaster proclaiming that “Lost Angeles Stinks” appears, but homo hero Fred Halsted comes to the city’s rescue and bashes New Yorkers, which is no doubt a noble sentiment on his part. After a number of scenic and soothing Buttgereit-esque arthouse shots of butterflies, salamanders, spider webs, and pretty plants set to the sounds of Japanese koto music, a naked Aryan hippie man (Rick Coates) with blond hair bathing in the sound is approached by a hunk hiker (Jim Frost) and the men engage in oral and anal sex when not prancing along gayly in a stream. The sex scenes begin to take a quasi-psychedelic form when butt-darting is superimposed over pink flowers and caves and boulders over buggery, thus symbolizing the peaceful pansies the mainstream gays have always attempted to project to mainstream society. Of course, the ugly reality of urbanization unfolds when a bulky bulldozer rolls by some flowers and aesthetically displeasing power-lines are revealed over a car-infested freeway. While Fred Halsted found his greatest source of solace in nature and the wild, even once admitting the happiest period of his life was when he was a gardener for Vincent Price, the filmmaker developed his fame/infamy in the urban S&M netherworld and LA Plays Itself is no different as the second part of the film reveals how a boyish Texan becomes the bitch boi of a strikingly sadistic sodomite with an unhealthy fixation with rope and forceful fists in assholes. After driving by billboards for cinematic cult classic Performance (1970) co-directed by Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell—an assumed favorite of Halsted's—a porn theater for three erotic flicks, including 101, Acts of Love, and Infrasexum, one is introduced to the “New Kid in Town”(played by the director’s real-life boyfriend/torturer Joey Vale). Apparently, a debauched dramatization of his autobiographical affair with Vale, Fred Halsted offers to show the new kid “the ropes” of L.A. and soon he is quite literally tying him up with them and bounding him in unpleasant positions au naturel. Forcing the new kid to climb steps naked while being brutally whipped, Halsted rules the roost with an iron-fist to the point where he is quite literally fisting him full force. The tortured Texan also licks Halsted’s dirty black boots like a common dog obeying its egomaniacal master.  In the end, a Texan is dead, which is a small price to pay in Halsted's wicked and wanton world where one is bound for pleasure. Whether its peaceful twinks engaging in sodomite splendor in the grass or lunatic leather-fags engaging in lethal lechery, LA plays for keeps. 

 In an interview with a bleeding heart homo fellow named Mikhail Itkin who saw it fit to constantly contradict the interviewee, Fred Halsted stated quite stoically, “What Nazism is saying, though, is: you’re Aryan, you’re white, you’re better. Gay supremacy is very similar to that. So I think it’s a new kind of fascism—which I wholeheartedly endorse…I really do think we’re superior and that thesis is fascistic. I don’t believe in equality, and I think it has been proven that at times when you have a great renaissance in culture and the arts, it’s always gay peole who are leading the whole thing. We are now starting such a renaissance again.” Indeed, the second half of LA Plays Itself features such ultra-masculine martial prowess, butch body worship, and a master morality philosophy as an expression of a sort of quasi-fag fascism of the aesthetic sort and is a far cry from the mainstream fairy faggot shit that now comprises mainstream ‘gay culture.’ Indeed, while Halsted was ‘gay married’ (i.e. in a long-term yet sexually promiscuous relationship) to Joey Vale, it is highly doubtful he would have promoted the sort of bourgeois-buggers-adopting-babies bullshit and effeminate homosexualization of mainstream society by slave-morality-driven celebrities who collect Negro and Asian children from around the world. An unclassifiable piece of potent idiosyncratic filmmaking, LA Plays Itself offers daunting dichotomies between soft hippie homos versus sadistic sodomites, man versus machine, the organic jungle versus the urban jungle, and sexual tenderness versus erotic torture that let's the world know that not all pansies are pink! A hypnotic horror flick for homosexuals and heterosexuals alike, LA Plays Itself is probably not going to get anyone off unless they are quick shooters and/or masochists who love botched orgasms, but it does make for a mesmerizing masterpiece of the cinematically macabre sort.  While a film like Brokeback Mountain (2005) projects the message that manly men who love men are just misunderstood romantics who are unable to reciprocate their love because of an unjust and so-called 'heteronormative' society, I think LA Plays Itself offers the hard truth when it comes to alpha-fag musclemen.  After all, there is no peace, equality or understanding in taking a huge clenched fist in the pooper, no matter how much poof puffery is shoved in one's face by the mainstream media.

