Pierrot Lunaire: Butch Dandy!

Somewhat ironically, around the same time he was putting together his most mainstream and accessible work to date, Gerontophilia (2013), Canadian-born alpha-homocore auteur Bruce LaBruce (Hustler White, Otto; or Up with Dead People) began assembling what would ultimately be the most experimental, artsy fartsy, obnoxiously avant-garde, and innately inaccessible film of his career to date. Indeed, LaBruce decided to direct an experimental film based on Arnold Schönberg’s atonal melodramatic ‘anti-opera’ Pierrot Lunaire (1912), which he had previously directed a couple of live performance of in March 2011 at the prestigious Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) theatre in Berlin, Germany. While LaBruce had two different performances of the play filmed for posterity, he later decided that he wanted to pay tribute to German Expressionism and silent cinema and got his usual producer, Teutonic pornographer Jürgen Brüning (who has produced virtually all of LaBruce’s films, including The Raspberry Reich (2004) aka The Revolution Is My Boyfriend and L.A. Zombie (2010)), to back the immortalization of his sexually unhinged Schönberg reworking in cinematic form, thus siring a curious celluloid photoplay that seems like it was directed by the bastard broad of F.W. Murnau and Ulrike Ottinger. Of course, aside from featuring the 21 selected poems from Otto Erich Hartleben's German translation of Albert Giraud's cycle of French poems of the same name that were featured in Schönberg’s original version of Pierrot Lunaire, LaBruce’s version features a more prominent parallel story written by the director that was based on a supposed true story/gay urban legend about a Toronto ‘proto-transman’ (female-to-male transvestite) who in 1978 cut off the cock of a taxi driver and attached it to ‘himself’ after his opulent girlfriend’s wealthy father forbid his daughter from seeing him upon learning that he was really a she. For better or worse, LaBruce ultimately assembled what is the most genitally confused (anti)love story since Rainer Werner Fassbinder's singularly tragic masterpiece In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978) aka In a Year of 13 Moons, though the film also seems to pay tribute to the arthouse splatter films of Berlin-based blond beast Jörg Buttgereit (who LaBruce once went on a date with for an episode of the ZDF/ARTE show Durch die Nacht mit... aka Into the night with...). A nightmarishly grotesque (as well as grotesquely nightmarish) tale of transman penis envy where LaBruce pays questionable tribute to Schönberg's supposed love of the Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol with scenes of castration (or “Dick-capitation!” as it is described in one of the film's various inter-titles) and buckets of blood that are splattered across the screen in a somewhat fetishistic fashion, Pierrot Lunaire: Butch Dandy! (2014) is postmodern celluloid at its most literally and figuratively perverse where literal pornography, gutter grade splatter cinema, and Hebraic anti-Romantic musical atonality are combined in such an aberrantly obnoxious and gleefully obscene way that not even Oswald Spengler or Volker Spengler could have foreseen such flagrant and fanatical cultural decay. 

 As someone that has unfortunately seen more films directed by kraut carpet-muncher Monika Treut (Seduction: The Cruel Woman, Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities) than I care to admit, I must admit that I find female-to-male transsexuals to be rather repellent in both appearance and character, as if they are gigantic little boys with perennially dry vaginas. Of course, LaBruce decided to go one step further in terms of the eponymous transsexual protagonist of Pierrot Lunaire by also making the character a lowlife wigger from the projects who sports goofy baggy pants and the sort of flashy basketball shoes that could get you shot in certain culturally diverse American cities. Although a sort of medium-length film at 51-minutes, the work features a very scant and superficial storyline that could have easily been told with a 5-minute short, but LaBruce decided to put more emphasis on atmosphere and aesthetics in what basically amounts to a sexually schizophrenic transman psychodrama and operatic orgy of blood where castration, swarthy male strippers, baldheaded capitalist pigs, and Teutonic diva Nico become objects of sick obsession. Indeed, aside from the fact that the lead resembles the butch cyber-dykes of her fiercely fucked films, LaBruce's Schönberg adaptation has much in common with the the works of Austrian transman A. Hans Scheirl (Flaming Ears, Dandy Dust) in terms of its queer Blitzkrieg of nonstop aesthetic aberrance sans the primitive stop-motion animation and kaleidoscopic colors (though LaBruce decided to add color to certain bodily fluids). Notably, for the scenes emphasizing the protagonist’s considerably unhinged mind, LaBruce opted to insert segments from the two different stage performances of Pierrot Lunaire that he had filmed, thus the film has two layers (on top of Albert Giraud's lyrics) that really drive home the tragic mental derangement of the titular lead. Indubitably, LaBruce’s film is probably the closest thing that transmen have to a sort of Tristan and Isolde or Orpheus and Eurydice in terms of tragic romance unless you count mainstream melodramatic twaddle like Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don't Cry (1999). 

 While the lyrics from Schönberg’s original version are sung/spoken in German (lead Susanne Sachße apparently spent 4-6 months receiving voice lessons to prepare for the role), the parallel story written by LaBruce is told via English language inter-titles, thereupon adding another layer to the already eclectically schizophrenic character and culturally mongrelized essence of Pierrot Lunaire, which would probably be nothing short of aesthetic terrorism for most viewers, including those super serious sort of cinephiles that diddle themselves to the latest Criterion Collection cover art. As told via an inter-title at the beginning of the film, “As our story begins, our hero, Pierrot Lunaire, and his girlfriend, Columbine, are out on a date…” Considering Pierrot Lunaire (played by Susanne Sachße, who previously engaged in unsimulated heterosexual sex while portraying the lead in LaBruce’s The Raspberry Reich) is a white woman who pretends s/he is a black man, her idea of a date is watching his lecherous hooker-like girlfriend Columbine (Maria Ivanenko) do a striptease in front of headlights while sipping on vodka inside of her car and yelling crude things at her hoe. Ultimately, Columbine proves to be a sort of cocktease and fails to completely strip for her boyfriend (I guess LaBruce was against having a naked woman in his film), which somewhat disappoints her cock-less and ball-less beau. After their less than eventful date is over, pseudo-pimp Pierrot heads back to his home in the projects and on the way decides to take a leak, thus revealing, “A sandbag for a cock!” Indeed, the pecker-less protagonist complains, “Oh mortal travesty and foul indignity that I must squat to pee!” while urinating in the snow just like any biological girl would (notably, while the film is mostly in black-and-white, LaBruce opted to colorize the urine-covered snow). Poor prick-less protagonist Pierrot also complains, “A curse upon these two onerous appendages!” and “What have I done to deserve such a grievous fate?” upon grabbing her pesky mammary glands while making a strange face that is a cross between abject disgust and melancholy. In a scene featuring the inter-title “Zombie Pierrot!,” Pierrot’s decidedly daunting body dysmorphia is reflected in shots where her face takes on warped shapes worthy of Francis Bacon. Of course, when Columbine’s wealthy father discover that his little girl is dating a chick that wished she had a dick instead of a real mensch and ultimately forbids her from seeing the protagonist, Pierrot's lunacy inevitably reaches murderous proportions. 

