The Visitor (1979)

Italians sure know how to polish turds, especially when it comes to taking banal Hollywood blockbusters and making them more stylish, cynical and—most importantly—sincerely sleazy. Undoubtedly, out of all the great Guido rip-off films, none is probably more ambitious than The Visitor (1979) aka Stridulum directed by Giulio Paradisi (who used the pseudonym ‘Michael J. Paradise’ so he would seem more ‘American’), who previously worked as an assistant director and actor on Federico Fellini's autobiographical masterpiece 8½ (1963) and was later mainly responsible for directing comedies. A work that shamelessly steals from Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed (1977), Damien: Omen II (1978), and The Fury (1978), among countless other films, yet throws in conspicuous arthouse and psychedelic elements that ultimately give the film its insanely idiosyncratic character, The Visitor is an extravagant celluloid monster gone berserk that defies both expectation and classification. Produced and co-penned by Egyptian-born Greek producer/director Ovidio Assonitis (Forever Emmanuelle aka Laure, Piranha Part Two: The Spawning), who previously co-directed/co-produced the notable Guido The Excorcist rip-off Beyond the Door (1974) aka Chi sei? and was later a stockholder and CEO of Cannon Pictures during the early 1990s, The Visitor was originally intended as just another cheap take on William Friedkin's hit supernatural horror flick, but evolved into a phantasmagoric science fiction horror epic of the celestial metaphysical sort with an eclectic all-star international cast, including Hollywood auteur John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, Wise Blood), Mel Ferrer (The Longest Day, War and Peace), Lance Henriksen (Aliens, The Terminator), Shelley Winters (The Night of the Hunter, Lolita), director Sam Peckinpah (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Straw Dogs), Franco Nero (Django, Querelle), and Glenn Ford (Gilda, 3:10 to Yuma). Notable among cinephiles as being one of the most recklessly whimsical and innately incoherent films ever made (which is more than a slight exaggeration), the film was originally released in the United States in a badly butchered cut that made the work seem even more inexplicable than it actually was, or as producer Assonitis stated in an interview with Zack Carlson, “When THE VISITOR was released in the US, the cut was very different than the original version, and much shorter as well. They did that without asking our permission. It was a distributor from Atlanta. They really eliminated a tremendous amount of the story […] They’d made the cuts, and they had no right to do it, but what could I do? There was a conflict, and we were going to take legal action, but the film had already played. It took decades for people to see the complete version.” 

 Luckily, Independent distributor Drafthouse Films re-released The Visitor in its complete form in 2013 in both theaters and on DVD. While I had previously seen the original butchered cut of the film and admired various random scenes, it was not until I saw the complete version of this much maligned work that I was able to appreciate it fully as being one of the most ridiculously ambitious oddities of Italian copycat cinema. Mostly shot in Atlanta, Georgia of all places with the support of the state government (then-governor George Busbee actually enticed the Italian crew to shoot there as they wanted to develop a film industry in the state), city mayor (three-term high yellow black democrat Maynard Jackson), and even media mogul Ted Turner, The Visitor is certainly a big celluloid cultural mongrel that producer Assonitis bizarrely claims was more influenced by video-games (indeed, the archaic first-generation video-game pong is featured somewhat prominently in the film) than other films (!), but is really a schizophrenic hodgepodge of various blockbuster Hollywood films and genre conventions that manages to bring artfulness to mainstream American industrial style filmmaking. Featuring a long-haired Franco Nero as a Christ-like figure, John Huston as an extraterrestrial exorcist/warrior battling an evil little blonde girl and quasi-Satanic businessmen, Shelley Winters once again portraying a bitchy maid, and Sam Peckinpah (who was apparently a pain to work with and only worked on the film for a single day) playing a doctor who gives his ex-wife an abortion because she is pregnant with a demon seed of sorts, The Visitor is a rare (anti)genre film where thematic insanity reigns and audacious aestheticism trumps genre formulas. Like Dario Argento at his prime meets Satyricon (1969) era Fellini as penned by William Peter Blatty had he fried his brain on acid and developed a nasty bird fetish, The Visitor is arguably the most entertaining mess of a low-budget (around $800,000) mega movie ever made. 

