Wir (1981)

Although best known nowadays, especially in the English-speaking world, as the mad scatological scientist with an affinity for sewing rectums to mouths in Tom Six’s The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009), seemingly half-crazed and reptilian-like kraut actor Dieter Laser was once quite a serious actor of German New Cinema, appearing in important cinematic works like The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) co-directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta and the omnibus film Germany in Autumn (1978), but undoubtedly his lead role in the dystopian sci-fi flick Wir (1981) aka We is one of the greatest and most important of his career, even if few people have actually seen it. Directed by Czech auteur Vojtěch Jasný (Až přijde kocour aka The Cassandra Cat, The Great Land of Small) and based on the novel We (1921) written by science fiction/political satire writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, Wir is a film that wastes no time criticizing authoritarian collectivism, especially of the commie sort. With the source novel being the very first book to be banned by the Soviet censorship board and the author Zamyatin being referred to as one of the first Soviet dissidents, Wir is, not surprisingly, one of the few ‘overtly anti-communist’ films of German New Cinema, albeit with little anti-fascist nuances like gas chambers and whatnot thrown in so as to assumedly appeal to the vogue far-left that dominated culture in the Fatherland at that time. Featuring a superlatively soulless world of transparent glass walls and architecture where everyone can see everything and no one has privacy, emotions and art for art’s sake is a crime, dreams are considered symptoms of madness, and the people worship a megalomaniac of a charlatan who literally drains what little bit of humanity they have left via psycho-surgery, Wir certainly deserves a place somewhere in between Welt am Draht (1973) aka World on a Wire directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Traumstadt (1973) aka Dream City directed by Johannes Schaaf and Die Hamburger Krankheit (1979) aka The Hamburg Syndrome directed by Peter Fleischmann as one of the greatest works of dystopian science fiction of German New Cinema. Adapted for the German Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) on a discernibly low-budget utilizing archaic video technology and primitive yet aesthetically pleasing special-effects, Wir is all but impossible to find nowadays by any official means, but is certainly worth the search, even if by quasi-illegal means. 

 One State—a quasi-urban artificial nation comprised almost entirely of glass—is a virtual prison community where everyone wears the same exact aesthetically displeasing uniforms (greyish blue sweatsuits where their genitals hang loosely out) and people have numbers instead of names. A somewhat grotesque-looking fellow ‘named’ D-503 (Dieter Laser) is the chief engineer of a spaceship named Integral that will be used to takeover and occupy extraterrestrial planets. Whilst working on the Integral, D-503 also keeps a journal about his day-to-day activities and his thoughts, which he will somewhat unreliably narrate Wir with as the film progresses. Like a human computer addicted to Adderall, D-503 is sort of a like an empty vessel who impulsively spouts propaganda slogans that has little opinion on anything aside from what he has been programmed to think, the source of which being the decided dictator of One State, the ‘Benefactor.’ D-503 is ‘friends’ with and does absurd Kraftwerk-esque exercises with a fellow named R-13 (Giovanni Früh), a slavish so-called ‘State Writer’ who is employed to read verses at executions and who is against art and artistic geniuses and regards the individualistic non-robotic sort of creator as heretical, stating, “poetry is civic service, poetry is useful,” thereupon making him a sort of aesthetic nemesis of Arthur Rimbaud. One day while exercising with his comrades in a scenario that looks like some early 1980s music video, D-503 runs into a chick named I-330 (Sabine von Maydell) and the two eventually reunite later at a place called the Ancient House—a Victorian-like home that acts as a museum in regard to how ‘ancient’ homes once looked—and the little lady commits the unsanctioned and unholy act of putting on a dress and acting in a spastic, albeit happy, manner. Despite the seeming deadness of his soul, D-503 begins to fall in love with wild weirdo I-330 and before he knows it, he is ‘registered’ (indeed, all sex is setup and scheduled by the government) to share his cold and calculating carnal knowledge, but the model citizen is more than a tad bit startled when he sees his federally registered fuck buddy partaking in the ‘marvelous poison’ of liquor, as well as cigarettes, both of which are serious crimes punishable by death in One State. 

 Enslaved by his growing love for I-330, who it turns out is a political revolutionary and member of a radical group called MEPHI that is looking to wipe out the One State, D-503 is taken through a tunnel inside the Ancient House and introduced to a rural and natural world outside his technocratic city-state, where dandy-like poets, hippies with folk guitars, naked chicks, and other beatnik types called the “Forest People” frolic in the grass gaily and live naturally, which scares the engineer because, as he states, “they look like the figures in the Human History Museum,” yet they are real, living and breathing people with personal freedom. Meanwhile, D-503’s assigned girlfriend O-90 (Susanne Altschul), who is considered by the government to be too short to reproduce, convinces the peculiar protagonist to impregnate her, or so she hopes. On top of that, a more hideous than homely redhead chick named U-27 (Hanna Ruess) seduces D-503 and before he knows it, he is betrayed and put under house arrest, thus making him unable to be around for the first test flight of the Integral spaceship he designed, so he can only think to himself, “Kill…Kill…Kill.” Naturally, D-503 blames U-27, who has apparently read his journal, for the treachery that has been bestowed upon him, so he goes to lunge at and attack her, but she flashes her tits and the Benefactor calls him right after, so he decides against killing her, at least for the moment. D-503 is forced to go see the leader of the One State, the Benefactor, who puts the young engineer in his place. Not long after, D-503 meets up with his lady love I-330, who tells him,“The thing at issue is bigger than us. It’s not about your individual happiness. But the happiness of many others,” thus demonstrating she is just as much of mindless collectivist as her enemies. Not unsurprisingly, D-503 goes mad and attacks a friend and is thus given psycho-surgery, which turns him into a reason-obsessed robot who is proud to admit the high-tech lobotomy made his head feel “light, empty” and that “reason must prevail” in a seemingly possessed fashion. Of course, it is revealed that U-27 told the Benefactor about everything that was written in D-503's journal, including I-330, revolutionary group MEPHI, and their plans to lead a counter-revolution against the cosmic communists at One State. As a treat for unwittingly toppling the MEPHI with his incriminating journal, D-503 has the distinguished pleasure of watching I-330 being tortured by the Benefactor via the “famous gas chamber.” Unwilling to give up her comrades, I-330 refuses to confess under the pain of the gas chamber and D-503 lives happily on as a sophisticated zombie of sorts. 

 Based on a novel that influenced and/or has thematic similarities with works like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), Wir might seem rather redundant to the uninitiated in terms of dystopian films, but with its absurdly minimalistic yet ominously oneiric sets, unforgettably unhinged performance from lead Dieter Laser, and the strange vintage video format the ‘film’ was shot on that only adds to the tone and aesthetic of the work, Vojtěch Jasný's striking micro-budget science fiction flick certainly deserves a place in science fiction history as a crudely charismatic kraut cult film that deserves to be rediscovered and rereleased. In terms of its sociopolitical message, Wir makes for a clever indictment of commie collectivism, but also bureaucracy, technocracy, passionless productivity, soulless sex and ‘utilitarian relationships,’ hyper-realization, and eradication of emotion, thereupon making it a film that has become all the more relevant since its release, even if it is outmoded in other ways. Aside from being a clearly low-budget work utilizing primitive technology, Wir has a vague hippie element to it as the “Forest People” in the film, who are essentially ‘progressive’ types, are dressed like cliché hippie scum with stupid haircuts and Jesus sandals. With star Dieter Laser's recent and rather surprising popularity as an iconic cult horror villain as a result of his role in The Human Centipede, one can only hope that interest in the actor will result in people digging up Wir from obscurity and proving the German actor is capable of playing more than just Mengele-esque characters like he did in Tom Six's films, as well as Volker Schlöndorff's The Ogre (1996) aka Der Unhold, but also a mundane engineer who becomes more interesting after receiving a lobotomy.

