Born of the Wind

Maybe because I have not seen that many decent films about deadly undead Egyptian aristocrats wrapped in ancient bandages, but I have never really had a strong interest in mummy movies, so I can appreciate it when a filmmaker dares to rape and defile the conventions and mythology of the classic horror subgenre, especially if you have to be a half-crazed and remarkably socially awkward camp-oriented genre-molester like Mike Kuchar (Sins of the Fleshapoids, The Secret of Wendel Samson). Indeed, forget the Ed Wood penned pseudo-erotic celluloid turd Orgy of the Dead (1965), the bandaged corpse host of Antony Balch's suave counterculture sexploitation flick Secrets of Sex (1970) aka Bizarre, Anthony Hickox’s self-referential pomo horror-comedy Waxwork (1988), and even the curious cult item Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), Kuchar’s 24-minute silent horror-melodrama-sci-fi experiment in avant-garde camp Born of the Wind (1961) is certainly one of the most wildly idiosyncratic, morally vacant, and uniquely unpredictable mummy movies ever made, even if it is more or less a glorified home-movie that was directed by someone that one might assume is a benign mental patient who could one day become like Mickey Rooney's titular character in Yabo Yablonsky's The Manipulator (1971) aka B.J. Lang Presents. Shot on the much maligned consume grade medium of 8mm, Kuchar’s waywardly enthralling flick not only abruptly switches between various movie genres in a ridiculously refreshing way, but also features various forms of archaic animation as a work that makes the special effects of the homegrown semi-Lovecraftian cult classic Equinox (1970) seem comparable to that of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). One of the few Kuchar Twins flicks that has been professionally restored and is available in DVD form (it was somewhat fittingly released as part of the 2008 DVD compilation Experiments in Terror 3 alongside shorts by Guy Maddin and imaginary filmmaker J. X. Williams), Born of the Wind has a sort of very distinct and unforgettable DIY Gothic neo-Expressionist aesthetic about it that accentuates the films refreshingly amoral tone where the most heinous of monsters are depicted in a strangely empathetic light that might make the average Hollywood spoon-fed American filmgoer vomit in abject confusion. A mad-scientist-meets-vampiric-mummy tale that evolves into a hysterically tragic bizarre love triangle involving pernicious space invaders and cat burglars that becomes completely aesthetically and thematically anarchistic in the end to the point where the filmgoer will be questioning whether what they just saw really happened or not, Kuchar’s flick is nothing short of campy romantic pessimism at its most flagrantly freaky and pleasantly psychotronic. Seeming like it was directed by the bastard idiot savant stepson of James Whale and Curtis Harrington, the short features a sort of melodically melancholic spirit that you might expect to bleed from Douglas Sirk’s mind had the master of melodrama become a horror fan upon developing Alzheimer's disease. Somewhat underwhelming described by co-star George Kuchar as, “A tender and realistic story of a scientist who falls in love with a mummy he has restored to life... 2,000 years as a mummy couldn't quench her thirst for love!,” Born of the Wind is nothing short of the height of celluloid outsider art as a work that tests the bounds of artistic tastefulness. 

 After opening with a sort of pseudo-psychedelic title screen, Born of the Wind features a partially incorrectly spelled handpainted inter-title reading, “It’s been three weeks since the disappearance of the mummy from the city museum. At Koshki Castle, Dr. Morris D. Koshki works feverishly to decode an old Egyptian scroll. The scroll says it can bring life and youth back to the mummified princess who died at an early age, thousands of years ago.” Indeed, Dr. Koshki (Kuchar regular Bob Cowan of The Secret of Wendel Samson (1966) and The Devil’s Cleavage (1975)) is an extra mad scientist with a slight sensitive side who seems rather lonely and hopelessly sexually repressed as he has dedicated all of his time to reanimating an ancient aristocrat Egyptian corpse that was born before Jesus Christ and no task or crime is too big for him to accomplish this seemingly ludicrous task of quasi-necrophiliac forbidden love. After berating his annoyingly meek maid (Janice Jones) for knocking over something while he is studying arcane Egyptian scrolls at his desk, Dr. Koshki finally realizes that he will need to procure human blood if he wants to perfect a magical potion that will give life to his rotten would-be-lover, so he naturally raids a blood bank that is designated with a poorly handwritten sign on the front door at a place called Shalimar Hospital and steals a couple jars full of fresh vital fluids. Upon getting home with the jars of stolen blood, Dr. Koshki is so excited about the prospect of bringing the mummy to life that he spills the stolen sanguine fluids all over the place while creating his special reanimating potion. Somewhat anticlimactically, the Mummy (Kuchar regular Donna Kerness of The Naked and the Nude (1957) and Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965)) instantly comes to life and transform into a somewhat beauteous busty babe after Dr. Koshski applies his special serum to her initially thoroughly decayed skull.  Somewhat preposterously, the mummy princess immediately embraces Koshski upon becoming reanimated and naturally the good doctor laps up all of the attention like a middle-aged virgin who has never had a girlfriend before.  Of course, being an autistically scientifically minded social misfit with probably nil social skills, especially when it comes to the opposite sex, Koshski never seems to consider that his special mummy chick might not feel the same way about him as he feels about her, or so he will eventually learn the hard way as the film progresses. 

 Not unlike a typical bloodsucking vampire, the mummy needs blood to survive as she begins to rot if she does not have a steady plasma supply. When Dr. Koshki’s cat knocks over the last remaining jar of blood while he is playing a piano ballad and he is forced to leave the castle to go steal some more red stuff from the local hospital, the fiending mummy, who cannot wait for her undead dope, takes it upon herself to rejuvenate her busty body by slitting the throat of the dorky castle maid and gorging on her seemingly half-stale vital fluids. While Dr. Koshki is naturally shocked to see the awkwardly contorted bloody corpse of his buffoonish maid when he gets home, he does not really give his poor loyal employee’s brutal death a second thought because he has more important things on his mind, or as an inter-title reveals, “Enslaved by his desires for the Princess the murder was soon forgotten, washed away in her tender, all consuming embrace, and in her promises of eternal love.” Unfortunately for the dandy-like mad scientist, his sphinxlike undead princess’ feelings for him are not exactly as strong as his are for her. Indeed, one night while sleeping in bed alongside Dr. Koshski, the busty mummy awakes to the sound of two incompetent cat burglars stealing utensils from the castle kitchen, so she absurdly threatens them with a hammer but before she knows it her anger and fear turn into ecstasy when the men get physical with her. Indeed, when one of the burglars (Spencer Lee Todd) grabs the blood-addicted princess and gets a little rough with her, she begins to enjoy it, strips off some of her clothes, and then proceeds to ballroom dance with the low-life criminal. While the mummy finds her dance partner to be fairly fun, she more or less falls in love at first sight upon seeing the face of his somewhat more handsome comrade (George Kuchar), who immediately reciprocates her feelings. Needless to say, this bizarre love triangle gets all the more bizarre when Dr. Koshki, who is busy sleeping like a baby, discovers that his beloved has committed the unpardonable act of emotionally betraying him like some cheap floozy. 