 An ostensible old Polack/intergalactic warrior named Jerzy Colsowicz (John Huston) has been summoned by a blond Aryan Christ figure (played by Franco Nero in a role he apparently offered to play for free just so he could work with his hero Huston), who surrounds himself with bald children acolytes in glittery white robes, to take care of an evil 8-year-old American girl from Atlanta named Katy Collins (Paige Conner). As the supremely stoic Aryan Christ explains, a certain Commander Yahweh managed to capture an evil mutant being known as ‘Sateen’ in a battle that claimed hundreds of lives. Unfortunately, Sateen eventually managed to escape in a tiny scout craft and landed on earth where he developed new psychic and occult powers and used them to dish out death and destruction.  To rid planet earth of inevitable destruction by dark forces, Commander Yahweh sent a flock of specially trained birds to kill Sateen, but the evil being managed to procreate with earth women before he kicked the bucket, thus spreading his demon seed in a somewhat cryptic fashion. 8-year-old Atlanta girl Katy Collins—a confederate Heather O'Rourke lookalike of sorts who is a master of gymnastics and figure skating—is one of Sateen’s descendents and it is ‘extraterrestrial exorcist’ Jerzy Colsowicz’s job to rid the girl of her sinister genetic inheritance as well as preventing her mother Barbara Collins (Joanne Nail) from breeding again, or else evil may spread like the plague throughout the cosmos. Barbara’s boyfriend Raymond Armstead (Lance Henriksen) is a professional basketball team owner who works for a group of satanic businessman who sent him on a sinister assignment to procreate with his girlfriend to create another demon spawn. Luckily, Barbara can sense her daughter is evil and does not want another child, but of course, Raymond and Katy have teamed up to make sure she spawns a satanic spawn against her will. 

Demonic brat Katy is so powerful that she merely stares down negro Muslim NBA player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to give him the power to do a literally explosive game-winning slam-dunk, but she has more pressing things on her mind as a little bad rich bitch who wants a bad little bro to help her establish an out-of-this-world aristocracy of satanic evil and destruction. In between playing pong with her stoned babysitter and using her evil pet bird ‘Squeaky’ to carry out devilish deeds, Katy plots to get her dimwitted mother pregnant. On her birthday, Katy magically receives a gun as a gift from her aunt (who really bought her niece a talking bird toy, but someone or something replaced the present) and ‘accidentally’ shoots her mother with it after throwing the weapon on a table in an excited fashion, thus resulting in her paralysis and her total dependence on her evil boyfriend and deranged daughter. Despite being a worthless cripple, Barbara refuses to get married or have a kid, telling Raymond, “I want my freedom.” Barbara also hires a maid named Jane Phillips (Shelley Winters) who loves to sing negro spirituals (which hint at the fact that she has sort of 'supernatural negro powers' despite the fact she is white) and talking about astrology and she can tell instantly that there is something not quite right about Katy. Meanwhile, a detective named Jake Durham (Glenn Ford) begins investigating the circumstances revolving around Barbara’s paralysis and when he asks little Katy about it, she says “Go fuck yourself,” adding, “I don’t like you. You’re a child molester. I bet you do dirty things to children.” Needless to say, it does not take long for the Detective to drop dead after snooping around the Collins home, as Katy has deadly demonical pigeons unleashed on him, which poke his eyes out while he is driving, thus causing him to crash and subsequently die after his unmarked cop car explodes. Meanwhile, Barbara ends up getting pregnant after her car breaks down, as evil scientists land Close Encounters of the Third Kind style, abduct her, and artificially inseminate her with the demon seed. Jerzy, who previously babysat for Katy and had a pong showdown of sorts with the little girl, tells Barbara that she has conceived out of the evil business men’s hatred for this world, so she naturally opts for aborting it. Luckily, Barbara’s ex-husband Dr. Sam Collins (Sam Peckinpah) knows how to perform abortions and reluctantly gives her one. When evil bird Squeaky attacks Barbara, maid Jane kills it, which irks Katy so much that she pushes her wheelchair-bound mother through a fancy gigantic fish tank (which contains no fish!). Barbara attempts to set Katy straight by bringing her in for psychological testing and experimentation, but nothing helps. Ultimately, Katy becomes completely demonically possessed, strangles her mother. and then throws her down the stairs. With the help of Katy, boyfriend Raymond attempts to lynch Barbara for aborting her demonic fetus, but Jerzy sends in some magical birds (the same sort that killed Katy’s evil ancestor Sateen), which kill the satanic basketball franchise owner when one drives its beak into his neck. Ultimately, the angelic birds also manage to ‘peck out the evil’ of Katy, who is delivered to Aryan Christ, albeit minus the evil and a head of hair. In the end, Jerzy states, “You can’t kill children. Only the evil part. That’s no more.” 

