Thomas Harlan - Wandersplitter

Undoubtedly, few post-WWII German filmmakers/playwrights/novelists so flagrantly epitomized ethno-masochism and cultural cuckoldry than the late and less than great Thomas Harlan (Torre Bela, Wundkanal), the seemingly half-deranged prodigal son of the great National Socialist auteur Veit Harlan (Opfergang, Kolberg). A man that had the positively priceless honor of dining with Uncle Adolf in 1937 at the mere age of 8 and whose father was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, filmmakers of the Third Reich, Thomas Harlan, not unlike many Germans of his generation who inherited a less than ideal legacy of shame and defeat, grew up to be a ‘Teutonic Uncle Tom’ of sorts by deleteriously dedicating his life to treasonously besmirching both his father and Fatherland and who wasted a good portion of his life exposing so-called ‘war crimes’ and directing relatively forgotten films like Wundkanal (1984), where he interrogated and even physically assaulted an elderly ex-SS officer in a mock trial interrogation carried out by fictional RAF-esque left-wing terrorists (the sort of people Harlan admired/mimicked). In the glaringly minimalistic and even amateurish YouTube-esque documentary Thomas Harlan – Wandersplitter (2007) aka Thomas Harlan - Moving Shrapnel directed by Christoph Hübner, Harlan gives a candid bastardized verbal autobiography of sorts regarding his fetishism for the ‘beloved Soviet Union’ (Harlan's words, not mine), his lifelong campaign of spiritual and aesthetic patricide, and his feeling of self-flagellating indebtedness as the less than proud progeny of a naughty nazi filmmaker who dedicated his life to exposing the ostensible horrors of the nazi era (despite the fact he personally witnessed Soviet Asiatic hordes rape and murder elderly German women). Although seeming like it was shot in a couple hours in a carelessly leisurely manner, Wandersplitter was filmed between 2003 and 2006 in the author/filmmaker’s ugly and thoroughly institutional room in a Southern German sanatorium (ironically, the clinic had a view of Obersalzberg, which is best known for being the location Uncle Adolf's scenic residence, the Berghof) near Berchtesgarden. Resembling a sad and defeated old pug dog who is so disillusioned with life that he no longer even derives pleasure from eating food, Wandersplitter is a positively perturbing and pathetic digital video portrait of Deutschland’s most degenerated member of ‘film royalty.’ Indeed, when you have a left-wing Dutch-British-Jew like Ian Buruma stating (as he did of Thomas Harlan) that you were, “an obsessive seeker of justice, a Nazi hunter in Poland, a Communist revolutionary in Portugal and Chile, and a lifelong critic of his father. He was the son, who took on the burden of guilt from an unrepentant father,” you must have some serious problems. 

 Quasi-morbidly obese, lacking even the most miniscule inkling of testosterone, and sporting a shabby head of white hair, Thomas Harlan resembles a burnt out retired lesbian who used to work as an American public school administrator and suffered some sort of mental break and was thus subsequently institutionalized. Indeed, a lonely man who is spending his remaining days living in a sterile room in a sanatorium (apparently, he was being treated for emphysema) with an outside view of Southern Krautland that he absurdly likens to China, Harlan’s life has reached its end (he would die in 2010 at the age of 81), though one gets the impression while watching Wandersplitter that the spiritual death of the author/filmmaker/playwright happened long ago in 1945 when Germany was defeated in the Second World War and his surname forever became tainted with the legacy of his father's infamous melodrama Jud Süß (1940) aka Jew Süss. Born in 1929 to German filmmaker Veit Harlan and Viennese actress Hilde Körber, Harlan had a relatively prestigious childhood as a privileged little boy that got to dine with Uncle Adolf (who he refers to as a ‘fakir’), hanging out with Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, and routinely receiving rare Reich stamps (rather unfortunately, the stamps were later stolen by some frog while Harlan was living in Paris during the 1950s) from official National Socialist photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. By 1945, Thomas Harlan witnessed the mangled corpses of 80-year-old women who had been gang-raped by Soviet Mongol hordes, but instead of growing up to be a stern anti-communist, he became of a commie of sorts himself, taking pilgrimages to the Soviet Union, Israel, and Poland during the 1950s. Moving to Poland in 1960, Harlan researched nazi concentration camps and eventually began getting sued by a number of ex-nazi politicians who he started making libelous claims against, which eventually resulted in the loss of his German passport and ability to legally enter his own homeland. Harlan tells a number of these tales in a shockingly jubilant manner, but when it gets to the segment of Wandersplitter fittingly entitled ‘Patricide,’ he begins to shed a couple of tears, expressing his lifelong determination to no let his love of his father deter his treasonous anti-nazi commie activism. Most interestingly, Harlan confesses in what amounts to a sort of premature deathbed confession that he flirted with arson, setting fire to two Berlin movie theaters the played his father’s movies, which included The Trip to Tilsit (1939) aka Die Reise nach Tilsit—an inferior anti-poetic remake of F.W. Murnau’s American masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)—and The Immortal Heart (1939) aka Das unsterbliche Herz. As Harlan makes quite clear during the doc, he was most mad at his father for continuing to make films after the National Socialist era and for being acquitted of ‘crimes against humanity’ for his role as the auteur of Jud Süß, a film that was made mandatory-viewing for the SS men that sassed and gassed god's chosen race. According to Harlan, the man who acquitted his father also previously sentenced Ukrainian children to death for stealing a mere scarf and who also married a nazi euthanasia doctor (someone else he had also previously acquitted in court). Since his father did not pay for his ‘crimes,’ Thomas Harlan thought it was his responsibility to do so, just as any white American bourgeois liberal wimp would. 

 As a number of his family members candidly confessed in the documentary Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss (2008) directed by Felix Moeller, they felt Thomas Harlan had wasted his life due to his undying hatred of his father. Judging by his rather weak cinematic and literary output, Uncle Tom Teuton’s attempt to ‘follow’ in his father’s footsteps in a sort of antagonistic manner was also a failure. On top of only managing to direct three films (one of which, Torre Bela, is a communist agitprop ‘doc’) during his seemingly sporadic yet lifelong filmmaking career, Harlan lacked an eye for beauty and the sort of angelic high-camp aestheticism that dominated his father’s work. Indeed, Veit Harlan may have directed Jud Süß, which inspired a bit of hatred against hapless Hebrews, but Thomas Harlan’s Wundkanal is nothing but seething celluloid hatred in its most pathetic form as American Jew Robert Kramer clearly revealed in his companion documentary Notre nazi (1985) aka Our Nazi, which features the patricidal commie kraut verbally and even physically berating an elderly gentleman (essentially a stand-in for his own father, who was by then already long dead) that he hired for his film under false pretenses. Aesthetically institutional and cold, Wandersplitter certainly makes for an apt bio of Thomas Harlan, a lunatic left-winger of the extra-extreme sort who lived in the past and who will ironically be forgotten before the father he loved-hated so dearly and undyingly. To his credit, Thomas Harlan was slightly less ethno-masochistic than his sister Susanne Körber, who not only married a holocaust survivor and converted to Judaism, but also committed suicide in 1989. Namedropping people like Isaak “the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry” Babel and stating such absurd things as “Of course, as a child I was a member of the gang” (Harlan’s summing up his role as a German child during the Third Reich), Thomas Harlan proved with Wandersplitter that, despite Hebraic Hollywood and the mainstream media’s claims to contrary, post-WWII Europids, especially those of the Germanic/Nordic persuasion, are not only amongst the most self-flagellating and ethno-masochistic people in the world, but also the most empathetic and individualistic. After all, when has anyone ever heard a Jew cry about the anti-white genocides of Judeo-Bolshevik hangmen Kaganovich or Yagoda, or an American negro acknowledge the fact that his/her people are, collectively speaking, the most violent and murderous people in the present day United States. Indeed, white genocide will not be the result of Tyrone, Avi, Muhammad, and Carlos, but spiritually and mentally sick individuals like Thomas Harlan, a man that unwittingly singlehandedly proved the nazi generation had more dignity, integrity and pride than all the degenerate generations that followed it. 

