Charley (1986)

Long before larger hordes of Muslims had invaded the Netherlands and towelheads became an easy, if not politically incorrect, target for criticism, Dutch Auteur Theo van Gogh—a born iconoclast who felt the savage wraith of Allah after he was assassinated and almost beheaded with a butcher knife in November 2004 at the age 47 after some crazed Moroccan Islamist got offended by his short Submission (2004)—directed black-and-white avant-garde absurdist works of the darkly hilarious and seemingly rather morally bankrupt sort. For his debut feature Luger (1982)—a fiercely fucked no-budget film noir of sorts starring the now relatively popular Dutch actor Thom Hoffman—van Gogh told the seriously sardonic story of a suavely dressed ‘fascist’ psychopath who kidnaps the retarded yet reasonably attractive daughter of a miserly millionaire who refuses to pay the ransom, with the director later confessing regarding his objective with the film, “There was no intent or purpose. We wanted just a movie, as politically incorrect as possible. The more sacred cows we killed the better.” Undoubtedly, with his third feature Charley (1986), the debauched Dutchman opted for slaying, cooking, and eating more sacred cows, as it is a sickly sardonic and statically directed cinematic work about a mute Aryan beauty of the decidedly deranged sort and her lesbian girlfriend/partner-in-crime who routinely lures horny and mostly socially defective men into their home, poison them, and fry and eat their body parts. Featuring an eponymous antihero with looks that can kill but who is as quiet as a dead mouse, van Gogh’s film also dares to present the homicidal man-hating lead as an innately infantile molestation victim who was raped by her own father while she was only toddler. While a discernibly unrealistic work that has a bizarre and sometimes semi-surreal atmosphere that is somewhat comparable to the later works of Luis Buñuel, albeit done in a distinctly Dutch fashion, Charley is rather accurate in its depiction of female serial killers because, as history demonstrates, women typically like to kill their victims in a cowardly and passive fashion via poison for oftentimes financial reasons (indeed, one of the top Dutch female serial killers, Maria Swanenburg, who was suspected of killing over 90 people via poison, did it so she could collect her victims’ insurance and/or inheritance money). Unlike Fassbinder’ similarly themed work Bremen Freedom (1972), which depicts 19th century kraut female killer Gesche Gottfried as a misguided proto-feminist of sorts, van Gogh’s Charley portrays its killer in a much more ambiguous, if not somewhat strangely empathetic, light that reminds one why the auteur was no fan of medieval-style Muslim misogyny.  Of course, van Gogh's film is not exactly the sort of work that will make a feminist's panties wet either.

 When blonde mute beauty Charley Pasja (Marie Kooyman) was only just a toddler, her working-class mechanic father decided to molest her in the shower and ever since then she has continued to have sex with daddy dearest. It seems that, like many molestation victims, Charley has not mentally matured much since the first time when her father first raped her, as she carries around a baby doll as if it is a real baby and likes to play with little boys on swings, among countless other childish things. While Charley is repelled by all other men aside from her father, she is in a hot and heavy lesbian relationship with her criminal accomplice/roommate Berie Werie (Rosita Steenbeek), who sometimes watches her girlfriend have sex with her dad in the shower (indeed, for whatever reason, Charley's father only likes molesting her in the same place where he once took her virginity). Despite looking completely different (Charley has fair-skin and platinum blonde hair and buxom brunette Berie almost looks Latin), people oftentimes confuse the two Sapphic sisters for biological sisters, as no one seems to suspect they a lesbian lunatics who seem to have taken Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto (1967) quite literally. As for their modus operandi, the two lure men to their home, Berie has sex with them and poisons them, and then they both subsequently drop their victims’ corpses on train tracks so as to make the men's deaths look like suicides. While disposing of their victims, Berie likes to make goofy jokes like, “You know what they found in Regan’s belly?...Rock Hudson’s watch!” One day, the girls encounter a majorly misogynistic Taxi Driver who calls them “grumpy bitches” and who self-righteously declares, “women are worthless,” so needless to say, they kill him by giving him poisoned caviar, but not before Berie bumps his fuzz.  A rather passive and seemingly introverted young lady, Charley likes to listen in on the men’s deaths via a downstairs baby monitor while Berie sexually defiles their corpses in their bedroom. The girls live in a small home owned by Charley’s comic publisher uncle and he has no clue that they have turned his place into the Dutch equivalent of the quaint home from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Although Charley likes to play with her prepubescent nephew Max, she becomes rather infuriated when the little lad pushes pins through her precious baby doll’s eyes. Despite the fact they are both coldblooded killers, Charley and Berie act like a bunch of feminist hypocrites and tell Max’s father that he is a sadist that is in need of some teaching.  Unfortunately, it seems the boy is far too young for them to kill.

 One day, the two girls go to a bar and listen to the patently perverted scatological poetry of a seemingly demented dude named ‘Brother Gabler’ who swoons Charley with the following poop-preoccupied poem: “What abstinence forbids, as I saw my shit in the loo…I thought: no runny shit this time, but a healthy turd decorating the bowl. Fat and streaming in the poet…can I not feel my dick groping up my groin? That brown boy turns me on. My heart thumps as saliva I spawn. I think I’ll wank above the turd…because my sphincter when I cum makes itself heard. I think I’ll flush. Yes, an old fashioned flush. I lost my heart. A modern jerk is not better than a fart.” In fact, Charley loves the poem so much that it causes her to smile for the first time in the entire film, though Berie is less than impressed and berates her girlfriend for approving of such frivolous filth. Of course, Berie does not mind boning and killing Gabler. When a group of Gabler’s mindless disciples arrive at the girls’ flat looking for their pseudo-Rimbaudian messiah, Charley decides to poison every single one of them. With their relationship falling apart, Berie eventually ends up dead after being bedridden for a while and Charley somehow learns how to talk in the process, as if her lesbo lover had previously stolen her voice (indeed, Berie was certainly the dominant of the two lethal lipstick lesbos). When Charley is asked by the police to come to a mental hospital to meet a man named Larive who she and Berie stole money from a couple days before, she naturally poisons the gent. While at the hospital, Charley is introduced to an ambiguously gay fascist police inspector named Beerekamp (Michiel Berkel) who seems suspicious of the Sapphic psychopathic killer. While her beloved Berie is dead, that does not stop Charley for sleeping with her corpse and wheeling it around in a wheelchair. In the end, Beerekamp and his buffoonish cop comrades discover that Charley is a serial killer after finding countless corpses in her humble abode. After concluding with the following epilogue: “Inspector Beerekamp was promoted for heroism. He’s Head of the narcotics brigade. Charley was given life. She’s in therapy with her fauther and makes progress every day,” a grotesque drawing by Dutch cartoonist Eric Schreurs appears featuring an exaggerated-looking demonic female putting a dismembered dick in her large negro-like mouth. 