 As Ovidio Assonitis revealed in a recent interview, apparently John Huston was not embarrassed by his role in The Visitor, or as the Producer stated himself, “Long after THE VISITOR was finished, I was invited out to visit John Huston. He was a week from dying. I got there, and he was very sick. He’d brought together all the women from his life. So he had a 22-year-old girl there beside an 80-year-old woman, all sitting around the same table. That was his farewell. I was the only other man there. And at that time, I saw that he’d purchased a video cassette of THE VISITOR so he could watch it at home.” Personally, I only have all the more respect for Huston for being in the film, as a legendary Hollywood director who dared to get a little dirty in a dago celluloid beast that demonstrates that Italians do it better, at least when it comes to ripping of soulless Hollywood mainstream trash. As both revealed in the extra features included with the 2013 Drafthouse Films DVD release of the film, star Lance Henriksen (who had no clue what the film was about) and Italian-American screenwriter Luciano Comici (who was mainly hired because he spoke both English and Italian) do not exactly have fond memories of The Visitor, with both men recollecting their chaotic experiences working on the film and essentially describing producer Assonitis as an intolerable egomaniac. Of course, Assonitis admitted himself that the film was made under intense and largely improvised circumstances, with the producer stating in an interview regarding how the film was in a constant state of evolution, “The story was being built and rebuilt day-by-day, even as we were shooting. Sometimes you include things that come out from your subconscious without you knowing it.” Cultivated and kaleidoscopic metaphysical sci-fi-horror kitsch crammed with sensational and otherworldly cine-magic, a pinch of psychosexual degeneracy, and a wonderfully warped sense of logic (or lack thereof) that even puts Brian De Palma to abject shame, The Visitor is ultimately pure style and spectacle over substance and that is certainly one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much. As someone who cannot be bothered to invest any sort of emotion in the majority of Hollywood horror/sci-fi/thriller films, I managed to appreciate The Visitor because it is such an aesthetically overwhelming and thematically convoluted experience that I never found myself bored and I certainly never found myself feeling lost while watching the work. Indeed, compared to the films of David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Visitor tells a fairly linear story that is easy enough to digest, especially on subsequent viewings. As for the importance of the film in the context of film history, I think Assonitis said it best when he once remarked, “All in all, I am sadly aware that my contributions to the horror genre are not of such historical relevance as, say, THE EXORCIST (1973) or PSYCHO (1960). We're not talking masterpieces here, but I have put all my love and enthusiasm into my films and I think it shows. What's most important, I have gained the respect of true horror fans, who are always loyal and extremely perceptive--they know a good film when they see one!,” as The Visitor is certainly a work that deserves an even larger cult following than it already has as a sort of poor man’s The Holy Mountain. The virtual father film to Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010), The Visitor is a “pre-Reagan-era fever dream” that demonstrates in a dreamscape-addled sort of way that CEOs (in one notable scene, a satanic businessman, who later dies with what looks like feces on his face, states, “Power corrupts [...] And absolute power corrupts absolutely. But we must have that power.”), politicians, and related parasitic psychopaths have been transforming America into a Devil's playground for sometime.  Of course, more importantly, the film demonstrates that a random Guido hack director has more creativity in his pinky than Spielberg has in his entire truly satanic being.