 When Columbine’s “fat capitalist pig father” (Boris Lisowski) comes to see Pierrot perform at a sleazy neo-Weimar cabaret, he soon asks “What kind of buggery is this?,” grabs the protagonist’s hidden bandage-wrapped tits, and declares, “I’m going to get to the bottom of this if it’s the last bottom I get to.” After Pierrot’s pants are pulled down, a curious inter-title reading “Wikileaked!” appears and Columbine’s father triumphantly declares, “Just as I suspected! Your mister is a sister!” upon exposing the pseudo-dude that is defiling his daughter. Naturally, Columbine’s father forbids his daughter from ever seeing Pierrot again, telling her, “As far as you’re concerned, Pierrot no longer exists!” and “You will only see him again over my dead body!” While there is no evidence that they have even attempted to have sex with one another, Pierrot is hopelessly in love with his superlatively slutty-looking girlfriend and s/he is willing to do anything to get her back. While watching a super swarthy baldheaded butch bro strip at a queer cabaret, Pierrot has an epiphany and declares, “I know what I must do to win back my love.” In a long and torturous scene emphasizing the protagonist’s rather insane plan, Pierrot is featured lurking around while sporting a strap-on dildo and carrying a butcher knife in a Norman Bates-esque fashion. After declaring, “The hunting ground: a house of burlesque!,” Pierrot watches a male stripper masturbate to the point of ejaculation and declares while watching the unwitting would-be-victim’s cock, “And what a prize package it is!” in a scene that is juxtaposed with a shitty electronic dance song that features trashy lyrics like, “...in the name of pussy fixation.” Pierrot’s obsession with cutting off the stripper’s cock is depicted in a variety of grotesque ways, including, “A Glory Hole Guillotine” that castrates the thug-like male whore’s massive member in one swift chop. In another scene emphasizing LaBruce's signature fag fetish for guys and guts, blood is splattered on a triple-screen scene of the male stripper dancing from various angles. Of course, the actual castration is much less romantic than Pierrot thinks it will be. 

 Despite being a pseudo-masculine lowlife wigger of sorts, Pierrot seems to feel a certain degree of kinship with German singer-songwriter and one-time Warhol superstar Nico (aka Christa Päffgen), as s/he visits her grave and acts as if s/he is praying at it for good luck. After pseudo-heroically declaring, “Sweet Columbine! Soon I will prove to your fat capitalist pig father that I’m a real man!,” Pierrot gets involved with “roid rage” and begins shooting steroids in her ass like it is heroin, as if it will give her enough strength to physically overpower a man so that he can chop his member off. When it comes time for Pierrot to finally dismember the male stripper’s member, Pierrot pretends to engage in bum-buggery with the prick-peddler, but things go terribly wrong when the protagonist whips out a straight razor instead of her imaginary cock. Indeed, not only does the male stripper get away totally unscathed with his meaty member left perfectly intact, but he also mocks Pierrot for not having a purple-headed monster of his own, thus leaving the tragic transman exceedingly embarrassed and heartbroken. Ultimately, Pierrot decides to go for a much easier target and cuts of the hoe-handle of a Hindu taxi driver (Krishna Kumar Krishnan). Indeed, while the Indian cabby has a different skin color and his schlong is predictably considerably smaller than that of the male stripper, the colored castrated cock somehow seems like a fitting fit for Pierrot, who stares at the dismembered member with considerable intrigue immediately after hacking it off the hapless Hindu and then thinks to himself, “A cock of one’s own.” After somehow attaching the brown bald-headed bandit to his body, Pierrot heads to his beloved Columbine’s house while sporting a hoodie and looking like Trayvon Martin’s albino doppelganger. When Columbine and her father answer the door after Pierrot knocks, the protagonist proudly displays her new bloody tanned schwantz but the two react by just staring with expressions of abject disgust and shock. As reflected in a dream-sequence that reveals how warped the protagonist’s psyche really is, it becomes clear that Pierrot truly believes that his new stolen flim-flam has turned her into a real man. Of course, one can only speculate where Pierrot and Columbine’s relationship is headed, but it is quite dubious as to whether the protagonist will be able to rise of the occasion when he takes his beloved into the bedroom. 