 Somewhat like a sordid celluloid marriage between the absurdism of Herbert Achternbusch, the female trouble of John Waters, and the unhinged grotesquery of Christoph Schlingensief as directed by the more comically-inclined son of Frans Zwartjes, Charley is an indisputably original and belligerently daring work that somehow even manages to make incestuous father-daughter pedophilia seem funny. Of course, not a single one of the characters in the film is realistically portrayed, as the film feels like what might if someone tried to translate a sardonic libertine comic into cinematic form. Indeed, Charley is almost terroristically tongue-in-cheek, as if van Gogh made the film solely to see how much he could get away with artistically, so it quite easy to see why some humorless camel jockey would get so enraged by his work that he would violently slaughter the filmmaker. As is especially apparent during the hysterical conclusion, a good part of van Gogh’s film was improvised. Indeed, apparently the director’s publisher van Wulften (who had just published a book of the director's poetry featuring illustrations by Dutch cartoonist Eric Schreurs) not only gave him funding for the film, but also the use of his house, workshop, employees, and even children (during the first couple seconds of the film, a naked toddler wearing a party hat appears). While not exactly a masterpiece, Charley is a truly underground comedy in the spirit of early Robert John Downey, Sr. flicks like Chafed Elbows (1966) and Putney Swope (1969), albeit more subversive and iconoclastic.  Indeed, as far as I know, van Gogh's film is the greatest Sapphic cannibal serial killer flick ever made.

-Ty E

Adam & Yves

As far as rare porn flicks that are drenched in shameless yet distinctly cultivated cinephilia, you probably cannot do better than the Franco-America homo hardcore flick Adam & Yves (1974) directed by French-born yet British-bred avant-garde auteur-pornographer Peter De Rome (The Fire Island Kids, Prometheus). Indeed, a sort of hardcore homo reworking of Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic arthouse magnum opus Last Tango In Paris (1972) made in partial homage to cine-magician Jean Cocteau ‘starring’ Swedish silent screen diva Greta Garbo in her last (and ultimately unauthorized) film appearance and featuring a nasty little nod to Blaxploitation and even an obfuscated hyper-homoerotic ‘tribute’ to Leni Riefenstahl, De Rome’s first feature-length film is a cinephiliac mongrel of a movie that reeks of cinema history just as it does of urine-and-cum-drenched pissoirs. Produced by fellow auteur-pornographer/producer Jack Deveau, who also directed an artsy fartsy fuck flick in the capital of Frogland entitled Le musée (1974) aka Strictly Forbidden that same year, Adam & Yves depicts the brief and strictly anonymous “no strings attached” love affair between an American 'agfay' and a fairy Frenchman in Paris. In fact, De Rome would describe the work, which was originally titled ‘Etoile,’ in his memoir The Erotic World of Peter de Rome (1982) as being more or less a porn flick where virtually every scene is a tribute and/or parody of another film, writing: “The first episode is when he meets a young Frenchman in an unfurnished apartment in circumstances strangely similar to LAST TANGO IN PARIS. From then on, each of their adventures has its film parallel, and it becomes a guessing game to discover which film they are ‘playing’ – from a new and startling view of QUEEN CHRISTINA to an erotic extreme in black exploitation movies; from the extension of Le Sang d'un Poète already described to a discreet voyeur witnessing one of the more singular charms of the bourgeoisie.” On top of cleverly synthesizing cinephilia with cocksucking, Adam & Yves is also quite notable due to its decidedly degenerate depiction of Paris as a historically fucked fetish-ridden nether-realm where proletarian perverts dip bread into piss and eat it as a delicacy (according to De Rome, this is a real French tradition that is referred to as “baba du pauvre”) and old men snatch up the discarded cum-covered tissues of fat old prostitute as if they have discovered gold. Partially inspired by De Rome’s experiences in Paris 25 years before, “the era of the Left Bank, Jean-Paul Sartre and Juliette Greco, students in black and the flowering of the Flore,” had changed everything for the more socio-politically and aesthetically degenerate, Adam & Yves might seem like a curious mess of a ‘Doran Love’ blue movie today, but it is certainly one of the most ambitious, inventive, intelligent, and groundbreaking porn flicks ever made.

Aberrosexual blond Aryan American Adam (played by Michael Hardwick, whose sole other film credit is Boy-napped (1975) co-starring hetero-flexible Hebrew Jamie Gillis) is on vacation in Paris and he loves swarthy frog fellows, but he also complains, “You French guys are all alike…just love them and leave them…isn’t that about it?!” Like the two heterosexual leads of Last Tango In Paris, Adam meets and ultimately buggers his swarthy sub-Europid quasi-lover Yves (Marcus Giovanni) one day in an abandoned apartment and they have been anonymous fuck buddies ever since, as the French fellow finds serious personal relationships—be they sexual or otherwise—to be too “difficult” and refuses to even tell the ever inquisitive American his real name. While Yves proudly professes that he feels like “getting away from people,” extroverted yank Adam feels like “getting closer to them,” hence the dubious status of their romantic relationship. Despite not revealing much about himself, Yves is eager to expose rather repellant French culinary traditions, including a shocking scenario that Adam witnesses where an old frog practices the “old French custom” (a practice that apparently dates back to the 1920s that De Rome once lovingly described as “the poor man’s rum baba”) of dipping his long phallic-like loaf of baguette in the fermenting juices of a ‘pissoir’ (a sort of fancy urban public urinal that was invented by the French and is quite common in Europe cities) so that his bread has more flavor. While Yves reveals a lot to Adam about Paris, the American also describes his experiences as a New Yorker, especially in regard to a special, “day for a lay when the air smelled like a locker room. A day to blow or get blow” when he met a random half-brain-dead 24-year-old ½ Polish/½ Irish mechanic named Bud (played by the hero of Deveau's 1974 cocksucking cult classic Drive) whose “tower of power” he delicately blew. Indeed, like his French buddy, Adam is certainly a fellow that will very likely acquire gay cancer in the next decade or so.