 Before leaving the castle with his criminal compatriot, Kuchar tells his new mummy mistress, “I’ll be waiting out there for you,” instead of just taking her with him then and there, which would have been the more sensible thing to do, or so he will soon learn as Dr. Koshki will ultimately discover his undead lover’s treachery before she can attempt to escape from his revengeful wrath. Of course, like any normal girl that likes a boy and wants to impress him, the mummy princess decides to get all dolled up before she joins her lover, so she puts on a slutty skirt and some streetwalker-esque make-up. As revealed in an inter-title in regard to the mummy’s love for Kuchar’s character, “As if born again for a third time, the Princess prepares herself for her new love.” Before meeting Kuchar outside, the princess makes the silly mistake of looking at Dr. Koshki one more last time while he is sleeping and in the process unwittingly wakes him from his slumber. As the sun causes a light to magically beam through a forest in a fashion that makes it resembles a sort of fiery star, the princess and Kuchar play and frolic gaily in the snow with one another right outside of the castle while Dr. Koshki stares angrily at them through an upstairs window while hysterically cursing at his treacherous beloved. When the princess makes the mistake of walking back inside the castle, Dr. Koshki is naturally waiting for her and he immediately begins violently slapping her in the face. Deriving a sort of vengeful sadistic glee from his violence against the woman that broke his heart, the good doctor can only laugh hysterically and point his finger at the princess like she is a freak when he notices that her face is beginning to rot. When Dr. Koshki then proceeds to laugh even more maniacally upon revealing that he has emptied all of the jars of blood in the castle, the perpetually deteriorating princess becomes enraged and begins savagely stabbing him with a large knife so that she can rejuvenate herself with his blood, but it curiously does not harm him and nil vital fluids are drawn. Indeed, in a bizarre plot twist that could happen in a Mike Kuchar flick, Dr. Koshki strips his clothes to the point where he is only wearing goofy red long underwear and then transforms into a sort of silly lycanthrope-like beast with white whiskers. Of course, things only get stranger from there, as the beast begins floating across the floor in a robotic fashion, puts on a metal helmet and is eventually beamed up to a flying saucer that is conveniently hovering above the castle in what is indubitably one of the most wonderfully implausible scenarios in Gothic horror cinema history. Indeed, as it turns out, Dr. Koshki is not just a misunderstood melancholic Gothic dandy cuckold or even a wussy werewolf, but an evil extraterrestrial with a perverse fetish for ancient undead earthling pussy. As Dr. Koshki flies into outerspace in his spaceship, Kuchar helplessly watches in abject horror as his beloved deteriorates rather rapidly and eventually dies, with the only thing remaining of her once-voluptuous body being her skeleton, a lone eyeball, and some rotten gray flesh. 

 Sort of like a stylishly schlocky Tristan und Isolde of the 1960s NYC underground as directed by an eccentric fellow who thought he could beat Douglas Sirk at his own game in terms of assembling aesthetically melodic yet misanthropic melodramas, Born of the Wind ultimately packs an unbelievably potent psychotronic punch that demonstrates that Kuchar could fill more passion and intrigue in 20 minutes than some imitator like Nick Zedd could in one of his features like his somewhat comparable 74-minute monster movie Geek Maggot Bingo or The Freak from Suckweasel Mountain (1983). Undoubtedly what separates the films of Kuchar and his brother from the filmmakers they influenced like Zedd and John Waters is that there is genuine beauty and human emotions in their films while their celluloid disciples just rely on heavy-handed scatological humor, cheap witticisms, and a bottom-of-the-barrel trash aesthetic. Simply put, Born of the Wind is arguably the greatest and most lavish 8mm film ever made as a marvelous monstrosity of a monster melodrama that manages to reconcile Tod Browning and Ed Wood with Sirk and Josef von Sternberg, among other things. In terms of idiosyncratic mummy movies, Kuchar's film is up there with Herbert Achternbusch’s absurdist arthouse comedy I Know the Way to the Hofbrauhaus (1991) and Michael Almereyda’s postmodern Celtic pagan piece The Eternal (1998) aka Trance, though it is naturally a lot more accessible than the other two films as a short and wickedly bittersweet celluloid treat that seems to have infinite replay value. Of course, with its lavish low-budget high-camp decadence, pseudo-arcane mystical themes, and all-star underground cast that includes Bob Cowan, Donna Kerness, and George Kuchar in the lead roles, Kuchar's short is unequivocally a worthy predecessor to the director’s magnum opus Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965).  An endlessly enthralling lo-fi micro-epic packed with an elegant aesthetic decadence that is comparable to any early Werner Schroeter flick and with a refined sense of cinema literacy that makes the films of Quentin Tarantino seem like the autistic postmodern ramblings of a negrophilic preteen megalomaniac that is addicted to Ritalin, Born of the Wind certainly deserves a special place in cinema history in some dark and wet corner, not least of all because it proves that you can make a timeless genre-schizophrenic Gothic horror-romance in your stern Ukrainian mother's cramped apartment.