-Ty E

The Simple-Minded Murderer

Undoubtedly, if any Nordic nation has all but totally turned its back on Allfather Odin and replaced him with innately alien slave-morality-driven atheistic humanism and has ultimately been hit the worst by the terminal metaphysical disease of liberalism, it is Sweden. With their most popular contemporary films being the superficially sadomasochistic man-hating crime film trilogy based on the “Millennium series” written by commie feminist cuckold Stieg Larsson, it is quite apparent that Sweden is a spiritually sick country that makes the ethno-masochism of the filmmakers of German New Cinema seem rather benign by comparison. Maybe it all started with the melancholy melodramas of Ingmar Bergman (Through a Glass Darkly, Persona) or the cynically class conscious and culturally pessimistic feminist flicks of Mai Zetterling (Älskande par aka Loving Couples, Nattlek aka Night Games), but few national film industries have been so thoroughly and lunatically liberalized and culturally Marxified as that of the Swedes and there are few better examples of this perturbing phenomenon of both cultural and cinematic self-flagellation than Den enfaldige mördaren (1982) aka The Simple-Minded Murderer directed by Hans Alfredson (Egg! Egg! A Hardboiled Story, P & B) starring a rather young Stellan Skarsgård portraying a half-retarded fellow with an unflattering harelip. Sort of like a Swedish Forrest Gump, except relentlessly and stoically somber in the manner only Swedes know how to do and minus most the the humor, The Simple-Minded Murderer is an anti-fascist, anti-heimat film of sorts set during the 1930s in rural Skåne, Sweden, that quasi-operatically depicts the tragic events that occur after an Aryan handicapped young man’s mother dies and he is forced to become the virtual slave of a stereotypically evil Nazi factory owner who makes his life a living hell. Winning three Guldbagge Awards from the Swedish Film Institute, including Best Director (Hans Alfredsson), Best Movie and Best Actor (Stellan Skarsgård), as well as the Silver Bear for Best Actor (Stellan’s role as the protagonist) at the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival, The Simple-Minded Murderer is undoubtedly considered an unmitigated masterpiece of Swedish cinema, with alpha-auteur Ingmar Bergman even praising the flick, describing it as, “A deep indignation, turned into a powerful fairy-tale. Hasse Alfredssons resources seem unlimited and my admiration for his creativity and the wealth of his ideas is absolute." However, the film also has the sickening stench of post-WWII self-loathing, which has become a sort of quasi-kitschy cliché of Swedish cinema as demonstrated by internationally revered works like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) and its equally aesthetically and thematically repellant sequels based on far-leftist Larsson’s Millennium series. Directed by a man known for his idiosyncratic brand of “humorist humanism,” The Simple-Minded Murderer is an undeniably powerful and entrancing work largely aesthetically inspired by the composition Requiem (1874) aka Messa da Requiem by Italian romantic composer Giuseppe Verdi, but it is also a superlatively sad reminder that one of the most iconic figures of Swedish cinema is a violent and vengeful retarded killer. 

 Opening with mentally-challenged and harelip-adorned protagonist Sven (Stellan Skarsgård, himself a proud and vocal atheist humanist) driving his paraplegic girlfriend Anna (Maria Johansson) to the middle of nowhere in rural 1930s Sweden and hiding in an old house, The Simple-Minded Murderer—with its rather literal title—makes it quite clear from the very beginning that the protagonist has just committed a violent killing and is evading justice, especially after he throws a large bloodstained blade into a well, as the rest of the film provocatively unravels how the vengeful crime came to be. The only images he has seen of his father being that of a völkisch-like painting at the local museum of his dead daddy riding a horse on the beach nude and a small wallet-sized soldier portrait, Sven—a uniquely unlucky lad born with a cleft palate and suffering from both a glaring speech impediment and a lack of intellectual prowess—only had a mother growing up, so when she dies, his life is turned into a virtual hell after he is forced to live with cows and work for free at the farm of an evil fascist factory owner named Höglund (played by director Hans Alfredsson), a superlatively sadistic man that beats his chauffeur, taunts and terrorizes his wife, and takes great personal glee in burning the last bit of rent money given to him by a tenant on Christmas who could not afford to give him the money in the first place. Although giving Sven a sense of dignity for a moment or so by allowing him to act as his personal chauffeur and driving him to debauched aristocratic parties with drunk naked chicks, Höglund eventually goes too far when he forces the halfwit Aryan boy to dress in drag for the entertainment of the local National Socialist party that the factory owner belongs to, thus ushering in an unlikely and ultimately murderous rivalry between a poor retarded fellow and a nasty Nazi aristocrat that concludes in tragedy for all parties involved. 

 Deciding enough is enough, Sven escapes Höglund farm and takes residence with the Andersson family, who are somewhat successful tenant farmers who lease land from ‘fascist pig’ Höglund. Under the roof of the kindly Anderssons, Sven develops a sense of dignity and worth he never felt before, even falling in love with the family’s crippled daughter Anna, which the girl's parents encourage, but things take a turn for the worst when high-class heathen Höglund, who is quite angered by the family’s genuine charity to a mentally-challenged man that he sees as his own personal slave, demands his harelipped serf back. Refusing to argue with peasants (as he states himself), Höglund wages a war of physical and psychological terrorism against Sven and the Anderssons, even attempting to impoverish the family, which, with his monetary prowess, he does quite easily. It is not until Höglund has his callous and perverted (he reads ebony porn magazines while working) chauffeur destroy Sven’s fancy motorcycle—a special item that the special boy worked hard to buy and get a license for—that the disabled young man begins to see red and decides to take aggressive action of the ostensibly holy homicidal sort. A deeply devout Christian in the ‘true believer’ sense not unlike the crazed character Johannes from Carl Th. Dreyer’s Ordet (1955) who went so insane that he thought he was Jesus Christ himself after reading too much Søren Kierkegaard, Sven, who is initially too sensitive and childlike to drown a rat (which he fails doing early on in the film), believes he has angelic homicidal powers after supposedly being visited by three angels and believing the sacred seraphim want him to take revenge and join them in heaven, the outsider hero with a harelip grabs a large blade (with the supposed angels following him behind), goes to Höglund in broad daylight in front of a number of witnesses and maliciously murders the proletarian-exploiting fascist factory man in cold blood in what is indubitably the most therapeutic revenge scene in all of cinema history. In the end, Sven takes his limp limbed lady love Anna with him out to the middle of nowhere so they can assumedly start a new fairytale life together without being discovered by the police. In a rather unhappy twist, Anna, spotting police and her father closing in on them at their forest hideout, shoots both Sven and herself in a sort of handicapped take on Romeo and Juliet. 