Upon visiting the grave of the debauched Irish dandy poet Oscar Wilde, Yves proclaims to Adam like a truly hopeless queen, “Friendship is so difficult. So delicate. I’m single and have no friends. Only lovers, like poor Oscar Wilde.” The two lovers also demonstrate their sense of solidarity with the Wilde quote, “For his mourners will be outcast men and outcasts always mourn.” Naturally, the two friends also visit the tomb of French poet/cine-magician Jean Cocteau and Adam asks, “Wasn’t it Cocteau who compared France to a cock crowing on a garbage dump?,” to which his French boy toy replies, “no, a dung heap. Takeaway the dung and the cock dies.” Upon taking a pilgrimage to the 11th century Chapelle Saint-Blaise des Simples in Milly-la-Forêt, which Cocteau covered with murals and was buried in as per as personal wishes, Adam looks through a keyhole in a scene in tribute to The Blood of a Poet (1930) aka Le Sang d'un Poète and spots a young Nordic Narcissus (played by Bill young, who starred in Deveau’s Le musée, as well as De Rome’s second feature The Destroying Angel) masturbating for about ten minutes or so in a scene of pure body worship reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 masterpiece Olympia (quite notably, De Rome cited Riefenstahl as one of his influences in the 2011 documentary Fragments: The Incomplete Films of Peter De Rome). Later that night, Adam and Yves play a movie-guessing game quite similar to the one played by the three protagonists of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003) where they act out scenes from old movies. After Yves acts out a scene from the Pre-Code Hollywood flick Queen Christina (1933) starring Greta Garbo and directed by Armenian-American director Rouben Mamoulian, Adam describes how he once spotted the Swedish-born silent diva walking around NYC (indeed, Greta Garbo was shot by De Rome without her knowledge from top of a roof), stating of the experience, “It was one of the most exciting moments of my life…A living legend walking along First Avenue in New York.”

In an undeniably iconic scene leading up to most daringly degenerate segment of Adam & Yves, the two eponymous protagonists drive past movie theatre marquees for various Blaxploitation flicks, including Shaft (1971), Hell Up in Harlem (1973), The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972), The Mack (1973), and Five on the Black Hand Side (1973), among various others, as well as a shot of a billboard of the director’s very own 8-film compilation work The Erotic Films of Peter De Rome (1973). Set to the negrophiliac tribal beats, the Blaxploitation theatre marquee montage then cuts to a vomit-worthy black orgy in an extra-cramped public restroom, of which De Rome described as follows in his memoir: “For the black orgy scene in ADAM & YVES […] I had engaged fifteen actors, but being very much aware of the exigencies of the situation, I was going to take no chances. So on the way over to shoot the scene (which took place in the men’s room of the Lincoln Art Theater), I approached two hustlers on Third Avenue and asked them if they’d like to earn some easy bucks. They were both ready and willing, and my foresight paid off because five of my original fifteen failed to show and I was left with twelve, which is just about what I wanted – and quite enough to cope with in the confines of a ‘can’.” After the genuinely bestial and equally revolting spade gang-screw, Adam prepares to go back to NYC and says his goodbyes to Yves by melodramatically remarking “drive off” and “don’t look back.” After dropping off Adam at an airport, Yves spots an extra-mature Hooker of the rather overweight sort giving a blowjob to an equally fat and old bastard. After the Hooker finishes giving a hummer, she immediately spits the john jism in her mouth into a tissue, which is soon found by an elderly Hobo who is quite exhilarated by his major biological find. In the end, Adam & Yves concludes with the repeating of best line of dialogue from the two protagonists: “Wasn’t it Cocteau who compared France to a cock crowing on a garbage dump? [...] No, a dung heap. Takeaway the dung and the cock dies.”  Indeed, De Rome seems to be saying that both fags and frogs need feces to survive.

Although never mentioning her by name, auteur Peter De Rome would describe his encounter with Greta Garbo that was used for his first feature as follows in his memoir: “Certain real-life situations provided me with scenes throughout the film, in fact. For many years in New York I lived very near a certain very celebrated and solitary lady who I’m sure would prefer to remain anonymous. I would sometimes see her out for a lonely walk and couldn’t resist the opportunity of getting some footage one day when she was passing my house on First Avenue. This I was able to incorporate into the film in a scene which recalls the famous ‘touching’ scene in QUEEN CHRISTINA. So that any filmography now would hardly be complete without her return to the screen in ADAM & YVES!” Interestingly, as the director explained in the documentary Fragments: The Incomplete Films of Peter De Rome (2011) directed by Ethan Reid, he planned to do a gay version of the classic MGM Edmund Goulding movie Grand Hotel (1932) entitled Grand Motel starring kraut queer sex icon Peter Berlin in the role that was originally played by Garbo. Indeed, make no mistake about it, De Rome was not only in love with Golden Age Hollywood, but cinema history in general, with Adam & Yves featuring one of the most bizarrely eclectic collection of film references in cinema history (who else would combine Cocteau with Shaft?!), thereupon demonstrating that Quentin Tarantino’s postmodern fanboy filmmalking gimmick is nothing new, as the little known British bum bandit with an even more unhealthy obsession with jigaboos was doing this decades before the Kill Bill director gave up his career working at a video rental store and began shoving incessant insipid exploitation film references in people's faces. Indeed, I suspect Adam & Yves would be much better known today if it were a simple (and straight) sexploitation flick as opposed to a full-blown blow-boy blue movie. Four years after the release of Adam & Yves, French auteur Jacques Scandelari (Beyond Love and Evil, Monique) would reverse the scenario of De Rome’s film for his work New York City Inferno (1978), which is a much darker flick that anticipates William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) where a Frenchman heads to NYC to look for his boyfriend in the homo underworld and ultimately finds himself engulfed in an absurdly sleazy and scummy leather-fag Sodom. Of course, with his second and dramatically more ominous feature The Destroying Angel, De Rome demonstrated that he was just as proficient at cinematically defiling Poe as he was of Cocteau, but one would not expect anything less from the “grandfather of gay porn.” 