 While academics claim that the Nazis labeled Arnold Schönberg’s work as “Entartete Musik” (aka “degenerate music”) simply because the composer was a Zionist and member of the Judaic tribe, it had more to do with the fact that his atonal music was considered a pathetic mockery of the medium and nothing short of “cultural Bolshevism” (notably, Schönberg’s Aryan student Anton Webern was a pan-German who more or less supported Nazism, yet his music was criticized for the same reasons as his Hebraic teacher). Indeed, in terms of his subversion and destruction of the Aryan model of music, Schönberg is like what Freud was to psychology, Franz Boas was to anthropology, and Einstein was to physics, hence why he was beloved by the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School like Theodor W. Adorno and far-left filmmakers like Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who cinematically adapted his unfinished opera Moses und Aron aka Moses and Aaron in 1973 and would direct another two films based on the composer’s work. Interestingly, it was not Bruce LaBruce but a Belgradian conductor named Premil Petrovic who is friends with star Susanne Sachße that ultimately came up with the idea to rework Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, yet I think no other film director was better suited for the job as the Canadian homocore auteur indubitably follows in the same counter-tradition of aesthetically obnoxious and anti-pulchritudinous degenerate art. After all, it is quite fitting that a Canadian cocksucker of German descent would defile the work of a heterosexual Hebrew who debased German music and culture. Despite not even really being familiar with the composer’s life or work before taking on the project, LaBruce managed to echo the Expressionistic horrors of the composer’s paintings with Pierrot Lunaire in a fashion that might lead one to believe that the filmmaker is actually a longtime Schönberg fan-boy and not someone that grew up listening to second-rate punk bands. In terms of its theatrical style and emphasis on classical music, the film is indubitably the closest that LaBruce will ever come to obtaining Prussian auteur Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Wagernian ideal of the cinematic ‘Gesamtkunstwerk.’ Arguably most importantly, LaBruce’s Pierrot Lunaire is quite possibly the most potent example as to how far German kultur has degenerated aesthetically, morally, and spiritually since the capitulation of the 6th Army in the Battle of Stalingrad. Indeed, more wanton than the worst of Weimar and more grotesque than the childish caricatures of kraut commie troll George Grosz, LaBruce’s film is truly aberrant apocalyptic art that more than epitomizes the slogan at the 1937 Nazi Entartete Kunst exhibit: “Madness becomes method.” 

-Ty E

“Criminally Insane”

Screw deluded fat acceptance morons, it has been my personal experience that the most cunty, ruthless, hateful, and just plain evil women I have ever met were also lard asses that no normal man would touch with a ten foot pole, thus I consider a loudmouthed female ogre to be an infinitely more horrifying villain than a beauteous femme fatale who manipulates men for her own personal gain.  After all, at least the predatory femme fatale gives her male victims a good blowjob or two before throwing him under the bus.  Undoubtedly, as demonstrated by the fact that Kathy Bates won both the Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe for her career-jumpstarting role as a psychopathic plus-size she-bitch in Misery (1990) demonstrates, I do not think I am the only person that finds extra chubby chicks to be extra creepy villains. When I was about ten or eleven, I could not help but rent a VHS tape with the overtly sensational title Crazy Fat Ethel featuring a morbidly obese killer on the cover, not realizing the film was actually an innately inferior sequel/remake of a superlatively sleazy piece of work entitled “Criminally Insane” (1975) directed by pornographer turned offbeat genre ‘auteur’ Nick Millard (Fräulein Leather, Satan's Black Wedding) under the pseudonym ‘Nick Philips.’ Directed by a man who managed the career of his own octogenarian porn star mother Frances ‘the oldest living porn actress’ Millard (who incidentally acted as the producer of the film and many of Millard’s other works and is probably best known for starring in gerontophiliac fuck flicks with titles like The Ultimate Granny Gang Bang (2000) and 92 and Still Banging (2000)), “Criminally Insane” is indubitably pure and unadulterated unmitigated trash with sass and a scrumptious sicko sense of humor that reminds trash cinephiles why they watch celluloid sleaze in the first place. Set in a sort of alternate post-counterculture white trash universe where less than pretty pussy-peddlers, elderly senile Johns, effeminate pimp would-be-actors, delinquent foul-mouthed delivery boys, cynical cops, and morbidly obese mass murderesses reign, Millard’s shockingly penetrating gutter grade low-camp photoplay feels like it was directed by a genuine dirtbag and pimp who lives off the suffering of others. Indeed, the lead anti-heroine is a grotesquely fat unhinged bitch who certainly looks the part she plays, but somewhat ironically the character somehow makes deranged obese dames seem vaguely likeable, at least in a sort of novelty sense that makes you forget that ‘fativism’ clowns exist. Featuring special effects that make the mostly worthless works of Hebraic exploitation hack Herschell Gordon Lewis almost seem Hollywood-esque and unexpected ‘artistic’ pretense, including a bizarrely entrancing psychedelic dream-sequence that could have only dreamed up by a decidedly deluded film director who has somehow convinced himself that he is an authentic ‘artiste’ following in the poetically macabre footsteps of F.W. Murnau (indeed, maestro Millard has credited Nosferatu (1922) as being one of the biggest influences on his horror films), “Criminally Insane” is unequivocally one of the few true ‘masterpieces’ of authentic exploitation cinema, as a marvelously morally retarded work that is nearly immaculate in its innate ineptness and gritty celluloid scumminess. Of course, one must also not forget that Millard’s film is probably the only film of its conspicuously kitschy kind that features a Hebrew-hating killer who trusts her Jewish doctor even less than an elderly Israeli lawyer trusts Herr Doktor Josef Mengele, thereupon making for a rare ‘horror-comedy’ that lacks a kosher flavor while still managing to be completely and utterly morally bankrupt. 

 As Jewish mental hospital head Dr. Gerard (Cliff McDonald) tells worried white trash polack grandmother Mrs. Janowski (Jane Lambert of Brian De Palma’s The Fury (1978)) regarding his concerns about releasing her morbidly obese whack-job granddaughter, “Your granddaughter’s case is a very strange one, Mrs. Janowski. Severe paranoid manifestations, long periods of depression, violent outbursts. Quite frankly, it’s against my better judgment that she is being released.” Indeed, lard ass lunatic Ethel Janowski (Millard regular Priscilla Alden) has received electric shock therapy and has spent much time isolated in a padded cell with a straitjacket, yet her main complaint regarding her stint in the mental hospital is that they are not giving her enough food, or as she later complains to her granny like a true paranoiac, “Did you know they tried to kill me? That goddamn Jew doctor gave them orders not to give me enough to eat. Two lousy boiled eggs and a piece of dry toast for breakfast. They were trying to save money and starve me while they were at it.” After Fat Ethel is released under the condition that she comes to four weekly appointments for electric shock therapy, her grandmother expresses her moronic sense of optimism by stating, “Everything is going to be fine again, I know it will.” When Ethel gets home and immediately fries an entire package of bacon and about a dozen eggs to celebrate her untimely release from the loony bin and her grandmother comes downstairs and remarks, “A person is never too old to watch her figure,” it becomes quite clear that the two wacky women will eventually bump heads and one of them might even literally lose their head. When her grandmother remarks that she needs to lose some weight because being fat is unhealthy for her heart, Ethel quasi-poetically replies, “My heart is just fine as long as my stomachs not empty.” 