 Indeed, while contemporary Swedish cinema certainly demonstrates the Swedes have become spiritual cuckolds and eunuchs of sorts, that does not mean these degenerated descendents of Vikings have become totally passive and pathetic people as one of the most common and potent themes of modern cinema in the Nordic nation is good old unadulterated revenge, albeit of the fashionable anti-fascist/anti-capitalist fashion, with The Simple-Minded Murderer being arguably the greatest of these films. Of course, aside from the more bitchy and bitter than sweet feminist-fueled work The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its equally overrated sequels, the Guldbagge-Award-winning flick Evil (2003) aka Ondskan—a work based on an autobiographical novel written by treacherous Swedish journalist Jan Guillou who worked as a spy for the Soviet KBG—is also a highly viscerally vengeful anti-heimat work set during the 1950s about a young man who single-handedly destroys the ‘fascist’ aristocratic classic structures and politics of a private boarding school. Even Swedish horror films, most notably the vampire flick Let the Right One In (2008) directed by Tomas Alfredson—not by coincidence the son of The Simple-Minded Murderer director/actor Hans Alfredson—also focuses on revenge, albeit of the supernatural coming-of-age sort where the boy protagonist sides with an ancient eunuch vampire who helps him literally slaughter his child enemies. Indeed, a sort of degenerate Odin archetype might live on today in the collective unconscious of the Swedish people as demonstrated by contemporary Swedish cinema, but too many centuries of Christianity and decades of anti-fascist communist/feminist/multicultural propaganda have turned these lapsed Vikings into a bunch of slave-morality-sanctioning metaphysical slaves who, as demonstrated by The Simple-Minded Murderer, prefer filmic folk heroes of the deformed and rather retarded sort to heroic knights in shining armor and virtuous kings of the enemy-exterminating sort. A carelessly cliché work set in the 1930s at the rise of fascism that assumes in the Trotskyite sense that fascists and factory owners are one in the same and that all the masters derive grand pleasure for perniciously poking and prodding at the figurative wounds of morally virtuous slaves, The Simple-Minded Murderer is a cinematic work that would be great if it were not for its redundancy in self-righteous quasi-red revenge politics. Of course, just as the Germanic races Aryanized Christianity, so have they done the same with commie politics and there is probably no greater cinematic example of Odinic bloodlust meets Nordish Christianity meets Nordic far-leftism than The Simple-Minded Murderer, a work of uncompromising celluloid vengeance that is ultimately compromised in terms of pseudo-moralistic redundancy of the hopeless holocaust-atoning variety. 

-Ty E

Space Is the Place

Personally, I have no fear of a black planet, as long as I do not actually live it on myself. Undoubtedly, Afrofuturist jazz musician and black nationalist ‘cosmic philosopher’ Sun Ra would not want me living there either as he makes it quite ‘crystal clear’ (both literally and figuratively) in the audaciously Afrocentric avant-garde sci-fi flick Space Is the Place (1974) aka Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Arkestra: Space Is the Place directed by cracker TV director/producer John Coney and produced by fellow white cuckold TV producer Jim Newman. The closest thing to a ‘negro Lucifer Rising,’ Space Is the Place is suavely surreal celluloid racial mysticism of the forward-looking variety that portrays a futuristic fantasy in the apocalyptic racial utopia spirit of The Turner Diaries where a stoic spade messiah played by Sun Ra comes to earth to colonize black America with hypnotic power music and takes its most upstanding citizens to the homeboy planet and where, in the end, earth, as well as all the white devils and Uncle Toms, is totally destroyed. Originally envisioned as a mere 30-minute performance documentary on “The Arkestra” (Ra’s musical group) after Sun Ra came to the attention of producer Jim Newman when the musician was teaching a course at the University of California, Berkeley on “The Black Man in the Cosmos” where he promoted thinkers ranging from Russian occultist Madame Blavatsky to black poet Henry Dumas, Space Is the Place eventually evolved into a feature-length narrative film with the help of screenwriter Joshua Smith, although two different films exist day. Writing all of his own lines and dialogue, Sun Ra ultimately rejected the 85-minute director’s cut due to what he rightfully perceived as featuring exploitative blaxploitation themes, thus a shorter 60+ minute Ra-approved radical cut of the film was released on VHS missing two sex scenes and a scene with a junky degenerate, among various others. Admittedly, I preferred the decidedly degenerate director’s cut as Ra’s version of the film seems like a poor black man’s puritanical take on Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Steve Arnold’s Luminous Procuress (1971) as it lacks the ludicrously lurid and racial-stereotype-charged angle of the longer cut. Indeed, blaxploitation scenes or not, Space Is the Place is still a strikingly singular esoteric black empowerment flick steeped in blood mysticism and radical Afrocentric historical revisionism that combines intentional race-based mythmaking akin to National Socialist philosopher Alfred Rosenberg and the collectivist black identity politics of revolutionary pan-African leader Marcus Garvey. Sort of the sci-fi fantasy genre equivalent to the Afrocentric horror flick Ganja & Hess (1973) directed by Bill Gunn and starring Duane Jones of Night of the Living Dead (1968), Space Is the Place is a work that reminds the viewer, despite what the Hebrews, homos, and other assorted cultural Marxist types in Hollywood have to say with their inorganic and culture-distorting films, racially nationalistic cinema is more about love and true culture than hate and soulless cosmopolitanism, consumerism, and other vapid values that are setting the world on a path to self-destruction. 

 Taking his pseudonymous name from the Egyptian God of the Sun, Space Is the Place features a sort of Aeon of Horus of the Afrocentric persausion that espouses self-realization, albeit of the racially collectivist as opposed to individualistic self-absorbed and hedonistic sort. Originally a somewhat lowly but locally legendary jazz musician at speakeasies around the time of the Second World War, Sun Ra vanished from the planet in June 1969 while on tour in Europa, ultimately landing on a funky celestial planet with his (musical) crew “The Arkestra.” As for his reasons for heading to outerspace, Ra is quite blunt, stating, “We set up a colony for black people here…see what they can do all on their own without any white people there.” With the potent stench of black power in the air, Sun Ra decides to head back to earth to spread his message and recruit new brothas for the mother planet, using music as his mad cool medium of galactic transportation. First time-traveling to 1943 Chicago where he used to play piano under the lowly name “Sonny Ray,” Sun Ra confronts his nasty nemesis named ‘The Overseer’ (Ray Johnson)—a kind of black devil who symbolically wears all white, loves white whores, and who is a pimp and ‘psychic vampire’ of sorts that styles himself as a community leader of the negro community but is really just the 'enemy within'—and the two agree to duel using Afrofuturist tarot cards for the fate of heart and soul of the black race. As Mr. Ra tells a couple black national activists who question whether or not he is ‘real,’ “I’m not real…I’m just like you…you don’t exist in this society. If you did…your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real…if you were you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So we’re both myths. I do not come to you as a reality. I come to you as the myth because that’s what black people are…myths. I came from a dream that the black man dreamed long ago. I’m actually a presence sent to you by your ancestors. I’m gonna be here until I pick out certain ones of you to take back with me,” thus demonstrating the need for blacks to make their own history and reality and stop living in whitey's world as second-class citizens.