-Ty E

The Destroying Angel (1976)

Aside from a handful of works directed by daring (and, in some cases, deranged) filmmakers like Jonas Middleton (Illusions of a Lady, Through the Looking Glass), Stephen Sayadian aka ‘Rinse Dream’ (Nightdreams, Café Flesh), Curt McDowell (Thundercrack!), and Michael Zen (Falconhead, Falconhead Part II: The Maneaters), there only a handful of avant-garde/arthouse horror porn flicks that have blessed this dark and depraved world, so naturally I always keep a lookout for similarly works themed from this rather idiosyncratic and somewhat inexplicable style of filmmaking. Recently, upon reading about the death of English avant-garde auteur-pornographer Peter De Rome on 21 June 2014 at the rather senile age of 89, I also learned that the fiercely fetishistic filmmaker directed an experimental hardcore homo horror flick entitled The Destroying Angel (1976), which was based on Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 doppelganger-themed short story William Wilson (which was also loosely adapted by German filmakers Stellan Rye and Hanns Heinz Ewers in 1913 as the silent horror flick The Student of Prague aka Der Student von Prag, as well as by Louis Malle in 1968 for the three segment omnibus film Spirits of the Dead aka Histoires extraordinaires) and borrowed its title from Luis Buñuel’s Mexican surrealist masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (1962). As a man who worked as a publicist for David O. Selznick and even worked on Carol Reed’s masterpiece The Third Man (1949) and Vittorio De Sica’s Terminal Station (1953) aka Stazione Termini, De Rome was not exactly the typical gay pornographer as a cultivated and worldly man who began making short avant-garde porn flicks during the mid-1960s for the mere personal pleasure and never expected that he would develop any sort of reputation among art fags and more cultivated porn addicts. After hooking up with fellow auteur-pornographer/producer Jack Deveau (Left-Handed, Drive), De Rome released eight of his shorts under the title The Erotic Films of Peter De Rome and achieved success among both art and porn crowds, thus leading him to directing his first X-rated feature Adam & Yves (1974) which, on top of being more or less a gay take on Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) and being heavily influenced by Jean Cocteau, is also notable for being the last film to feature silent screen diva Greta Garbo. Indeed, due to the fact that De Rome stalked Ms. Garbo around NYC and filmed the reclusive actress against her own will from a rooftop, she would ultimately unwittingly conclude her acting career by unknowingly appearing in a 3-minute scene in a gay porn flick that was made some 30+ years after her last role in George Cukor’s Two-Faced Woman (1941). For his second feature, which like Adam & Yves was produced by Deveau, De Rome decided to mix leather-fags, psychedelic mushrooms, Christian guilt, and a tinge of fascistic imagery for a perversely potent, if not somewhat incoherent, mix of hardcore Poe-esque pornography that will certainly be a more of interest to fans of avant-garde horror than horny homos looking for a cheap squirt ‘n’ spurt aid. Directed by a man who beared a strikingly physical resemblance to Poe, De Rome’s film is, if nothing else, probably the most demented and deranging depiction of a minister’s degeneration into sexually depraved personal purgatory of hallucinatory homo orgies, deleterious doubles, quasi-demonic golden showers, rectum-reaming cucumbers, and less than saintly seed spilling. 

 Caswell Campbell (Timothy Kent) is a sexually inverted minister who has been in the seminary for two years and one day makes the major mistake of taking a break from his religious studies to put into practice his undying fantasies for male flesh and exotic hallucinogenic mushrooms (notably, the books The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by John Allegro and Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality by R.G. Wasson heavily inspired De Rome’s screenplay). Upon taking his sod sabbatical, novice cocksucker Caswell decides to head to a shadowy and equally sleazy NYC leather-fag bar in the sadomasochistic spirit of William Friedkin's Cruising (1980) where he meets a meaty philistine biker buck named Bud (Bill Young) who, being a full-blow degenerate of the morally retarded sort, is proud of the fact that he shares the same name as the crappy America beer. Naturally, curious Caswell reluctantly takes Bud back to his pad near the Brooklyn Bridge, which is adorned with religious and icons, as well as a portrait of Edgar Allen Poe instead of Jesus Christ (indeed, it is quite apparent that something is a little off about the poof protagonist). After Bud insults minister's religious devotion and sexual performance and subsequently leaves his dimly lit apartment, Caswell confronts his double/doppelganger (who his identical from the minister aside from having a bigger cock and much more mangy hair) and for whatever decides to slowly devour a small red mushroom that he has magically found on a small nightstand near his bed. Before Caswell knows it, the mushroom, which he assumes to be a Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria), has sent him into a surrealist sodomite nightmare where he becomes the passive victim in a golden shower orgy involving a brigade shirtless beefy beefcakes sporting tight denim jeans.  Needless to say, Caswell is somewhat troubled by the entire experience of being ritualistically pissed on by a gang of fag phantoms with big pricks.

 After his ugly phantasmagoric night of ritualistic communal urination, Caswell goes by a friend’s house who, for whatever reason, has both a Jewish menorah, as well as a painting of a young Aryan twink wearing an Iron Cross necklace, hanging up in his loft. Needless to say, Caswell meets a dimwitted yet sexually eager twink (Philip Darden) at the party and brings him back to his Brooklyn flat where the two take shrooms and suck cocks. While literally tripping balls, Caswell’s debauched doppelganger abruptly appears and gets in the middle of the sexually aberrant action. Indeed, Caswell watches in horrified amazement as his kinky double grins sadistically while being anally reamed by the minister’s twinkish one-night-stand-man. After the plodding phantom threesome, Caswell decides he needs a break from his spiritual cramp and heads to the beach for a rather lonely vacation of would-be-holy serenity where he even turns down a muscular Mediterranean man for sex. Of course, the debauched doppelganger is not happy about this and appears while Caswell is shaving to tell the minister that, “I’m the air you breathe…the blood in your veins.” After also telling Caswell that he is his “Angel of Light” (but that he can also destroy him), the doppelganger coerces the mentally perturbed minister into getting with the Mediterranean beach boy, who ultimately shoves cucumbers, bananas, and other quasi-phallic items in his holy manhole. In the end, Caswell realize that he was not taking Fly Agaric after all but the similar looking but quite poisonous mushroom Amanita virosa (or “Destroying Angel,” hence the title of the film) and that he will soon die as there is not antidote. Clearly enraged as a young minister who has spent his remaining days living in hardcore sin and only has a couple hours to live, Caswell murders his doppelganger by stabbing him to death through a Cocteau-esque mirror. Dressed in monk-like religious garb, Caswell, who has somehow inherited his alter ego’s mighty phallus, fiercely masturbates onto his own grave, thus spilling his seed onto the ground, which sinks into the earth and produces Amanita muscaria. 