-Ty E

The Craven Sluck

Naturally, as a result of my recently acquired obsession with the films of George Kuchar, I decided it was about time that I dig through the somewhat less impressive oeuvre of the filmmaker’s less prolific but seemingly all the more gay twin brother Mike Kuchar, whose 20-minute darkly comedic sci-fi-melodrama hybrid The Craven Sluck (1967) aka Madonna seemed like a worthy introduction to his films, especially since it stars his pathologically dorky sibling in the outstandingly against-type role of an abusive womanizer who exploits the undying loneliness of an over-the-hill blonde bombshell who is suicidal due to the fact that her less than handsome workaholic hubby no longer wants to acknowledge her existence, let alone hump her the way she needs to be humped. What I have immediately discovered upon watching a couple of Mike Kuchar’s films is that he is a somewhat more genre conscious and slightly less personal filmmaker than his twin, whose largely autobiographical auteurist works oftentimes reek of sardonic self-loathing and self-destructive obsession. While the brothers initially co-directed amorously appealingly titled works like I Was a Teenage Rumpot (1960) and Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof (1961) together as teens and were soon lovingly described as “the Mozarts of 8mm Cinema” (in fact, avant-garde gatekeeper Jonas Mekas once described their work in The Village Voice as, “Pop Cinema at its best pop”), the two eventually began directing their own individual auteur pieces when they graduated from using consumer grade 8mm to 16mm film stock after Mike bought a 16mm camera, or as George states in the documentary It Came From Kuchar (2009) directed by Jennifer M. Kroot in regard to their failed collaboration on Corruption of the Damned (1965) and their subsequent parting of ways as a twin directing team, “He [Mike] bought a Bolex and we launched our career[s]. The first picture was CORRUPTION OF THE DAMNED. That was a big 16mm movie. Then Mike abandoned that because he was more interested in Hercules type movies and I was left with the CORRUPTION OF THE DAMNED and I finished that. And that was our first 16mm film.” Incidentally, the first films that both brothers created after going their separate ways as filmmakers were also the films that would be regarding as their greatest masterpieces, with George directing the semi-autobiographical self-reflexive experimental melodrama Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966) and Mike directing the ultra lo-fi sci-fi micro-epic Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965). Despite directing their own individual films, George would continue to be an important ingredient in Mike’s cinematic works as the main leading man of most of his brother’s films. Undoubtedly, what is somewhat ingenious about The Craven Sluck is that Mike managed to get his brother George—a hopelessly neurotic homo who had about as masculine charm and charisma as a plastic pink flamingo lawn ornament—to pull off the seemingly unlikely role of a portraying a charismatic lowlife beatnik alpha-male that manages to con various strange beautiful (and not-so-beautiful women) into falling madly in love with him despite the fact that he is married to a manly pill-popping cripple. A playfully degenerate piece of eccentric extramarital excess where a big bosomed blonde that looks somewhat like a poor man's cross Jayne Mansfield and Anita Ekberg learns the hard way that carnal crimes do not pay, especially when cheating on your husband with a debauched beatnik bastard with a Beatles-esque mop-top, Kuchar's little film ultimately makes a major mockery out of the once-timeless institution of marriage, heterosexual monogamy, and romance in a fashion that can be appreciated by any man, be they are hetero or homo, who has ever had to deal with the problems associated with lovelorn female hysteria.  In other words, Kuchar seems to have made The Craven Sluck as a means to brag about the fact that he, as a proud poof, does not have to deal with the problems that bored and/or whimsical dames cause.

Instead of opening with proper credits that involve inter-titles appearing on the screen (apparently, Kuchar assembled the film in a hasty fashion so that he could finish it in time so that it could play at a gay film festival), The Craven Sluck begins with salacious publicity shots of female lead/‘glamour puss’ Floraine Connors juxtaposed with an off-screen narrator (Bob Cowan, who also portrays two of the characters) orally reciting the credits in a goofy fashion (for example, a pin-up photo of the female lead is juxtaposed with the narrator stating, “Also starring the extremely lovely and talented Bob Cowan, not pictured here”). Protagonist Adele (Floraine Connors) has been married to her sub-average-looking husband Brunswick (Bob Cowan) for seven years and their once apparently steamy love affair has stagnated so drastically that the latter is more interested in reading The Wall Street Journal than looking at his wanton wifey’s rather large tits, which are fairly hard to not notice. As Adele somewhat hysterically thinks to herself while her hubby ignores her as the two sit at their kitchen table, “He makes me ashamed of my torso and ignores my womanly charms. If this is how our marriage has turned out after all these years, I want no part of it. When he leaves for work, I’m going to kill myself.” Indeed, while still strangely wearing her bra and skirt (I guess Kuchar could not convince Connors to lose her clothing and completely expose her bare bazoombas), Adele gets in her bathtub and absurdly attempts to drown herself by merely lying down and holding her head under the water, but she is ultimately saved just in the nick of time when her husband unexpectedly comes home after forgetting to bring his beloved fountain pen with him to work. Somewhat humorously, Brunswick pays such little attention to Adele and her brazen behavior that he does not even realize that she was trying to kill herself and instead berates her by complaining, “For heaven’s sake, Adele! You could have at least fed the dog before you took your bath!” and then thinks to himself, “When will that peroxided woman face up to the responsibilities of being a wife?!”  Of course, Adele is the sort of wayward woman that should have become a pin-up model or go-go dancer instead of a housewife, which is a ‘job’ that is innately at odds with her psychology as an exhibitionist with a seemingly potent sex drive who cannot stand sitting around an apartment all day while there are tons of hot men roaming the streets that she would love to show off her giant udders to.  With seemingly nil interest in having children, Adele certainly personifies what Otto Weininger described as the ‘prostitute archetype.’

Luckily for her, at least initially, Adele’s dog (played by the Kuchars’ real-life pet ‘Bocko,’ who played the eponymous lead of George’s classic short The Mongreloid (1978)) will both literally and figuratively lead her to a new and much more exciting path in life, or so it seems at first. Indeed, when Bocko runs away while Adele is walking around a park, a vaguely handsome young man named Morton (George Kuchar) whose ostensibly good-looks she has been admiring comes to the rescue and helps her to catch the renegade canine. An effetely dressed young bargain bin beatnik who is sporting a pair of extra queer cowboy boots, black leather-pants, and unbecoming suit jacket, Morton gives off the impression to Adele that he is a chic and sexually potent young gentleman of the sensually adventurous sort who makes her husband seem like an insufferable rotting old fart by comparison, so naturally the protagonist more or less instantaneously falls for him without really thinking twice about the consequences. While sitting at a park bench and sharing food with Morton, Adele thinks to herself, “Oh, I’m having such a wonderful time…its been years since I’ve had someone to talk intelligently to. I think I’ll tell him what I’ve always wanted to be: A movie actress…desired by a million men.”  Somewhat revealingly, while fantasizing about being a famous actress, the film cuts to a sort of fetishistic dream-sequence featuring Adele doing burlesque oriented glamour poses where she shakes and flashes around her extra fleshy jumbo jugs, thus highlighting the character's rather moronic sense of vanity. Of course, Adele is rather saddened when she has to eventually part ways with Morton, but she never stops to think that her new loverboy is an abusive degenerate who likes roughing up his crippled wife, or as the narrator states, “Little does Adele know about Morton’s private life. Florence, Morton’s wife, suffers from severe headaches due to a serious bicycle accident in which Morton was at fault.”  Before parting ways, Adele and Morton kiss in a sickly goofy scatological montage that inter-cuts shots of dog Bocko defecating and that wickedly lampoons a famous kissing scene from Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959).