 Not surprisingly, things take a considerably nasty turn for the worst in the Janowski home when Ethel comes downstairs in the middle of the night to get a midnight snack and discovers that there is no food in the refrigerator and all of the food has been locked inside a cabinet by her grandma. When her grandmother wakes up and comes downstairs to find her granddaughter attempting to open the lock on the cabinet by stabbing it with a butcher knife in a quite ferocious fashion, she asks her what she is doing and Fat Ethel cries, “What’s the idea of locking up all the food?” Needless to say, when her granny firmly declares, “We’ll have no fresh meat or milk until you learn to curb your appetite,” Ethel becomes exceedingly enraged, chases Mrs. Janowski from behind while yelling, “You and that heeb are trying to starve me again. Well, you’re not going to do it,” and literally stabs her in the back with the butcher knife. Although dead, the key to the cupboard is locked in Mrs. Janowski’s hand via a death grip, so Ethel proceeds to frantically stab her dead grandma’s hand while repeatedly shouting “I want that key” like a disgruntled child throwing a temper tantrum. After managing to free the key from her granny’s cold dead hand, Fat Ethel naturally proceeds to gorge on junk food and even leaves her grandparents corpse in the same spot in a pool of blood until the next day. Indeed, aside from being a rather rotund and equally intemperate wench with the self-discipline of a rabid autistic toddler, Ethel is lazy as hell, which will ultimately lead to her inevitable downfall. 

 Since both she and her dead granny have no source of income aside from meager unemployment benefits, Ethel finds herself in serious trouble when it comes to procuring food, so when she places a huge order over the phone with a local grocery store that she owes money to and the delivery boy arrives with the goods and refuses to give them to her since she only has $4.50 for an order that is $80, she hilariously hits the teen over the head with a liquor bottle and then proceeds to stab him to death with the now broken bottle. Literally right after killing the ill-fated delivery boy, Ethel’s sub-homely hooker sister Rosalie (Lisa Farros) randomly shows up at the house and asks if she can crash there for the next couple of days. Being a drug-addled degenerate that peddles her pussy for a living to dirty old men and dates an abusive fellow that regularly beats her, Rosalie is naturally not the least bit concerned when she notices a pool of blood on the floor of the house, not to mention the fact she does not ask her super big sis for much information about her MIA grandmother’s whereabouts. Ethel clearly has no sense of solidarity with her family as demonstrated by the fact that she seems completely disinterested when Rosalie states to her, “I guess she’s better off sleeping with that little brown man than being drunk all the time,” in regard to the fact that their mother is living with a dubious Filipino man. Additionally, when Rosalie begins bringing back Johns to the house in the middle of the night who fondle her breasts in plain view, Ethel merely finds the situation to be mildly humorous. 

 Despite the fact that she warned Ethel to tell him that she never wants to see him again if he ever showed up at the house, Rosalie soon brings her low-life would-be-actor/pimp beau John (Michael Flood) to live at the house. As is quite apparent by her senseless behavior, Rosalie is more concerned over the fact that John previously left her for an older woman than the fact he routinely beats her. As John explains to Rosalie before they have ‘makeup sex’ as to why he beats her, “Rosalie, I'm gonna tell you the truth for once, okay? You need a good beating every once in a while. All women do. And you especially.” Meanwhile, Dr. Gerard decides to pay Fat Ethel an unexpected visit since she has been ignoring his calls and has missed her electric shock therapy sessions, so the anti-heroine naturally murders him and then locks his corpse in her grandmother’s room where she has placed all the other corpses. When Rosalie laughs at John while watching him put on makeup and remarks, “I’m sorry…I’ve seen a lot of things but never a man putting on makeup,” the petty gutter grade pimp becomes enraged and smacks the shit out of her while calling her a “stupid whore.” Of course, as demonstrated by the fact that they are depicted jovially snorting cocaine together in the next scene of the film, the two zany lovebirds do not stay mad at each other for long. As Rosalie explains to her sister regarding her and her beau’s nose candy, “It’s a nasal medicine the doctor prescribed. Both John and I have sinuses.” Somewhat fittingly, it is ultimately their noses that lands Rosalie and John into serious trouble. 

 The same night a police officer named Detective McDonough (George ‘Buck’ Flower of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975) and John Carpenter’s They Live (1988)) comes by the house asking questions about the delivery boy that Ethel had murdered for $80 worth of food, Rosalie and John find that they are unable to sleep due to the putrid stench of rotting corpses emanating from Grandma Janowski’s room, so they make the unwitting mistake of complaining to the whacked out woman responsible for the odious odors. Naturally, Ethel thinks that John is getting a little bit too nosy for his own good, so she brutally slaughters him with a hatchet while he is asleep, thus causing Rosalie to wake up and scream in abject terror in the process. Of course, Fat Ethel is forced to liquidate her sister as well, though that does not stop her from continuing to talk to her after she is dead and say sassy things to her corpse like, “I know you want to be alone. Sometimes I can hear you. I know what you were doing with John, Rosalie.” In a scene that hints at necrophilia, Ethel is featured laughing hysterically while lying next to John’s corpse in bed in a scenario that eventually turns into a strange pseudo-artsy dream-sequence that features psychedelic murder scenes (including scenes of Ethel hacking away at what is clearly a cheap mannequin sans wig), shots of a graveyard, and the deranged anti-heroine dressed like a glamorous diva in a pink dress. While Fat Ethel finally gets enough common sense and motivation to dispose of her corpses by dismembering them, putting them in trash bags, and driving them to an oceanside cliff where she plans drop them off, a group of pesky tourist taking photographs ruin her plans and she is forced to bring the body parts back home. While tirelessly hauling the bags of body parts back into her dilapidated home, Ethel carelessly leaves some of the parts in her unlocked truck and it does not take long for a busybody neighbor to discover a dismembered hand upon examining the car. Of course, Detective McDonough soon comes to arrest Ethel, but he is in for quite a surprise when he finds his suspect gnawing on a dismembered arm, thus causing him to cry out, “My god.” 

