The Counselor (2013)

In my opinion Sir Ridley Scott (and to a greater extent, his belated little brother Tony) epitomizes what one might describe as an ‘artisan filmmaker,’ as a director who is clearly a master of technique and calculatingly constructing films as if he were a carpenter of celluloid, yet lacks a true personal vision (after all, the only film he ever wrote a screenplay for was for his early short Boy and Bicycle (1956), which was made when he was a photography student) and thus cannot be described as a real auteur (after all, how could one ever compare someone like Ridley to real cinematic artists like Pasolini, Fassbinder, Herzog, Syberberg, etc.?!). That being said, it seems that the quality of Scott’s films relies heavily on the script that he decides to use for a film and there is probably no better example of this than his most recent celluloid effort The Counselor (2013), which was penned by contemporary Southern Gothic novelist Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men) in what was ultimately the writer’s first attempt at writing a film screenplay. Until recently, as far as I was concerned, the last great film Scott made was Blade Runner (1982) as he seems to have been constructing absurdly asinine and insipid eye-candy ever since, with his pseudo-pre-sequel to Alien (1979), Prometheus (2012), being the height of the famed filmmaker’s action-packed and slickly stylized soulless celluloid products, yet The Counselor proved to a welcomed shock for me, if not a visually irrelevant one. As with any highly literary and philosophically inclined work with an unhappy ending and a tasty tinge of political incorrectness underscored by decidedly depressing unpopular human truths, The Counselor has been largely panned by both mainstream film critics and filmgoers alike as a work that was clearly made for an undeserving and proudly uncultivated audience that also creamed their panties for Martin Scorsese’s 3+ hour music video tribute to American Hebraic psychopathy, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). A sort of pre-North American Civil War Breaking Bad (in fact, Dean ‘Hank Schrader’ Norris has a small role in the film as a rich coke buyer) with the tragic poetic eloquence of Shakespeare, the penetrating pessimism and scathing cynicism of Schopenhauer, and the tastelessly charming cracker sociology of Jim Goad, The Counselor is a somewhat delightful downer of a mainstream movie that unequivocally proves that pretty plastic Hollywood people can appear quasi-sophisticated if given the right lines to read. A nasty and even nihilistic Southwestern Gothic where wimpy white collar lawyers, ruthlessly murderous Mestizo drug cartels, naïve Catholic girls, ferocious car-fucking femme fatales, head-decapitating-wires, and snuff films collide in a celluloid cultural clash made in the Armageddon-stirring age of globalization and ‘Reconquista’ of the Aztlán by brown hordes with nothing to lose, The Counselor is the sort of film that slaps the viewer in the face and then proceeds to bugger their body, hence the work’s lack of acceptance among the escapism-humping American public. A film that essentially depicts a white collar criminal's worst night, The Counselor tells the aesthetically and thematically torrid tale of a relatively young and handsome hotshot lawyer enslaved to love who becomes immersed in an intricate one-off drug deal with a Mexican drug cartel that goes terribly wrong as a result of bad luck and a lethally lecherous female fatale whose ‘naughty bits’ are described by her Brian Grazer-look-alike boyfriend (Javier Bardem) as having suction properties equivalent to that of a bottom-feeder fish. 

 A charming statuesque lawyer simply known as ‘The Counselor’ (played by rather talented Irish-German actor Michael Fassbender) wants to pop the question to his nice and loving yet terribly naïve long-distance girlfriend Laura (Penélope Cruz), so he decides to woo her by flying all the way to Amsterdam (the Dutch capital city is home to Coster Diamonds, one of the oldest diamond polishing factories in the world, thus demonstrating the Counselor's desire to buy only the best for his girlfriend)  to buy a nice sized rock from a Sephardic Jewish Diamond Dealer (ironically played by Bruno Ganz, who is best known around the world for portraying Hitler in Downfall (2004) aka Der Untergang). On top of buying a nice and expensive engagement ring for his beloved Latina, the Counselor is given a nice and long free-of-charge rant from the Diamond Dealer about the superiority and corrosive power that is the international Hebrew nation and how, “Every country that has driven out the Jews has suffered the same fate.” Naturally, Laura accepts the Counselor’s rather awkward wedding proposal, but the lawyer is also strapped for cash as a result of buying the wedding ring so he rather reluctantly decides to get involved in a major one-time coke deal with his party boy Mestizo friend Reiner (Javier Bardem)—a legit entrepreneur and club owner who moonlights as an underworld drug kingpin and who lives a lavishly lecherous lifestyle, hence his need for greed—but little does he realize that his friend’s psychopathic girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz) has plans of her own. A wickedly wanton woman whose ‘pussy power’ literally scares her boyfriend Reiner (who tells the Counselor a story about how she freaked him out after she fucked his car and drenched his windshield with her girl juices), Malkina (a name derived from ‘Grimalkin’ which means an evil looking female cat) is a fierce femme fatale of the sociopath-chic variety who has cheetah print tattoos and literally gets sexually aroused by the sight of her two pet cheetahs (Raoul and Silvia) “bringing down jackrabbits at 70 miles an hour” and uses all people, including her friends and boyfriend, for her own personal gain. Left an emotionally brutalized bastard at the age of 3 after her parents were apparently thrown out of a helicopter into the Atlantic Ocean and eventually working her way up in the world as a seductive stripper, Malkina disguises her internal pain with her stunning beauty and by flashing around her dubiously obtained wealth. When the Counselor makes the unwitting mistake of helping a client, a Mexican murderess named Ruth (Rosie Perez), by bailing out her crotch-rocket-riding son—a high level member of a drug cartel known simply as ‘The Green Hornet’ (Richard Cabral) who likes freaking out white girls by telling them he is on a steady diet of dog food—he basically marks himself, his girlfriend, and all his business partners as dead men. 