 Upon arriving in Oakland, California, Sun Ra opens a place called the ‘Outer Space Employment Agency,’ where he turns down an Aryan man that worked for NASA with the most bluest of white devil eyes, a slutty white MILF, and a homeless black wino who refuses to work, as the mature Amero-Mandingo metaphysician musician is looking for negroes of upstanding characters and even prefers morally keen ‘ghetto blacks’ to ‘white physicists.’ Meanwhile, two radical young negroes—Bubbles (Jack Baker) and his mulatto friends—are told by the evil Overseer that Sun Ra is a charlatan and a fraud, stating, “The dude wants you to buy his records, you dig?!...He’s not dealing in black magical soul power…He deals in cold cash, you understand?,” but the two young black bucks disagree, stating, “But he hasn’t yet traded his black brethren to the exploitative, racially and culturally co-opted Caucasian power structure.” Sun Ra also faces spiritual trouble when a Svengali-like brotha' Jimmy Fey (Christopher Brooks)—the cracker-loving minion of the Overseer who is a sort of archetype for the fake Uncle Tom type blacks in the mainstream entertainment industry—coerces the out-of-this-world musician to ‘sell-out’ by doing radio appearances, a music album, and a large concert of biblical performances. On top of that, a duo of honkey hellions working for Nazi NASA begin spying on and plotting to kill the subversive spade Sun Ra. Of course, Ra has the power of Afrofuturist music on his side and believes that most blacks are depressed because, “The people…have no music. That is…in coordination with their spirits…because of this… they are out of tune with the universe. Since they don’t have money…they don’t have anything,” so he naturally decides to give them the gift of music to fight back against the white menace. Just when Bubbles tells his comrade that he thinks Sun Ra has degenerated into a sell-out Uncle Tom, stating “I think this whole big concert business is a byproduct of the Eurasian Occidental conspiracy…he’s been coopted, coauthored, and correlated,” the two Afrocentric revolutionaries spot the two white devils from NASA kidnapping the Afrocentric musician, so they rescue and free him. Not long after, Bubbles gets shot and killed by one of the white NASA dudes while shielding Sun Ra during a botched assassination attempt, but the musician ultimately saves his life by putting him on his spaceship, which will take him to the glamorous intergalactic ghetto. Aside from Bubbles, his friends (a mulatto and a Fat Albert-esque negro), Sun Ra also allows Jimmy Fey’s “black part” to board his spaceship, leaving the evil “white part” of Fey behind to taunt the Overseer. In the end, the most noblest of negroes fly into outerspace on Sun Ra’s spaceship and planet earth explodes not long after, killing the whole wide white world in the process and thus ultimately securing black domination of the entire universe, thereupon making Space Is the Place easily the greatest and most uncompromising black power sci-fi flick ever made. 

 As the scatological Semite Norman Mailer wrote regarding the Apollo 11 moon landing and its uniquely Aryan and Faustian character, “the real mission of the Wasp in history was not, say, to create capitalism, or to disseminate Christianity into backward countries…It was to get the U.S. to the moon” and “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,” yet clearly the self-proclaimed “white negro” novelist spoke far too soon and jealously as Space Is the Place demonstrates there is not only a transcendental and spiritual element to space travel, but also that proud national black men would love to do it too, even if whitey was there first. More importantly, the film proves that black Americans can produce idiosyncratic mystic kultur that does not revolve around crude and animalistic sexual habits, ‘ill’ literacy, nihilistic materialism, and philistine-style hate-for-hate's sake. In fact, the antagonist of Space Is the Place, the Overseer, is a pernicious cultural parasite who enslaves his own people via drugs and addicts, prostitutes his own people for profit, is totally irreligious, and will do anything for a buck or fuck. Like the Aryan operatic “Gesamtkunstwerk” films of proud Prussian auteur Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King, Hitler: A Film from Germany), Space Is the Place is a cinematic work that, aside from its humor and classic sci-fi conventions, would be totally inaccessible and misunderstood today in our spiritually vacant and monstrously materialistic times due to its promotion of cultural myths among the respective group the film was made for. Indeed, it may be a total fiction that ancient Egypt was a black civilization, but such grandoise sentiments unify a people, which is a message that Sun Ra more or less tried to spread with Space Is the Place. Pro-black without being matriarchal and black Bolshevik like the cinematic works of Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène (Xala, Camp de Thiaroye) meets primitive science fiction cinema of the outmoded old school sort, Space Is the Place ultimately did for avant-garde Afrofuturist jazz what Slava Tsukerman’s cult classic Liquid Sky (1982) did for punk/New Wave/electroclash, thus making it a must-see for fans of the music subgenre (I must admit I am not one of them). With curiously comical and highly quotable quotes like, “looks like we got another dead nigger on our hands,” “we’ll put a coon on the moon by June,” and “sometimes when you lose you win,” Space Is the Place is accidental satire at its best.  Rather ironically shot concurrently on the same sound-stage as the porn chic classic Behind the Green Door (1972) considering Sun Ra's disciplined monk-like ways (the Afrofuturist did not cut out the sex scenes out of his cut of the film for nothing!), Space Is the Place is not only a celluloid space oddity, but a cultural oddity that is more thematically relevant today than when it was when released nearly four decades ago, especially considering a certain mulatto president of the United States of America bears a certain resemblance to the villain of the film as a false messiah leading not only blacks, but also whites and every other race, on a path of total destruction.

-Ty E

Signs of Life (1968)

As a longtime appreciator of Bavarian auteur Werner Herzog’s idiosyncratic cinematic oeuvre, I felt it was about time that I watch his first feature-length film Signs of Life (1968) aka Lebenszeichen, a breakthrough work that also proved to be the director’s first critical and commercial success, even earning him the Silver Bear Extraordinary Prize of the Jury at the 18th Berlin International Film Festival. Admittedly, I was more interested in seeing Signs of Life because it is the director’s sole work set during the Second World War than because it is Herzog’s first flick, but rather unfortunately, as the director stated himself, “The film is set during the Nazi occupation of Greece, and inevitably some people will want to suggest that the film is something like a ‘historical drama’. Of course, it is nothing of the sort.” Indeed, Signs of Life is far from a conventional ‘war film’ as it depicts soldiers of National Socialist Germany, even mentally deranged ones, with an uncommon degree of humanity, or as Herzog explained himself, “How often do you see German soldiers acting as decently as this in a war film? I think that using the war as a backdrop enables the audience to see the absurdity and total violence of what went on during the Second World War in a different light, one we are not used to seeing. It is not a metaphor, but like Invincible which is set just before the era of the Third Reich, Signs of Life uses the absurdity of this situation – showing the interactions between an occupying army and the locals – to make what is a more ‘existential’ point.” Indeed, aside from humanizing the horrendous homicidal Hun, Signs of Life, although loosely based on the story Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau (1818) aka The Mad Invalid at Fort Rattoneau written by Prussian Romantic poet Ludwig Achim von Arnim, was an extremely personal work for Herzog as the film is set at a real 14th-century fortress built by the Knights Hospitaller where the director’s grandfather Rudolf Herzog, who apparently went mad later on in life, worked as an archaeologist for a number of years publishing translations of ancient Greek engravings, which even appear in the film. 

 A fairly conventional and even sometimes mundane flick for the first hour or so, Signs of Life ultimately turns into a positively penetrating psychodrama during the last 30 minutes when the anti-hero Stroszek goes berserk and runs amok in a most pathetic manner. A sort of German New Cinema equivalent to Stephen King’s The Shining, Signs of Life depicts the wonderful whimsicalness that occurs when a boyish beta-male who can only dream of being an Aryan alpha finds himself with a screw or two loose and believes he had debts to pay to invisible adversaries, thereupon futilely attacking everyone in his path. Far from seeming like a formative work, Signs of Life is hopelessly Herzogian to the cracked kraut core as a work that features the hallucinatory physical and metaphysical madness of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), the bold black-and-white insect fetishism and exotic island eccentricity of Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), the charming chicken hypnotism of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), the breathtaking windmill landscapes of The Wild Blue Yonder (2005), and the wacked out war weariness of Rescue Dawn (2007), not to mention the fact that the lead protagonist’s name is Stroszek, the same name as the protagonist of Herzog’s Amero-kraut masterpiece Stroszek (1977), both of which were named in tribute to a classmate that helped the director cheat on a test while he still was a underage student. The absurd story of a man with the intensity to exterminate an entire army, but is far too impotent and only manages to kill a mere donkey in the end, Signs of Life is a celluloid parable of sorts about the insane impotence that ensues when a spiritual cuckold forgets his place in society and ultimately loses everything, especially his sanity, in the process. 