 As a shot-on-video piece of patently pointless trash where no less than ¼ of the film seems to be comprised of footage from the previous film, the “Criminally Insane” sequel Criminally Insane 2 (1987) aka Crazy Fat Ethel 2 is nothing but a sad joke that is not even worthy of being described as a cheap novelty by fans of the original film.  In fact, anti-auteur Nick Millard would reuse the credits and kill scenes from his magnum opus in a number of his subsequent shot-on-video sub-schlock works, including such singularly worthless efforts as Death Nurse (1987), Death Nurse 2 (1988), and Doctor Bloodbath (1987). Naturally, Millard would also continue working with the same actors, including “Criminally Insane” star Priscilla Alden and when the director was asked in an interview with the curiously named horror film review site The Liberal Dead why he chose to do this, he gave the startlingly pretentious reply, “So I like using the same people. Again and again. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the German director, did the same thing...” As can be expected from any cult horror film that even has the most pathetically marginal of followings, a remake entitled Crazy Fat Ethel (2015) directed by a fellow named Brian Dorton (Trashology, Theatre of the Deranged) is set to be released sometime this year, though it is an indisputable fact that no film can recapture the distinct putrid post-counterculture trash essence of Millard's original film. Indeed, “Criminally Insane” is like a Warhol era Paul Morrissey flick as directed by an apolitical smut-peddler who still unwittingly manages to demonstrate how degenerate America has become since so-called women’s liberation and counterculture movements helped the Baby boomers further rationalize their pseudo-individualism and nihilistic hedonism. Indeed, 250 pound beastess Ethel is just another hopeless moron inspired by the hippie weltanschauung that, if it feels good you should do it, albeit she just takes her self-absorption a step or two further. Of course, considering her flagrant anti-Semitism, one would think that Fat Ethel would know better and not embrace a Reichian/Marcusian approach to eating, but not everyone is perfect. In terms of films about resentful tubs of quasi-female lard, you certainly cannot do better than “Criminally Insane”, but considering that over half of Americans are ‘overweight’ (aka fat asses), I suspect that subsequent generations will find the film less funny and easy to relate to.  After all, the Occident is so decadent nowadays that it now has a growing collective of politically active social justice lard asses known as the so-called ‘fat acceptance movement’ who actively promote unhealthy physiques and lifestyles in a pathetic attempt to rationalize their aversion to exercising and sensible eating. Somewhat tragically, if not surprisingly, “Criminally Insane” star Priscilla Alden—a true outsider actress whose performance in Millard's film makes Shirley Stoler's character in The Honeymoon Killers (1969) seem rather lightweight and who would have indubitably made a great John Waters superstar as the the more demented daughter of Edith Massey—died of complications from diabetes at the age of 68 on 24 August 2007.  Obviously, her performances in Millard's films did not scare Alden straight about her weight and inspire her to take a more healthy approach to life, but at least she has been immortalized as the most deranged plus-size dime store diva of cinema history.

-Ty E

White Material

As the country that produced audaciously arrogant Marxist documentarian Jean Rouch (Moi, un noir aka Me a Black, Babatu) and far-leftist extremist propagandist René Vautier (whose short agitprop doc Afrique 50 (1950) was arguably the first European anti-colonial film ever made), not to mention exceedingly ethno-masochistic ‘intellectuals’ like spiteful little lazy-eyed toad Jean-Paul Sartre (a white man who gleefully backed the slaughtering of Europeans in his preface to Frantz Fanon's classic text The Wretched of the Earth yet characteristically was a hypocrite that lacked the testicular fortitude to follow through on his own beliefs and kill himself), France has a long history of anti-colonial agitators that seemed to suffer a sort of totally unbelievable race-based Stockholm syndrome. Of course, as Vilfredo Pareto demonstrated in his classic text The Rise and Fall of Elites: An Application of Theoretical Sociology, when a culture becomes irrevocably decadent its debauched elites begin to root for and actively support the very same people that seek to destroy them, as if they hoped to be spared from the very same revolutions that emphasize the extermination of all their friends and family members. To my knowledge, the only contemporary film that I can think of that depicts such warped thinking is ironically a French work directed by a woman who spent most of her childhood living in various French colonial West African nations and has dedicated most of her filmmaking career towards directing racially-charged works that were directed from a somewhat preternatural post-colonial white French female perspective. Indeed, White Material (2009) directed by Claire Denis (J'ai pas sommeil aka I Can’t Sleep, Trouble Every Day) depicts a racially schizophrenic white French woman played by half-Hebraic frog diva Isabelle Huppert who has a visceral hatred for her own people and is determined to keep her unprofitable coffee plantation going during a quasi-genocidal anti-white civil war in an unnamed Africa nation even though both the corrupt government and especially negro rebels want to see all whites killed, only for her and her family to experience a sort of self-prophesying tragedy of the quasi-apocalyptic sort. Depicting a sort of Haitian Revolution 2.0 that emphasizes the innate stupidity and self-deceptiveness of idealistic xenophiliac whites, the film should have probably borrowed its name from Dutch auteur Adriaan Ditvoorst’s masterpiece 1984 swansong and be called White Madness as it depicts how a delusional white dame more or less causes the death of her entire family due to her insistence that they stay in negroland during a savage civil war featuring roaming armies of rape-inclined child soldiers, thug mercenaries that charge people an insane rate just to drive down dirt roads without being executed, and other forms of murderously violent rabble who seem to be geared towards murdering their ‘enemies’ (aka virtually anyone they come in contact with) in the most malevolently sadistic ways imaginable. Surely White Material is an important contemporary film in the sense that it is probably the only somewhat recent work of its kind that dares to depict what can happen to xenophile and negrophile Europids when they refuse to face reality in terms of race dynamics, especially in regard to the fact that just because someone is an ethno-masochistic cracker who hates their own people does not mean that pan-African rebels and other groups of honky-hating sambos will not slaughter you and your entire family in a most malevolent fashion.  Arguably more intriguingly, Denis' film spreads a message that makes it seem as if there is no hope for redemption for both France and its ex-colonies in Africa, as irrevocable damage has been done to both sides to the point where the best thing whitey can do is to leave the Dark Continent alone for good.  Indeed, thankfully White Material is neither your typical masturbatory tribute to the dubious legacy of charlatan frauds like Mandela nor a putrid piece of poverty porn that is meant to coerce the slave-morality-ridden white viewer into crying for the perennially impoverished noble savage.