 If the Counselor had taken the advice of wise-ass middleman dealer named Westray (Brad Pitt)—a cynical fellow who might have been a philosopher and/or a monk had he lived in a less decadent age—regarding not getting involved with the drug cartel, which is responsible for sex slavery and snuff films, the meta-tragic route his life inevitably takes could have been easily avoided. Seemingly more knowledgeable about her boyfriend’s drug business (and, in turn, the Counselor's) than he is, Malkina hires a sinisterly stoic dude known as “The Wireman” (Sam Spruell) to kill drug runner Green Hornet (who is carrying a key to a sewage truck containing barrels with $20 million dollars worth of cocaine) to steal the very same drug supply that the Counselor and his friends are tied to. Naturally, after the drug cartel realizes that the Counselor bailed out the Green Hornet from jail, they doubt the timing was a coincidence and assume the lawyer was the one responsible for killing their comrade and attempting to steal their cocaine. Eventually, two drug cartel members dressed as cops kill the Wireman and take back the drugs, thus Malkina’s scheme falls through. In no time, Reiner is accidentally killed while attempting to flee from members of the drug cartel and the Counselor’s fiancée is beaten and kidnapped. Meanwhile, Westray takes a plane to London in an attempt to evade the wrath of the drug lords. When the Counselor attempts to reach out to a high-ranking member of the cartel named Jefe (Rubén Blades) in a desperate attempt to save Laura, he is told there is nothing he can do and that he must be a man and accept his unfortunate fate as a marked man who made an unwise decision long ago that cannot be changed. In an act of complete impotence, the Counselor goes to Mexico to find Laura, but ends up doing a lot of drinking and crying instead due to his undying guilt. Meanwhile, Malkina, who is determined to get rich quick since her prior scheme fell through and her sugar daddy Reiner is dead, decides to track down Westray (who she apparently previously had an affair with and knows how to manipulate) in London and uses a stunning hired slut (Westray’s admitted sole weakness is women) played by Natalie Dormer to steal his bank codes and social security number. Westray is ultimately killed when Malkina pays a hired goon to throw a so-called ‘bolito’ (a mechanical device with a battery-operated motor that wraps a wire around the victim’s neck until their carotid arteries are severed and, in some cases, their head pops off) around his neck. Meanwhile, the Counselor receives a mysterious DVD-R with “Hola!” written on it, which assumedly features a snuff video of Laura being executed (the next scene features Laura's decapitated body being dumped in a landfill). In the end, queen bitch Malkina is victorious and tells her banker (Goran Višnjić) about her plans to head to China and convert all of her money into diamonds.  After all, diamonds are a girl's best friend, especially when you're a cross between Ted Bundy and Marilyn Monroe.

 In one of the more philosophical scenes early on in The Counselor, the old Jewish diamond dealer delivers the following spiel to the eponymous protagonist of the film in regard to the cultural wasteland that is modern Spain and the historical legacy of world Jewry: “There’s no culture save for the Semitic culture there. The last known culture before that was the Greek, and there will be no culture after. Nothing. The heart of any culture is to be found in the nature of the hero… In the classical world, it is the warrior, but in the Western world it is the man of God. From Moses to Christ. The prophet, the penitent. Such a figure is unknown to the Greeks. Unheard of, unimaginable…because there is only a man of God, not a man of gods, and this god is the god of the Jewish people. There is no other god. We see him—what is the word? Uh…purloined. Purloined in the West. How do you steal a God? The Jew beholds his tormentor dressed in the vestments of his own ancient culture. Everything bears a strange familiarity. But the fit is always poor and the hands are always dripping blood.” Indeed, one would assume from the old Heeb's rant that the sorry state of the miserable and cultureless Mexico depicted in The Counselor was Sephardic revenge for the ancient execution of Marrana Jew Francisca Nuñez de Carabajal in ‘New Spain’ (aka Spanish colonial Mexico) in 1596 during the Inquisition. Indeed, with his previous effort American Gangster (2007) where Australian goy Russell Crowe plays a Hebrew hammer of a detective who proudly sports a Star of David gold chain, as well as his upcoming Biblical epic Exodus (2014), flagrant philo-Semite Ridley Scott has never shied away from expressing his career-securing solidarity with the self-described chosen amongst God’s chosen and The Counselor is no different, but luckily the film is as culturally pessimistic as Hollywood films come as a work that depicts Mexico as a rabid mongrel beast with the brain of a demented demon that would love nothing more than to slowly torture and dismember pussy America to its bloated jelly-filled Judaic core. After telling the rather humorous joke, “you want to know why Jesus wasn’t born in Mexico? He couldn’t find three wise men or a virgin,” criminal sage Westray warns the Counselor with the following words regarding the true motivation of the Mexican drug cartels: “Hey Counselor, here’s something else to consider: The beheadings and the mutilations—that’s just business. Gotta keep up appearances. It’s not like there’s some smoldering rage at the bottom of it. Let’s see if we can guess who it is they really want to kill. You, Counselor. You.” Indeed, savagely snuffing out white collar, white lawyers must be a rather refined delicacy when you live in a country where running water is a luxury and you can purchase dismembered teenage girls for less than a pretty penny. 

 On top of frying criminally organized beaners to the point of seeming like the most uniquely ugly and unhinged, radically repellant, and decidedly perverted people in the world, The Counselor features a number of ‘misogynistic’ aphorisms in the spirit of Weininger (albeit, of the dime store sort) like, “Women have funny ideas about sex. They’re supposed to be so modest. Yeah (chuckles). Let me tell you, when they get it in their heads how they want to fuck, they’re like a freight train.” And, indeed, the sexually sadistic she-bitch played by Cameron Diaz quite openly admits that she believes that sexuality and sadism are not mutually exclusive but inherently connected, as she sternly professes that the weakness of humans when compared to that of natural predators (aka her pet cheetahs) of the wild is as follows: “It is our faintness of heart that has driven us to the edge of ruin. Perhaps you won’t agree, but nothing is crueler than a coward. And the slaughter to come…is probably beyond our imagining.”  Needless to say, the mayhem-splattered Mexico of The Counselor has a big black heart flowing with cheap tequila, cocaine and, most importantly, pure and unadulterated hate and bloodlust.  Indeed, as a country that has been left relatively unscathed by virtually all of the major wars of the last century and is populated by a nation of superlatively spoiled people (even the poor live like kings in the good old USA!) who absurdly believe their nation is invincible and is exempt from the sort of poverty and chaos that plagues the majority of the world, America certainly has no idea what is in store for it is if the Mexican drug cartels take control and/or the North American continent enters a racial civil war. Of course, the coward of The Counselor, aside from America in general (indeed, it is no coincidence that Diaz's character snidely states to a semi-morally-minded young lady, “You know what I like about Americans? You can depend on them.”), is the Counselor as demonstrated by his dubious actions in the face of fear and a telling remark made by a bitter ex-client: “the Counselor here has a way of sullin’ up like a possum when he don’t get his own way. I’m gonna say you probably noticed it. And that ain’t really the problem. The real problem is, is his thin skin makes it okay in his eyes for you to wind up under the bus.” Indeed, aside from the scheming femme fatale played by Diaz, it is ultimately the Counselor’s shifty behavior and cowardice that lead his fiancée and friends to the slaughter. While featuring the aesthetic prowess of the latest sportscar commercial, The Counselor at least has enough patently pessimistic food-for-thought to keep the most culturally pessimistic of Blade Runner fans reasonably happy. That being said, one can only assume that The Counselor receives the prestige that Blade Runner would eventually achieve after a decade or so, but somehow I doubt it as Americans are only getting stupider and stupider as their country goes to the untermensch dogs and international moneychangers. 