 It is the Second World War and an injured paratrooper named Stroszek (tightrope walker Peter Brogle) is sent to the ancient Greek city of Kos with his foriegn Greek wife Nora (Athina Zacharopoulou) where two other injured Teutonic soldiers, Meinhard (Wolfgang Reichmann) and Becker (Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg) are also temporarily residing to recover from their injuries. Basically, the men do nothing aside from pretending to protect a stone fortress that they are not even worthy of setting foot on. While Becker helps translate ancient Greek inscriptions, Meinhard creates a somewhat dubious yet effective makeshift cockroach trap. Somewhat controversially married to a non-Aryan woman of swarthy Mediterranean stock, Stroszek is weaker than his wife, who helps him take precious gunpowder from grenades to make Roman candles and other fireworks. In one especially foreshadowing scene, Stroszek seems immensely disturbed by a young blond Aryan (played by Herzog longtime musical collaborator of Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh) , who describes “Chopin as evil,” while playing Chopin on his piano, thus suffering a minor mental breakdown, but the best is yet to come. While Nora attempts to refine her German, Stroszek, who seems to suffer from both boredom and an unwavering feeling of impotency, complains to his commanding officer and is reassigned to guarding the countryside where, after spotting a virtual army of windmills, he loses what is left of his sanity. Later that day while eating a lovely dinner with his wife, as well as his comrades Becker and Meinhard, Stroszek accuses them all of being secret spies out to get him and haphazardly chases them with his rifle, failing to injure any of them in the process. While Stroszek’s behavior is wildly whimsical and uniquely unpredictable, if one thing is for sure, it is that he has an incapacity for doing any real damage to anyone. In fact, in the end Stroszek only manages to kill a donkey. For all the horror stories regarding the German military during the Second World War, Stroszek is treated rather respectfully by National Socialist commanders during his standoff, where he literally states, “I don’t know what duty is.” In the end, Signs of Life concludes with the following words, “His rebellion had set something colossal in motion, and his adversary was much more powerful than he was. So, like many others before him, he had failed miserably,” which may or may not be a thinly disguised reference to Uncle Adolf.

 While not exactly Werner Herzog’s greatest accomplishment as a filmmaker, Signs of Life is certainly no small debut cinematic effort, but a positively penetrating celluloid psychodrama that, at least in my mind, depicts how the director might have acted were he forced to fight for the Fatherland in the Second World War. Indeed, Herzog could not have chosen a more diacritic setting and context for a WWII war film as Signs of Life seems like another universe that is equal parts paradise and pandemonium. In terms of a first feature from the great director of German New Cinema, Herzog’s Signs of Life certainly beats Alexander Kluge’s Yesterday Girl (1966), Wim Wenders’ Summer in the City (1970), and even Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) as a work with an audacious auteur signature that has not been dated by anachronistic far-left politics nor aesthetic influences from the French New Wave (thankfully, unlike his contemporaries, Herzog was never inspired by Godard). As for what Signs of Life means for Herzog himself, he stated the following in an interview, “One thing to say about Signs of life – and maybe other filmmakers felt this way about their first films – is that I have always had the very strong feeling that it was made somehow as if there was no history of film preceding it. As such it is my only really innocent film. Something like this happens only once in your lifetime because, once this innocence has been lost, it can never be recovered.” Undoubtedly, compared to a monolithic mainstream artistic work like Invincible (2001)—a film that is easily the director’s most artistically compromised and phony cinematic one to date—it does indeed seem like Herzog has certainly lost a bit of innocence since Signs of Life, but he would also go on to direct a number of masterpieces of world cinema, including (but certainly not limited to) Stroszek (1977), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982). The perfect work to deprogram oneself from both the anti-German WWII propaganda and formulaic aesthetic vapidness of Hollywood, Signs of Life—with its crazed cocktail of gypsy conmen who claim to be kings, a pathetic platoon of National Socialist nerds and nihilists, a creepy cameo from the musical mastermind of Popol Vuh, and an odd appearance from an old Turkish man that was the last surviving worker from Rudolf Herzog's archaeological project—is just one of the many reasons why Werner Herzog is not only one of the greatest filmmakers of German New Cinema, but cinema history in general. 

-Ty E

Invitation au voyage (1982)

Like anyone, I like a good road movie, but finding one I have yet to see that catches my fancy has become a rather tedious task, so I do not exactly go hunting for them and prefer to allow them to fall into my lap. Knowing nothing about the film aside from the fact it was supposedly about a lurid incestuous love affair between fraternal twins, I decided to watch the French-Italian-German co-production Invitation au voyage (1982), a work based on a novel written by the relatively unknown French novelist Jean Bany that proved to not only be one of the most idiosyncratic road movies I have ever seen, but also a nicely nuanced piece that esoterically expresses the vapid essence of its particular zeitgeist. Directed by Italian auteur Peter Del Monte (Piso pisello aka Sweet Pea, Étoile aka Ballet), Invitation au voyage is a post-punk/death rock/new wave drenched work of laidback yet ominously off-beat celluloid poetry that, as demonstrated by the film’s title, alludes to decadent French poet Charles Baudelaire, but also Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joan Jett. Despite winning the prize for the Best Artistic Contribution at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival and being a rare French cult arthouse flick to actually have a mainstream release in the United States (Sony Pictures put it out on VHS), Invitation au voyage has, rather unfortunately, faded into almost total obscurity like the hokey hairstyles featured in the film. A moody, melancholy, and even morbid road movie about incestuous twins—one male and one female—that might as well be doppelgangers were it not for having different genitals, Invitation au voyage unravels through a series of flashbacks what happens when a brother promises his sister he will make her “live again” if she were to ever die, which she does. Featuring a brother bathing his twin sis in a bathtub full of creamy white milk, an exquisite naked corpse in a cello case strapped on top of an antique Rolls Royce, and a curious corpse-like ‘protagonist’ who moves like a somnambulist as he internalizes and ultimately transsexualizes his innate incestuous feeling after his rock star sister dies in one of the most peculiar accidents of cinema history, Invitation au voyage, for better or worse, is a film about transformation and emasculation in the post-apocalyptic age of cultural degeneration. 

 As demonstrated by the fact that he puts the corpse of a naked woman in a cello case, loads and ties said makeshift coffin to his car, and drives away for a rather dubious road trip, loner Lucien Vallon (Laurent Malet) seems to be a lecherous lunatic and as the film Invitation au voyage progresses, this seems to be all the more true, but not in the manner that one initially assumes as he is not a psychopathic serial killer or a rapist, but a man with a rather unhealthy attachment to his sister that extends to incestuous necrophilia of the morbid milk fetishizing variety. As revealed later in the film, the naked dead girl is postmortem punkette Nina Scott (Corinne Reynaud), the more successful fraternal twin sister of Lucien who has supported her brother both economically and emotionally with her music. As quite blatantly demonstrated in a flashback scene featuring the two totally unclad and embracing after coitus, Lucien and Nina were incestuous siblings, so when the ‘female’ half of the duo dies, it leaves the male half in a sort of existential pandemonium, which is tested during a road trip where the lovesick twin brother meets a number of individuals no less eccentric than himself who more or less unwittingly help him embrace his metamorphosis into a tranny weirdo who believes he has taken on the identity of his decidedly deceased sister. As twin sis Nina tells her brother regarding their rather close relationship sometime before she dies, “With us it’s not the same. The others don’t matter. No one but us understands,” and, indeed, as Lucien will find out through his vaguely phantasmagoric odyssey through rural France in a Rolls Royce, no one can quite compare or even begin to act as a substitute for his sister. The first person Lucien meets on his trip is an exceedingly extroverted female kleptomaniac (Aurore Clément) who rather irks the mourning twin after she accidentally puts on his dead twin sister’s black lipstick, thus inspiring the melancholy traveler to kick the stranger out of his car into the pouring rain of the night. By happenstance, Lucien later runs into the cutesy klepto at a bar and she tells him in a stereotypically French manner that he is “a phantom” and that he is “here without being here,” which the half-dead man seems to take rather well and the two strangers, somewhat surprisingly, share carnal knowledge later that night. Of course, when Lucien notices the wind is blowing around the cello case containing his sister on his car, he has a rather senseless emotional freakout and pastes a number of Nina Scott flyers around the bar, thus leaving his klepto love interest in the dust. After running into two Norwegian truckers at a diner and helping them to translate a conversation with a French waitress, Lucien ultimately helps the two Nordic gentlemen get in the pants of the frisky frog waitress, so when the loner twin is run off the road by a group of delinquent teenagers, he receives help from the Nords get backing on the road and eventually goes his marginally merry way. After getting his car worked on at an auto repair shop, Lucien is met with a surprise when an elderly and seemingly half-senile geezer, who had hid inside the automobile, randomly pops up, but does not scare the melancholy twin too bad. Using Lucien as a way to hitchhike to a graveyard to visit his wife’s grave, the odd old timer confesses his deep dissatisfaction with his daughter and son-in-law, stating, “Money’s the only thing that interests them…not even screwing. I have no grandchildren,” but also confessing his love for David Bowie and Nina Hagen, thus signifying the lack of real values and worship of false values in the West. 