-Ty E

Weird Weirdo

One of my best friends growing up was literally the most infamous and all-around worst behaved kid in school and like many bad boys, he had a curious relationship with his mother that even seemed borderline incestuous (once, my friend and I walked by his mother's bedroom and saw her standing in front of a mirror naked, as if it was normal to get undressed with your door open while having three sons always running around the house). No matter what crime my friend committed—be it hitting the high school principal in the head with a full bottle of Gatorade or stealing expensive pieces of equipment from school—his mother still babied him as if he were the absolute epitome of baby Jesus-like purity. His mother also taught him and his friends (myself included) that all women were whores that would ruin a man’s life without thinking twice, so naturally my friend did not treat his lady friends that well (even breaking one of their noses, hence one of the many reasons why I stopped hanging out with him). Although my friend is not a French mannequin-loving rapist serial killer, he certainly does remind me a bit of the Oedipal-plagued antihero of the avant-garde counter-culture frog flick Weird Weirdo (1969) aka Le grand cérémonial directed by Pierre-Alain Jolivet (Bérénice, Black Mirror). A playfully aberrant and aesthetically and thematically quasi-autistic piece of mod-art-molested artsploitation cinema that is based on a play by Spanish auteur filmmaker/Renaissance man/Panic Movement founder Fernando Arrabal (Viva la muerte, I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse) that was once lovingly described as “Arrabal’s weirdest play yet,” Weird Weirdo is the sordid semi-surreal story of a wayward young man with sadistic tendencies who falls in love with an equally wayward woman with masochistic tendencies who suffers from kleptomania in a cinematic work that strangely proves that opposites attract, especially when they are sexually dysfunctional whack jobs. Directed by an obscure French auteur who is best remembered, if at all, for his rather rough yet strikingly aesthetically pleasing sadomasochistic arthouse flick The Punishment (1973) aka La punition—a work about a high-class hooker who faces sexual displeasure under pernicious patrons with exotic S&M tastes—Weird Weirdo features a strangely hypnotic hodgepodge of trashy and classy themes and aesthetics that will appeal to both Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Rollin fans alike, though Arrabal fanatics might find the film to be not insane enough for their liking. Indeed, while Alejandro Jodorowsky's Arrabal adaptation Fando y Lis (1968) is even crazier than its source material (Arrabal even admitted this himself), Weird Weirdo was made to be palatable for more ‘general’ audiences, sort of like a date movie for decidedly debauched dudes and dames as a work with a tinge of melodramatic romance, not to mention a strangely happy ending. Like Jacques Baratier’s Piège (1970), Weird Weirdo also features a cameo from the playwright as an eccentric shop owner and thus should be a cult classic of sorts by now, but due to its unavailability (the print I found looks like it was found in a Mexican garbage dump), it will just have to remain in the celluloid dustbin of history.