-Ty E

Theater in Trance

Technically, German New Cinema alpha-auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder's antepenultimate film was the rarely-seen documentary Theatre in Trance (1981) aka Theater in Trance aka Theatre in Trance: Ein Film In 14 Teilen, an ethereal and poetic 91-minute celluloid document covering the 1981 ‘Theaters of the World’ (aka “Theater der Welt 1981”) that took place in Cologne, Germany on the Rhine. Covering an event that included over 30 different theater/dance groups (including Het Werktheater, Squat Theater, Sombras Blancas, Kipper Kids, Jérôme Savary, Yoshi Oida, etc.) from 15 different countries who gave over 100 performances over a two week period, and told in 14 fragmented yet seamlessly woven segments, Theater in Trance is more of an avant-garde tribute to theater and a call for truly anarchic theatrical art than a simple report document of the Theaters of the World event. On top of being one of Fassbinder’s rarest films (it has yet to be released in the United States in any form), Theater in Trance, which was commissioned for West German television channel ZDF and shot on a handheld 16mm camera, also has the distinction of being the only documentary the auteur made, but of course, it is by no means a conventional documentary (in fact, Fassbinder's Danish filmmaker friend Christian Braad Thomsen described it as more of an 'anti-documentary'). Featuring typically monotone narration by Fassbinder himself of excerpts from his poet/playwright hero Antonin Artaud’s collection of essays The Theatre and Its Double (1938) aka Le Théâtre et son Double—an iconoclastic assault on modern Occidental theater and art that expresses the importance of Europeans to develop an atavistic awakening and recovering “the notion of a kind of unique language half-way between gesture and thought”—Theater of Trance is essentially an eclectic collection of 14 theatric tableaux that the filmmaker felt were worth preserving (and, in some instances, potentially mocking). Indeed, ranging from theatric performances of a fellow declaring that he “feels like Adolf Hitler” to primitive African dancing, Theater in Trance has a strikingly oneiric stream-of-conscious essence where the images sometimes seem in stark contrast to Fassbinder’s readings, as if the filmmaker was attempting to express his agreement with Artaud in regard to the current degenerate state of European theater and the need to destroy and rebuild it. As a work directed by a man who got his start in theater and once stated, “In the theatre I stage things as if it were a film, and then shoot films as if it were theatre,” Theater in Trance acts a sort of mixed-medium esoteric celluloid metapolitical manifesto on not only theatre, but cinema and cultural politics as well. Indeed, the tone of Theater in Trance can probably be best summed in a scene where Fassbinder narrates the following words to images of naked women in what seems to be a sanatorium for the mentally deranged: “The theater, like the plague, is a crisis which is resolved by death or cure. And the plague is a superior disease because it is a total crisis after which nothing remains except death or an extreme purification. Similarly the theater is a disease because it is the supreme equilibrium which cannot be achieved without destruction. It invites the mind to share a delirium which exalts its energies and we can see that from the human point of view the action of theater, like that of plague, is beneficial for impelling men to see themselves as they are, it causes the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world.” 

 Undoubtedly, Theater in Trance begins charmingly enough with a satirical scene of theater bigwigs and wine-sniffing kraut cultural bosses being served champagne and whatnot by butlers to the soothing Teutonic technocratic sounds of “Computer World” by Kraftwerk, but not before the following words are narrated, that theatre (and, in turn, cinema), “never goes so far as to ask itself whether this social and intellectual system might not be based on injustice through pure chance. But I say that this present state of society is unjust and worthy of destruction.” Of course, being set during the post-counter-culture era, Theater in Trance is packed with subversive and sometimes sacrilegious theatric performance that ranges from simple nudity of the high-camp sort to all-out scatological performances of the literally infantile ass-licking-and-fingering sort. Among other things, the documentary features Jack Smith-esque diva shows, countless unmanly men in drag, bodacious negro dancing performed by muscular black broads sporting aesthetically repellant neon tights, adult women pretending to be little girls while riding mini-tricycles, pseudo-cripples being wheeled around in wheelchairs as if in a drag race, pretentious art-punk-noise performance art, and cyber-punk instillations that seem to be taken straight out of Kamikaze 89 (1982); the final film Fassbinder starred in. In one rather amusing segment, a degenerate Brit with an Uncle Adolf mustache of the theater group the Kippers Kids (co-founded by Martin von Haselberg, the husband of Bette Midler) self-righteously declares, “The reason we really came here tonight is that we want to have an intellectual discussion about what is theater and what is not theater. What is art and what is not art,” only seconds after his female partner shoves an object up his ass. From there, the Kipper Kid has his ass wiped and licked by his partner and the two proceed to get messy Viennese Actionist style. Although Fassbinder mumbles words in a seemingly apathetic manner, one gets the impression he considers the Artraud’s writings to be the holy writ of both theatre and cinema. This becomes especially apparent by the fact that he tends to repeat the same passages, with the following words seeming to be the most imperative text: “Either we return all the arts to a central position, a central necessity and find an analogy between a gesture in painting or in the theatre and the gesture of the lava in the catastrophe of a volcanic explosion, or we must stop painting, gabbling, writing and anything else.” In the final performance of Theater in Trance in a rather wayward work entitled ‘Andy Warhol’s Last love” performed by a group called Squat Theatre (started by Hungarian Jewish refugees who had a hard time correctly practicing social realism), the corpse of Red Army Faction cofounder/far-left-wing terrorist Ulrike Meinhof is sexually ravaged in her jail cell by an alien and transported to a revolutionary planet where she is ordered to do the following: “The intergalactic 21st revolutionary committee sentences Andy Warhol to be shot for his merits. The sentence is to be carried out instantly. The intergalactic 21st revolutionary committee designates Ulrike Meinhof to carry out the death sentence.” Rather fittingly, the documentary concludes with Artuad’s words: “Only in the acting out of a temptation, in which life has everything to lose and the spirit has everything to gain, can the theatre regain its specific meaning.” 

 Aside from Theater in Trance, Fassbinder would pay tribute to his hero Antonin Artaud with Satan's Brew (1976) aka Satansbraten, which opens with a curious quote from the playwright, as well as Despair (1978), which was dedicated to the Greek-French mad man of theater. As demonstrated by a good portion of his films, but especially World on a Wire (1973) aka Welt am Draht, Satan’s Brew, and Despair, Fassbinder was obsessed with the idea of the double/shadow/doppelganger, so it should be no surprise he included the following quote from Artuad in Theater in Trance: “Every real effigy has a shadow which is its double, and art must falter and fail from the moment the sculptor believes he has liberated the kind of shadow whose very existence will destroy his repose.” Not surprisingly considering it was the enfant terrible’s only celluloid excursion in documentary cinema, Theater in Trance is in many ways Fassbinder’s most bizarre and idiosyncratic work and probably his most revealing film in terms of expressing his particular artistic Weltanschauung, which certainly owes more to Artaud than kraut commie Brecht. That being said, the documentary is no mere completist work as I initially assumed but essential viewing for serious Fassbinder fans. Probably only comparable to his Swiss friend Daniel Schmid’s documentary The Written Face (1995) aka Das geschriebene Gesicht—a nonlinear ‘dream documentary’ about Japanese Kabuki theater—Theater in Trance is more of a hypnotic ‘experience’ than anything, but one with actual ‘intellectual’ meat to it that demands just as much visceral soul as grey matter, or as Fassbinder once stated himself, “it is not thinking but dreaming that broadens life.” Mixing the Vietnam War, Warhol, Meinhof, Kraftwerk, and art-punk, Theater in Trance holds up remarkably well today as a nonlinear document of cultural debris and it is undoubtedly all thanks to Fassbinder’s innately anarchistic yet highly personalized approach to the typically aesthetically sterile documentary form. During Theater in Trance, an unnamed female narrator speaks the following line: “The thick-skinned Germans sleep in their bottomless pride.” While that line might be an attack against an entire people, he also leaves the prophetic line for himself: “Dying is an art like everything. I can do it particularly well.” 