-Ty E

Left-Handed (1972)

It has been my experience that most left-handed people are wacked-out in some striking way or another. In fact, my most criminally-inclined and psychopathic friend growing up was left-handed and when not breaking said left hand/wrist doing a number of idiotically dangerous things, he was certainly used it to thieve or to smoke a joint laced with coke or whatever drug of choice he was using at that time. Naturally, I would expect a gay hardcore porn flick entitled Left-Handed (1972) to be riddled with unsavory left-handed degenerates doing unsavory things and avant-garde pornographer Jack Deveau’s film certainly does not disappoint in that regard as a work of completely callous cocksucking cynicism that does not celebrate gay liberation and related counter-culture crap, but is instead a wonderfully wicked work that portrays the left-handed sodomite lead as predatory and pernicious psychopath who gets off to destroying normal heterosexual relationships, as well as loses interest and drops ‘lovers’ once they fall in love with him and he has fully debased to a most irreparable degree. The feature-length debut of architectural and graphic designer turned fag filmmaker/producer Jack Deveau (Drive, A Night at the Adonis), Left-Handed is far from the positive poof ‘crossover’ pictures of Wakefield Poole (Boys in the Sand, Bijou) and the sodomite S&M-celebrating of Fred Halsted (LA Plays Itself, Sextool), as a work about a long-haired trio of moral and sexual degenerates, including a hustler, antique dealer, and pot dealer, who live for sex, drugs, and rock n roll and ultimately pay the price for such hedonistic idiocy. Essentially the story of a gay hustler who conspires to turn an ostensibly heterosexual drug dealer with a girlfriend into a passive fag bottom, only to leave him in heartbreak in the end, Left-Handed is lecherous hardcore homo porn at its most misanthropically melodramatic and nastily nihilistic as the sort of work that, not unlike William Friedkin's Cruising (1980), would have been labeled ‘homophobic’ by hysterical homo do-gooders had it been directed by a heterosexual man. A dark and bitter tale of aberrant mis-romance with hardcore homo action thrown in between, Left-Hand is the film that announced Jack Deveau arrived and that Halsted was not American's only artsy fartsy S&M auteur pornographer. 

 Heterosexual country boy dope-peddler Bob (Robert Rikas) and super swarthy would-be-hunk hustler Ray (Ray Frank) have never met, but through their mutual ‘friend’ Larry (Larry Burns)—a dirty hippie antique dealer with an exceedingly annoying voice—the two will meet through happenstance and almost immediately begin a steamy sodomite love affair of the initially bi-curious but ultimately tragic sort. On his way to Larry’s shabby knick-knack shack, Ray makes a stop at a public restroom and having some time and semen to waste, he proves his oral versatility to a total stranger. When Ray finally arrives at Larry’s store, the antique dealer has already bought a couple kilos of grass from Bob, but the two strangers spend enough time with one another for the Hustler took get hooked on the Adonis-like Nordic-American dope peddler.  Like the stereotypical high school whore, Ray vows to Larry that he will initiate Bob into male buggery sooner or later.  Rather impressed with Bob’s outdoor hetero hunkness and crude country boy charm, Ray goes home and masturbates while fantasizing in what is an elaborate pornographic black-and-white dream-sequence between the scheming sodomite streetwalker and half-braindead pot dealer. In his innate vulgarity and deep-seated desire to defile country boy Bob, Ray perfectly personifies what Teutonic prophet philosopher of Occidental decline Oswald Spengler meant when he wrote regarding urban anti-folk, “In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.” One afternoon while walking down the street, Ray bumps into Bob and the two virtual strangers decide to smoke dope at the latter’s pathetic apartment, thus resulting in rather raunchy consequences. Bob, who is featured in Left-Handed passionately performing cunnilingus on and penetrating his girlfriend (Teri Reardon), gets so pathetically stoned and inhibited that he decides to get naked with Ray and even screws the assumedly STD-stricken hustler’s rather ripped rectum.

 After converting Bob to play on the pink team, Ray decides to stalk the dope dealer, who lives with his girlfriend, at his quaint farmhouse. With his girlfriend viewing voyeuristically from a window, Bob allows Ray to blow him in a barn and the two continue to fuck furiously around the rural homestead. When big gay Ray leaves, Bob comes to the startling realization that he loves the homo hustler more than his girlfriend, so he drops her and his heterosexuality like a bad habit to begin his new life as a rare masculine rural queer. Naturally, Ray moves into Bob’s country home and the two engage in incessant aberrosexual activity that becomes more and more depraved as the days pass. Eventually, born bottom Ray deflowers Bob’s bi-curious bunghole, thus leading to the beginning of the end of their raunchy ‘romantic’ relationship, as the streetwalking sod is mainly attracted to the redneck dope dealer's innocence, which he has enthusiastically destroyed like the immune system of AIDS-addled crackbaby. Meanwhile, prissy antique pusher Larry becomes jealous like a frigid queen upon learning of Bob and Ray’s relationship, so he creates a sadistic plan to setup a five-man fag orgy at his apartment where he hopes the dope dealer will walk in on his hustler boy toy getting gangbanged by a brigade of rough and tough buggering boys. Of course, Ray goes to the party and in gives into his hyper hedonistic hustler tendencies, and just as lecherous lunatic Larry planned, Bob walks in on his beloved butt-boy being carnally manhandled by a number of anonymous unclad men. In fact, Ray becomes so erotically enamored with the five-cock orgy that he proudly takes some random dude’s fist and half of his arm up his ass like a true bitch with a sinister itch for morbid masochism. Of course, Bob finally comes to his senses and realizes that Ray was only capable of offering him a ‘left-handed’ romance, thus concluding Left-Handed on a rather depressingly note that is bound to spoil any poof pervert's masturbatory climax. 