 White Material begins somewhat abruptly with a group of negro soldiers curiously finding the corpse of a negro rebel named ‘The Boxer’ (Isaach De Bankolé of Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (2005) and Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control (2009)) lying on a bed in a white bourgeois home (as indicated by pictures of white people in the room) and declaring in an emotionless fashion, “It’s the Boxer. He’s dead alright.” The same group of negro soldiers are also depicted locking a young Aryan man with a shaved head into a room and setting it on fire. Edited in a somewhat confused nonlinear fashion, the film will eventually reveal at the end how the anti-white negro rebel leader the Boxer ended up dying in a white person’s comfortable bourgeois bed, as well as how the young Aryan boy ended up being locked in a room where he would ultimately be burned alive in a micro-holocaust of sorts. The foredoomed white boy’s name is Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle of Denis’ Beau Travail (1999) and Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s À l'intérieur (2007) aka Inside) and, not unlike his protagonist mother Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert of Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) and François Ozon’s 8 Women (2002)), he is somewhat unhinged, which seems to be both the natural result of tainted genetics and being part of a marginal white population that lives in a sub-Saharan African nation that is mostly hostile to Europeans. Aside from being a female cuckold of sorts that still lives at the same coffee plantation home with her ex-husband André (Christopher Lambert of Highlander (1986) and Mortal Kombat (1995)) who produced an illegitimate mulatto bastard son with the family’s fairly young live-in maid Lucie (Adèle Ado), Maria refuses to leave her unnamed African nation even though her business no longer turns a profit and a civil war has just started where all the whites are being killed as being broadcasted by a rebel DJ that has taken over the local radio station. Indeed, when a white neighbor attempts to convince Maria to leave the country by yelling to her from a helicopter, “Madame Vial. The French army is pulling out! We’re leaving! You’ll be completely cut off! Think it over, Madam Vial! Think it over! We’re pulling out! You must leave immediately,” she responds by getting a bitchy self-righteous attitude, gesturing a “fuck you” to the guy that tried to save her life, and saying to herself in a spiteful and rather confused fashion, “These whites, these dirty whites. They look down on us, and we risk our lives for them. They’re a bunch of nouveaux riches, pretentious, arrogant, ignorant. They don’t deserve this beautiful land. They can’t even appreciate it!,” as if she is in total denial about the fact that she belongs to the very same group of whites that she has so much seething hatred for. Of course, in the end, Maria’s decidedly deluded attitude will result in the death of her entire family. 

 While Maria is making her way back home to her coffee plantation, a negro preacher lies dead in his church, which has a banner outside of it that ironically reads, “God doesn’t give up,” thus reflecting the apocalyptic situation brewing in the African nation. Of course, the preacher was killed by cracker-hating commie rebels that are mostly made up of mere children who clearly lack both the intellectual and emotional capacity to fully understand the deranged behavior they are engaging in, as well as the dubious dead-end cause they are mindlessly fighting for. A group of these rebels eventually run into their almost supernaturally stoic hero the Boxer who, although severely wounded, brings no attention to the fact that his time is numbered. When the Boxer is handed a fancy golden lighter by one of his comrades and asks where it came from, one of the rebels replies, “It’s just white material,” thus indicating it is war booty that was taken by the child soldiers from a white family that they have recently slaughtered. Meanwhile, Maria gets back to her plantation and is quite enraged when a couple of her black employees tell her they are quitting and leaving due to the civil war, soundly stating to her, “Coffee’s coffee…Not worth dying for,” so she maturely responds to them by telling them to fuck off and to never come back.  Indeed, despite her ostensible love for Africa and black Africans, Maria treats virtually all negroes like slaves who can be bought and ordered around for mere pennies and when they do not oblige her demands, she becomes rather ruthless like your typical privileged white bourgeois bitch who is used to getting what she wants.  Without employees to help her harvest the coffee, Maria is forced to travel to a nearby village to contract employees among the most desperate and impoverished of negro sub-lumpenproles, but before she does, she finds the Boxer hiding in a shed on her plantation, but she does not kick him out because he is the nephew of her favorite and most loyal employee Jean-Marie even though he is an anti-European pan-African revolutionary who wants her kind flushed out of the decidedly dark, Dark Continent. Naturally, harboring a rebel leader in her home is not exactly a sound move on Maria’s part and it will ultimately foredoom her family to a most ungodly fate that is nothing short of catastrophic, if not all that different from what white Frenchmen suffered during the Haitian Revolution when the negro population exterminated the entire white population, including the women and children (though a handful of white female traitors managed to survive by agreeing to marry negroes). 