-Ty E

Olivia (1983)

Before becoming an object of hateful ridicule and scorn amongst mostly virginal American fanboys who know nothing of the filmmaker’s previous career with international cinematic greats like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Andy Warhol, German-born auteur Ulli Lommel (Adolf and Marlene, Cocaine Cowboys) directed a couple Hitchcockian thrillers with his then-wife Suzanna Love (Hair, A Smile in the Dark), a Dupont/Standard Oil heiress, after the huge success of his cult slasher flick The Boogeyman (1980). Interestingly, the best of Lommel’s 1980s Hitchcock-esque erotic-thrillers, Olivia (1983) aka A Taste of Sin aka Prozzie aka Beyond the Bridge aka Mad Night aka Double Jeopardy aka Faces of Fear, was made on a whim while Lommel was getting ready to shoot Boogeyman 2 in Arizona and was shocked to discover that the ‘London Bridge’ was staring back at him across the Colorado River. Indeed, as Lommel would learn upon doing some research, the original 1831 London Bridge, which spanned the River Thames in London, England, was dismantled stone-by-stone in 1967 and reconstructed in Lake Havasu City, Arizona in 1971. Seeing this as the perfect opportunity to make a film ostensibly set in London and using the bridge as a sort of metaphorical image for a film about a woman who decides to change her identity and move to another country, Lommel decided to temporarily ditch Boogeyman 2 and use the film crew for that film to shoot what would ultimately evolve into his nihilistic psychosexual thriller Olivia. Like most of Lommel’s films, Olivia is a work that dwells in the misery of the past, especially in relation to a tragic event during childhood, and how it affects the future, which is certainly a personal theme for the filmmaker. 

 Born in 1944 in the chaos of the Second World War to Ludwig Manfred Lommel—a popular German comedian and radio personality who was sometimes described as the ‘German Charlie Chaplin’—Lommel ultimately became a prodigal son and decided to rebel against his father (who disapproved of his son's dream to become an actor), so he quit school and ran away from him to seek a new and exciting life. When his concerned father called the police to help search for his son, Lommel telephoned him and yelled, “How could you do this to me, you old Nazi?” in what would ultimately be the last words he ever spoke to his papa as the comedian died three years later. Naturally, Lommel's unresolved break with his father would have an imperative influence on his work as a filmmaker and as he would later remark in an interview with Rory MacLean of Goethe Institute London regarding the importance of art: “Within every one of us is a painter, a dancer, a storyteller. I believe that if every individual¹s artistic side was nurtured at school, it could channel much frustration and anger, and change the way people live their lives. Change even the way a potential serial killer might have lived his life. Maybe this is just an illusion. But I really do believe that art heals.” Indeed, it is probably for the better that Lommel never became a sadistic serial killer and instead opted for directing one of the greatest kraut psycho-killer films ever made, The Tenderness of Wolves (1973) aka Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe. A stylish reworking of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) inspired by the shadowy yet kaleidoscopic and mirror-obsessed camera work of Fassbinder’ cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (who, like Lommel, would leave Germany and make Hollywood his new home), Olivia is the unsettling and equally unhinged story of a young woman who witnessed the brutal slaying of her prostitute mother while a young child and now hears voices from said dead prostitute mother telling her to kill. Trapped in a nightmarish marriage with an abusive rapist husband who will not let her get a job, the eponymous antihero decides to start prostituting herself around the London Bridge and in between killing unsuspecting Johns, she falls in love with a successful American man, thus ushering her attempt to fully reinvent herself and begin a new life. 

While just a wee little girl, London native Olivia—the bastard child of an American and an English hooker—witnesses her working-girl mother (Bibbe Hansen) being brutally murdered at the hands of an American soldier (Nicholas Love) during a game of bondage gone terribly wrong. Flash forward 15 years later, Olivia (Suzanna Love) is now is in figurative bondage as the unhappy housewife a control-freak, rape-obsessed husband who won't even let her get a job as a mere bar maid. To pass the time, Olivia looks with almost envy as local streetwalkers peddle their fleshy goods around the London Bridge and after hearing voices from her dead mother persuading her to peddle her puss, the unemployed housewife becomes a hooker as well, but she is more interested in the metaphysical side of blood and mayhem than mere material cash-money. After brutally murdering a strangle fellow with a bizarre mannequin fetish straight out of Maniac (1980) starring Joe Spinell, Olivia goes on a random ‘date’ with a charming and considerate American gentleman named Mike Grant (Robert Walker Jr.) and the two make passionate love.  Indeed, for the first time in her decidedly deplorable existence, Olivia feels true love and empathy, thereupon giving her a totally new outlook on life. Of course, all hell breaks loose when Olivia’s husband discovers his wife’s affair with the quasi-ugly American. While attempting to murder Mike, Olivia’s husband falls to his death from the London Bridge, or so the viewer assumes. Traumatized by the series of events, Olivia runs away from her true love Mike into the night and eventually starts a new life by moving to America and taking on a new identity as a blonde and sophisticated quasi-feminist babe. Flash forward four years later after that deadly night in London, Mike spots what seems to be Olivia’s doppelganger working as a successful Arizona realtor. Like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, Mike obsessively stalks the Olivia-look-alike and tries his damnedest to get her to open up to him, which she eventually does with a bit of reluctance. Eventually, Olivia reveals her true identity to Mike and the two make passionate love all around the latter’s home. In a tragic twist, Olivia’s husband is magically revealed to be alive after all and he wastes no time in brutally murdering Mike and subsequently raping his wife once again. In the end, Olivia gets the strength to murder her equally homicidal hubby, but nothing will repair the damage that has been done her fragile mind and forsaken soul. 