 On top of being the first feature directed by Jack Deveau and the first Hand-in-Hand (the film studio Deveau cofounded) production, Left-Handed also has the dubious distinction of being the first fully scripted gay porn flick, as well as the first gay porn flick to feature an original musical score, which is not exactly a grand achievement artistically, but considering that in context with the fact that is a terribly dark fuck flick with a less than flattering depiction of fagdom and its seems rather funny. Described by Mallory Callan in the March 16, 1973 issue of The Reader: Chicago’s Free Weekly as follows, “As pornography goes, the film is remarkable because of its aesthetic sophistication and intellectual curiosity…While taut, the plot is not merely a flimsy premise to introduce one more sexual possibility. The essence of economy, all action advances the obsessional sexual pursuits of the central character, Ray, and all gratuitous ‘emotionality’ which does not bear directly on the erotic situation has been pruned away,” Left-Handed, as well as most of Deveau’s films, ultimately proved that porn, even gay porn featuring fisting, could rise above the level of a pathetic masturbation aid and reach a sort of visceral ‘truth’ that most non-pornographic films lack. Made at the end of the hippie era when even the most masculine of men looked like dirty pussy Jesus impersonators, Left-Handed, most importantly, demystified the appeal of ‘free love’, drug addiction, and idiotic haircuts and wardrobes, ultimately depicting these innately inane irrational ingredients as the recipe for a sad self-serving life of soulless sex and destructive relationships that no one, no matter high, would be proud of. Personally, I think Deveau’s second cinematic effort, Drive (1974), is superior to Left-Handed, but undoubtedly, if the two films have anything in common aside from the obvious homoerotic attractions, it is that they are unwaveringly aesthetically repugnant works from a decidedly deplorable zeitgeist, thus both works should be deemed culturally and historically significant in that they epitomize everything that was damningly degenerate about its excrement-flavored era of excess and eroticism for eroticism's sake.  Indeed, if there ever was a ‘left-handed’ film about a left-handed era, it is most certainly Deveau's Left-Handed.

-Ty E

Madness (1980)

As far I am concerned, there is no such thing as a bad Joe Dallesandro film aside from possibly Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984) and a couple of his later works where he only has cameo roles, so naturally I will watch just about anything featuring the lapsed Warhol superstar. Of course, I jumped at the chance to see little Joe play a psychopathic fugitive killer in the Guido crime-thriller Madness (1980) aka Vacanze per un massacre aka Vacation for a Massacre directed by mafia movie maestro Fernando Di Leo (The Italian Connection, Rulers of the City). Personally, when it comes to the films of dirty dago director Di Leo, I prefer his more obscure and unconventional works like Avere vent'anni (1978) aka To Be Twenty to his much more popular Cosa Nostra-themed flicks, so Madness instantly grabbed my attention when I first discovered it, even if it seemed like a stereotypically sleazy exploitation flick with softcore sex scenes. Indeed, Madness is essentially like The Last House on the Left (1972) Italian style, albeit with Joe Dallesandro and a curiously cynical anti-bourgeois message where the ‘victims’ of killer Joe are almost less sympathetic than the killer himself. A wicked and biting celluloid work featuring misanthropy and misogyny that depicts young jet-set middle-class Hightalians as the most unscrupulous of money and cock-grubbing whores, Madness is certainly far from the ‘victim power’/’rightful revenge’ message of Craven’s The Last House on the Left, which is certainly one of the reasons the film is still provocative and outrageous today. Largely taking place in a country home decorated with posters of strangely creepy Hollywood icons like Marlon Brando, James Dean, and John Travolta, Madness portrays a decidedly degenerate and proudly decadent goombah bourgeois brainwashed by American trash culture and dedicated to then-vogue post-WWII politics like feminism and sexual liberation of the quasi-incestuous. Featuring a totally tasteless bizarre love triangle between a wop preppy, his girlfriend, and her sister, Madness indeed wallows in ‘madness,’ albeit more of the Cultural Marxist variety. Although director Di Leo suffered hostility from his fans and monetary failure for branching out to the urban crime-thriller ghetto with To Be Twenty, he had the great gall to follow it with Madness, a superlatively sleazy genre-less hybrid featuring elements of action, horror, thriller, mediocre melodrama, and good old exploitation excess. Like To Be Twenty, Madness was also a commercial failure that did not even receive an American distributor (thankfully RaroVideo released a dvd of it in 2012) and thus is virtually totally unknown, even amongst Dallesandro fans. Not exactly up to par with his performances in prestigious European arthouse works like Louis Malle’s Black Moon (1975), Serge Gainsbourg’s I Love You, I Don't (1976) aka Je t'aime moi non plus, Walerian Borowczyk ‘s The Streetwalker (1976) aka La marge nor Jacques Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round (1981), Madness is still mandatory viewing for Dallesandro fans, even if the Italian-American actor’s blue-collar Brooklyn accent has been slaughtered via classically absurd Guido dubbing. 

 Joe Brezzi (Little Joe D) has just escaped prison and to celebrate, he kills two farmers, steals their car, and makes his way to a quaint cottage in the Italian countryside to dig up the 300 million lire that he hid in a fireplace hearth five years ago before he was locked up. Unfortunately, Joe B runs into a seemingly minor problem when he discovers that a lecherous good-for-nothing middle-class 'family' is staying there, thus thwarting his chances of swiftly collecting his well earned cash and making his way to some sort of paradise. From there, Madness evolves into a mildly idiosyncratic and totally tasteless and classless chamber piece where four completely calculating and corrupt degenerates do their damnedest to survive, or at least die trying. While snooping around at night around the country home, Joe learns that its occupants are cheaters and liars unworthy of sympathy, let alone mercy, so he has a pretty good idea how to deal with these debauched folks. The ‘man’ of the house is a would-be-macho preppy outdoors-man named Sergio (Gianni Macchia) who is married to Liliana (Patrizia Behn), but is screwing her pseudo-feminist sister Paola (Lorraine De Selle) under the same roof! Of course, Paola, who seduces her sister’s husband Sergio, is the true femme fatale of the humble abode and naturally she puts up the greatest fight when the mayhem begins. If any character is even remotely redeemable, it is Liliana as she at least genuinely loves her hubby, though she is too weak and vapid of a character to have any real sympathy for. After spying on them at night, Joe makes his first move the next morning and savagely seduces Paola whilst she is all by her lonesome. A born whore that knows all the tricks of the trade when it comes to seduction, Paola does everything she can to make Joe think she genuinely wants his cock, even flashing her furry bush at him while sitting in an unlady manner in a chair. Paola eventually attempts a great escape while totally unclad, but Joe soon catches her and no long after he also captures Sergio and Liliana. For his own sadistic enjoyment, but also to demonstrate to poor Liliana that her sister and husband are having an affair, Joe forces Sergio and Paola to have sex at gunpoint, which they do with the utmost gusto and sensuality despite hostile onlookers watching them in a viciously voyeuristic manner. After Joe demonstrates that he is the undisputed alpha-male of the home, but also to spite her sister and husband, Liliana has sex with the violent psychopathic fugitive. Meanwhile, Paola plots to steal Joe’s small fortune. In the end, everyone dies except one bitter bitch who has been screwed over by everyone she loves (minus a murderous madman, who she screws over!)