-Ty E

Time Expired

 

One must certainly wonder how decidedly derelict director Danny Leiner, being of the traditionally Hebraic Hollywood persuasion with such formulaic, vacuous comedic hits as Dude Where’s my Car? (2000) and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) came to begin his career with Time Expired (1992), a semi-serious, and not particularly slapstick funny, but rather bizarre 30-minute short about a hyper masculine married wop whose latent homosexuality is unleashed after serving a two-year stint in the city jail while housed with a presumably Puerto-Rican, fiery latina transvestite cellmate. Indeed, Time Expired is a rather bizarre, yet enjoyable short film about the not so uncommon, but often unspoken of scenario of seemingly macho men finding their true lascivious homosexual selves in prison, and the often raucous ramifications that result from their lustful prison proclivities. Upon his exit from jail, Bobby (played by Bob Gosse) seems rather ambivalent about being reunited with his family who await him outside the prison gates. On the way out, however, his already mixed emotions about his release are further complicated when his former cellmate and lover, saucy latina tranny Ruby, decadently dressed to the nines in a sexy, short blue dress complete with a long, flowing black wig and sunglasses (played by the highly versatile John Leguizamo—whose many diverse roles range from portraying a sex-obsessed, possibly gay Guido in Summer of Sam (1999) to a nearly-brain dead half-Hispanic/half-Jewish hustler retard in King of the Jungle (2000)) walks by and asks him if he’d like to meet up later. Bobby, unsure of how to deal with the situation, immediately dismisses Ruby’s presence and eagerly walks over to his awaiting family—his chubby, short and unassuming mother, his semi-autistic comic books obsessed brother Burt, and his young, faithful wife, Ginny (played by Edie Falco of Sopranos fame in one of her earliest roles). Bobby feigns excitement at seeing his forgiving family after being in jail for a presumably cum-in-the-butt filled two years with his Latin lover Ruby (after apparently having been charged with “ripping off over 1,000 parking meters,” which is somewhat suggestive of kleptomaniac tendencies, which seem to be strikingly common among homosexuals, including my beloved flaming fag uncle), and returns home only to fall into a drunken, unemployed slump in which his pretty and forgiving and decidedly tame for an Italian wife Ginny can’t help but feel sorry for her ex-con husband who, unbeknownst to her, is incessantly ruminating about and lusting after the sweet and spicy Latina ass of his tranny lover, Ruby.

Barely able to concentrate even on shitty afternoon cartoons while staying at home one day, Bobby finally gives Ruby a call and asks if she’d like to meet him at the local park, as covertly as possible of course, for fear of his family discovering that he is a lustful horndog of a homo with a predilection for a cross-dressing maricon. Ruby happily obliges and attires herself accordingly in her favorite black wig and sexy red dress, only to find that Bobby is twenty minutes late for their presumed encounter of afternoon delight in the park. Ruby, predictably tiffed by his lateness yet very excited to see Bobby, remarks, “You’re twenty minutes late—that’s how late you are!” and “You’re way too flaco—you need a latina to make you some pollo!” is beyond dismayed when Bobby coldly tells her he only met up with her to say that he needs two months time to get his life in order, and that between now and then, the two of them can’t carry on any kind of relationship. Ruby, in characteristically hot-blooded Hispanic response, is beyond dismayed by Bobby’s plans and leaves immediately, but not before slapping him when he leans in for a kiss, and then giving him the finger and flamboyantly flashing her ass in anger. Later in the evening, Ruby goes to the local gay bar, dressed from head-to-toe like Marilyn Monroe, and washes away her sorrows in a dipsomanic fit after being told by the bartender, “You know, he’s just a breeder” and responding, “I know. That’s what I like about him,” demonstrating that the little latin lover is still clearly quite obsessed with her Italian boy-toy and truly distraught over his looming, self-imposed two-month hiatus from their admittedly awkward, yet intense love-making sessions.