 In an interview featured on the Image Entertainment dvd release of Olivia, auteur Ulli Lommel states: “I think the big difference between Hitchcock and the way I make movies is definitely.... Hitchcock has the audience in mind and I, for my films, never have the audience in mind.” Indeed, Olivia certainly concludes too cynically and depressingly for the average American viewer as a film that is ultimately more nasty and nihilistic than Lommel’s German New Cinema horror masterpiece The Tenderness of Wolves. In fact, Olivia was such a personal work for Lommel that he ended up hiring and firing eight cinematographers before deciding to become director of photography himself. While going on the record as stating that Olivia is his “most favorite movie of the 80s,” the film would ultimately bankrupt the auteur and probably help sire the ‘slippery slope’ that plagued the rest of his filmmaking career. Indeed, as a man who went so far as directing a scene featuring Robert Walker Jr. of Easy Rider (1969) fame performing cunnilingus on his wife, Lommel was certainly not screwing around when he made Olivia. As to the reason why the auteur has made a filmmaking career out of depicting debased and deranged individuals in the tradition of Peter Lorre's character from Fritz Lang's M (1931), Lommel stated, “Since my childhood I’ve felt uneasy with the demonizing of an enemy. In my work I find myself standing up for the outsider, the accused. Again and again I want to understand their perspective,” and Olivia does just that as a rare cinematic work that dares to empathize with a female psycho-killer.  Indeed, while not exactly an unsung masterpiece, Olivia certainly goes farther than Hitchcock in terms of psychosexual sickness and makes the films of Brian De Palma seem like softcore Hitchcockian celluloid bubblegum filled with artificial flavoring. In other words, Olivia was clearly directed by a troubled man with a lot of pent up hatred, acute internal pain, and a seemingly strong fetish for sadomasochism and bondage. Not unlike Fassbinder’s early masterpiece The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Olivia is an obscured autobiography of the transsexualized sort featuring an antihero who, like Lommel himself, is plagued by a childhood trauma relating to the parent of the same sex, so she tries to move to a new country and “assumes another identity hoping the future will be better than the past” (Lommel’s words, not mine). While Olivia certainly did not rid herself of her inner demons and achieve the American dream upon moving to the United States, Lommel did not seem to do half bad as he outlived both his masters, Fassbinder and Warhol, and can at least say he has lived a totally singular life as a man born at a time when most of the babies of his nation were starving to death.  Arguably Lommel's greatest post-Warhol flick, Olivia and the director's other Hitchcockian flick BrainWaves (1983) aka Shadow of Death certainly make welcome exceptions to the banality of slasher schlock and swill typical of the 1980s.

-Ty E

Interior. Leather Bar.

Fuck The Exorcist (1973), I think Cruising (1980) is easily the most aesthetically/thematically audacious and least monetary-motivated film Hollywood Hebrew auteur William Friedkin (The French Connection, Sorcerer) has ever directed, so naturally I was intrigued upon learning that the obscenely popular mainstream actor James Franco was purportedly directing a film based on 40 minutes of documentary-like S&M scenes cut from the infamous leather-fag slasher flick. Of course, like so many other people that heard about Franco’s film, Interior. Leather Bar. (2013) aka James Franco's Cruising, I did not realize that it was not really actual straight interpretation of the scenes cut from Cruising, but a postmodern pseudo-documentary film-within-a-film about the Hollywood star turned auteur and his gay hipster co-director Travis Mathews (I Want Your Love, In Their Room: London) ostensibly ‘playing themselves’ and documenting themselves making a “re-imagined idea” about what the deleted scenes from Cruising might have been like. In short, Interior. Leather Bar. is a piece of patently pretentious pomo homo pseudo-intellectual posturing featuring a couple minutes of the re-imagined Cruising scenes co-directed by a hot Hollywood celeb who wants to prove he has no problem watching homos giving each other head and whatnot. Franco began his directing career with the crappy comedy The Ape (2005), which mixes a gorilla suit with a pseudo-Allen-esque tribute to Russian literature, and made a couple more forgettable/unseen non-gay-themed features since then, but ever since directing the homoerotic short The Feast of Stephen (2009)—a rather unfortunate tribute to Kenneth Anger featuring pedomorphic brown boys—he has almost exclusively focused on queer-themed material of the rather contrived sort. With his black-and-white feature The Broken Tower (2011)—a work that the auteur not surprisingly created as his graduate school thesis project at NYC—Franco portrayed the gay American poet Hart Crane and even gives head to another man (a prosthetic prick was used, of course) in what is easily one of the most aesthetically barren and eclectically vapid 'avant-garde' features I have ever seen. With My Own Private River (2012), he paid tribute to River Phoenix’s role as a gay hustler in Gus van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) by simply re-editing the film in a seemingly Asperger-addled fashion where Phoenix is the focus and Keanu Reeves is mostly cut out. Undoubtedly, what virtually all of Franco’s films demonstrate is that he might know more about queer cinema than the average Brokeback Mountain (2005) fan yet he does not seem to have a personal vision nor original ideas of his own, so he simply caters to the preposterously politically correct LGBT-cuckolded sensibilities of mainstream film critics to prove he is an ‘edgy’ and ‘open-minded’ artiste and not a spoiled Hollywood superstar who has enough money to do whatever he wants whenever he wants.  Indeed, at best, Interior. Leather Bar. seems like a fanboy film school project that goes so far as to liberalize, multiculturalize, and metrosexualize Friedkin’s original film to the point where it lacks any of the true anti-p.c. gay grit of Cruising. 

 After beginning with an inter-title revealing that Cruising was plagued by protests (homos thought it was homophobic), that director William Friedkin received death threats, and 40 minutes of the film (which has never been publicly shown and is now assumed lost) was cut to avoid an X rating, Interior. Leather Bar. cuts to co-directors James Franco and Travis Mathews as they discuss ‘re-imagining’ the long lost scenes of Cruising. Seemingly like a fidgety stoner who needs to smoke a bowl, Franco mentions how he was partly inspired to direct the film after reading his homo professor Michael Warner’s book The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (2000) and coming to the realization that gay marriage might go against the original anti-bourgeois spirit of true queer politics. While I concur with Franco, Interior. Leather Bar. could not be any more politically correct and socially accessible. For their re-imagining, the filmmakers make the would-be-provocative decision to cast mostly heterosexual actors in the roles, including a seemingly gay but apparently married heterosexual fellow named Val (played by Franco's real-life friend Val Lauren who played the eponymous lead in Franco’s 2011 Sal Mineo biopic Sal)—a man of dubious racial origin who seems to have as much testosterone as Richard Simmons—to play Al Pacino’s character from Cruising. As the director wants the viewer to know, hysterical homophobia is lurking everywhere as demonstrated by the fact that Val gets an urgent call from a friend who demonstrates concern for his friend playing a leather-fag in a movie by stating, “I know you’re at the Franco-fag project today and I gotta tell ya man, I don’t know where your head is on this and I think we really need to talk about this right away.” Homos are not the only ones who feel Franco’s intentions with the film are dubious, as gay extras on the film question why a heterosexual would want to make a gay film. In a nice nod to Franco’s unprejudiced narcissism, the extras also discuss how they hope the director gets naked in the film, which, of course, he does not do (in fact, Franco seems M.I.A. anytime gay sex scenes are shot). When star Val discusses his feeling of unease being around guys fisting each other in the ass and whatnot, Franco becomes pseudo-irate and goes on a rant where he complains: “Here’s how I feel… I don’t like the fact that I feel like I have been brought up to think a certain way. I don’t like thinking that. I don’t like realizing that my mind has been twisted by the way the world has been setup around me and what that is, is straight, normative, kind of behavior…and its fucking instilled into my fucking brain.” Indeed, Franco seems to believe that bareback buttfucking, fisting, and gay orgies should be everyday images that should bother no one, especially heterosexual men who like big tits and asses. As a man brainwashed by the pink fascist LGBT beast, Franco cannot handle the fact that seeing a man plowing another man’s bunghole is not ‘normative’ enough for him or something. In the end, two erect dicks are shown and the emotionally and physically debased star Val gets all moody broody as a fellow who has ultimately been debased and has his masculinity undermined for the sake of pseudo-fag Franco's ‘art.’ 