 Featuring a psychedelic soundtrack that sounds like Jimi Hendrix farting in a Whammy pedal created by maestro Luis Bacalov (Django, City of Women) and typically radically repellant 1970s wardrobes and home décor, Madness is not exactly an unsung masterpiece of Italian celluloid art but it is certainly a suave and sleazy way to waste 90 minutes or so. Probably best compared to Hitch-Hike (1977) aka Autostop rosso sangue starring Franco Nero and David Hess in terms of its glittery Guido grade psychosexual tensions and culture cringe in regard to trendy counter-culture/sexual liberation politics of the time, Madness is certainly nasty and naughty cinematic nihilism at its most unwavering yet preposterously wanton. Although a couple more of his European era films, including Merry-Go-Round, were released after the Fernando Di Leo flick, Madness was apparently the last film Joe Dallesandro worked on in the old continent and I would not be surprised if he felt the experience was a negative one, thus leading to his return to the United States, yet his understated and naturalistic performance in the film is indubitably one of the most strikingly stoic and macho of his singular career. Of course, out of all the actors featured in Madness, Patrizia Behn, who only starred in a total of three films during her marginal acting career, would only appear in one more film, the hardcore porn flick La gemella erotica (1980) directed by great Guido sleaze-surrealist Alberto Cavallone (whose career had also declined and was forced to make porn flicks out of financial necessity, so he made rather unsavory and unhinged fuck flicks that would turn virtually no one on!) and later apparently completed by Luigi Cozzi. Director Fernando Di Leo’s anteultimate feature film before his filmmaking career ended in 1985 (despite the fact he did not die until 2003) with Killer vs Killers, Madness, not unlike To Be Twenty, demonstrates the filmmaker was getting much more angry and aesthetically malicious as the years passed, as if he could foresee his own downfall.  A tragic yet trashy celluloid work offering nil redemption for its characters nor solace to its viewers, Madness is how all exploitation films should be as a work that, unlike the films of Wes Craven, never reaches the cheap and intolerable level of espousing humanistic ideals, liberal lunacy, or moral relativism.  In other words, Madness is not an exploitation flick for brainwashed p.c. pussies, frigid feminists, mainstream film critics, nor most Quentin Tarantino fans.

-Ty E

Le grand départ (1972)

Apparently (and not surprisingly) considered a ‘lost film’ until its release in late 2008 on DVD by a French company, Le grand départ (1972) aka The Big Departure aka The Great Departure also has the dubious distinction of being the first and sole feature-length film directed by French Nouveau réalisme artist/painter Martial Raysse, a fellow who had the honor of having some of his paintings exhibited with Jean Cocteau in 1958 when he was just still a young man. Rather unfortunately, Le grand départ, although an experimental feature-length work utilizing some minor (but rather dominant) special-effects, is not exactly up to par with the cinematic masterpieces of Cocteau, but is instead an innately incoherent and plot-less counter-culture-inspired work featuring merry morons in animal masks frolicking around gayly, pedo-worthy scenes of little girls naked, and other forms of would-be-hip hippie hijinx and hedonism in a positively passé flick that would probably be described as celluloid beatnik feces. Indeed, fittingly titled ‘The Great Departure’ in English, Le grand départ is an ostensibly avant-garde work that seems to reject most conventions of cinema history as a nauseatingly nonlinear piece of whimsical yet seemingly lethargically-assembled cinematic pseudo-libertinism of the putridly pretentious and plodding sort that reminds the viewer that art and drugs do not always mix well. A member of the French Nouveau réalisme (New realism) movement—a sort of frog equivalent of the Warhol-dominated Pop Art movement in New York that was in part inspired by Dadaism/Marcel Duchamp and placed special emphasis on collage and assemblage (incorporating real objects directly into their artwork)—auteur Martial Raysse certainly assembled a flashy piece of celluloid postmodern posturing with Le grand départ, a sort of whimsical celluloid wreck that says very little in its overly long 70 minutes or so of hallucinatory hippie hysterics. Almost entirely shot in kaleidoscopic negative exposure that was done via reversed color (negative) developing process, Le grand départ looks like a living painting directed by German völkisch symbolist artist Fidus where he an autistic hippie with an obsession with psychotropic drugs. Marginally enjoyable for a minute or two in a sort of ‘outsider artist’ sort of way, Le grand départ is virtual, archetypical failed 1970s counter-culture cinema from beatnik froggy hell that makes Franco Brocani’s equally obscure work Necropolis (1970) seem like an unsung masterpiece. 

 Starting with images of a seeming tropical island paradise, Le grand départ soon demystifies the viewer by revealing that the images were merely that of a flabby fellow’s Hawaiian shirt who is sitting beside his rather bitchy wife watching the news on television. From there, the Hawaiian shirt man and his wife are rudely greeted by a menacing yet strangely merry man who is wearing a creepy cat-mask and is riding a cheap motorbike. The cat-man is a criminal trickster and delinquent of sorts and most certainly a degenerate who, when not mugging people and stealing their cars, hangs out with a totally unclad prepubescent girl who he promises to take to “heaven” and sort of does so by allowing the little lady to ride in one of his pinched automobiles. The cat-man also has a rather strange knack for rescuing people, which he totally discredits by raping multiple women. The cat-man is also a Grim Reaper of sorts who represents ‘death’ as demonstrated by the fact that virtually all of the people he runs into end up dying, many of whom he personally kills, or as some burnt out hippie broad states, “This cat brings death.” Meanwhile, a group of mask-wearing hippies hang out in the forest and dream of some sort of intangible utopia of sorts just like all drug-addled flower child bastards. Eventually, the cat-man hooks up with a charlatan hippie guru named “M. Nature” (American commie/leading man Sterling Hayden) and his dirty and delinquent mask-wearing followers. Mr. Nature, on ‘the advice of the almighty,’ has built a raft that is retardedly named “raft of freedom,” that will supposedly take his followers and the cat-man around the world in what is apparently the ‘ultimate voyage’ to a ‘land of peace’ or something. As if part of the LSD division of NASA’s Apollo program, M. Nature and his crew are counted off for lift off and soon enter a psychedelic trip of sorts via the raft of freedom. In the end, the negative exposure film finally reverts back to normal colors and the cat-man’s naked preteen friend appears once again, thus concluding what is essentially a short film that has been painfully stretched out to feature-length. 

For anyone who has seen Clive Barker’s self-described ‘home videos’ (aka early no-budget avant-garde shorts) Salomé (1973) and The Forbidden (1978), especially the latter film, Martial Raysse’s Le grand départ seems rather redundant and absurdly over-long by comparison. Indeed, Le grand départ, like Barker’s The Forbidden was shot in negative exposure, but whereas in the horror short it makes aesthetic and metaphysical sense as a piece of morbid psychosexuality, Raysse’s films feels like an obnoxious celluloid gimmick of the pseudo-liberating sort that has long worn out its welcome in just the first ten minutes! Undoubtedly, if any film personifies the aesthetic puffery and counterfeit rebellion of the counter-culture generation, it is surely Le grand départ as a work that pretends to be cinematically subversive simply due to the fact it was shot in negative exposure (making the majority of the film have a neon pink/purple tint!), has nil plot and preteen tits, and features a ‘cool cat’ of the rapist sort as its (anti)hero. Naturally, Le grand départ also reminded me of E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten (1990) and Din of Celestial Birds (2006) due to its negative exposure imagery, but also due to its pseudo-Biblical themes. Of course, while Begotten is a flawed and overly long work (the first 15 minutes are immaculate, but the rest seems like a 'nightmarish mess'), it left me nothing short of entranced in multiple parts, which I certainly cannot say of Raysse’s Le grand départ, even if I found it to be slightly more provocative and interesting than, say, the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Described as “A Martial Raysse fable” during the opening credit scenes and featuring a bunch of hippie hedonists frolicking around the woods, Le grand départ is like a The Wicker Man for braindead acidfreaks(and that is giving it too much credit!) For experimental/rare film completists only who like Hebraic Beat poet Ira Cohen's totally intolerable avant-fart short The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (1968) , skip Le grand départ, drop some acid, and re-watch Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising (1972) instead.