Indeed, when Morton gets home from his amorous play-date with Adele, he reveals a very different side of himself by doing all he can to ignore his ugly crippled wife Florence (also Bob Cowan, albeit this time in Divine-esque drag), who is popping pills while hilariously reading the latest chic leftist literary vomit in The New Yorker. When Florence dares to annoy him while he is watching an episode of the sci-fi adventure TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-1968), Morton roughs her up by pushing her on the ground and then shoving her onto a sofa. Obviously someone that encourages his wife’s seemingly highly deleterious drug addiction, Morton also gives Florence some pills and has her swallow them with a coffee mug full of toilet water before going out again to hunt for some more sexy street cunt. Naturally, when Morton happens upon a young blonde babe named Marilyn Marmoset (Donna Kerness of George Kuchar's masterpiece Hold Me While I'm Naked)—a character who, as the narrator notes at the beginning of the film, has a surname that is curiously the, “same spelling as the African tree monkey”—while prowling the streets and stalks her all the way back to her apartment (in fact, Ms. Marmoset even unlocks her door so that he can walk right in), he decides break off his planned rendezvous with Adele, who he lies to by telling her that he has to attend to a sick uncle who has supposedly, “been stricken with a severe case of gassy stomach and is in considerable pain.”  Unfortunately for her, Adele learns the truth when Morton's wife grabs the telephone from him and reveals to the protagonist that her dashing love interest is a deceitful scumbag who is banging various other dumb broads.  To make matters ten times worse, a UFO invasion hits NYC only seconds after Adele gets off the phone with the dime-store Don Juan, thus the protagonist has to put her lovelorn despair on hold. While Adele declares, “Good Lord, we’re being attacked by flying saucers from another planet. I must flee to safety!” and immediately begins attempting to find sanctuary around the city, she is soon zapped by a UFO ray and completely vaporized shortly after leaving her apartment, thereupon conveniently abruptly concluding the heroine's story and, in turn, the problems associated with her domestic despair. In the end, the narrator snidely states regarding the ostensible moral of the story, “So, as we near the closing of our story and see how the little pieces of life fall into their true meaningful places, we can’t help but think to ourselves: God really…uhuh…came…uhuh…knew what he was doin…uhuh.”

Apparently, auteur Mike Kuchar was so embarrassed by The Craven Sluck after completing it that he initially refused to screen it, or as the filmmaker once stated in an audio commentary track for the film, “I developed a complex...I thought maybe this might be the sloppiest picture ever made. And I started to repress it, like for years…And I never really put it into many shows after it had its release.” It was not until the film was warmly received when it was screened at retrospectives in both Germany and England that Kuchar actually began to finally embrace and respect his own film, thereupon leading him to conclude that he is not exactly the best judge of his own work. Of course, as a campy work featuring both a fat fellow in drag portraying an abused housewife and an unloved wife who attempts to off herself in a bathtub, The Craven Sluck has almost certainly influenced the infamous Manhattan Love Suicides (1985) segment Thrust in Me (1985) co-directed by Richard Kern and Nick Zedd where the latter filmmaker dresses in drag and portrays a girl her kills herself in her bathtub, only for her corpse to be mouth-fucked by her emotionally negligent beau (also portrayed by Zedd in a scenario that seems to pay homage to the scene in John Waters' Female Trouble (1974) where Divine literally fucks herself by portraying both a male and female character during a rape scene), who interprets her act of self-slaughter as an attempt at emotional blackmail and reacts accordingly by deriving pleasure from her death.  While Kuchar's film might not be as graphic as Thrust in Me, it is certainly a cleverer and more competently directed work that demonstrates Zedd is merely a poor heterosexual imitator who lacks the charm, cinematic literacy, and class of his filmic forebear.  Certainly one of the most tastelessly charming titled works ever made (although the word has multiple meanings, ‘sluck’ is typically seen as another word for ‘slut’ and is a portmanteau of ‘slut’ and ‘fuck’), Kuchar’s film is ultimately a mockery of heterosexual romantic love and marriage that is both sardonic and even scatological in its satirizing of high Hollywood melodramas like Sirk's Imitation of Life, as a work that not only dares to feature a UFO appear out of nowhere during the last minute or so and zapping the female heroine to death but also features a dog defecating in a seemingly painful fashion while the female lead and her new extramarital beau kiss, thus underscoring the pettiness of both romance and personal problems in the context of the world at large.  After all, what would seem more frivolous to a gay man than the romantic qualms of a big boobed blonde bimbo with the IQ of a gnat.  In the end, The Craven Sluck ultimately proves to be a highly therapeutic experience in that it gives the viewer the opportunity to witness the singular novelty of seeing some annoying airheaded female lead randomly killed under rather absurd circumstances, which is a fantasy I have always had ever since I was a kid as a result of those rare occasions where I was forced to watch a Hollywood romantic-comedy or kitschy big budget melodrama.  Indeed, call me a cynic, misanthrope, and/or sadist, but I would delighted to see Casablanca (1942) conclude with a Nazi UFO appearing out of nowhere at the end and vaporizing both Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid while they are saying goodbye to one another during the all-too-famous airport scene.

-Ty E

Eclipse of the Sun Virgin

While Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966) and A Reason to Live (1976) are oftentimes considered two of the filmmaker’s very best films, George Kuchar’s Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (1967) certainly holds a special place in my heart simply because it was the very first film that I saw by the seemingly quasi-autistic auteur that made me realize that he was more than just an obscenely outmoded amateur film director who flooded the American underground with his shamelessly neurotic experiments in excess, eccentricity, and senseless scatology. Arguably Kuchar’s most innately esoteric and experimental film as an anti-linear montage piece, the film is a sort of quasi-sequel to the filmmaker’s most well known and revered cinematic work, or as he stated himself, “ECLIPSE OF THE SUN VIRGIN was the follow-up to HOLD ME WHILE I'M NAKED, in which I try to get into the character's mind. The character was me of course. I did it in a more dreamlike way. NAKED was about the experience of what's happening; SUN VIRGIN was more enigmatic. When it first came out, no one could make head nor tail of it, but now people understand it—which scares me. I didn't totally get it 'til years later. Someone saw it and said this is a gay picture, and I thought, he's right. I had no idea at the time, twenty years ago.” Indeed, the film is a piece of semi-cryptic Catholic cocksucker guilt where the auteur fittingly plays the lead and displays his sense of disgust while in the company of fat grotesque girls while, at the same time, he longs to be with some greasy Guido guy of his dreams. Featuring an almost all-Hebraic cast of morbidly obese Divine-esque Jewesses, wops and Yid dorks, as well as Kuchar as himself in the lead role sporting all-black Scorpio Rising-esque leather motorcycle outfit, Eclipse of the Sun Virgin reveals that the filmmaker's preferred communication with girls is by way of belching and farting and his interest in boys is almost religious in a sort of ritualistic Catholic homoerotic sense where the lead character worships young men in a fashion not unlike how sexually repressed nuns pray to the image of Jesus on the cross. Of course, when it comes to both genders, Kuchar does not have the testicular fortitude to pursue any sort of meaningful physical relationship and instead attempts to impress his would-be-sexual-conquests with screenings of vulgar medical footage. A film with a sort of distinct dream logic that seems to be set more in the director’s terribly sexually repressed fantasy realm than any sort of tangible reality, Kuchar’s all-too-brief 13-minute experiment in middle class repression is indubitably one of the most idiosyncratic, enigmatic, and truly quirky queer themed films that I have ever seen and I say that as a fan of the oeuvre of Teutonic dandy Werner Schroeter. Indeed, the film makes anything that John Waters has ever done seem hopelessly contrived and insincere by comparison. Additionally, the film makes anything Jack Smith has ever done seem like the obnoxiously abhorrent aesthetic ravings of a hyperactive poof philistine queen. Most importantly, Eclipse of the Sun Virgin is more thoughtful and intriguing than anything directed by the majority of so-called Structural filmmakers like Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton that were working during the same era, as a playfully perverse piece of highly personalized preternatural cinema with a deep and bizarrely darkly joyous soul. 