 While driving and daydreaming at night, Lucien hits a half-deranged Turkish illegal alien named Timour (Mario Adorf) with his car. Although Timour initially pulls a gun on Lucien when he seeks to help the injured man, the strange stranger passes out and is driven back to his homestead by the young Frenchman. After playing a one-person game of Russian roulette while laying injured on a pool table, the hot tempered Turk confesses to Lucien he killed his “whore” wife, but, for whatever reason, later denies he killed his wife, meekly stating, “Those were all lies I told you last night. Forget everything.” After the Turk takes back what he said about killing his wife, Lucien tells Timour that he “does not make sense,” to which the ostensible wife-killer understatedly states, “neither do you,” thereupon establishing a strange sort of unspoken solidarity between the two mental men. With Timour riding along, Lucien heads to a farm where he grew up to meet up with his childhood friend Martine, but leaves rather abruptly without speaking to her and heads to Martine’s brother Gérard’s home where he reveals that his sister Nina is dead. After proclaiming, “I thought with her head, I saw with her eyes. You understand? Now, I see nothing…I feel nothing” regarding his sister, Lucien goes a little a crazy and cuts himself with a butcher knife while crying and reveals to Gérard that he is hauling around his sister’s Nina’s corpse. After telling Gérard that Nina loved him very much, Lucien homoerotically kisses his friend as if his sis’ ghost is living vicariously through him, stating before he leaves to his friend, “never forget her.” The next day, Lucien takes his sister Nina’s nude corpse to a landfill and burns it. After going to a bar, Lucien once again runs into Timour, who is working as a server and is planning to go back to Turkey but needs a passport. Lucien, who has decided to take on the identity of his sister Nina (he promised to her “I’ll make you live again” were she to died shortly before she actually did die) and ultimately transforms into the tranny doppelganger of his big sis, gives Timour his passport. In the end, both Lucien and Timour head south via ship, but the latter does not recognize the former on the boat ride as he is dressed like a degenerate punk chick that wears far too mascara. 

 Whether looked at as a modernist tranny tragedy, post-punk road trip, macabre off-beat melodrama, arthouse Goth fetish flick, and/or decidedly degenerate dysfunctional filmic family affair, Invitation au voyage is most certainly hard to classify, but if anything is for sure regarding the film, it is a superlatively suavely stylized and ideally idiosyncratic cinematic work that never fails to be provocative in terms of its phantasmagoric ‘cold wave’ tableaux and froggy libertine themes. Shot by French cinematographer turned director Bruno Nuytten—the man behind the creepily compelling camera work of underrated frog cult flicks like Zoo zéro (1981), but more importantly Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981)—Invitation au Voyage is a film that wallows in the ‘dark side’ of life and not in any sort of campy or cartoonish manner, but in a romantic and decadent fashion that borders on metaphysical horror and invokes the (di)spirit of not only Baudelaire, but also Edgar Allen Poe and Hanns Heinz Ewers. Featuring an insanely incestous protagonist who ritualistically drinks milk that his twin sister died in during a freak accident involving electricity from a light bulb and a bathtub full of dirty dairy products, Invitation au voyage also features more universal themes, especially regarding the specific era when it was made, when boys began to resemble girls and vice versa. Most notably, protagonist Lucien relies on his sister both economically and emotionally, as he, although a male, is the weaker of the twins, thus symbolizing the emasculation of males not only in France (though France is obviously one of the most worst off), but the entire Occident in general. Of course, in its inclusion of an old man who longs for grandchildren but whose daughter is too selfish and money-motivated to have them, Invitation au voyage is a work that focuses on cultural decay in Europe in general, which reaches its most absurd level when the criminally-inclined Turk Timour even decides he prefers his homeland to France and ultimately decides to sail home. The extremely moody tale of a young man who is only able to find solace after his sister’s death by ‘taking on her identity’ and becoming a punk rock tranny, Invitation au Voyage is by no means a happy film, but certainly an aesthetically hypnotic and hallucinatory one that might offer a sense of hope to certain hopeless (homo) types, even if it will leave most viewers, myself included, with an odd combination of disgust and ecstasy. 

-Ty E

Ugly, Dirty and Bad

 Undoubtedly, the Italians are not only the greatest cinematic exploiters, but also the greatest self-exploiters and if any film demonstrates this, there is probably no better example of this than the delightfully degenerate, great tragicomedic Guido-sploitation Ugly, Dirty and Bad (1976) aka Brutti, sporchi e cattivi aka Down and Dirty directed by Ettore Scola (A Special Day, What Time Is It?). Set in a sub-medieval maggot-infested micro-Third World shantytown in inner city Rome, Ugly, Dirty and Bad is the superbly sordid and sleazy yet hysterically hilarious tale of a magnificently miserly slumlord of the pathologically criminally-inclined sort who has four generations of his own family living under his rickety rat-infested roof as if they are the prisoners of a death camp run by Goombah hobos. Co-written by Sergio Citti (Ostia, Bawdy Tales)—the sole filmmaker protégé of Pier Paolo Pasolini who himself came from the slums of Rome as proud members of the sub-proletariat (Citti taught Pasolini ‘rare’ Roman dialects) and featuring actors like Ettore Garofolo of Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962)—Ugly, Dirty and Bad is like a slapstick poverty porn of the absurdly anti-erotic sort, featuring incestuous heterosexual trannies, father-in-law rapists, poverty-ridden playboy models, and a family that may not agree on much aside from the fine points of familicide. Starring Nino Manfredi—one of the most prominent actors of the “commedia all'italiana” (Italian-style comedy) genre—in the lead role as a pathetically greedy, one-eyed patriarch who is willing to kill his entire family to keep his well ‘earned’ insurance money he obtained in a quicklime accident that cost him the hefty price of half his vision, Ugly, Dirty and Bad is a radical remainder that the fall of the Roman Empire was not exactly the best thing for what would become the racially despoiled Italian non-race. Apparently, originally envisioned as a documentary, Ugly, Dirty and Bad is nihilistic Italian neo-neorealism from a deranged dagowop netherworld where people are willing to do anything and everything to hold on to what little they have in regard to a life, like maggots on a corpse, except less dignified. Probably the best unintentional cinematic arguments for the merits of Cosa Nostra, Ugly, Dirty and Bad is, indeed, ‘ugly, dirty and bad’ but it is also brilliantly cynical and masterfully misanthropic in an almost tragicomedically transcendental sort of way. If you ever thought about what it would be like to see a motley crew of ghetto Machiavellians without teeth fighting tooth and nail for mere self-preservation, you can do no better than Ugly, Dirty and Bad, a film that even trumps Werner Schroeter’s Nel regno di Napoli (1978) aka Neapolitanische Geschichten aka The Kingdom of Naples—a work apparently hated by many Italians upon its release due to its unflattering portrayal of poor garlic-deprived Guidos—in its all-encompassing cultural pessimism and aesthetic and thematic grotesquery, albeit done from a mercilessly mirthful angle. A celluloid contradiction of the age old Italian saying “Africa begins south of Rome,” Ugly, Dirty and Bad is a uniquely ugly remainder that even the greatest and most illustrious civilizations can degenerate to the level of slime-ridden savages not much different than those found in the Congo or Brazil. 