-Ty E

Seconds

As far as I am concerned, McJew auteur John Frankenheimer (Birdman of Alcatraz, The Island of Dr. Moreau) reached the height of his artistic prowess as a filmmaker with his psych-out semi-psychedelic flick Seconds (1966), the final chapter in the director’s ‘Paranoia Trilogy’ (following The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964)). Based on the lesser known 1963 novel of the same name written by David Ely and featuring luscious black-and-white cinematography by Academy Award winning Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe (Hangmen Also Die, Sweet Smell of Success), Seconds is a sort of de-teutonized, Hollywoodized counter-culture taken on Goethe’s Faust with an anti-bourgeois leftist twist about a somewhat past middle-aged banker who gets hooked up with a dubious ‘word-of-mouth’ company that helps him fake his own death and gives him a new identity, including a new face via state-of-the-art plastic surgery. In keeping with the film’s theme of ‘rebirth,’ Seconds quite notably features a number of communist blacklisted actors whose careers had been destroyed in the 1950s in primary roles, including Jeff Corey, Will Geer, and John Randolph, thus demonstrating director Frankenheimer’s solidarity with the left and his cold war anti-anti-communist sentiments, which he previously made quite clear with his most popular flick The Manchurian Candidate, but especially with Seven Days in May. Of course, being an idiosyncratic and phantasmagoric dystopian flick of sorts that is equal doses psychological thriller, horror, and science fiction, Seconds may be a work of passive leftist counter-culture agitation, but it is also a patently pessimistic, unwaveringly nightmarish, and even somewhat nihilistic work that offers no answers to the questions it asks, ultimately ending on a rather negative note that is bound to haunt viewers, myself included. In fact, Seconds had such a deleterious effect on Brian Wilson, the manic-depressive schizo master songwriter of the Beach Boys, that he thought the film was talking directly to him (to his credit, the character is named ‘Mr. Wilson’) and it caused the songwriter to abort his concept album Smile, which went unfinished for almost four decades (though he released various forms of the album in 2004 and 2011). Indeed, as far as films go, Seconds is a high-strung schizophrenic's worst celluloid nightmare as a sort of eerie expressionist piece of pernicious cinematic paranoia that is bound to ruin even the most stoic of optimists’ days, yet it is also an aesthetically pleasing and atmospheric work that demands ritualistic re-viewings. Starring masculine old school Hollywood homo heartthrob Rock Hudson in an unconventional lead role where the actor does not appear onscreen until around 40 minutes into the film, Seconds is a rare work from Tinseltown with a degree of artistic merit that is rightfully now regarded as a cult classic. 

 Miserable middle-aged bourgeois banker Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) may be a Harvard graduate who makes a decent living and has done financially well for himself, as well as his wife and grown daughter, but he is a walking corpse of sorts whose soul seems to have died a slow death long ago. Finding next to nil love nor solace in his faithful wife and rarely seeing his married adult daughter, Arthur just walks through life like a nameless and faceless ghost who is rarely noticed by anyone, so after receiving a phone call from a college friend, Charlie Evans (Murray Hamilton), that he thought died long ago regarding a underground corporation that offers the possibility of a ‘rebirth’ with a new identity, the banker considers his options. Through Charlie, Arthur is hooked up with the word-of-mouth company simply known as “The Company” that offers to provide customers a new life and identity for the measly sum of $30,000, which includes the faking of one's death and plastic surgery. Eventually, Arthur is brought to the secret location of the Company, whose secretary drugs the banker’s tea. When Arthur wakes up, a fried-chicken-licking executive of the company, Mr. Ruby (Jeff Corey), shows the banker footage of himself seemingly raping a young nubile girl, which is used as blackmail were the rather reluctant customer to pass on the identity-changing operation. After realizing he might go to jail for rape, as well as talking to the seemingly nice owner of the company, ‘The Old Man’ (Will Geer), Arthur reluctantly decides to go through with the procedure and wakes up as a very haggard looking yet much more youthful Rock Hudson. Rechristened ‘Antiochus 'Tony' Wilson’ (Rock Hudson), the lapsed banker, whose death has been staged by the Company in a hotel fire using a cadaver resembling his own body, has now taken on the identity of a successful degenerate artist with a lavish home in Malibu, California and a groveling personal manservant, so life seems to be looking up for the protagonist, or so he hopes. Eventually, ‘Tony Wilson’ starts a relationship with a somewhat ominous blonde babe named Nora Marcus (Salome Jens), who takes the reborn ‘artist’ to a neo-pagan bacchanalian grape-stomping/winemaking orgy where the ex-banker loses his ‘beatnik virginity’ and gets wild and naked, but all good things must come to an end, especially after being reborn as someone you're innately not (have you ever heard of an artistic banker or a true artist that is good with managing money?!).

 Unfortunately, things soon get ugly for Arthur-turned-Tony when he hosts a happening party at his new swinging pad and gets so plastered on some fine firewater that he reveals to his guests about his former identity as bourgeois boob Arthur Hamilton. Unbeknownst to Tony, many of his guests/neighbors are also ‘reborns’ who utilized the secretive services of the Company and they don’t take kindly to a newcomer going around revealing such sensitive esoteric information in such a reckless manner. Worst of all, Tony learns that his sensual sweetheart Nora is not a sweetheart at all, but a manipulative wench who has been employed by the company to be his full-time quasi-callgirl girlfriend. Unsurprisingly upset upon learning of these rather regrettable revelations, Tony decides to revisit his former wife (Frances Reid) from his previous life under his new persona (pretending he is a friend of the ostensibly deceased Arthur Hamilton) and discovers from the widow that their marriage failed because he was a soulless and vapid workaholic who put social prestige and material possessions before love and family matters. Determined to start all over again and be reborn for a second time, Arthur-as-Tony asks the Company for a new identity/body, but to do so he must provide them with a new name of an individual he knows that might also want to be reborn. As Tony/Arthur learns, his friend Charlie Evans was required to ‘sponsor’ a friend to get a new identity, hence why he contacted the banker in the first place. Rather unfortunately for him, Tony/Arthur cannot think of a friend/acquaintance who might want to be ‘reborn,’ thus leading to his nefarious and nightmarish downfall via Mengele-esque surgergy. After failing to provide the name of a potential person to be ‘reborn,’ Tony/Arthur is awakened by the kindly Old Man who owns the Company who tells him that he is being immediately taken for identity-changing surgery. Unbeknownst to him, Tony/Arthur is been taken to surgery to be euthanized where his corpse will be used to fake a new reborn client's deaths. In the end, Tony/Arthur, who is strapped to a surgery table, suffers a hysterical fit as he realizes he is about to die and is read his last rites by a charlatan priest/rabbi/minister. Luckily for him, before being euthanized, Tony/Arthur seems to fall into a catatonic state. 