 George Kuchar plays a college graduate who is plagued by Catholic guilt, fat obnoxious sisters (all of whom are played by fat and swarthy Jewesses despite Kuchar’s own Slavic Catholic origins), and a low tolerance for alcohol. At the beginning of the film, a drawing of Jesus Christ is juxtaposed with a frigid sounding woman narrating, “he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it” from Matthew 10:39. In the next shot, a framed college graduation photo of Kuchar is juxtaposed with the same woman narrating, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me” from Matthew 19:21. In the next shot, Kuchar is featured attempting to drink liquor out of a coffee mug, though he has a hard time swallowing it and seems to almost barf it up. From there, we witness a bizarre scene where Kuchar’s Hebraic homeboy Larry Leibowitz plays piano while his mother Frances Leibowitz plays on a different piano that is positioned in the opposite direction. Out of nowhere, Mrs. Leibowitz grabs on old framed portrait of her and her son when he was just a small lad and stares at it intently as if disappointed that her little boy is a now a little mensch with sexual urges. In what is the first overtly homoerotic scene, Kuchar stares like a goofy gay goofball at a somewhat gawky guido boy named Joe Zinzi as if he wants to devour his dago dong, but the filmmaker becomes afraid of the wrath of god when he notices that his little friend is sporting a large crucifix necklace. Indeed, guido Zinzi will homoerotically haunt Kuchar for the rest of the film, but so will Christ and his deep-seated Catholic background. Somewhat strangely at almost the three minute mark of the film, it is insinuated that Kuchar might actually be dead as the Jesus portrait from the beginning of the film closes to reveal a leather bound obituary reading “In Loving Memory” on the cover. Humorously, a storm knocks the obituary down and exposes that it was being propped up in a half-ass manner by a bottle of Right Guard deodorant. Whether Kuchar is dead or not is questionable, but it seems fairly undeniable that most of the characters in the film, including the protagonist, seem like sexually repressed phantoms that live in some sort of alternate dimension for forsaken perverts that lack the fleshy goods and charisma to obtain a mate. 

 As the film progresses, Kuchar continues to attempt to hold his liquor but he ultimately ends up spitting it back in his blue coffee cop. When Kuchar ends up going outside, the film ends up taking an all the more mystical tone that only gets all the more bizarrely esoteric as it progresses. After a segment where the matronly narrator states, “Only as your pride slowly crumbles will you get the glimpse of true humility,” Kuchar uncovers a mirror that is covered with pieces of fruit and closely stares into it in a scene that is certainly a hilarious allegory for homosexual narcissism. At this point in the film, Kuchar begins a temporary excursion in so-called heteronormality and tries in vain to attempt to court a somewhat chubby girl that sometimes has a parakeet resting on her shoulder who he watches playing Beethoven on a piano while seemingly like he is bored to death. When Kuchar attempts to pick a rose for the girl in a scenario one might interpret as his abject failure at attempting to live as a heterosexual man who courts women, he ultimately fails pathetically and merely pricks his finger instead to the point where blood is gushing out of it (not long after, the girl also receives a bloody finger). In another scene that illustrates Kuchar’s decided disinterest in the fairer sex, the protagonist is featured sitting on a stuffed animal adorned bed while sporting leather-fag biker gear and keeping his distance from his would-be girlfriend, who is admiring herself in a compact mirror and seems to be waiting in vain for her hapless beau to peck her on the lips. In a preternaturally potent montage that sort of feels like an experiment in subliminal pop art, shots of the pseudo-girlfriend displaying where she pricked her finger on a rose are juxtaposed with Kuchar checking out his guido pal Zinzi, who gives him a flirtatious knowing smirk. Notably, during this montage, Kuchar is sporting the leather biker outfit and a pair of black sunglasses, which one might interpret as the sort of idealized macho homo that he wishes he was. In the same montage, Kuchar is also featured stealing a Beethoven bust and throwing it into a dirty above ground pool in a scenario that seems symbolic of the protagonist’s sacrifice for sodomy (after all, Kuchar’s female ‘love interest’ was featured in a previous scene playing Beethoven on the piano). After Kuchar tosses both the Beethoven bust and a partly deflated beach ball in the pool, the girlfriend is featured sobbing hysterically while staring at a goofy portrait of the protagonist.  Naturally, Kuchar and his little fake girlfriend are not featured in another single scene together for the remainder of the film, thus confirming that the poof protagonist has rid himself of any heterosexual pretenses that he might have had before and has accepted the fact that he is about as straight as a circle.

 After his failed girlfriend cries to the point where her face is literally soaked with tears as if someone hit her in the face with a water balloon, Kuchar is depicted calling a fat Jewess on the phone and belching into the receiver when she picks it up. Hilariously, the heavyset Hebrewess responds to Kuchar’s fairly powerful burp by farting so loudly that she causes the bed that she is lying on to shake. From there, the viewer is forced to endure the unsightly sight of fat, Divine-esque Jewesses applying lipstick, smoking cigarettes, and playing with kitty cats, among other things that seem to make a mockery of femininity and the so-called fairer sex in general. For whatever reason, during this truly grotesque kosher chick montage, a random photo is spliced in of a young black bourgeois mother staring lovingly at her young daughter as she prays in a scene that—whether intentional or not—seems to hilariously highlight the absurdity of the American negro's devotion to the white man's brand of Christianity. In a scene that may or may not be of Kuchar as a child, a boy is depicted playing with a cardboard toy ‘skeleton-plane’ in a scenario that hints that the filmmaker is dead and that he is now merely floating back and forth through time (which would explain the overall dreamlike nature of the film). After the surreal skeleton-plane scene, Kuchar trips an obese Jewess and causes her to spill coffee on the cover of a comic called “Teen-Age Love” featuring an attractive young man and woman embracing on the cover. Of course, the spilled coffee scene seems to symbolize Kuchar’s rejection of all-things-heterosexual. In the end, George screens footage of a man showing off his rather large and flexible Adam's apple, as well as surgery footage. While screening the footage, Kuchar spends more time watching his friend than the actual film, thereupon indicating that he has finally embraced his homosexuality, even if he has yet to physically act upon it. When the surgery footage ends, Eclipse of the Sun Virgin also fittingly ends. 