 Admittedly, I wanted to like Interior. Leather Bar., but it ultimately felt like a piss poor premature ejaculation from two hipster fanboys with seemingly nil life experience and a pedantic understanding of queer cinema history. Featuring a largely effeminate multicultural cast and none of the naughty neo-fascist imagery associated with the clubs of Friedkin’s film, Interior. Leather Bar. ultimately seems like a parody of what two politically correct poofs might calculatingly direct so as not to offend the ass-munching authoritarian gatekeepers of mainstream gaydom. Pseudo-Godardarian behind-the-scenes banality of the redundantly reflexive and mind numbingly banal yet academically vogue ‘meta-filmmaking’ variety, Interior. Leather Bar. is certainly a film that will bore to death most of its target audiences (i.e. filmmakers, leather-fags, cinephiles, Francophiles, etc.), most especially loyal Cruising fans like myself. Not surprisingly, in April 2013, James Franco was awarded the so-called “Ally Award” at the 15th annual Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, thus proving his servile celluloid ass-licking of the politically powerfully sodomite community has paid off. After watching Interior. Leather Bar., I decided to view Franco’s most recent auteur piece As I Lay Dying (2013)—a jumbled mess that attempts to juggle Faulkner, the iconic spit-screen technique of Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s Chelsea Girls (1966), and Hollywood Heebs playing hapless impoverished hicks—and it proved to be a totally unwatchable mess of a movie without any objective aside from demonstrating the director is classy enough to cinematically adapt classic American literature in a would-be-avant-garde fashion. A mockery of a mockumentary posing as chic postmodern queer theory swill co-directed by the sort of brainwashed morons that use made-up fag fascist words like ‘heteronormative” in a sad slave-morality-driven attempt to molest and sodomize language itself to 'empower' the already preposterously empowered, Interior. Leather Bar. is a marvelously mundane manipulation of cinema as well that does not attempt anything that was not done half a century ago by Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, and other soulless and intellectually masturbatory pansy postmodernist filmmakers who get a pathetic kick out of alienating viewers. Indeed, if you’re looking for real gritty and uncompromising celluloid leather-faggotry, make sure to skip Franco’s failed film-within-a-film and hunt down Jacques Scandelari’s New York City Inferno (1978) aka Cock Tales, which probably offers more than what you expect the 40 minutes of missing scenes from Cruising might be like as a recklessly wanton work that features real Greenwich Village-based sadomasochistic sodomites engaging in what they do best. Additionally, contemporary queer art-porn auteur filmmakers Todd Verow (Frisk, Bottom X) and Bruce LaBruce (Hustler White, The Raspberry Reich) have been doing what Franco and Mathew attempted with Interior. Leather Bar. for decades and I must admit they certainly do it much better. Of course, what should one expect from an actor who seems at his best playing degenerate stoners as demonstrated by his roles in Freaks and Geeks (1999–2000), Pineapple Express (2008), and Spring Breakers (2013).  Indeed, at best, Franco's attempt at becoming a controversial avant-garde auteur seems nothing more than another scripted role played by the swarthy pretty boy actor and until he develops a real vision and complex Weltanschauung as all great filmmakers do as opposed to pandering to mainstream queers and leftist intellectuals, his cinematic works will never amount to much more than soulless celluloid exercises in poof puffery and shallow con-artistry.

-Ty E

Fassbinder's Women

As revealed in the book The Queer German Cinema (2000) by Alice Kuzniar, agitprop-oriented queer kraut auteur and all-around homo-agitator Rosa von Praunheim (Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts, Horror vacui) was apparently quite relieved when his nemesis Rainer Werner Fassbinder—the true heart of German New Cinema and arguably the most important Teutonic filmmaker of the post-WWII era—dropped dead from a drug overdose in 1982 at the premature age of 37.  Indeed, while von Praunheim is probably the most important and influential figure of German Queer Cinema, Fassbinder was the most important figure of German cinema in general, hence the former's undying jealousy.  While still alive, Fassbinder made it quite clear that he was no fan of von Praunheim either, ultimately remarking regarding his enemy in an article he wrote in defense of Werner Schroeter (von Praunheim's ex-boyfriend): “Rosa von Praunheim, a man who is so progressive, whose consciousness is so liberated from all our bourgeois longings that he actually believes he alone has the right, almost a monopoly, to use the film medium to reflect his or anybody else’s homosexuality.” Of course, many things can be said of von Praunheim, but being a total ‘pansy’ is not one of them, at least as a filmmaker, as he had the gall to make what is probably the best documentary ever made about his rival Fassbinder’s personal life, Fassbinder’s Women (2000) aka Für mich gab's nur noch Fassbinder - Die Glucklichen Opfer Des Rainer Werner F aka Fassbinder Was the Only One for Me: The Willing Victims of Rainer Werner F. As von Praunheim would state regarding his ex-enemy Fassbinder and his decision to make a documentary about him, “Fassbinder, I knew him when he was starting out, and I couldn’t like him. I was jealous of him, envious, and I never liked melodrama. It was only after his death that I really became aware of his qualities. I was fascinated by his wild life – contrast with bourgeois dramas – and his courage to live out the most extreme situations.”  For Fassbinder’s Women, von Praunheim managed to interview most of Fassbinder’s closest friends, acquaintances, and collaborators and dig up some new gossipy gay dirt about the dead film director. Needless to say, Fassbinder’s Women reveals a man that was no less complex, melodramatic, erratic, deleterious, and paradoxical than his films. Indeed, converting ostensibly heterosexual comrades to cocksucking, causing countless men/women to fall in love with him for the mere narcissistic pleasure, and turning friends on to drug addiction are just a couple things you will learn about R.W.F. while watching von Praunheim’s tell-all scandal-ridden doc.  While not featuring a single frame nor excerpt from any of Fassbinder's films, Fassbinder's Women is also loaded with countless rare photographs of the filmmaker in his natural habitats, which range from leather-fag S&M bars to nude beaches, thus making the documentary essential viewing for any serious fan of R.W.F. and his wayward celluloid ‘Weltanschauung.’