 Although doing poorly on its initial release and hated by European critics when it was originally screened at the Cannes Film Festival (Frankenheimer was even afraid to attend the press conference and had Rock Hudson do it instead), Seconds has rightfully earned its place as a cinematic cult classic. Luckily, some realized the aesthetic majesty of Seconds upon its release, as cinematographer James Wong Howe, who should be credited as largely responsible for the film’s foreboding atmospheric and fierce phantasmagorical essence, was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the film. Indeed, as much as I loathe auteur Frankenheimer political persuasion and sympathy for kosher commies like John Randolph (real name Emanuel Hirsch Cohen), few films capture the particular zeitgeist so potently, perturbingly, and penetratingly than Seconds; a nearly immaculate work that shows the failure of the ‘American Dream’ to truly bring happiness to its citizens/consumers. A sort of post-industrial take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) meets a delicately deconstructed take on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (1808) meets the Hebraic paranoia of Orson Welles' 1962 cinematic adaption of Franz Kafka's The Trial (1925) aka Der Prozess, Seconds is essentially modernist Gothic horror in suburbia in the age of the atom bomb and cold war paranoia. Additionally, Seconds is a spiritually pessimistic work of metaphysical sci-fi horror that asks the difficult question: What good is being reborn when the soul is already dead? Directed by a man who may or not be the father of bastard Hollywood hack Michael Bay (Frankenheimer denied it, claiming he took a paternity to prove otherwise when said DNA tests did not then exist), Seconds is a work that makes one question whether or not, quite unlike Europe, cinematographers are the true ‘auteurs’ in Hollywood as it is hard for me to believe the film would be nearly as effective without James Wong Howe's signature cinematography.  The closest thing to a mainstream 1960s Eraserhead, Seconds is the perfect thing to watch all alone while suffering a bout of insomnia. Forget the now somewhat outmoded and less aesthetically prestigious The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds is forever Frankenheimer's most artistically ambitious, strangely beauteous, and most memorable film.

-Ty E

The Last House on Dead End Street

About a decade ago or so ago, I watched Roger Watkins’ lost Helter Skelter-esque horror-exploitation flick The Last House on Dead End Street (1977) aka At the Hour of Our Death aka The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell aka The Fun House and I was so turned off by the film’s absurdly amateurish and carelessly crude 1970s film school aesthetic that I did not even bother finishing it, ultimately shrugging it off as typical overrated cult horror crap that is worshiped by undiscerning fanboys who rate the quality of a film simply by its rarity, but not long after my initial viewing, I re-watched the film while stoned and came to the solid conclusion that it was one of the greatest masterpieces of its unhinged and unkosher kind.  That being said, I still regard The Last House on Dead End Street as one of the greatest exploitation/horror flicks ever made as a work that it is second to none in expressing pernicious psychopathy in a sort of exceedingly eerie and atmospheric form.  One of the many rip-offs of Wes Craven’s excess-ridden exploitation flick The Last House on the Left (1972) that actually manages to be better than the original, The Last House on Dead End Street is a sort of pseudo-snuff arthouse flick of the uncommonly visceral sort directed by a true degenerate and seeming psychopath who, being high constantly during the film’s production, spent only $800 of the $3,000 allotted for the actual film and spent most of the remainder on amphetamines. Nearly impossible to see until about a decade ago when the now defunct dvd company Barrel Entertainment released a double-disc DVD of it in 2002, The Last House on Dead End Street was so riddled with urban legends and mystification that no one even knew who actually directed the film until 2000 when Roger Watkins (aka Victor Janos aka Steven Morrison aka Claude Armand, etc.) revealed on an internet messageboard that he was the true auteur of this malicious and macabre no-budget cinematic masterpiece. In fact, not only was it revealed that Watkins was the director, but that he was also responsible for most other aspects in regard to the creation of The Last House on Dead End Street, not only writing, producing, and editing the film, but also acting as the charismatic lead anti-hero. The seemingly semi-autobiographical story of a Manson-like ex-pornographer who gets out of prison after a one year sentence relating to drug charges and nonsensically takes bloodthirsty revenge on society by making snuff films with a band of psychopathic degenerates that he personally banded together, The Last House on Dead End Street was so shocking to viewers on its initial release in 1977 (the film was completed in 1972, but an actress threatened to sue because Watkins included hardcore porn loops of her without permission, so the release was held back) that people thought it was an authentic snuff film, which was an urban legend that the film's sleazy distributor apparently encouraged. A rare American exploitation auteur piece directed by a patently pessimistic and curiously cynical speed addict who would go on to become a nihilistic pornographer, The Last House on Dead End Street, like the so-called Manson Family, is a demented and deranged depiction of the darker side of counter-culture movements as a god awfully grotesque celluloid work with a fiercely foreboding and even apocalyptic atmosphere and nil moral compass.  Featuring brutal slaughterhouse scenes that predate those featured in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's dark arthouse melodrama In a Year with 13 Moons (1978) aka In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden and gorgeously grotesque gore scenes that put The Last House on the Left and just about every other exploitation film of its time to shame, The Last House on Dead End Street is indubitably a singular exploitation flick in that it was clearly sired by a misanthropic and even malevolent man with a cold, black heart whose onscreen character and real-life persona seem totally identical.

 Charismatic rock-star-like ex-con Terry Hawkins (Roger Watkins) has just gotten out of jail for serving a one year sentence for drug related charges and despite claiming he liked the ‘security’ of prison, he firmly feels it is his god-given right to seek revenge against society for sending him to the jailhouse, so he comes up with the bright idea to become a snuff film director because, after all, people are terribly tired of simple pornography, so something new and innovative needs to be made. First, Terry gets a cowardly cuckold of a camera man named Bill Drexel (Bill Schlageter as Lawrence Bornman) that he used to shoot porn loops with in the past, but ultimately screwed over after stealing the poor fellow’s film. As for criminal cohorts, Terry hires two ‘witchy’ nihilistic chicks, Kathy Hughes (Kathy Curtin as Janet Sorely) and Patricia Kuhn (Pat Canestro as Elaine Norcross), as well as a crazed cow-fucker of a butcher named Ken Hardy (cinematographer Ken Fisher as Dennis Crawford), to ‘play’ as active performers in his nasty snuff flick. As for victims, angry angst-ridden auteur Terry cons a movie money man named Steve Randall (Steve Sweet as Alex Kregar), a porn star named Suzie Knowles (Suzie Neumeyer as Geraldine Saunders), and a debauched husband and wife couple, (Edward E. Pixley as Franklin Statz) and Nancy Palmer (Nancy Vrooman as Barbara Amunsen), as unsuspecting victims for their snuff flick who they ultimately lure to an abandoned building where they will be meticulously tortured, dismembered, and slowly killed for the snuff flick. Like most people of his degenerate generation, Terry Hawkins, who sports a Zardoz-like mask while in kill mode, is an idiotic idealist of the bodacious beatnik variety who spouts pseudo-rebellious hippie jargon and feels his acts of vengeful viciousness are of a nobly revolutionary variety and thus he does not think twice of sacrificing human beings for his aberrant celluloid art. When the homicidal hippies begin killing, they do it with gusto and positively perverse pleasure as they suffer from delusions of grandeur and counter-culture brainwashing. Among other things, a less than homely topless broad in Terry’s crew attaches an animal hoof to her crotch and forces one of the male victims to suck on her pseudo-cock. Terry and the gang also strap the victims to a makeshift operating table and begin operating on the unfortunate individuals, drilling their eyes with electric drills and opening them up and taking their organs, including the intestines, out as if performing a Viennese Actionist-inspired vivisection. In an off-screen voiceover added to the film against Roger Watkins' will (the filmmaker felt it ruined the entire film), The Last House on Dead End Street concludes with the post-script anecdote announcing that Terry Hawkins and his maniac crew were apprehended and jailed for their crimes. 