 Upon leaving in a large truck to look for employees to help her with harvesting coffee, Maria is stopped on the road by a couple of young machinegun-wielding negroes who demand that she pays $100 as a ‘toll’ or be killed. Interestingly, the leader of the group is Maria’s son’s gym teacher and the protagonist also personally knows every single one of the militant negro crooks, but that does not stop them from sticking guns in her face and threatening her life, thus she is forced to pay the rather ridiculous toll just so she will not be gunned down for driving on an archaic dirt road. Before heading to the village, Maria stops at a pharmacy to pick up drugs for her ex-father-in-law and her black pharmacist friends attempt to coerce her to leave the country as they assume she will be killed since she is white. Notably, while at the pharmacy, a rebel DJ announces via radio: “As for the white material, the party’s over. No more cocktails on shaded verandas while we sweat water and blood. They’re getting out…and they’re right to run scared. Our rulers are already trembling, their suitcases stuffed with booty they amassed while you starved.” Unbeknownst to Maria, while she is picking up about a dozen or so negroes to work at her plantation, her ex-husband André is selling the entire business and property to the local mayor Chérif, who is not beneath ripping off his old white friends during times of desperation even though he is already extremely rich to the point of having his own private militia. As André retorts to Chérif when he comments that Maria will be mad when she finds out that he went behind her back and secretly sold the plantation, “I’m protecting her from herself. We no longer turn a profit. No use getting massacred over some coffee. The plantation isn’t worth a thing.” Clearly a self-absorbed scumbag of sorts, Chérif brags to André, “I keep you alive. Without me, you’d be rotting on the Garonne” upon making a dubious deal  to buy the plantation for literally nothing (in fact, the plantation is given to Chérif to settle supposed debts, with the colored predatory capitalist claiming that André will still owe him money after handing over the property). 

 Before heading home with her new employees, Maria goes by an elementary school to pick up her ex-husband’ 12-year-old bastard mulatto son Jose, but André arrives around the same time, so he brings his half-breed progeny back home with him on his motorbike. When Maria gets home, she tries in vain to wake up her twentysomething-year-old adult son Manuel—a clearly half-crazed fellow who takes after his mother sans her work ethic—since he is still dead asleep even though it is well into the afternoon. When Manuel finally awakes from his slumber, he decides to take a dip in the dirty family pool and is quite intrigued when he hears a couple young children moving inside his house. Ultimately, Manuel's curiosity gets the best of him and he decides to do what proves be a major mistake when he attempts to chase down the kids while wearing no shoes. Unbeknownst to Manuel, the children are armed and they eventually corner him while wielding machetes, spears, and guns and then proceed to call him a “yellow dog,” cut off a lock of his hair, and shove a gun down his pants near his genitals in a perverted fashion that signifies that they have a sickly salacious sod thirst for defiling white meat. Although not actually depicted, it is insinuated that one of the child rebels rapes Manuel as he is featured in a subsequent scene completely naked with his knees and feet bloody, as if somehow had just violently manhandled him while he was bent over on the ground. While André eventually finds his son naked in the field and provides him with clothes and Maria subsequently begins driving him home, Manuel eventually escapes and heads back home where he grabs a rifle, completely shaves his head into a skinhead style in a seemingly symbolic act that demonstrates his recent psychological castration via negro rape, and then shoves his hair into the mouth of his half-breed brother Jose's mother Lucie in a rather violent fashion, as if to let her know that he no longer takes orders from his parents' virtual slaves and that he is disgusted with the fact that his father left his mother and reproduced with a young negress concubine. Although Manuel’s grandfather Henri Vial (Michel Subor of François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1963))—the true owner of the plantation and patriarch of the home—comes to Lucie’s rescue and kicks his grandson out of the house, the black girl is enraged and hatefully declares, “The patriots will kill you all! All of you!,” thus indicating that she has no love for her white baby-daddy or his crazy cracker family.

 In a flashback scene that hints that Maria may have been carrying on a romance with the negro mayor, the protagonist shares a joint with Chérif as he gleefully explains to her how she has failed as a mother in terms of raising a mentally unstable slacker of a son.  After describing Manuel as a boy whose “mind is all over the place” that is turning into a “dog,” Chérif remarks to Maria regarding her influence on her son, “You botched it with him. You didn’t finish the job” and she responds by laughing like a typical stoned stupid moron. Of course, Maria’s workers fear for their lives and decide to quit when they hear the following announced by a government soldier on the local radio: “A reliable source has informed us that the rebel soldier, the Boxer, is hiding out amidst foreigners who rip us off and use our land to grow mediocre coffee that we’d never drink. Their accomplices will be eliminated.” Indeed, the black workers pull guns on Maria and demand money, but someone has stolen all the money from the family safe, so the desperate negro proles settle for a ride back to their village. Unfortunately, on the way back to the village, a group of rebel child soldiers that are clearly wearing the protagonist's jewelry and clothing steal Maria’s van and kill a couple workers who dare to proclaim their innocence as poor workers.  Indeed, by killing the poor peasants, the revolutionaries demonstrate they could care less about the bastardized Marxist ideology that they are ostensibly fighting for. When Maria goes to check on her friends at the pharmacy, she discovers that the store has been wrecked and robbed and that all of her buddies have been brutally slaughtered.  Of course, the pharmacists were killed by the child rebels, who are more interested in getting high on factory grade drugs than bringing down their supposed capitalist oppressors.

 Rather bizarrely, when he sees the child soldiers driving his mother’s truck, Manuel, who is clearly not sound of mind and has developed a particularly advanced form of racial Stockholm syndrome where he has become sympathetic to the struggle of his black rapists, yells to them while riding a motorbike that he knows where their ‘spiritual leader’ the Boxer is and he will take them to him. Indeed, Manuel takes the murderous ‘youths’ back to his plantation and helps them steal a wheelbarrow full of food and then he and the killer kids get high on stolen drugs from the pharmacy and gorge on a buffet of western junk food. Meanwhile, a group of government soldiers begin invading the plantation while elderly patriarch Henri looks on silently and does not bother to warn his family members that a group of army thugs have come to slaughter them. When the soldiers find most of the child rebels sleeping in rooms inside the plantation house, including a preteen boy lying in a bathtub next to toys and empty jars of jelly, they kill them softly by driving knives into their still bodies in what is unquestionably one of the most calm and even soothing mass murder scenes in cinema history. When the soldiers find Manuel walking around the plantation with a rifle in his hand, they lock him in a room, set it on fire, and burn him alive. Meanwhile, Maria eventually manages to get a lift back home from her friend Chérif and during the ride the protagonist complains that her son Manuel is “defenseless” without her and the mayor soundly responds, “Extreme blondness brings bad luck. It cries out to be pillaged. Blue eyes are troublesome. This is his country. He was born here. But it doesn’t like him.” When Maria gets home, she finds both her ex-husband André lying dead in a pool of blood next to passports and Manuel’s scorched corpse. After noting that her (ex)father-in-law is still alive and discernibly unscathed, Maria brutally murders Henri by hacking him up with a machete in a scene that, whether intentional on the director's part or not, seems to symbolize the deleterious effect that living in post-colonial Africa can have on a European. At the end of the film, a wounded rebel runs off into the woods, thus assumedly signifying the perennial state of catastrophic revolution in post-colonial Africa.  The film concludes with the pseudo-dedication, “For the fearless young rascals…for Maria,”  as if to insinuate that both the child rebels and the protagonist suffer from a similar sort of childish arrogance, pathological pigheadedness, and self-destructive naivety.