 Before the white trash Irish-American Gallagher family of Showtime’s Shameless (2011-presents), there was the miserable Mazzatella family of Ettore Scola's masterpiece of merry meek misery Ugly, Dirty and Bad. The patently perverse patriarch and 'Duce' of the family, Giacinto Mazzatella (Nino Manfredi), is a man without any serious plans, aside from hiding his well earned insurance money from members of his family, not working, and getting so retardedly drunk that he forgets where he hides said money. Four generations living under one dilapidated roof in a shitty shack in a negro-inspired shantytown on the poverty-ridden borderlands of Rome, the world of Ugly, Dirty and Bad is a pleasantly perturbing place where ideas of prostitution start before puberty for young girls, debauched trannies screw their cuckold brother’s wives, fathers shoot their sons over baseless accusations revolving around money, and mothers take pride in the fact that their daughters are featured in porno magazines. With seemingly 20+ people living under one roof and every single one of them poorer than prole piss, Giacinto makes sure to sleep with a loaded shotgun, which he is more than willing to use as demonstrated by the fact that he nonsensically shoots one of his sons after misplacing his money and accusing his entire family of stealing it. As someone who literally stabs his wife Matilde (Linda Moretti) after an argument, rapes his daughter in law, and denigrates his transvestite son Nando (Franco Merli) with remarks like “homo, tranny, faggot…get fucked in the ass,” Giacinto makes for the ultimate archetypical anti-family man. After a short stay in prison for shooting his progeny, Giacinto’s life takes a dramatic change for the better when he meets and instantly falls in love with a young yet morbidly obese prostitute with monstrous bosoms named Iside (Maria Luisa Santella) and does not think twice about taking his new lecherous lady love home and having her sleep in the same bed with his wife Matilde. Naturally, considering Giacinto gives Iside ‘love’ and ‘respect’, treats her to lavish gifts and fine wine, and screws her in front of his entire family, his wife Matilde seeks revenge and enlists the help of a local voodoo master who drives pins in the heart of a voodoo doll representing Giacinto, but that pseudo-magical mumbo jumbo proves unfruitful in killing the sub-proletarian philanderer. Eventually, the entire family agrees to kill patriarch Giancinto by poisoning his macaroni, but like all ‘white’ trash, he survives the ordeal and pays his family back by setting fire to his home at night while everyone is sleeping inside, yet, rather unfortunately, they, also being human garbage, all survive. Determined to rid himself of his family and profit in the process, Giancinto sells the family shack to a Neapolitan immigrant family but the tenacious termite-like tribe fights back and the humble home collapses as a result. In the end, the family that hates each other stays together as Giacinto builds his degenerate dynasty and new shack and lives haplessly-ever-after with his piggy prostitute girlfriend, wife Matilde, and four generations of degenerates. 

 Notably, the family shack featured in Ugly, Dirty and Bad has a peculiar statue of Charlie Chaplin, which is quite ironic considering, instead of pumping up and pleading for the proletariat like the silent commie film star did in his films, Ettore Scola portrays them as acutely accursed criminals and scumsuckers of the innately irredeemable sort. Rather paradoxically, the untermensch cretins of Ugly, Dirty and Bad ultimately somehow come out looking more likeable, at least in my opinion, to any of the cinematic tramps Chaplin ever created as Scola's film is celluloid scatology with a sensitively sordid soul, thereupon making it a cinematic work that could have only been sired in post-WWII Italy. Indeed, without question, no other nation of people is better at cinematically polishing a turd and making it pleasantly palatable than the Italians and I doubt there is a better example of this than Ugly, Dirty and Bad, a film that makes meatball misery, misanthropy, and meagerness seem merry and magical, which is something no Bolshevik agitprop flick has ever been able to accomplish. And I am not the only one to see it this way as director Ettore Scola earned himself the “Prix de la mise en scène” (Best Director Award) at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival for directing Ugly, Dirty and Bad, a work the makes for perfect company with the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and his protégé Sergio Citti. As someone who has always had a softspot for Italians and Italian-Americans with a lack of self-control, erratic emotions, and a propensity for petty criminality, I find that Ugly, Dirty and Bad is like the Citizen Kane of Guido-sploitation flicks and a work that makes classic American family comedies like National Lampoon's Vacation (1983) and A Christmas Story (1983) seem like prissy bourgeois bullshit by comparison.  A fiercely and foully farcical celluloid family affair for the entire family, Ugly, Dirty and Bad is guaranteed to make even the most perverted and poverty-stricken of pedigrees feel better about their troubled family matters as Scola's film personifies the wise phrase, “if you can't feed them, don't breed them” like no other.

-Ty E

Female Trouble

While John Waters has made an entire career out of cinematically portraying degenerate proletarian white trash and rednecks from Baltimore City in a uniquely unflattering manner, he grew up as a bourgeois Irish Catholic in one of Baltimore County’s most bland and crime-free areas (Lutherville, Maryland) and attended prestigious private schools, thus his films are mostly from the perspective of a posh, if not particularly peculiar, poof that might not think much of the human pigs of pigtown, but he was at least able to give a sort of immortality to their ‘legacy’ of riff raff lunacy, which certainly no other filmmaker has accomplished, especially “city of neighborhoods” Hebrew Barry Levinson (Diner, Rain Man). Personally, I rather respect Waters’ contribution to cinema as an eccentric camp exploiter of one-of-a-kind Balti-morons who seems to have more ‘respect’ for perverted proles and unhinged urban hillbillies than people from his own anally retentive boobeoise background. Of course, Waters’ pre-Hairspray (1988) “Trash Trilogy” (Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living) is where the “Pope of Trash” made his most intemperate and callously camp-addled attacks against “Natty Boh” drinkers and crab fetishists of not so charming Charm City. With Female Trouble (1974), wacked-out Waters’ combined his propensity for cinematically pissing on proles with his infamous serial killer fetishism. Lovingly dedicated to Manson Family member Charles "Tex" Watson—an honor student and football star turned deranged psycho killer who John Waters paid a number of visits to in prison and even still sends Christmas cards to every year—Female Trouble is the discernibly debauched and aesthetically delinquent tale of a less than dainty dame named Dawn Davenport (played by Waters’ muse “Divine”) who goes from banal schoolgirl to maniac mass murderer after a tragic Christmas experience where her parents fail to give her the gift that keeps on giving: a pair cha-cha heels. Inspired by Tex’s practically practiced philosophy of “crime is beauty”—something that French queer thief Jean Genet wrote about—Female Trouble is anything but beauteous as the sort of celluloid equivalent of the aged barf of a gang-raped Baltimore beggar. With the original working title being “Rotten Mind, Rotten Face”, it should be no surprise that Female Trouble is one of the most uniquely ugly, undyingly unhinged and undignified, and aesthetically and thematically reprehensible works to be defecated out of a film director’s decidedly despoiled soul. A film that reminds you why no other filmmaker has a more fitting name than “John Waters” (aka toilet water), Female Trouble is less than fresh farcical filmic feces that could have only been directed by Baltimore’s most debauched member of the bourgeois. 