 In spite of what he said, Bobby cannot make good on his promise to abstain from his debauched disposition, and just a day or so later he is already hanging out at the salon where Ruby works as a manicurist and hairstylist. The two go on an intimate afternoon date, in which he purchases for her a Jesus figurine at a local Hispanic market; the day ultimately ends with the two dancing intimately and lustily to some Billy Holiday or other such Negro spiritual inspired, faux-romantic, pretentious music in Ruby’s candle-lit bedroom, which inevitably concludes with the dubious pair exchanging bodily fluids and falling asleep, only for Bobby to later wake up and leave, only to return to his as yet unknowingly jilted wife who implores him to make love to her. Upon waking alone in bed the next day, Ruby, in typical latina fashion, is beyond pissed and can’t wait to take out revenge on and humiliate Bobby in front of his clueless wife. And indeed, the following morning is a true disaster for Bobby who, already packing his suitcase and preparing to leave his wife, is greeted at the front door by a truly pissed and volatile Ruby who barges through the front door and makes her presence known to Bobby’s wife Ginny who angrily responds, “Who the hell is this thing?!” with a lust-filled, passionate screaming match erupting between the two jilted ladies. Bobby finally admits to Ginny that he was a closet fag, and that he “consummated” his relationship with Ruby while in prison, and in rather atypical wop-fashion, Ginny is surprisingly accepting of his new-found life as a flaming homo, and quite graciously allows him to pack up his things and leave their humble abode. Ruby, on the other hand, is not so forgiving and while Bobby implores her to run away to Florida with him so that they can begin their licentious lives anew, she vehemently refuses and rather sacrilegiously throws at him the Jesus statue he had purchased for her just days ago; Bobby falls to the ground like the limp-dicked loser he is, as the statue symbolically lay broken on the ground.

Ultimately, Time Expired rings true to its meaning with a somewhat open-ended conclusion in which Bobby peers in at the window to Ruby’s salon, seemingly begging for forgiveness and for her to take him back, only for Ruby to shake her head at him in disbelief at his desperation. While Time Expired is by no means a masterpiece of any sort, cinematically or thematically, it certainly does make for a brief yet highly enjoyable viewing, particularly for those entranced by John Leguizamo’s always enthralling and diverse personas, ranging from stereotypical mafia gangsters to hot-blooded homos to raunchy retards. And the film is also an insightful exercise in what it must be like for previously masculine men, having found their true salacious selves in prison, to make the real-life, outside of prison transition from being former lily-lickers to presently equally semen-spewing and semen-loving homos with a predilection for lustful man-ladies. And, finally, Time Expired proves that, while the old saying may go that “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” even those who are not biologically ladies are no exception to the rule, especially those of the hot-headed and fiery Latina tranny variety.

-Magda von Richthofen zu Reventlow auf Thule

 