 Not one to play around with puffery in regard to his own films, auteur Peter De Rome wrote regarding the somewhat spastic narrative of The Destroying Angel in his memoir The Erotic World of Peter de Rome (1982): “If not all of this is apparent to the casual viewer of the film, it is partly due to insufficient development of the theme on my part, and partly because the film was undershot, leaving our very creative editor, Bob Alvarez, with a difficult problem which he brilliantly manage to disguised with some virtuosos effects.” Indeed, Alvarez edited a number majorly masturbatory jump-cut montages for the film that give it a certain hyper hallucinatory, psychosexual psychedelic flare, as if the viewer has been sentenced to endure surreally sadistic sexual savagery in some sort of post-counter-culture homo Hades that is ruled over by Fred Halsted. Indeed, The Destroying Angel certainly demonstrates why alpha-Beat William S. Burroughs, who once wrote De Rome a letter of praise describing his own film ideas, described De Rome’s work as “gassy- a real rarity.” Unfortunately, it is quite clear while watching the film that the over-ambitious auteur did not get to fully realize his vision and thus was forced to extend what would have probably made for a nearly immaculate short film into a discernibly fractured work that is barely feature-length.  Aside from the fact that De Rome was unable to shoot all the scenes he needed, the work is also apparently missing a scene featuring Peter Berlin. Indeed, Andy Warhol's 'painting assistant' Rupert Smith probably said it best when he described De Rome's hardcore horror feature as, “a mess but a masterpiece,” as a work that is discernibly flawed yet is a totally singular and strangely effective piece of pernicious pornography that, indeed, despite what politically correct poofs say, proves that homo sex can be horrifying, especially for those the god-fearing sort. Due to the AIDS scare and various other personal reasons, De Rome decided to quit directing artful fuck flicks after The Destroying Angel, complaining in his memoir regarding the pathetic state of porn at the time: “Sadly, what passes now for pornography in movie house plays gay sex films I find infinitely tedious and depressing. Possibly I am in the minority and most people would rather watch graphic scenes of explicit sex no matter how badly filmed. I would rather not. And for this reason I have tended to be relatively unproductive in the last few years. It’s an age-old gripe, and may sound presumptuous, but until and unless I can make the sort of films I want to make, I am not interested in making any.”  Indeed, one can only guess what De Rome would have accomplished had he been given a proper budget to work with, as The Destroying Angel features more authentic horror than anything ever created by a contemporary no-talent zionist psychopathic like Eli Roth. It should also be noted that The Destroying Angel was not the the director's last celluloid excursion in horror, as De Rome went on to play a malicious yet terribly charming man-loving magician in Long Island-based exploitation auteur Nathan Schiff's short Abracadaver! (2008), which was included with the 2012 BFI dvd release The Erotic Films of Peter De Rome, who strikes fear into a married homo-hating heterosexual man and proudly states, “Magic’s quite gay […] How many female magicians do you know? It’s a bit of a boy’s club.”

 On top of being one of the greatest homo hardcore horror flicks ever made, The Destroying Angel should be also noted for being a rare work that attempts to establish the controversial link between homosexuality and religious fanaticism. In his groundbreaking 1886 text Psychopathia Sexualis, revolutionary Teutonic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing recognized that a rather large numbers of gays become seriously mystical-minded and spiritually devout, but more importantly, he recognized the common link between spirituality and sexuality, writing: “But this relationship between religious and sexual feeling also manifests itself on indisputably psychopathological territory. Let it suffice to point to the powerfully active sensuality in the case histories of many religious maniacs, to the colorful mixture of religious and sexual deliria, that is observed so often in psychoses (e.g. among maniacal females who think they are the mother of God and the bearer of God), but most especially in psychoses with a masturbatory basis; finally, let us point to the lustful, gruesome self-flagellation, wounds, self-emasculations, even crucifixions on the basis of a morbid sexual-religious feeling.” Indeed, before he became a highly influential hieromonk for the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia that had an immense spiritual and theological influence on the Occident, Seraphim Rose was a practicing sodomite who only gave up his vice after accepting Orthodoxy.  Of course, the tragic protagonist of De Rome's film was not nearly as strong of a man as Rose. Needless to say, I would not mind hearing Rose's always provocative insights regarding a seemingly personal film like The Destroying Angel, as a work that somehow manages to create an aesthetically and thematically malevolent marriage between Poe, leather-faggotry, spirituality, and psychedelic mushrooms in a way in uniquely unhinged fashion that reeks of abject metaphysical malady. 

-Ty E

Last Tango in Paris

Make no mistake about it, I am no friend of commies, be they of the kosher or shabbos goy persuasion, yet Italy has somehow managed to produce a red or two that I actually respect, though dago Freudian-Marxist Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist aka Il conformist, The Dreamers) is certainly not one of them. Indeed, while I have always regarded Pier Paolo Pasolini as one of my favorite filmmakers, his fellow poet-turned-filmmaker buddy Bertolucci (whose first film, La commare secca (1962) aka The Grim Reaper, was penned by Pasolini) has always rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it is because he degraded the European arthouse film by turning into something akin to a cheap Hollywood product, uses degenerate sex (i.e. incest, anus-fingering, etc) as a cheap gimmick to prove the artistic merit of his work among the right far-left intellectuals and film critics, routinely sexually and emotionally exploits his actors and actresses, and/or because he is a rare Guido Francophile, but Bertolucci is a certainly man I love to hate and easily my least favorite of the great post-WWII Italian directors. Of course, as someone who likes to give credit where credit is due, I must admit I rather enjoyed two of the pinko goombah’s films, La commare secca (1962) aka The Grim Reaper, as well as his Franco-Italian ‘magnum opus’ Last Tango in Paris (1972) aka Ultimo tango a Parigi. Considering it has been at least a decade since I last saw Last Tango in Paris, I recently decided to re-watch it to see if I was not merely hypnotized into liking the film by Maria Schneider’s jumbo jugs and Marlon Brando’s singular brazen butter-loving post-twink performance. It should be noted that both stars of the film went on to say that they felt raped and manipulated by Bertolucci, with Brando refusing to talk to the director for 15 years after the work's release and Schneider even going so far as to describe the auteur as a “gangster and pimp” and even completely disavowing her involvement in the film that made her a famous and international sex icon, once stating, “Last Tango ... first major role […] I regretted my choice since the beginning of my career would have been sweeter, quieter. For Tango, I was not prepared. People have identified with a character that was not me. Butter, about saucy old pigs...Even Marlon with his charisma and class, felt a bit violated, exploited a little in this film. He rejected it for years. And me, I felt it doubly.”