In terms of all the many beauteous ladies in Fassbinder's life, actress Irm Hermann was apparently “the woman that probably loved him most” as demonstrated by the fact that she financially supported him when he was a nobody, took out a life-destroying loan for his first film, and even attempted to prostitute herself for the filmmaker.  Nowadays, Hermann, who typically played bitchy and sexually repressed women in the filmmaker's films, finds great joy in just visiting Fassbinder's grave and reminiscing over the not-so-good days.  As a lesser known Fass-bande actress, Ursula Strätz, happily states, “Fassbinder was the only one for me,” which is a sentiment that most of her contemporaries seem to also share. Indeed, apparently Fassbinder “loved being loved,” even if he was apparently incapable of reciprocating said love and spent his entire filmmaking career obsessing over the innate inequality that comes with virtually all romantic relationships.  Indeed, it is no coincidence that Fassbinder's first feature film was entitled Love is Colder Than Death (1969). On top of having a short-lived love affair with his future musical composer Peer Raben, Fassbinder managed to convert his assistant director/actor/right-hand man Harry Baer, who originally intended to get married and have kids, to homosexuality during a trip to Paris. Indeed, the portrait of Fassbinder that appears in Fassbinder’s Women is that of a hysterical hyper-asshole and self-consumed control-freak, but as the director’s one-time cameraman Michael Ballhaus (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The Last Temptation of Christ) stated regarding his working relationship with the filmmaker, “My attitude has always been that if someone is good they can get away with it. I’d rather work with someone complex and brilliant, like Fassbinder or Scorsese, who aren’t so nice, than with someone who is nice but boring.” Additionally, Fassman’s main leading lady Hanna Schygulla goes so far as even stating that “in a way it was like living in a fascist regime” in terms of working with him, but at the same time he also tended to bring the best out of people and pump up their self-esteem.  Of course, Fassbinder just as easily could break someone as demonstrated by the tragic suicides of two of his three great loves. While called “Fassbinder’s Women,” the documentary is just as much about the men in Fassbinder’s life as the title is more of a campy ironic reference to the fact that the filmmaker gave all his male friends/collaborators female nicknames (i.e. Harry Baer was ‘Ilse,’ Ballhaus was ‘Sonja,’ Peter Berling was ‘Mummy,’ etc.). Indeed, while most of the people in the doc seem to agree that Fassbinder was more or less predominately homosexual in persuasion, he also needed a woman in his life like most heterosexual men do, hence his short-lived marriage to actress Ingrid Caven (who only appears in the doc via telephone) and later relationship with film editor Juliane Lorenz (who is now the head of Fassbinder Foundation, which is the foremost promoter of the filmmaker’s work). Undoubtedly, if anything is for sure, it is that Fassbinder was not only less gay than Rosa von Praunheim, but also a greater filmmaker, hence why the latter went on to direct a documentary about the former.  On the other hand, Fassbinder once paid ‘tribute’ to von Praunheim by naming a female character in his avant-garde gangster flick The American Soldier (1970) ‘Rosa von Praunheim.’

While missing important actors/actresses from the filmmaker’s life like Margit Carstensen (who apparently backed out of the doc at the last minute), Barbara Sukowa, Ulli Lommel, Günther Kaufmann, Gottfried John, and a couple others, Fassbinder’s Women is easily the most insightful, informative, and incriminating documentary I have ever seen on the belated Bavarian bad boy auteur. For instance, Fassbinder’s ex-wife Ingrid Caven revealed that the filmmaker somehow managed to ‘assert himself’ on her, remarking, “He was like a normal man. He really tried. He even screwed me. I think he’d made up his mind to do it. I don’t know how much he enjoyed it. He did what he had to do. It was amazing. I don’t think he forced himself.”  One also learns that, quite ironically, it was Fassbinder's ‘right-hand man’ and assistant director Harry Baer that ultimately acted as the courier of cocaine that would take the filmmaker's life.  One also gets to see Brigitte ‘Mother Küsters’ Mira—who despite being ½ Jewish, got her start in acting playing a villain in the Nazi propaganda series Liese und Miese and who Fassbinder made an unlikely film star with Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) aka Angst essen Seele auf—describe how the filmmaker’s Arab boyfriend El Hedi ben Salem (who played Mira’s lover in Ali) would act like a wild animal when he was drunk (he would ultimately stab three strangers while inebriated). Of course, the subjects of the documentary also discuss how Fassbinder contributed to the deaths of two out of three of his great loves, El Hedi ben Salem and Armin Meier, as both of the men committed suicide after the filmmaker became bored with them (the filmmaker tended to date people that were his inferiors). Undoubtedly, out of all the subjects featured in Fassbinder’s Women, Irm Hermann seemed the most empathetic regarding the filmmaker, stating of his life and seemingly inevitable premature death, “I don’t know how things are judged in the next world, but I think he’d already been through hell on earth, despite all his fame. He was punished enough. I don’t think you have to suffer twice. He suffered enough.” If one thing is quite clear to the viewer after watching von Praunheim’s Fassbinder’s Women, it is that all those who worked with Fassbinder (with the possible exception of cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and already established stars like Jeanne Moreau), virtually none of them would go on to greater prestige and success after the filmmaker died. As Brigitte Mira confesses in the documentary regarding Fassbinder’s imperative role in her acting role, “If he were still here, I’d have had better opportunities. In an interview recently I was asked what I wanted and I said ‘An Oscar.’ But I could get one only if Rainer were alive. I’m sure of that,” thus demonstrating the actress' undying faith in the filmmaker's craft after all these years. Indeed, as a man who turned seemingly bimbo-like blonde bombshell Barbara Valentin (who was dubbed by the press as a “German Jayne Mansfield” despite the fact she was Austrian) into a serious and somewhat respected arthouse actress and who made an illiterate Moroccan laborer like El Hedi ben Salem into a memorable movie star, Fassbinder must have been doing something right.  Of course, more than anything, Fassbinder's Women reminds one of all the unmade films the world has been cheated out of as a result of Fassbinder's tragic and senseless premature death.