The Addiction

With his undoubtedly most idiosyncratic and inaccessible celluloid work The Addiction (1995), NYC Catholic nihilist auteur Abel Ferrara (9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, King of New York) managed to homogenize Gothic Grit with wayward wit in an innately anomalous vampire flick that has the ability to scare viewers away from doing drugs and studying philosophy. The virtual sister film to Ferrara’s The Funeral (1996) in that both films were apparently inspired by the tragic death of screenwriter Nicholas St. John's son, The Addiction is a decidedly dreary and maliciously melancholy work that mischievously mediates on sex, death, drugs, and religion to the point of inspiring abject disgust and misanthropy in the viewer. An aberrant arthouse bloodsucker flick shot in suavely stylized black-and-white, The Addiction is much like the David Lynch produced work Nadja (1994) directed by Michael Almereyda in its total deconstruction of the vampire subgenre, except with a vulgar and seemingly oxymoronic rap soundtrack (which was probably inspired by the fact that Russell Simmons of all people executive produced the film) as opposed to soothing shoegaze and all the more philosophically penetrating, like a dispiriting stake in the heart of Occidental philosophy. Starring the ever so homely and unappealing Lili Taylor (Arizona Dream, Pecker)—an actress who is only second to Sandra Bernhard in terms of being an anti-diva who literally brings physical disgust to my stomach any time I see her—The Addiction follows an ugly graduate philosophy student who does ugly things after being bitten by a beauteous babe of the unhinged and undead sort. Addicted to blood and books, as well as searching for the meaning of life, death, and the reason for man’s eternal violence against his fellow man, the physically and mentally perturbed plasma-addict vampire of The Addiction goes through an odyssey of the body and soul that cannot simply be learned by spending one’s free time reading in an academic library. Featuring quotes and references to Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Feuerbach, Descartes, Dante, Charles Baudelaire, and William S. Burroughs, as well as stock footage from the atrocities of Auschwitz concentration camp and the My Lai Massacre, The Addiction is a mystifying and misery-inspiring piece of allegorical celluloid metaphysics that reminds one that, to quote Christopher Walken’s character’s seemingly contrived but charming reference of Nietzsche, “Mankind is driven to exist beyond good and evil…From the beginning.” While I never saw Abel Ferrara as a man interested in German philosophy and arthouse vampire flicks, The Addiction is filled with enough drug-addled derangement, cultural pessimism, and an unromantic view of NYC to remind viewers who directed it, even if the philosophical meat of the film was clearly a result of screenwriter Nicholas St. John's uncompromising contribution to this seedy exercise in post-Victorian bloodlust. 

 Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor) is a promising yet hopelessly naive graduate student at the philosophy department of New York University, but she has a hard time understanding why a bunch of American soldiers wasted a bunch of gooks at Vietnam and an even harder time fathoming why only one fellow was brought to justice for his infamous war crimes. It is only when she is passively bitten by a voluptuous vamp named Casanova (Annabella Sciorra) during a nefarious NYC night that Kathleen begins to understand the meaning of a life of lechery and bloodlust, later learning from an elder vampire played by Christopher Walken, that “The entire world's a graveyard, and we, the birds of prey picking at the bones. That's all we are. We're the ones who let the dying know the hour has come.” While Casanova even tells Kathleen to “order me to go away” before she sinks her teeth into her neck, the grad student is far too pathetically lifeless and intellectually pedantic to merely verbally defend herself, even at the request of her victimizer (who calls her a “collaborator” due to her pathetic passivity in an unholy crime against her soul), thus her transformation into a bloodlusting vampire is just what she needed, at least when it comes to being a cannibal as opposed to mincemeat in the rotten Big Apple. Unfortunately, being addicted to human hemoglobin, Kathleen must satisfy her cravings by abandoning empathy and stoically taking victims, including her best friend Jean (Edie Falco), pompous philosophy professor and a Negro gangster named “Black” (played by rapper Fredro Starr) who rather vulgarly offers her a bit of “jungle fever,” who provides her with some tasty dark meat. When a pretentious anthropology student quotes Protagoras’ famous and once-infamous proto-humanist “man is the measure of all things,” Kathleen teaches the sucker of a idealistic college student man’s true worth by draining her of her sacred sanguine fluid. When the anthropology student freaks out over the fact a piece of flesh has been ripped out of her neck, Kathleen snidely remarks, “It was your decision. Your friend Feuerbach wrote that all men counting stars are equivalent in every way to God. My indifference is not the concern here. It's your astonishment that needs studying,” thus displaying her new and improved intellectual insights as a postmodern active-nihilist philosopher with a master morality as opposed to a slave morality (like she once had before as a feeble human). Of course, being a fiending blood addict, Kathleen suffers major withdraws when not getting enough of the biological fluids she needs and an older and wiser Nietzschean vampire named Peina (Christopher Walken) recommends that she read trust-fund junky William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959) to help her cope with addiction. A recovering vampire addict who only need to take a ‘maintenance dose’ of blood to survive, Peina is proud to admit to Kathleen that he is a rare bloodsucker that defecates and that he lives a rather 'human existence' and that she has all of her immortal lifetime to master her diseased soul. A studious sadist of the vampiric sort, Kathleen graduates and has a party to celebrate and admits to her professor and colleges, “I'd like to share a little bit of what I've learned,” thereupon ushering in an ominous yet orgasmic bloodsucker orgy with her vampire compatriots (including Casanova and her many victims, who are now vampires as well). Being a bloodthirsty broad who must spread moral decay and a daunting degenerative disease of the immortal sort to survive, Kathleen inevitably comes to the conclusion that suicide is the only answer, but her maker, Casanova—an unlikely fan of Calvinist theologian/philosopher R. C. Sproul—is not going to let her philosophical progeny make the mistake of an endless lifetime. In the end, Kathleen sheds her human mortality, which is really a small price to pay to be perennially undead in at a time when god is dead. 