 Indeed, Schneider felt the film “stole her youth” and even described it as her life’s only regret (which is pretty telling considering she was a sexually depraved junky who burned many bridges during her uniquely uneven acting career), yet in my humble opinion, it is easily the greatest and most moving performance she has ever given, thus acting as a rare example where Bertolucci’s manipulative and exploitative directing style has had a somewhat positive outcome. Of course, the most incriminating claim against the Guido pervert is the fact that a proud sexual outlaw and perennial bad boy like Brando of all people would claim that he felt ‘raped’ by Bertolucci, yet the film also gave the On the Waterfront (1954) star his then-stagnating career back. Ultimately, Last Tango in Paris is a pretentious and obscenely overrated proto-artsploitation flick that only has slightly more artistic merit than the typical Tinto Brass fuck flick and it is certainly not the “landmark in movie history” and “movie breakthrough” that purportedly “altered the face of an art form” as kosher critic Pauline Kael lauded it as in her famous puffery-ridden New York Times review, yet the film is undeniably alluring and even sometimes provocative, if not in an oftentimes unintentionally hilarious manner as a piece of patently perverse celluloid pomposity that reminds one why Bertolucci is a self-professed Freudian. Notably, conservative Factory auteur Paul Morrissey thought the film was so wretched and pathetically pretentious that he included a line in his Warhol-produced horror satire Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) where the eponymous character played by Udo Kier states, “To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life in the gallbladder” to mock a famous scene from Bertolucci's film where Brando absurdly states, “until you go right up into the ass of death; right up in his ass until you find the womb of fear, and then maybe, maybe then you'll be able to find him.” Indeed, featuring unsanctioned sodomy of the buttery and unholy sort and Brando taking two fingers up the bum like a seasoned champ of scatology, Bertolucci’s somewhat poorly aged film demonstrates that Swedish master auteur Ingmar Bergman may have been right when he stated the work was “really about homosexuals.” Of course, the director has denied that the film was inspired by any sort of latent homosexuality on his part, stating it was based on a personal sexual fantasy of his that was inspired by how he, “once dreamed of seeing a beautiful nameless woman on the street and having sex with her without ever knowing who she was.” It should also be noted that the film was co-written by French feminist filmmaker Agnès Varda, who based the ending of the work on the death of Jim Morrison, who overdosed on heroin in Paris the previous year. 

 Opening with a curious credit sequence featuring two paintings, Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerback and Study for a Portrait, by gay British figurative painter Francis Bacon, Last Tango in Paris immediately lets the viewer know that they are in store for a superlatively sleazy European arthouse film where post-counter-culture sexual degeneracy of the pseudo-romantic sort is the main selling point. After the credits scene, the viewer is introduced to a majorly melancholy middle-aged American flophouse owner named Paul (Marlon Brando), who screams “Fucking God” while walking aimlessly around Pont de Bir-Hakeim in Paris due to the fact that his beauteous blonde French wife Rosa (played by Veronica Lazar, who went on to star in a number of Bertolucci’s films, including La Luna (1979), The Sheltering Sky (1990), and Besieged (1998)) has just committed suicide by slitting her wrists in a bathtub. While walking around Pont de Bir-Hakeim, Paul spots a hot young 19-year-old frog chick with big tits named Jeanne (Maria Schneider), who is headed to Left Bank to look for an apartment for her and her pompous pansy documentary filmmaker fiancée Tom (Jean-Pierre Leaud) to live together in. Ultimately, Paul follows Jeanne to a dilapidated apartment in Left Bank, speaks French to her a bit with a rather rough American accent, remains silent for a couple minutes or so, and out of nowhere decides to forcefully push the young lady against the wall, rip her panties off, and give her a good old forceful fucking in the crummy flat. While Paul soon leaves without so much as even introducing himself, he returns to the apartment the next day and lays out ground rules to Jeanne regarding how they will meet twice a week to improve one another’s carnal knowledge, but that they will never get to know one another.  Indeed, Paul even bans Jeanne from telling him her name, but naturally curiosity is eventually going to get the best of the cute, if not severely scattered-brained and emotionally erratic, young girl.

 Meanwhile, Jeanne is becoming increasingly annoyed by her effeminate fiancée Tom’s incessant tendency towards following her around with a film crew and filming every single mundane thing she does. Indeed, Tom wants to make a cinéma vérité documentary about Jeanne’s deceased father, who was a hero in the French Foreign Legion that was killed during combat in Algeria in 1958. Indeed, since her immature yet artistically pretentious boy toy is more interested in her long dead daddy than her, Jeanne sees it as only natural to begin a relationship with a lecherous and seemingly half-loony macho American man, who also serves as a depraved father-figure of sorts (in fact, Bertolucci attempted to gain publicity for the film by claiming that Schneider developed a real-life “Oedipal fixation with Brando” during the production). Indeed, as a man whose wife cheated on him and committed suicide in the same flophouse they ran together, Paul has his own problems to worry about and having a random “no strings attached” sexual relationship with a seemingly undefiled young girl seems like just the thing he needs at this rather dark and dreary point in his increasingly intolerable life. When Paul meets with Rosa’s mother (Maria Michi), who wants her daughter to have a proper Catholic burial and receive absolution from a priest, the whacked out widower becomes enraged and screams at his crying mother-in-law, “No! Rose didn’t believe. Nobody believes in the fucking God here! […] The Priest doesn’t want any suicides. The Church doesn’t want any suicides, do they?”  Of course, it seems like Paul is more irked by the fact that his wife committed suicide without writing a suicide note than the fact her mother wants to give her a traditional Catholic funeral.  Indeed, Paul just cannot seem to fathom why his spouse would commit self-slaughter out of the blue, thus hinting that he is a psychopath who lacks the empathy to understand other people, including his own loved ones.  Of course, in the end, Paul will also discover that he does not understand his young Parisian fuck buddy and it will ultimately cost him his rather worthless life.

 Naturally, after a couple passionate coitus sessions, Jeanne wants to know more about the personal life of the old fart who likes talking about farts (at one point, she remarks he has “strong hands,” to which he replies, “The better to squeeze a fart out of you!”) that has been routinely feeding her extra-furry frog pussy. Paul eventually gives into being more confessional after Jeanne describes how she lost her virginity to her first love, who also happened to be her cousin (ironically, the lucky, if not incestuous, fellow’s name was also Paul). After describing his parents as follows, “My father was a drunk. Tough, Whore-fucker, bar-fighter. Super-masculine. And he was tough. My mother was very poetic. Also a drunk” and claiming that one of his earliest memories involved being arrested for being nude in public at his quaint childhood farm community, Jeanne calls him out on what she believes is pure fabricated bullshit and calls him an “egoist,” proclaiming, “your solitude weighs on me.” As punishment for weighing his solitude on her, Jeanne decides to deny Paul sex and proceeds to get kinky all by her lonesome by masturbating. Meanwhile, Paul learns that a degenerate tenant named Marcel (Massimo Girotti) at the flophouse that he and his dead wife managed was carrying on an affair with Rosa around the same time she committed suicide. Of course, Jeanne’s relationship with her fiancée Tom continues to go sour as she is “tired of being raped” by his camera (indeed, it seems Monsieur Leaud was a stand-in of sorts for the director). With both of them suffering from personal misery related to disappointing lovers, Paul decides to spice things up by rubbing butter on Jeanne's virginal rectum and forcibly sodomizing her while forcing her to chant, “Holy family. Church of good citizens. The children are tortured until they tell their first lie. Where the will is broken by repression. Where freedom is assassinated by egotism.” Needless to say, Jeanne, who is assumedly an anal virgin, sobs like a scared child while being bestially sodomized by her eccentric elder. 