-Ty E

New Wave Hookers

Undoubtedly, New Wave Hookers (1985) is a porn flick with a reputation that is more (in)famous than the actual quality of its content, namely due to the fact that the original cut of the film was forever removed from distribution in 1986 after it was revealed that star Traci Lords (Black Throat, Kinky Business) was actually underage when she made the film. As someone who has managed to view the original version of the film featuring Lords as a salacious she-devil, I cannot say that the edited/abridged version of New Wave Hookers really suffered from the deletion of those naughty underage teen scenes. Admittedly, my interest in New Wave Hookers came from the fact that it is a punk/new wave porn flick that, like Alex Cox’s cult masterpiece Repo Man (1984), features a score by the Latino punk band The Plugz, not to mention the fact that it features Hebraic hardcore superstar star Jamie Gillis (The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Through the Looking Glass, Water Power) in one of the lead roles as an over-the-hill punk pimp who speaks with a bogus oriental accent. Indeed, certainly a cream of the crop work when it comes to mainstream 1980s porn, New Wave Hookers was directed by Gregory Dark aka Alexander Hippolyte aka The Dark Brothers aka Gregory Brown (Let Me Tell Ya 'Bout Black Chicks, Sex Freaks)—a miscegenation-obsessed Anton LaVey-look-alike who is one of the few pornographers to successfully make the transition from the porn ghetto to Hollywood and who has been described as “the Steven Spielberg of the soft-core set” and “the Martin Scorsese of the erotic thriller”—so it benefits from having an actual aesthetic vision, if not a rather aberrant one. The surely sordid and thankfully politically incorrect story of an odd couple—a negro and a Jew—who both share the literal and figurative dream of becoming quasi-high-class punk pimps who whore out mostly Aryan new wave/punk chicks, New Wave Hookers works best as a racially-charged comedy that certainly could have benefited from less hardcore scenes and a more eclectic soundtrack. A porn flick that will probably most appeal to fans of old school punk films like Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky (1982), Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia (1984), Cox’s Repo Man, and even Surf Nazis Must Die (1987), New Wave Hookers also features racially-charged comic relief, especially of the oriental-parodying oriented sort, that is comparable to C-grade porn trash typical of the 1980s like Invasion of the Samurai Sluts from Hell! (1989). In short, New Wave Hookers has more to offer than merely Traci Lords’ teenage titties and twat as a work that makes a great argument that Jamie Gillis certainly would have made for a more likeable, charming, and humorous mainstream ‘performer’ than most kosher comedians. 

 Goofy jigaboo Jamal (Jack Baker) and his Jew boy buddy Jimmy (Jamie Gillis) are watching an interracial blue movie and the latter remarks to the former that he looks just like the mandingo negro in the fuck flick. Jimmy also remarks how he used to play tennis with spade pimps when he attended Berkeley College and how he has always wondered about the profession. Magically, Jimmy and Jamal fall asleep while watching the porn flick and somehow awake as pimps with different personas. While Jamal is dressed like a poser member of Devo, Jimmy sports an idiotic anarchy symbol shirt and takes on the personality of a stereotypically racist egomaniac Jap. On top of everything else, the two obtain their own personal guard dog (Steven Powers) in untermensch white boy form. Out of all the girls the two could pimp out, Jimmy and Jamal deal in ‘New Wave chicks’ that can only become sexually aroused by the sweet and sensual sounds of New Wave music, or as the black pimp states himself, “programs bitches to music to fuck.” Dressed quite similar to the Scottish duo from Strawberry Switchblade, the nubile and mostly Nordic new wave babes like riding on roller-skates and playing with shiny dildos. When not engaging in cross-species foursomes with their two bosses and their loyal yet seemingly stoned man-dog, the horny hookers sell their sex to a variety of sexually deprived losers, including a towelheaded Arab Sheik (Peter North) and two virginal and seemingly bi-curious dork college boys. When the cops bust Jimmy and Jamal for “subjecting our bitches to a plot” (aka white slavery), the pimps bribe the police with their busty bitches, thus evolving into a magical multicultural orgy in a scene that makes for a great metaphor for the wacked-out cultural and racial mongrel that is the United States of America. Rather bizarrely but nonetheless humorously, black brother Jamal masturbates and yells “come on white boys, do it to dem bitches” while watching the cops break the law with the new wave hookers. Of course, all good things must come to an end and both Jimmy and Jamal wake up to empty 40oz. malt liquor bottles and not a single new wave hooker in sight. Disturbed by the fact that he had the same wild wet dream as his homey Jamal, Jimmy leaves his friend’s apartment and drives around fantasizing about the fantastic dream he had about being a pseudo-Japanese punk pimp. 

 Featuring great and highly quotable one-liners like, “Fuck you, Negro,” “Deadhead, rat’s ass, fool to boot,” “No nigger music, strictly New Wave,” and “Do you think a rat’s ass is as good delicacy for a Japanese gentleman?” New Wave Hookers is certainly more funny and outrageous than the average scatological bromance flick defecated out by Hollywood each month, even if it has its flaws and tends to drag, especially during the lackluster pre-condom sex scenes. Indeed, New Wave Hookers was so popular that it would inevitably sire no less than six sequels (with the first three also being directed by Gregory Dark), as well as a reasonably stylish, if not innately inferior, remake entitled Neu Wave Hookers (2006) directed by artsy fartsy ‘alt porn’ auteur Eon McKai (Art School Sluts, On My Dirty Knees). While New Wave Hookers director Gregory Dark would later become a monetarily ‘successful’ mainstream music director (directing videos for mainstream pop trash like Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Linkin Park, etc.) and even directed an episode for the popular HBO TV series Oz (1997–2003), he would ultimately degenerate into a Hollywood hack responsible for helming such celluloid garbage as the horror flick See No Evil (2006) starring WWE fake wrestler ‘Kane’ and the crap comedy Little Fish, Strange Pond (2009) starring Matthew Modine and Zach Galifianakis. Indeed, while an undeniably humorous and audacious porn flick, New Wave Hookers seems rather tame when compared to the avant-garde fuck flicks of Stephen Sayadian aka ‘Rinse Dream’ (Nightdreams, Café Flesh, Dr. Caligari). While the sex of Sayadian’s films is typically nightmarish, nihilistic, creepy, and even anti-erotic, New Wave Hookers is packed with outmoded orgies with generic plastic Barbie doll babes and seemingly inebriated men who seem to have a hard time obtaining erection, thus I would be hesitant to describe the film as a masterpiece—be it of pornography or otherwise—but it is certainly a tastelessly charming classic of the quasi-iconoclastic and sardonic stereotype-driven sort. Part New Wave minstrel show, part retrograde race comedy, part slapstick vaudeville-esque fuck flick, and 100% culturally and artistically irredeemable, New Wave Hookers ultimately manages to epitomize everything that was aesthetically, culturally, socially, and politically revolting about the 1980s yet somehow manages to enthrall and for that reason alone makes it essential viewing for anyone that thinks John Hughes’ films were bullshit and that The Last Dragon (1985) was one of the most bizarre Hollywood films ever made. 

-Ty E