 A rare vampire flick lacking in romance (as well as a romantic subplot), aristocratic elegance, and an easy-to-read black-and-white moral compass, The Addiction is more focused on the need to live an egoless, colorless, and nondualist life as depicted through the torturous trials and tribulations of a vamp that is initially too interested in social prestige and hemoglobin to see the bigger picture, but finally comes around when her overwhelming bloodlust almost destroys her. Indeed, it is no surprise that the film concludes with Kathleen walking by her own tombstone, which has the inscription John 11:25 as one witnesses the vampiress’ death, burial, resurrection, and post-resurrection. Of course, with its quoting of everyone from Nietzsche to a Calvinist kook, one would be quite wrong to describe The Addiction as a ‘Christian’ film, but more like a work of Perennialism as promoted by Aldous Huxley due to its portrayal of all religions sharing a singular truth, thus ultimately making the film a strangely spiritual work with a positive message, which is rather ironic for a work featuring vulgar academic-eating vampire orgies, historical snuff footage, cliche Nietzschean ramblings, and a rather retarded rap soundtrack. For a film featuring a curious character whose aberrant actions are more disturbing than real-life footage of genocide and war, The Addiction must be doing something right as an unwonted bloodsucker and soul-sucking flick that trades in supernatural superstition and folklore for perennial philosophy and gritty street realism of the quasi-apocalyptic. In comparison to similarly themed works like Jeffrey Arsenault‘s Night Owl (1993) and Larry Fessenden’s The Habit (1995), The Addiction is certainly the king of American metropolitan metaphysical vampire flicks. With a short but brilliantly bittersweet performance from Christopher Walken that is almost in league with German actor Max Schreck in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) directed by F.W. Murnau in terms of vampiric authenticity, as well as shadowy and phantasmagorical imagery in the spirit of the German expressionist movement except contained with a largely “black” and negrophilic world, The Addiction is a rare postmodern ‘horror’ flick that does not inspire me to barf, even though it features a ghastly ghoul of a gal like Lili Taylor in the leading role, which is typically a cruel curse for any celluloid work. One of the few Americans films ever made—be it from the horror genre or otherwise—with some intellectual meat to it, which makes it all the more diacritic and inaccessible since it is a quasi-horror flick of sorts, The Addiction is undoubtedly habit-forming, although Lili Taylor and Feuerbach certainly leave a bad taste in one's mouth.

-Ty E