 Undoubtedly, I would be lying if I did not admit that I found Isabelle Huppert’s character in White Material to be strikingly less sympathetic than her role as the eponymous masochistic pervert in Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, which certainly says a lot, at least as far as I am concerned as I consider the anti-heroine in the latter film to be one of the most grotesque and uniquely unlikeable female characters in cinema history. Indeed, aside from being an exceedingly ethno-masochistic cuckquean who smokes dope with corrupt black politicians and romanticizes African negroes so much that she considers them to be infinitely preferable to her own people even though they hate her and everything she represents while at the same time treating said African negroes like virtual slaves, Huppert’s character risks the lives of everyone in her family so that she can maintain her silly dead-end existence of running a coffee plantation in a forsaken third world hellhole where murderous commie revolutions and anti-European race hate are everyday occurrences, thereupon resulting in a number of inexplicable tragedies that could have been easily avoided had she taken heed of the much warranted advice of virtually everyone she knows, including her black employers that understand their country much better than she does, thus making her no different than the moron politicians in Europe who thinking flooding their countries with more Islamic barbarian untermenschen will somehow make their countries more stable.  I also do not think it is a coincidence that the protagonist's son is a moronic lunatic, as the character acts as a sort of allegorical representation of the negative effects of being white and born into a post-colonial nightmare nation where everyone hates you simply because of the color of your skin and you have nothing or no one to relate to, hence why the character goes completely berserk and leads the anti-white black rebels back to his family plantation so that they can destroy the place.  It should also be noted that during the film the protagonist's ex-husband's mulatto son senselessly commits sabotage at the plantation while the characters are harvesting coffee by going on the roof of a building and cutting an electricity wire.  Undoubtedly, this half-breed prodigal son is a sort of historically accurate archetype of colonial history as reflected in the fact that various leaders of the Haitian Revolution were the bastard Mulatto sons of French aristocrats and plantation owners.  Of course, as the old Greek adage goes, the bastard will always be the enemy of the true-born.  If White Material has any discernible message, it is there is no hope for whitey in the Dark Continent, or as virtual pimp politician Chérif states, “Extreme blondness brings bad luck. It cries out to be pillaged. Blue eyes are troublesome.” Of course, nothing is more troublesome than racially schizophrenic blue-eyed devils that somehow think they can survive and even thrive in a country full of poor and resentful half-starved negroes who cannot stand a foreigner that is more successful in their own homeland than they are. 

 In its depiction of the hopelessly ‘unequal’ master-slave relationship that occurs when black works for white, White Material is surely superficially comparable to Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène’s debut feature La noire de... (1966) aka Black Girl, albeit more intricate and strikingly nihilistic. As much of Denis' work, including J'ai pas sommeil (1994) aka I Can't Sleep—a genre-confused film based on the true story of gay mulatto serial killer Thierry Paulin, who had a fetish for killing elderly white women and died of AIDS in prison before ever being convicted of any of the heinous crimes that he committed—demonstrates in a intricately idiosyncratic sort of fashion, the ghost of Frantz Fanon lives on as black Africa is taking its revenge against France for colonialism in a variety of strange and oftentimes predictable ways while racially schizophrenic white Frenchmen seem completely oblivious to the point of welcoming their misfortune. Thematically speaking, I must admit that I think Denis’ film is extremely grotesque and quite symbolic of the sort of all-consuming sickness that is plaguing the post-colonial French collective unconscious, hence White Material’s importance as a rare frog flick that offers some sort of contemporary truth, especially in regard to the impossibility of real peace between black and white. Indeed, something is indubitably innately sick and dysfunctional about a society when an elderly French woman directs a film where a young and handsome Adonis-like white Frenchman that is old enough to be the filmmaker's grandson is raped by a murderous negro child, as it demonstrates a certain irrevocable defilement of the soul that would have seemed totally inexplicable only a generation ago, even in a traditionally degenerate nation like France. Indeed, forget Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Georges Bataille, White Material is Franco-debauchment at its most horrifyingly sick and depraved. Of course, for those individuals that have a certain disdain for bleeding heart white liberals, Denis' film indubitably offers a bit of schadenfreude, even if the director has a somewhat curious view of race relations.  Like the work of any great female filmmaker, including the films of Ulrike Ottinger and Helma Sanders-Brahms, White Material ultimately reflects the sort of bizarre and seemingly convoluted moral stances that honest members of the fairer sex seem particularly susceptible to, thus making for a particularly provocative cinematic work that dares to stir and ultimately debase the soul of the viewer to the point where they might question the popular view that it is the duty of Europids everywhere to champion mindless altruism towards poor negroes.  If nothing else, Denis' film demonstrates that sub-Saharan Africans and blacks in general generally hate whites and no amount of altruism, pathetic groveling, or moronic negrophilia will change that fact.  After all, it is no coincidence that after over 210 years, black Haitians still celebrate the complete extermination of the entire white population during the Haitian Revolution as the greatest event in their entire history.  Of course, it is also no coincidence that Haiti went from being one of the most advanced and fruitful colonies in the world to degenerating into one of the most backwards and destitute slums on earth as a result of the revolution.

-Ty E