 Notably, in a segment from a lecture in the documentary George Kuchar: The Comedy of the Underground (1983) directed by David Hallinger, Kuchar states regarding the genesis of his film and why he decided to make a sequel to Hold Me While I'm Naked, “I had myself in the picture and there were all these trilogies coming out… Antonioni’s was coming out with trilogies… Satyajit Ray was coming out with these trilogy movies…So I wanted to make one so I put myself in another picture called ECLIPSE OF THE SUN VIRGIN. ECLIPSE OF THE SUN VIRGIN hit more closer to home. Some of you may realize that…those that know me…that it came close to home. So therefore I had to change it…I had to make it more ambiguous and have the plot line more like a dream…So that it doesn’t tell that much.” Of course, while absurdly esoteric for a Kuchar flick, there is no doubt while watching Eclipse of the Sun Virgin that it is an extremely personal film about homosexuality and the seemingly innate neuroticism that accompanies it, especially if you had a strict religious upbringing like the filmmaker, who never quite let go of his Catholic roots as his films readily demonstrate (in fact, at various points in his career, Kuchar has credited Catholic iconography and ritual as influencing his distinct aesthetic sensibilities as a filmmaker, which is especially apparent in his highly confessional video diary Temple of Torment (2006)). Interestingly, Kuchar would once state in a somewhat self-deprecating tongue-in-cheek fashion regarding Eclipse of the Sun Virgin, “I dedicate this film poem to the behemoths of yesteryear that perished in Siberia along with the horned pachyderms of the pre-glacial epoch. This chilling montage of crimson repression must be seen by the victims of perversity, regardless of sex or age. Painstakingly filmed and edited, it will be painful to watch, too.” Of course, considering his strong Catholic background and the era he grew up in, it is easy to see why Kuchar had some major hang-ups regarding his homosexuality, which his mother was apparently not too glad about, or as the filmmaker once confessed in regard to some of his seemingly traumatic personal experiences, “I made a transvestite movie on the roof and was beaten by my mother for having disgraced her and for soiling her nightgown. She didn’t realize how hard it was for a 12-year-old director to get real girls for his movie.” Although quite different aesthetically speaking, Eclipse of the Sun Virgin is quite comparable to Gregory J. Markopoulos’ masterpiece Twice a Man (1964) in terms of being a sort hyper hermetic homo ‘coming out’ film that depicts the depression and sense of despair that results from being a young gay man from a fairly normal middle class background. 

 While Kuchar once confessed, “I don't see myself as a gay filmmaker....I don't think other people see me as a gay filmmaker either because certain of my films don't deal with that—and because I don't grab my student audience and fondle them on the side. Curt [McDowell] felt the gay scene was a ghetto,” Eclipse of the Sun Virgin is unequivocally an innately gay film directed by a filmmaker of the extra queer persuasion and, interestingly but not surprisingly, it also happens to be what is probably the most difficult, offbeat, baffling, and just plain curious work that he ever made. Incidentally, the same also can arguably be said of gutter auteur Andy Milligan whose first flick Vapors (1965) is not only his only overtly gay and least exploitative film (even if it features a dangling cock at the end), but also easily the most artsy fartsy and idiosyncratic flick that the AIDS-ridden sadistic sod filmmaker ever sored. Undoubtedly, what films like Eclipse of the Sun Virgin, Twice a Man, and Vapors demonstrate is that repression and persecution of homosexuality at least had some positive consequences, as it resulted in truly groundbreaking art that reflects the height of human misery and melancholia from a sort of highly introverted gay perspective. Of course, what makes Kuchar’s films different from works like Twice a Man and Vapors is that it manages to create a sort of delectably disharmonious marriage between camp and pathos, which seems totally oxymoronic upon hearing but makes total sense in the wonderfully wayward world of Eclipse of the Sun Virgin, which is probably the only film ever made that makes gay self-loathing seem like a quite merry experience. 

-Ty E

A Reason to Live

At the very end of his film Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966), tasteful trash auteur George Kuchar (Pagan Rhapsody, The Devil's Cleavage) looks directly into the camera and asks the rhetorical question, “I guess there’s a lot of things in life worth living for…isn’t there?,” to which he seems to attempt to answer in his inordinately beauteous yet nonetheless sometimes scatological micro-masterpiece A Reason to Live (1976), which depicts the absurdist tragedy that ensues when a melancholy man whore who is cheating on his wife decides to ditch both of his babes and move from San Francisco to Oklahoma to fulfill his dream of living in a sleazy motel in tornado territory instead of rotting away like some banal bourgeois bastard in a lame apartment in fag city.  Starring his then-lover/student/longtime best friend, filmmaker-cum-pornographer Curt McDowell (Thundercrack!, Loads), in the lead role as a fairly pathetic mensch who gets a fair amount of pussy but seems completely apathetic to the couple of dames that want to down his dong, especially his wifey, Kuchar’s film tells the joyously cynical story about how following one’s dreams can lead one to lying naked and dead in some cheap Oklahoma motel, which becomes all the more curious when one considers that the lead character actually dies as a result of doing something that the auteur did on a yearly basis. In fact, not unlike the protagonist of the film, Kuchar would travel annually to Oklahoma where he would stay in the same cheap hotel so as to observe the weather and clouds as demonstrated by his shockingly entertaining video documents like Weather Diary 1 (1986). Apparently co-directed by female lead Marion Eaton, A Reason to Live is an endlessly entrancing 25-minute melodramatic fever dream that oftentimes degenerates into a histrionic mock-ominous nightmare where a man’s fate is both literally and figuratively in the clouds, at least until he finally decides to take action for what is probably the first time in his life and eventually must pay the ultimate price for a seemingly benign choice. Easily the most bizarre tornado flick ever made as a work that even makes Michael Almereyda’s debut absurdist family dramedy Twister (1989) seem terribly tame by comparison, Kuchar's film is a sordid little cinematic work that mimics the tableaux and melodramatic hysterics of filmmakers like Josef von Sternberg and Douglas Sirk in the way that borderlines the line between respectful homage and preposterous parody. Of course, like his other masterpieces like Hold Me While I'm Naked and Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (1967), the film is genius in that it somehow manages to do the seemingly nonsensical by juggling camp and kitsch with Weltschmerz and melancholy in a way that makes it seem as if Kuchar is so hopelessly self-denigrating and neurotic that he cannot even take his own abject misery seriously, hence its singular brilliance as a an outstandingly aesthetically pleasing piece of phantasmagorical celluloid trash with a preternatural degree of class. A mix of nihilistic nerd neuroticism, pathological cinephilia, crypto-cocksucker longing and despair, shadowy (anti)glamour and gloss, and morbid suicide fetishization, A Reason to Live is ultimately auteur cinema in the truest sense, even if Kuchar opted to give one of his stars a co-director credit when it is obvious that the film is 100% his own personal vision. Indeed, only George Kuchar could make a small apartment living room seem as mystifyingly foreboding as the famous swamp scene from F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). A totally improvised work where Kuchar apparently created and personally dubbed all the dialogue after the film was shot, the campy genre-bending horror-thriller-melodrama hybrid with pseudo-mystical undertones is notable for being probably the only film ever made where taking out the garbage and a taking shit are depicted as climatic events that are worthy of extended screen time.