 Rather unfortunately, the original Watkins’ director's cut of The Last House on Dead End Street, which was titled ‘The Cuckoo Clocks Of Hell’ (a reference to the nazi-themed Kurt Vonnegut novel Mother Night (1961)) and was a whopping 175 minutes in length, has yet to be unearthed and purportedly the single surviving print might be deteriorating in a New York film lab, thus it is quite doubtful that the world will ever get to see the film as the filmmaker intended it to be. As Watkins revealed in the audio commentary for the Barrel Entertainment release of The Last House on Dead End Street, his assistant Bernie Travis butchered the 78-minute cut of the film that exists today, which rather irked the director. In fact, in the same audio commentary, Watkins states of Travis that he “recently committed suicide… I’m glad to say” and that his suicidal ex-assistant was an, “inept fool” who was simply “juggling imagery around” when he put together the 78-minute cut of The Last House on Dead End Street. Of course, Watkins, who was a protégé of Hollywood bad boy auteur Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, They Lived by Night), had a lot to be pissed off and disgruntled about as he ultimately became in real-life what his character Terry Hawkins in The Last House on Dead End Street despised as he made his living in the 1980s directing gritty Taxi Driver-esque porno flicks. After directing the porn flick Her Name Was Lisa (1980) under the pseudonym Richard Mahler, Watkins made his second and final attempt at directing a horror flick with Shadows of the Mind (1980) aka A Heritage of Blood under the pseudonym Bernard Travis, but the production of the film proved to be a horrendous experience for the director and the film itself was nothing short of an abject artistic failure with nil of the grizzly aesthetic idiosyncrasies, foreboding atmosphere, nor nightmarish nihilism of The Last House on Dead End Street. As someone who has seen Shadows of the Mind (which the director himself described as, “a piece of trash”), as well as a number of Watkins’ porn flicks like Corruption (1983) and Midnight Heat (1983)—both of which star Judaic porn legend Jamie Gillis—I can state with the utmost confidence that The Last House on Dead End Street is the accursed filmmaker’s unrivaled movie magnum opus, even in its present butchered state at 78-minutes. 

 A radically raw and ravenous horror flick from meth-fueled counter-culture hell featuring white college chicks in Jolson-esque blackface being whipped at decadent jet-set parties, bourgeois degenerates being orally raped via dismembered animal hooves, and a fiercely fucked filmmaker who is more destructively dedicated to creating celluloid art than the eponymous auteur terrorist of John Waters’ satire Cecil B. DeMented (2000), The Last House on Dead End Street is an ideally incendiary, iconoclastic, and idiosyncratic artsploitation horror flick from a seemingly authentic psychopath auteur who rather unfortunately never accomplished anything else even remotely as interesting as mental illness and drug addiction apparently took their toll on Mr. Watkins. Wired (and wasting the film production costs) on meth while directing films and recently joking about the suicide of one of his former collaborators in a dvd audio commentary, Watkins was without question a true sleaze-bag of sorts in real-life and whenever I re-watch The Last House on Dead End Street, I cannot help but think the actor/direct was acting out a deep dark fantasy when he directed the film and that’s arguably the scariest thing about the wonderfully wicked cinematic work. A self-reflexive film-within-a-film where Watkins as Hawkins (in)famously yells, “I’m directing this fucking movie!,” The Last House on Dead End Street is a true auteur piece that tested the bounds of morality and one’s duty as an artist. Created by a man with next to nil interest in horror/exploitation cinema who once confessed in an interview, “You have to understand that the scariest film of all time to me is Orson Welles’ The Trial. I think that’s the most horrifying film ever made, not The Last House on Dead End Street, not any splatter film. I was heavily influenced by Un Chien Andalou, by the fact that it could shock and still does,” The Last House on Dead End Street was a film that was made at the right place, at the right time, by the ‘right’ person, and will thus live on to be a holy grail of (unhinged!) underground horror cinema despite the fact its original dubious history has been demystified for over a decade. 

A nasty and nihilistic yet charismatic and captivating true no-budget film directed by nasty and nihilistic yet charismatic and captivating individual who, not unlike the character he portrayed in the work, was too far morally gone to make a big name for himself and start a career as a serious auteur filmmaker of sorts, The Last House on Dead End Street is ultimately an extreme celluloid symptom of a country and culture afflicted with a metaphysical disease of the soul.  Forget contemporary soulless and tasteless exploitation flicks like the August Underground trilogy directed by fat fanboy Fred Vogel (who was originally supposed to produce an 'authorized' sequel to The Last House on Dead End Street, but luckily Watkins dropped dead before he could authorize an aesthetic molestation of his masterpiece), The Last House on Dead End Street is the real deal as a work of uncompromising, deranged celluloid decadence and visceral vulgarity that no one wants to admit they enjoy, even if it is one of their favorite exploitation flicks (as it is certainly one of mine). Notably, Las Vegas-based exploitation auteur Ron Atkins (Schizophreniac: The Whore Mangler, Mutilation Mile) somewhat recently directed a quasi-sequel/tribute to The Last House on Dead End Street entitled The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell (2011) starring fellow exploitation auteur Jim Van Bebber (Deadbeat at Dawn, The Manson Family) in the role of Terry Hawkins, which is certainly worth checking out if you're a fan of the original fan, but it lacks the unwavering viciousness of Watkins' film and is essentially an ultra-violent psychedelic black comedy from postmodern exploitation hell.  Indeed, as it's rip-off tagline advertised, The Last House on Dead End Street may be “only a movie!,” but it is also probably the only movie that acts as the sort of cinematic equivalent of being spiritually tortured and raped by a counter-culture cult, which is certainly no small achievement on auteur Roger Watkins' part, even if he refused actually taking credit for the film for what was a good portion of his lifetime.

-Ty E

Necropolis (1970)

After reading various warnings to avoid the film like the experimental LSD-ridden celluloid plague, I decided it was about time I get around to seeing the lost psychedelic-drug-inspired Gudio avant-garde epic Necropolis (1970) directed by obscure Italian auteur Franco Brocani (Clodia – Fragmenta, Schifanosaurus Rex). Starring Italian avant-garde auteur Carmelo Bene (Our Lady of the Turks, Capricci) as a very authentically drunk leather-jacket-adorned Kenneth Anger fan, Warhol Superstar Viva (Bike Boy, Lonesome Cowboys) as a repressed housewife who shoves coke cans up her pussy, and French junky arthouse superstar Pierre Clémenti as a rather gay and naked Attila the Hun, as well as gigantic penises, a dandy-like melancholy Frankenstein monster, a human-size King Kong, Satan himself, and a number of other famous cinema/literary/historical fantastic figures in less than fantastic yet highly stylized settings, Necropolis—a hippie fantasy-horror work with an international cast featuring dialogue in Italian, English, German, and French—is a sort of postmodern psychedelic psychobabble fest where the various actors, whose chemical-fueled inebriation is certainly not in question, deliver mostly mundane and madly meandering monologues about a bunch of unintentionally corny and even sometimes funny crackpot counter-culture subjects. A sometimes strangely charming celluloid endurance test that will only be of interest to diehard cinephiles, wannabe-hippies and people who think they are more intelligent while they are high, Necropolis in many way epitomizes everything that was wrong and degenerate about the late-1960s/early-1970s as a convoluted work of counter-culture craziness and drug-addled debauchery masquerading as cultivated celluloid art of the highly intellectual and transcendental sort. Yet for all of its nauseating nonsensicalness, pseudo-philosophical meanderings, and inane and uninventive iconoclasm, I somewhat enjoyed Necropolis, even laughing out loud a number of times at the film’s vivacious vulgarity. Starring Viva as a brazenly bitchy and sexually repressed housewife who rather regrets her marriage to a pussy of a poet, Necropolis features many great and highly memorable quotes from the Warhol superstar like, “Bring me a Coca Cola so I can fuck myself,” “I knew he’d always end up in bed with a boy,” and “If it weren’t for vibrators, I’d be in a sorry state,” among countless others. Like an early Warhol production on steroids meets Kenneth Anger and Carmelo Bene as directed by someone who knows a thing or two about set-design, shot composition, and general filmmaking techniques, Necropolis apparently purports to be a distinctly deep ‘statement about life’ and, judging the film, it must be a life less than worthy of living. A collection of petite vignettes featuring distinctly stylized yet mostly minimalistic tableaux, Necropolis is a playful celluloid counter-culture pandemonium of pretentiousness, perversion, and bawdy blasphemy that reminds the viewer that not all things ‘beatnik retrograde’ are totally worthless, if not always retarded. 