 While at a wedding rehearsal with her family and fiancée Tom, Jeanne has a hysterical emotional breakdown of sorts and runs to Paul for safety while still wearing her wedding dress. After taking off her wedding dress, gently bathing her body in a bathtub, and explaining to her that love does not exist, Paul decides to reward Jeanne for her audacious anal courage from the previous day by allowing her to shove her fingers up his middle-aged American porthole, though he forces her to cut her fingernails beforehand. When Paul goes to his dead wife Rosa’s wake, he opts for savagely verbally assaulting his postmortem beloved’s cute corpse by calling her a “cheap, goddamn, fucking, godforsaken whore” and a “goddamn, fucking, pig-fucking liar,” but he ultimately realizes he never really understood her and gets all sentimental, calling her his “sweetheart” and whatnot by the end of his rather unconventional attempt at (non)mourning. More than anything, Paul wants to know why Rosa committed suicide in the first place and he also wishes he had the gall to do the same.  Luckily, Jeanne will eventually give him the chance to end his miserable life of endless internal suffering. Rather disconcerted by the fact that he cannot make sense of his wife's suicide, Paul abruptly decides to stop meeting Jeanne at her apartment for salacious sex sessions, which naturally shatters the rather naïve young girl, so she decides to go patch things up with Tom, who proves to be a bourgeois bore. Of course, Paul eventually has a change of heart and when he randomly spots Jeanne walking down the street one day, he tries to reconcile with her and begins telling her about his personal life as a lonely widower who owns a sleazy hotel, but she tells him that their relationship is over and that she is marrying Tom. While Jeanne eventually confesses to Paul that she loves him, she will not back down regarding her decision to end their relationship, so the exceedingly egotistical American pervert only becomes all the more determined to make her his perennial fuck-buddy, even though he is really only using her as a fleshy tool to get over the untimely self-slaughter of his belated wife. After getting drunk at a café where a tango contest is taking place (hence, the title of the film!), Paul coerces Jeanne into tangoing with him and while they are doing so, she begins to jerk him off, but during mid-hand-job, she has a panic attack and runs away like a scared little girl to her mommy’s apartment. Of course, Paul chases Jeanne down and corners her in her mother’s apartment. After Paul asks Jeanne her name for the first time and she tells him it, the sexually aggressive American deadbeat decides to lunge at her, thus resulting in romantic tragedy. After assumedly unconsciously deciding she is no longer interested in fucking her sad and pathetic pseudo-father-figure because he is no longer intriguing (after all, she now knows everything she needs to know about him), Jeanne symbolically pulls out her deceased daddy’s military service revolver and blows away Brando with a bullet to the belly. Of course, like most desperate and scornful women looking for a rather shameless way to get out of legal trouble relating to a lover who has fallen out of favor, Jeanne cravenly decides that she will tell the police that Paul tried to rape her and that she was only defending herself. Indeed, in the end, Paul ironically went “right up into the ass of death.” 

 After watching Last Tango in Paris, it is easy to see why Maria Schneider rapidly degenerated into an emotional trainwreck of a junky with no sex appeal who ruined her chance of being in countless great films, including surrealist maestro Luis Buñuel’s masterful swansong That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Indeed, among other things, she destroyed Jacques Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round (1981) and even quit the production before it was actually finished, thus forcing the director to hire a stand-in to play her role. While in Rivette’s film Schneider clearly looks like ‘damaged goods’ with an intolerably bitchy demeanor, she seems quite fresh and virginal in Last Tango in Paris, thus hinting that the actress may have been somewhat right when she proclaimed the film ruined her life, even if she was already engaged in hard drug use and sexual debauchery at the time. Shortly after she died from cancer on 3 February 2011 at age 58, Bernardo Bertolucci publicly stated regarding Schneider, “Her death came too soon, before I could hold her again tenderly, and tell her that I felt connected to her as on the first day, and for once, to ask her to forgive me,” and even went so far as to admit, “Maria accused me of having robbed her of her youth and only today am I wondering whether there wasn't some truth to that.” Of course, as his similar dubious use of young actors like American twink Michael Pitt (Boardwalk Empire, Funny Games), sensual French Jewess Eva Green (Kingdom of Heaven, Casino Royale), and French avant-garde auteur Philippe Garrel’s son Louis Garrel (whose godfather is Last Tango star Jean-Pierre Léaud) in The Dreamers (2003) demonstrates, Bertolucci has only grown more eager with age to use youthful actors as masturbatory tools for his own overtly fetishistic fantasies. Indeed, like his epically mundane Marxist epic 1900 (1976) aka Novecento, which features two unclad little boys more or less masturbating, Last Tango in Paris features naked children, including a completely pointless scene where a little boy proudly defecates in Schneider’s company. Indeed, as much as I think Sigmund Freud was an anti-Aryan quack whose main objective with his studies was subverting the morality of the Occident, it would certainly be interesting to see what he would have to say about Bertolucci’s films, especially Last Tango in Paris, which features incest, obsessive anal fixations, scatology (ranging from defecating little boys to buttery yet brutal bum-fucking), eccentric Electra complexes, and rape fantasies, among countless other things that make it quite clear that the director would have probably been put into a gulag if his lifelong dream of Italy degenerating into a communist hellhole had actually been realized. When Ingmar Bergman stated of the film that it “was really about homosexuals, and only in those terms did the film make sense and become interesting,” Bertolucci replied by stating, “I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.” Personally, I interpreted the film as celluloid sexual sadism and exceedingly enthusiastic degeneracy disguised as cinematic poetry, but then again, that is arguably the film’s greatest appeal as a piece of unintentionally absurd con-artistry directed by Italy’s foremost commie conman filmmaker. 

