Luger

Upon reading up on assassinated Dutch auteur Theo van Gogh (Loos, Blind Date), I encountered an unintentionally hilarious article written by some do-gooder leftist pussy type where the slave-morality-driven author makes various pathetic attacks on the director’s personal character. In regard to van Gogh’s first feature Luger (1982), this certain hysterical and culturally cuckolded writer, who will go unnamed, made the following complaint: “Already in his first movie […] Van Gogh, with sadistic pleasure, had a gangster push his pistol in a woman’s vagina.” Indeed, to the limp-wristed pansy liberal’s credit, van Gogh’s first feature is a limp-wristed pansy liberal’s worst celluloid nightmare (in fact, when the film was first released, various Dutch film critics used the typical pathetic neo-Trotskyite buzzwords like “fascist” and “anti-Semitic” to criticize the film), as a work that not only features not a single so-called “person of color,” but also includes rather uproarious jokes at the expense of women, cripples, negroes, innocent animals, and other specially protected groups that devout leftists (aka spiritual eunuchs) with slave moralities feel the need to hysterically defend as if they are protecting their gods. Of course, considering that most active left-wingers are completely humorless, the hysterical libertine humor of a film like Luger would be totally lost on them. A severely sardonic (anti)film noir flick that makes a total mockery of the entire classic Hollywood film style it parrots starring now-popular Dutch actor Thom Hoffman (Dogville, Black Book) in his first ‘major’ film role, van Gogh's daring directorial debut is a rare cinematic work that features uncompromising contempt for virtually everyone and everything. Hell, auteur van Gogh would once even confess regarding his intent 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.” Since one of Van Gogh’s angry ex-girlfriends threw one of two total existing prints of the film into a canal, the film was impossible to find until rather recently after the surviving print was discovered at the filmmaker’s home after he was assassinated by a ticked-off towelhead in 2004. Naturally, after having South Africa auteur Aryan Kaganof, who collaborated with van Gogh on a couple projects (the Dutch filmmaker appeared as a freaky foot fetishist in Kaganof's 1992 avant-garde short La séquence des barres parallèles), tell me that Luger was an “absolute masterpiece,” I had to see it and after actually viewing the work, I can happily report that it is as charmingly fucked as I expected it would be, albeit in a fiercely farcical fashion that one might describe as the sort of slapstick comedy that an ex-SS man with Alzheimer's disease might enjoy, as an innately iconoclastic piece of strangely aesthetically potent black-and-white celluloid grit that makes a valiant attempt to offend all viewers, despite whatever race, class, sex, gender, and/or creed they may belong to. 

 In the first couple minutes of Luger, the viewer is introduced to the eponymous antihero played by Thom Hoffman (back when he used to go by the name ‘Tom Ancion’) as he liquidates a bunch of bleach blonde babes at a night club in what is truly a disco bloodbath. When Chris Luger slowly and gently puts his prized black leather gloves on a ritualistic fashion, you know he is about to kill someone, but otherwise it is hard to know what his next move will be because he is as cold as ice to the point of parody and he has a fiercely flat affect, especially when murdering or committing some other sort of wicked act. The antihero hates modern Hague as the city is “getting black” and “speed heads are too lazy to work,” not to mention the fact that he apparently works for “men who sit on their asses all day,” but that does not stop him from collecting a monthly negro-approved welfare check. As Luger explains, his ultimate goal is to get rich quick so he can buy a castle in Palm Spring and tell his butler: “James, throw another nigger on the fire.” After failing to take the “cherry” of a crippled 21-year-old “spoiled bitch” named Eve in front of her sailor grandfather (he was quite excited about seeing the untimely deflowering of his granddaughter and even paid the deranged Dutch gangster to do it), Luger learns from a friend that: “Jews don’t deal in gold but in diamonds. Gold it too heavy. They have to travel light. That’s why they’re into diamonds.” Luger decides he also wants to “travel light” like a member of god's chosen tribe, so he conspires to kidnap the retarded daughter of a millionaire named Marsjaupt so he can ask for a ransom of “half a million in diamonds,” which he plans to sell to a wealthy “freaked out faggot” named Repsure that he knows from Central Park. Unfortunately, Marsjaupt is a miserly old bastard and he is not going to give away half a million dollars worth of “girl’s best friend” to save the retarded daughter that he is probably more than glad to get rid of in the first place. On top of not getting his ransom money, Luger has to clean and bath mental invalid Lelia (Laurien Hildering) who, being a worthless retard and all, constantly shits and pisses in her panties like a newborn baby. Of course, the psychopathic would-be-gangster does find some use for Lelia, as he gets her to help him kill a couple cats just for kicks by putting them in a dryer. Meanwhile, Luger starts a bizarre relationship with an overweight ex-nurse named Esther (Frieda Ysebaert) who proclaims to love the pope and seems to have latent lesbian tendencies (or so one would assumed based on her bull-dyke-like appearance and lack of dainty dame qualities).  Of course, Luger ultimately finds himself falling for Lelia.