 Before viewing Necropolis, I decided to watch an experimental black-and-white dystopian sci-fi short entitled Segnale da un pianeta in via di estinzione (1972) aka Signal from a Planet on the Way to Extinction directed by auteur Franco Brocani. Indeed, if I learned anything about Brocani as a filmmaker whilst watching his rather lecherous and loony science fiction short, it is that he is a cultural pessimist of the far-left who, despite bemoaning the spiritual and moral degeneration of the left, is certainly a byproduct of said degeneration and Necropolis certainly confirms this, albeit in a rather confused, campy, and chaotic manner that makes one wonder whether or not the filmmaker fried his brain on too much mescaline, cocaine, and LSD. As mumbled by the effete Frankenstein monster in the film, Brocani seems to believe that in some form or another that “The universe is in my head” and Necropolis must be seen as a celluloid expression of the auteur’s unhinged universe of eccentrically eroticized film references, hippie hysterics, anti-bourgeois baloney, and decidedly demented anti-capitalist/anti-fascist diatribes. Featuring no real beginning nor end, let alone a linear storyline, Necropolis is a discernibly discombobulated nightmare from a warped wop mind that wanted to concoct a work as intimate and idiosyncratic as a masterpiece like David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) would prove to be, but was too high on LSD and cinema history to discern between celluloid genius and total trash art, thus ultimately siring something somewhere in between. Opening with an off-screen narrator stating, “You look upwards, because you want to exalt yourselves. You want to exalt yourselves. I look downwards, because I am exalted,” Necropolis immediately gives the viewer the feel that the film was directed by a proud narcissist who believes he and only he knows the truth. Of course, what the ‘truth’ is is rather dubious, but it seems director Brocani is a proud proponent of individualism as demonstrated by a character’s remark,“Everyone must live according to his own PERSONAL law.”   Of course, all the characters of Necropolis have innately different life philosophies.

 Indeed, Necropolis is certainly a celluloid work inhabited by diacritic, if not demented and damaged, individualistic characters of counter-culture who play by their own warped tune, which is a large part of the film’s appeal today. For one, one once again gets to see famed frog fag Pierre Clémenti, in the role of Attila the Hun, riding a horse naked in a scene that anticipates his mostly unclad performance in Philippe Garrel’s The Inner Scar (1972) aka La cicatrice intérieure. One also gets to see absurdist Italian auteur Carmelo Bene, who is as drunk as a Sicilian skunk, bickering with Viva about Satan and magic. When Viva asks him, “What about the devil?”, Bene hilariously responds “Anger, Kenneth Anger,” but the Warhol superstar rejects the art of cinema being a true reflection of life, stating, “It’s not in films you find magic, it’s in life…It’s not in Kenneth Anger’s films. It’s in real life.” Of course, Bene is not the main victim of Viva’s lapsed bourgeois bitchiness, as she saves most of her hatred for her filmic husband Louis Waldon, who she previously had unsimulated sex with the year before in Warhol’s Blue Movie (1969). Unfortunately, it seems their romance has fizzled since the Warhol flick as Viva spends the entire scene berating her onscreen husband, describing him as an impotent pansy of sorts, ultimately declaring of her ostensibly homosexual hubby, “I knew he’d always end up in bed with a boy.” Other standout quotes from Viva to her sad cuckold of a spouse include, “If it weren’t for vibrators, I’d be in a sorry state” and “If I wanted a purring pussy, I would have married a girl.” Of course, as a superlatively spoiled yet miserable woman who less than proudly admits, “I always get everything but what I want,” it seems nothing will satisfy Viva, impotent hubby or not. Undoubtedly, one of the most standout scenes in Necropolis is of Paul Jabara of Hair fame, who was a pioneering member of the disco ‘culture’ and who died of complications relating to AIDS in 1992, giving a monologue next to a gigantic six-foot-tall phallus, but not before his decapitated head is somehow magically reattached to his emasculated body. In what is easily the most technically innovative scene, Jabara delivers a monologue to ‘himself’ in the same scene as he is dressed in drag as ‘Countess Viva Bathory’ (indeed, the swarthy hippie-like homo somehow pulls off pretending to be a spoiled blonde NYC debutante). Not surprisingly, Necropolis concludes just as abruptly and nonsensically as it begins. 

 With a Wilde-esque Nordic dandy Frankenstein monster (as depicted by Spaghetti Western/giallo star Bruno Corazzari, who worked with Lucio Fulci, among various others) in a green velvet two-piece suit (with ‘black power’ sound clips being played in the background) suffering from major melancholy, a rather impotent and naked Attila the Hun as depicted by Clémenti riding a horse on a phantasmagoric pop-art set, Louis Waldon as an angst-ridden American tourist looking for the (apparently missing) Mona Lisa, Viva giving what is arguably one of her greatest and most vivacious (and tolerable) screen performances, mad Mesoamerica Aztec/Tenochtitlan ruler Moctezuma II as a mellow hippie-like blue-eyed lover of birds, and French-Jewish-Dominican-American hipster Tina Aumont (Modesty Blaise, Fellini's Casanova) as a mostly mute and childlike cradler of babydolls, Necropolis is certainly a majorly mixed-up cinematic work with some sometimes palatable counter-culture meat on it that surely becomes more interesting on subsequent viewings, at least for those cinephiles stoic enough to brave through the entire film. Of course, Necropolis will be totally inaccessible and intolerable for most filmgoers, especially those unfamiliar with the counter-culture characters featured in the film, thus it will undoubtedly stay in the celluloid dustbin of history where it has essentially been since its original release over four decades ago. Featuring a sort of half-coherent dialectic between the cine-magic of Kenneth Anger/Jean Cocteau versus the gritty realism of Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey, Necropolis is ultimately like a celluloid/LSD-addled counter-culture cinematic psychosis created at a time when experimental film was at its height, so the fact that Pierre Clémenti, Viva, and Carmelo Bene star in it make it an all the more worthwhile endeavor for adventurous cinephiles.  A sort of Guido Chelsea Girls from cinema history hell, Necropolis is a zany and artistically overzealous product of its deluded zeitgeist that reminds the viewer that hipsters may have always sucked, but at least in the past they were somewhat more original and genuine in their degeneracy and longing for revolution.

-Ty E