-Ty E

Loads

A couple months ago, I went to a closing sale for Baltimore’s greatest video rental chain in the hope that I would be able to purchase some rare gems at a discounted price. The owner of this now defunct video chain is a rather goofy and borderline obese Hebrew with a perfectly circular bald-spot on the back of his head who I once overhead discussing to one of his equally bloated kosher comrades about how the Jewish diamond industry is just as sketchy as the film industry, which I certainly do not doubt. Anyway, during the closing sale, I managed to find a VHS compilation tape entitled Loads of McDowell featuring the eponymous short Loads (1980) and a couple other short films directed by American underground queer auteur Curtis McDowell, who is undoubtedly best known for his campy and semi-pornographic epic “old dark house” horror parody Thundercrack! (1975). Assuming the video would be only a couple dollars or so, I eagerly approached the Judaic proprietor of the business and asked him how much it cost, only to discover that the shameless penny-pincher wanted $70 for the single VHS tape (!), with his absurd reasoning being that it is out-of-print and he could not find a single copy of the film online for sale, so it must be worth a lot of money. Needless to say, I rejected the old miser’s offer and told him that I would go download the film somewhere online that same day, which I did. Indeed, if not solely for novelty reasons, I had to see a film with the proudly sleazy title ‘Loads’ and, to my surprise, the wantonly titled work was even more decidedly depraved and debasing than I suspected it would be. While I was expecting loads and loads of tasteless campiness as is typical of auteur McDowell's oeuvre, the short turned out to be about 19 minutes of camp-free unhinged faggotry of the scum-and-cum-lathered sort where the colon-choking director sucks off a couple swarthy and ugly short men of the ostensibly heterosexual sort and describes in disgustingly degenerate detail about his sick love for straight men. Shot on scratched 16mm black-and-white film stock in a mostly dilapidated apartment that looks condemned and starring a couple longhaired and tastelessly tattooed losers who look like they just were released from the drunk tank of an urban Irish-American ghetto, Loads is certainly full-blown pornography, but due to its overwhelming aesthetic odiousness and amateurish home-movie-style, McDowell somehow managed to sell it as cinematic art to art fags and gay rights activists. Apparently inspired by former Miss Oklahoma and Florida Citrus Commission spokesman Anita Bryant’s moral crusade against cum-guzzling (which she depicted as something akin to vampiric cannibalism), Loads is more or less a micro-movie manifesto-cum-diary that makes it quite clear why director-narrator-star-agitator McDowell died of AIDS in 1987. 

 As Indiana-bred bum bandit McDowell describes via narration at the beginning of Loads, he met his first heterosexual victim—a bodybuilder with a small stature—at a bath house and since “there weren’t very many women to go around,” the straight muscleman eventually settled for “second best” and went home with the hyper horney homo director of the film. Of course, McDowell did not mind being the man's second choice as he gets really “turned on by straight men” and eagerly paid the less than buff Bodybuilder to spill his straight seeds onto some vintage porno magazines featuring bodacious babes with big boobs and even bigger bushes. To the delight of the terribly debauched director, the Bodybuilder started a “chain reaction” in regard to eager gay-for-pay rednecks, as various heterosexual hicks of the swarthy and seemingly racially mongrelized sort became enticed by the prospect of being paid to do hand-to-gland combat for an exceedingly effete Midwestern mud-packer. Needless to say, some of the prole pole-strokers were somewhat baffled by McDowell’s fetishistic requests, or as the director explains, one of the men “didn’t understand why I wanted to film him peeing…especially laying underneath his legs.” Probably the dumbest of all the pseudo-hetero hillbillies is a guy who hooked up with McDowell solely because he wanted the countless trashy tattoos covering his stocky and hairy body immortalized on film. When McDowell got “bored or daring” he sucked off a guy that he describes as being like “a crude little monster of a boy” at a semen-soaked porno theater. As one can expect from a film directed by an exceedingly eager inspector of manholes, Loads concludes with a climatic collage of climaxing cocks, with McDowell having loads upon loads unloaded on his face, including his conspicuously gay leather-fag-like mustache.  Indeed, if you ever wondered why homos have a thing for mustaches, McDowell's sperm-burper-themed short has the rather appalling answer.

 Featuring director McDowell performing what some pretentious gay studies professor might describe as “avant-garde anilingus” on a man whose gooseberry grinder is more furry than the armpit of a middle-aged Mexican barmaid, Loads is certainly less artistically inclined than the works of auteur pornographers like Fred Halsted and Jack Deveau and thus does not seem particularly groundbreaking, especially where artsy fartsy queer blue movies are concerned. Indeed, whereas Halsted was a bone-braking and ass-fisting alpha, McDowell was, as his lo-fi homo home-videos demonstrate, a passive ‘power bottom’ who literally had to pay to play when it came to finding performers. Undoubtedly, compared to the director's campy cocksucker horror-comedy epic Thundercrack!, Loads seems more like a plodding premature ejaculation, even if it is probably McDowell’s most personal, incriminating, and visceral work (indeed, how many other filmmakers have filmed themselves slurping up the less than sanitary spratz of countless dirtbag dudes who look like they could be bastard son of Charles Manson?!). Considering she felt one of the longhaired gay-for-pay heteros bared a striking resemblance to her own father, my girlfriend (indeed, she and I are probably the only couple in the entire world that watches vintage gay/lesbian porn together) found Loads to be a rather revolting experience, though that did not stop her from laughing at McDowell's obsessive, if not poorly articulated, anecdotes regarding his commitment to turning bad boys into joy boys. Of course, McDowell’s short does feature some scenes of accidental comic relief, as demonstrated by narrated remarks from the director like, “Then there was the one who was really uncommunicative. I directed him to say “suck it.” He said “suck it” so realistically that I sucked it with gusto” and “It’s such a beautiful, thick ass. I would have loved to have stuck my dick in there.”

Concluding with McDowell saying, “fuck his ass” in a rather animalistic fashion and a man moaning as a result of an orgasm after assumedly being savagely skull-buggered by McDowell, Loads is ultimately poof celluloid poetry in its most unsophisticated form as a sort of American proletarian equivalent to Jean Genet's avant-garde short A Song of Love (1950) aka Un chant d'amour, thereupon most likely only being of interest to old school porn addicts, underground film fanatics, and those majorly masochistic individuals who wallow in asinine aberrosexual aesthetic torture. With its pornographic depiction of a group of mostly short, swarthy, and ugly men who would probably repulse 99.9% of heterosexual women and gay men, Loads ultimately proves that, if nothing else, McDowell was certainly right about one thing when once remarked, “No one is a sex object, but anyone can be a sex subject.” 

-Ty E