 A Reason to Live begins with a shadowy woman (Marion Eaton of Thundercrack!) that looks like a drag queen attempting to impersonate Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950) creeping up on her beau Vince (Curt McDowell) while he is less than gracefully sleeping on an ugly sofa and surprising him with a passionate kiss on the lips that he is less than passionate about. After kissing her boy toy, the woman stares out of a window and states to her assumed husband, “Wake up, darling. It’s dawn” and then walks over to a plant and says while stroking one of its branches like it is a hard cock, “I’m going to gave thanks to god for making dawn shed its light on my beloved.” Vince reacts to his beloved’s romantic words by pulling a blanket over his face, thus more than hinting that he is absolutely disgusted by the exaggerated love and affection his wife regularly showers him with. When his insufferable lady love goes to make breakfast for him, Vince secretly gets on the telephone and tries to call his busty blonde-haired sister Julia who, for whatever reason, has positioned a hose with water pouring out of it between her leg, as if she has a bad case of penis envy. Somewhat strangely, the sound of the ringing telephone proves to be a borderline tragic experience for Julia as it causes her to collapse on the ground. After his aborted attempt at calling his sis, Vince’s wife asks him who he tried to call and he curiously ignores her question and instead replies, “I saw some cirrus clouds this morning and I had high hopes. I hoped that they turn into cirrocumulus then altostratus, then maybe a big nimbostratus would move in….But.” Indeed, as the film reveals, Vince is more interested in clouds than cunts. 

 After Vince’s wife declares to him, “I’ll get you your pecan pie,” the fairly grating 1950s melodic Sirk-inspired musical score of the film is abruptly replaced by a sort of erotic and energetic celestial synthesizer score and then the protagonist proceeds to call his slob mistress Chichi, who is moronically passed out on her couch with a lit cigarette in between her fingers and tons of trash all around her floor, including a pizza box with half-eaten pieces of crust, countless empty Pepsi and beer cans, and other items that indicate that the less than gorgeous harlot lacks even the slightest inkling of dignity and does not exactly care about her health. When Chichi picks up the phone after stumbling around trash that is lying around her apartment, Vince asks her if she was sleeping and she lies and states, “No, darling…I was in the garden planting vegetables,” which seems to arouse the hopelessly naive protagonist as indicated by his excited reply, “I like you…you’re natural.” From there, Vince proceeds to fondle and finger a small statue of a topless aborigine chick, which somehow magically turns on not only just Chichi, but also his wife too, who is secretly listening to the entire conversation on the other line in another room. At the end of their largely wordless orgasmic phone conversation, Vince declares to Chichi, “I’ll meet you at moonrise.” After his worried wife asks, “Going already?” and proceeds to cry, Vince begins walking through the street of San Francisco to meet Chichi, but tragedy strikes for his slobbish mistress when she is in such pain as a result of intestinal issues that she has to crawl to the bathroom and subsequently takes such a massive dump that she has to use a large stake to get the turd pile down the toilet when it fails to flush. Meanwhile, after scrawling on the ground near a skull, Vince’s sister Julia goes outside and states to a fellow dirty blonde that may or may not be her girlfriend, “Nora, I tried to kill myself.”  Somewhat humorously, annoyingly happy-go-lucky Nora, who is tending her garden, responds to Julia’s mundanely stated confession by passionately embracing her, calling her “foolish,” and then giving her the following timeless advice, “Remember…there are three things in this world that you can do: you can do good, you can do bad…or you can do nothing.” Obnoxious optimist Nora also states to Julia, “Lookout there, Julia. A fog is coming to us…it will give you strength,” but not long after ominous music begins to play and fog proceeds to engulf the SF suburbs in a scene that eerily foreshadows the series of absurd tragedies that will soon destroy most of the characters in the film. 

 After finally managing to get her giant turd(s) flushed down the toilet, Chichi, who is late as a result of her major bowel problems, makes a frenetic attempt to meet Vince in time for the moonrise and in the process she absurdly attempts to wave down a taxi in an open field and then subsequently falls off of a cliff after carelessly not watching her step in her valiant struggle to get to her boy toy. Meanwhile, Vince’s wayward wife almost suffers a complete mental breakdown while taking out the trash. As a result of the fact that Chichi did not meet him in time for the moonrise and thus probably assumes that she stood him out, Vince goes to see Julia, complains to her, “Sis, I feel sort of bad,” and while sharing a coke with her during an extra touching brother-sister moment proudly declares, “I’m leaving this place, Sis.” After confiding in Julia, “I saw some cirrus clouds this morning and I had high hopes. I hoped that they turn into cirrocumulus then altostratus, then maybe a big nimbostratus would move in, but I’m leaving this place, Sis,” Vince goes back to his place and reads a book entitled Oklahoma Weather by meteorologist Gary England (who is apparently a pop culture icon in Oklahoma City and who had a cameo in Dutch master cinematographer turned Hollywood hack filmmaker Jan de Bont's blockbuster Twister (1996)). In the next scene, Vince is featured standing stoically in front of a large airplane during a sunny day while putting on a pair of sunglasses on like he is a man on the mission yet he ultimately ends up at a sleazy motel in Oklahoma where he plans to start his supposed dream life. Unfortunately, while downing a banana like it is a pulsating purple-headed monster, Vince sees a news report on TV about a tornado warning in his area, but of course he makes no attempt to seek safety elsewhere because he has come to Oklahoma to experience the splendor of mother nature's destruction. After Julia catches a news program about how a tornado ravaged Oklahoma, Vince's unclad corpse is featured on the floor of his ravaged motel room and next to one of his feet is a newspaper with the headline “Twisters, High Winds Rip Area” and “Tornado Hits Apartments.”  After seeing a young muscular negro father and his two young children appear on the news, Julia immediately turns off her TV, heads to her bathroom, fills up the bathtub, stands inside said bathtub, and then puts her fingers inside a light bulb socket, thereupon finally achieving her dream of committing suicide and possibly reuniting with her recently deceased brother, who arguably committed a sort of passive self-slaughter. While Nora is horrified upon hearing Julia’s gruesome ear-piercing screams while she is outside fiddling with her garden, she soon gets happy upon seeing fog entering the area, as she sees it as another good omen, even though all the recent series of events have affirmatively proven otherwise. Of course, Nora’s happiness does not last long when Julia’s skeleton appears from an upstairs window and cynically states, “Look, look out there! The fog is coming. It will give you strength” while smoke oozes out of the eye-sockets of her completely fleshless skull, which resembles one of the various corpses of German citizens that were burned alive during the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II due to the fact that it still covered with a head full of hair.  Indeed, A Reason to Live may begin as a lurid melodrama but it concludes as a sort of pseudo-supernatural horror flick.