 It is the year 1960 in Baltimore and Dawn Davenport (Divine) is an aesthetically displeasing, obese juvenile delinquent who enjoys eating meatball sandwiches and wreaking havoc at her posh all-girls school, especially where lying, cheating, and fighting are concerned, though she is not particularly good at any of these things. When gutter dilettante Davenport fails to receive a pair of glorious cha-cha heels for Christmas from her uptight parents, she loses more than her cool and knocks over a Xmas tree over her mommy and makes the mistake of running away, thus ushering in her new life as a criminally-inclined whore with a bastard baby aka daughter of a rapist. While hitchhiking, Ms. Davenport is picked up by a boorish blue collar slob named Earl Peterson (also played by Divine), who viciously rapes (indeed, Divine rapes Divine!) and ultimately impregnates the enfant terrible teenage runaway. Stuck supporting a brat daughter named Taffy as a less than sexy slut single mother, Davenport takes employment as a reckless waitress, sleazy go-go dancer, hapless hooker, and petty thief with a crooked eye for aesthetics. For her more criminally-inclined jobs, Davenport has teamed up with her equally repulsive but much thinner and more 'beautiful' friends Chicklette (Susan Walsh) and Concetta (Cookie Mueller). By the year 1968, Taffy is such a little bad bitch at the age of 8-years-old, that her mother Dawn Davenport wastes no time in beating her with a TV antenna. Luckily, after Chicklette and Concetta recommend to Dawn that she get her hair done, she meets and falls in love with white trash hairstylist Gator (Michael Potter), whose conspicuously obese and crippled aunt Ida (Edith Massey) wants the hillbilly hunk to be ‘progressive’ and “turn queer” but he’s no fag (or as he states himself, “I'm straight, I mean I like a lot of queers but I don't dig their equipment”) and the two dirt bag love turds inevitably marry. Flash forward to 1974 and daughter Taffy (Mink Stole) is now a terrible teen at age 14 and she hates her stepfather Gator—a man who is more sexually attracted to the tools in his toolbox than his wife—so she lucks out when her mommy catches her hubby screwing other women and reading porn mags, so divorce proceedings are carried out. Meanwhile, Dawn seeks refuge in Lipstick Beauty Salon—the same place her ex-gator worked as the world's most redneck hairstylist—which is owned by a wacky weirdo couple, Donald (David Lochary) and Donna Dasher (Mary Vivian Pearce), who use the single mother as a rather unconventional guinea pig in an experiment to prove Jean Genet’s dictum “crime is beauty,”  thus ushering in the beginning of the end of the obese whore's life as a nobody who inevitably turns into a crazed criminal somebody.

 Dawn proudly beats her daughter with a chair for a crime-inspired photo shoot, but her less than photogenic face is truly ruined after Ida disfigures the single mother by throwing acid on her face in retribution as she blames her for Gator's decision to move to Michigan to work in the prestigious auto industry. The Dashers kidnap and put Aunt Ida in a giant birdcage and vengeful Dawn cuts off the hand of the acid-thrower after getting out of the hospital. Meanwhile, daughter Taffy finds her real father after her mother refuses to reveal who he is and after meeting daddy dearest, she ends up killing him after the pathological rapist tries to sexually pillage his own daughter. Not long afterward, Taffy becomes a Hara Krishna and frees Ida, which enrages her mother Dawn so much that she kills her own little girl, which is cheered on by the degenerate Dashers. Dawn, although disfigured and looking like she was raped by a gang of transvestite bikers, starts a naughty night club act involving jumping on a trampoline and swimming in a waterless playpen full of death fish, subsequently proudly confessing regarding her dedication to criminality, “I framed Leslie Bacon! I called the heroin hot line on Abbie Hoffman! I bought the gun that Bremer used to shoot Wallace! I had an affair with Juan Corona! I blew Richard Speck, and I'm so fuckin’ beautiful I can't stand it myself!!!,” thus demonstrating her prestige as a purveyor of bad taste.  After absurdly yelling “Who wants to be famous? Who wants to die for art?” to her adoring audience of aberrant psychopaths and jaded degenerates, Dawn shoots at the crowd and makes her escape in the woods, even living like a wild animal for a time, but is soon arrested by the cops. Ironically, during the trial, the Dashers—the people who egged on Dawn to commit the crimes, including the murder of her own daughter—are granted “total immunity” in exchange for their testimony. The Dashers also pay off Ida to lie. In the end, Dawn is found guilty and condemned to die in the electric chair, but she is rather proud of it. After starting a lesbian relationship with a fellow prisoner (played by male-to-female post-op tranny Elizabeth Coffey, who previously played the 'chick with a dick' in Pink Flamingos), Dawn proudly states being executed will be “like winning an Academy Award” and, indeed, while strapped in the electric chair, she gives an extravagant speech, concluding with the remark, “Please remember, I love every fucking one of you!,” thus rather climatically concluding a career in glamorous criminality with electricity. 

 Sparked largely by auteur John Waters’ interest in the members of the Manson family, most specifically his ‘friend’ Tex Watson, who came from a similar ‘wholesome’ background as the director yet turned into an infamous acid killer freak, Female Trouble is unadulterated celluloid bad taste from a hokey yet quasi-highbrow homo who is one of the only filmmakers able to reconcile William Castle with Federico Fellini, and Jean Genet with the Manson Family. Notably, Waters described his mainstream flick Serial Mom (1994) as “the Hollywood version” of Female Trouble. More accurately, Serial Mom is the tight-ass Towson bourgeois version of Female Trouble, thereupon making it a film closer to the director’s heart in a sense. Despite its reckless white-trash-sploitation angle, Female Trouble is certainly a work of its 'zany' zeitgeist in depicting a young girl going from being a loser schoolgirl to a mass murderer, as it takes place during the rise of counter-culture groups (Waters did not include Hare Krishnas for nothing!), a time when mainstream-brainwashed teens of the 1960s senselessly threw away their parents' traditions/religion and adopted bogus beliefs and lifestyles, which is most extremely personified in the man to whom the film is dedicated, Tex Watson, the honor student and star athlete turned mass-murdering drug dealer who threw his life away with a stoned blink of an eye. Additionally, John Waters has never lied about the fact that he, like his man muse Divine, was on a steady dose of ganja during the writing and directing of his Trash Trilogy, thus fitting in with the era the film was made. Ultimately, Female Trouble is like an unholy marriage between the naked melodramas of Rainer Werner Fassbinder with the Hebraic exploitation hate of Herschell Gordon Lewis, portraying Baltimore’s urban hillbilly population in a manner that only a warped and exceedingly effeminate yet eccentric homo could, most specifically the sort that sports a child molester-esque little Richard mustache. While my least favorite chapter of compulsively campy celluloid sleaze in the Trash Trilogy, Female Trouble is nothing short of a hysterically humorous trash masterpiece that proved that John Waters is the last iconoclastic Baltimorean since H.L. Mencken to prove that some people from Baltimore are actually conscious-minded and have scathing wit when it comes to making fun of such a uniquely cultivated, shitty city.  As someone who has had at least two relatives that where murdered in Baltimore in bizarre fashions worthy of a John Waters flick, Female Trouble is just another reason why the “Prince of Puke” is probably the only thing charming about contemporary Charm City. With eloquent quotes like, “I wouldn't suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!” in Female Trouble, Waters has singehandedly put Baltimore on the map in the cinema world and for that feat alone, he deserves a statue in one of dilapidated row-house neighborhoods in the city that are now populated by the sort of feral-like beasts that would murder the filmmaker for a nickel.

-Ty E