 At one point, Luger attempts to get Lelia to rape Esther, but he ultimately decides to put his pistol in the old slag's pussy instead, hilariously stating, “you have to cock it first” before putting a hole through her fleshy hole. Upon first meeting Esther, Luger confesses that he wishes he could be reincarnated as a legless SS man, stating: “I’d come back as an SS officer without legs. I’d be called Hocus Pocus. Hocus Pocus in a wheelchair. I’d ride along the beach with little boys on my lap. I’d give them my gun and say: Shoot the fish. But give me your fishing rod. I’d tie it to my wheelchair with your Tampax on the hook.” When Luger manages to get what he believes is diamonds and attempts to sell them to queer criminal queen Repsure, he is told they are nothing but worthless glass. Repsure also tells Luger that he is a third rate criminal and “talented whore” who should know that, “Diamonds are for Jews. Not for a bastard like you.” Needless to say, Luger puts the “freaked out faggot” in his place. While Luger never achieves the great wealth he so eagerly craved, he does end up exterminating a number of people and even seems to fall in love with a retard, who he lovingly adorns with a dog collar. Ironically, in the end, invalid Lelia kills Luger. Indeed, during what seems like a mock symbolic wedding at a train station, Luger makes the major mistake of handing his trusty Luger to his prisoner Lelia who, despite being rather retarded, immediately shoots and kills her crazed kidnapper.  No doubt, Lelia ultimately proves to be the most subtle and calculating yet simultaneously exceedingly retarded femme fatale in film noir history in the end. Undoubtedly, it is hard to discern whether or not Luger has a happy ending, but it certainly has a hilarious ending to what is overall a hilarious film. 

 In her book Radical State: How Jihad is Winning Over Democracy in the West (2010), kosher conservative journalist Abigail R. Esman wrote: “Theo van Gogh's first film, LUGER, premiered on April 8, 1982. It was by no means a great film, or even, by many accounts, a good film. It was, however, certainly a controversial one, one which would have allowed its producer plenty of notoriety and recognition no matter what his last name might have been: it was for LUGER that Van Gogh created his infamous scene, with the two cats in a washing machine. It was tasteless. It was an unnecessarily dramatic performance in the breaking of rules. It was shock for shock's sake. But it was quintessential Theo: he had something to say, and he was damn well going to say it.” Of course, what the Jewess forgets to mention about van Gogh’s film is that it features many jokes at the expenses of Judaics like herself, which is a big “no, no” in the pathetically philo-Semitic Netherlands. Indeed, aside from criticizing Jews for always complaining about the holocaust and incessantly using the ‘Shoah card’ to deflect attention from Israel’s less than kosher treatment of the Palestinians and whatnot, van Gogh wrote hilarious pieces about “copulating yellow stars in the gas chamber” and even once wrote an article during the 1980s for the Amsterdam University magazine Folia about Dutch Jewish writer Leon de Winter regarding something called the “Treblinka love game” where the Semitic scribbler put a “piece of barbed wire” around his already mutilated circumcised member. Indeed, maybe the director’s assassin Mohammed Bouyeri should have considered van Gogh’s more anti-Zionist qualities before killing him, as few other Dutchman have the gall to question the Jewish question. Apparently, the director was convinced that, despite receiving death threats from crazed camel jockeys after the release of his short film Submission (2004), no one would ever actually kill him because, “Nobody kills the village idiot.” Indeed, Luger is certainly the perverse product of a village idiot, but a rather jovial idiot who was too sophisticatedly sardonic for his own good, hence why a group of medieval-minded muzzie morons did not get his jokes. Somewhat in the spirit of Fassbinder’s early ‘avant-garde’ gangster flicks like Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) and Gods of the Plague (1970) due to its European-flavored deconstruction and wicked mutation of the film noir style, albeit replacing Teutonic Weltschmerz with distinctly deranged Dutch dark humor, Luger may not be a cinematic masterpiece, but it is certainly a masterpiece of ideally iconoclastic absurdism. For those interested, the film also features a Hitchcockian cameo by van Gogh from his pre-beer-gut years. 

-Ty E