 As far as I am concerned, when it comes to the seemingly oxymoronic category of truly cultivated psychotronic celluloid, A Reason to Live is like the Black Narcissus (1947) of the trash avant-garde, albeit featuring debauched dames with bad dye jobs instead of naughty nuns and clouds and tornadoes instead of mountains, among other things. Evoking films ranging from William Dieterle’s Fog Over Frisco (1934) to von Sternberg’s Ana-ta-han (1953) to Sirk’s William Faulkner adaptation The Tarnished Angels (1957) and featuring lavish and vaguely oneiric phosphorescent black-and-white celluloid, the film is really like no other (aside for some of Kuchar's other flicks) yet it has only ever been released on VHS as part of a ‘Best Of’ video compilation entitled Color Me Lurid (1966-1978), which also features Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966), Wild Night in El Reno (1977), I, an Actress (1977), and The Mongreloid (1978). Like his Weather Diary videos, Kuchar’s Wild Night in El Reno is notable for continuing the filmmaker’s weather watching fetish. Notably, Kuchar would reveal that there are ancestral roots attached to his storm and weather fetish in Jennifer M. Kroot’s doc It Came from Kuchar (2009) where he tells the seemingly apocryphal story, “Mom was born in the Ukraine. She was a farm girl. There was a lightning storm. One of the farm boys ran into a bale of hay to escape the rain and lightening hit and incinerated him…And that’s why she’s always been afraid of electrical storms. You couldn’t calm her down. I’ve always liked lightning and thunder and I’d always be by the window and she’s say, ‘Get away from the window!,’ and she’d be very agitated.” Indeed, like much of his work, A Reason to Live seems to be at least partly rooted in Kuchar's somewhat morbid mommy issues, albeit in a more rebellious way since Mrs. Kuchar apparently was horrified by inclement weather yet the filmmaker loved it.  As to whether or not Kuchar wanted to be killed by a tornado, that remains to be seen but I suspect that he felt it would be a romantic way to die, especially after watching his film.

 As quoted in the book Queer Looks (1993), Kuchar remarked regarding certain minor problems he had with his ostensible ‘co-director’, “I had fun photographing A REASON TO LIVE—it was all done with a Bolex, and the sound was dubbed in later. Plus I loved designing Marion Eaton, although she was horrified at the result; because it was black and white, I wanted the lipstick to look just right, to stand out, and I had to redesign her eyebrows. I liked the way the sofa looked when you took the cushions off—you could see the shapes of the springs underneath. Marion couldn't understand why I'd want such a horrible-looking sofa in the film. I explained that this movie was about a relationship falling apart, about disillusionment, I guess.”  Apparently, Eaton, who is probably best known for her performance in the Kuchar penned and McDowell directed epic ‘old dark house’ porn flick Thundercrack! (1975), had somewhat mixed yet largely positive feelings about the film, or as she once stated herself regarding her experiences, “A REASON TO LIVE was the first time I did a film for George that was not scripted. It was pure improvisation and it wouldn’t have sync sound, so I wouldn’t be using his language, his feelings. And it was a learning experience for me, that I got to share with him […] George wanted me to empty the garbage [laughing] wearing this dress. It was a little hard for me to get that together until it finally clicked through my mind that when I empty the garbage myself in my house in Mill Valley, I would go out and walk up the stairs in this beautiful day and that’s when I’d usually think about the poetry that was going on my mind while doing this mundane task. So, I was really pleased with the shot, the way it came out, because this woman who is feeling a great deal of emotional dramatic tension has to perform this mundane act and so there’s…I can’t finish that; I don’t know why; I got lost…” 

 With its crypto-cocksucker material that emphasizes camp over actual cocksucking as personified by Kuchar’s then-lover playing a sort of dime-store Don Juan who is adored by various lecherous ladies, A Reason to Live offers a great example as to why the filmmaker once stated regarding his loathing of being described as a fag filmmaker, “I don't see myself as a gay filmmaker....I don't think other people see me as a gay filmmaker either because certain of my films don't deal with that—and because I don't grab my student audience and fondle them on the side. Curt felt the gay scene was a ghetto. He loved mixed crowds because he liked straight guys. Another friend of mine, Dan Turner, was saying how he liked interchange situations. That's where I come from.” Indeed, one of Kuchar’s greatest talents as a filmmaker is that, not unlike Andy Milligan and to a lesser extent John Waters, he was oftentimes able to mask his homo sensibilities and give them an ostensibly hetero form and ultimately assembled with A Reason to Live a delectably disturbing subtextual melodrama that puts all the films of Sirk to shame in terms of its scathing critique and ironical cynicism in regard to seemingly banal subjects like love and romance, which is something that people of all sexual persuasions can relate to. Somewhat ironically considering its various depictions of brutal deaths, A Reason to Live really does offer some reasons to live, albeit some fanatically self-destructive ones like tornado hunting, sexual promiscuity, and suicide ideation. Of course, as Kuchar once stated in regard to a scene in Weather Diary 3 (1988) where there is a shot of him taking a piss, “Everyone wants to be a stripper, but if you don't do it now, you'll go to your grave bitter. That's how I felt. What could be better in your past than a nude scene? It's a dream come true. We all want a scandalous past—it's what Hollywood pictures were always made about. I think it's the dream of our nation, to be a person like that.” 

-Ty E