 Cavanosa (Michel Tureau) is no Casanova as a hysterical and homicidal momma’s boy who thinks all women are whores and treats them as such by scooping them up at night and ditching their corpses in large boxes at a railway station. During one of his daily drop offs, Cavanosa spots a young beauty named Syl (played by Marcella Saint-Amant, who appeared on the American soap opera Days of Our Lives during the mid-1960s) being chased by an angry crowd yelling “stop thief!” because she has just stolen a purse, which she hands to the crazed young man. Later, Syl finds Cavanosa and accuses him of waiting for his mommy (indeed, he has been spending the entire day thinking of his equally mental mother trying to kiss him), but he claims that he killed her. Cavanosa’s mother taught him to hate woman, so he seeks solace in semi-anatomically correct mannequins, which he seems to have hundreds of. That night, the deranged young man confesses to his insane mother (played by Ginette Leclerc, who previously starred in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 masterpiece Le Corbeau: The Raven) while being tucked into bed like a toddler that he is in love with, “A very young woman. Very beautiful. Very pure.” Needless to say, the Mother, who practically carries her progeny’s testicles around in her purse, becomes agitated by her son’s declaration of love, thus upsetting him in the process, so when Syl gives Cavanosa a bouquet of roses the next day, he flips out, rips up the flowers, stomps on the torn petals and tells his love interest “Commit suicide immediately. Here. In front of me. That’s what I want,” which only turns her on all the more since she is a major masochist who delights in being degraded by young dandies. When Syl begs Cavanosa to kiss her, he responds quite hysterically by stating, “You’re just a whore who kisses every guy she meets […] Me, I’m the one nobody wants to kiss. I’m doing my best to be hated. Only my mother loves me. And I killed her. And she died because of you, slut!,” even though his mother is clearly still alive. Ultimately, the demented dandy agrees that Syl can spend the night at Cavanosa’s house so long as she lets him kill her that very same night. Meanwhile, Cavanosa’s mother goes to a police superintendent and tells him that her son is the serial killer that is responsible for dropping off dead chicks in boxes at the train station, even going so far as to describe her beloved son as follows: “He’s is hunchbacked, he’s lame, he’s repulsive.” On the other side of the city, Syl brings Cavanosa to meet with her (ex)boyfriend, who she tries to dump. Eventually, the tableside bizarre love triangle results in jealously and resentment on the maniac momma’s boy’s part, so Cavanosa essentially tells Syl and her boyfriend to go fuck off and die.

After attempting to buy lingerie from Fernando Arrabal for his mother but forgetting her size, Cavanosa once again meets up with Syl, who has bought a whip so that he can beat her with it. Before they go back to Cavanosa’s casa, the young man forces his new nubile little girlfriend to get naked in public. When Cavanosa arrives back home, his mother accuses him of losing his virginity and tells him that Syl is nothing but a dirty whore who wants to “pump a child out of you.” Cavanosa is so irked by his mother’s irrational hatred, he attempts stabbing her with a knife but chickens out at the last minute and buries his head in her crotch as if he wants to reenter her womb. Of course, Mommy Dearest lets her little boy know, “All women are whores, my darling. I’ve sacrificed my life for you.” When salacious Syl arrives at Cavanosa’s humble abode, he undresses her and makes her say the word “Volubilis” (the name of an ancient Roman city located in what is now Morocco that fell to local tribes around 285 and was never again reclaimed by the Romans as it was in an indefensible region in the southwest corner of the empire). From there, Cavanosa makes Syl wear a white dress and a crown of thorns as his mother laughs in a maniacal manner while watching them through a peephole. In a semi-foreshadowing phantasmagoric dream-sequence, Cavanosa has ditched all of his mannequins in a dump and kills Syl, but not before telling her he loves her. After the dream-sequence ends and the viewer is transferred back to some semblance of reality, we watch as Syl admires her boyfriend’s eclectic mannequin collection. Undoubtedly, the centerpiece of the life-size doll collection is a creepy black mannequin with a third eye in its forehead and a hand protruding out of the top of its cranium. When Cavanosa joins Syl in the mannequin room, the two proceed to blowtorch all of the dolls, mainly their faces, breasts, and crotch regions (aka the most important physical parts of a woman). After the pyromaniac fun is over, the Mother breaks into the room while in a seemingly demonically possessed state and irrationally accuses her son of being a bastard. Indeed, Cavanosa is such a bastard that he ties Syl to a bed and begins to violently rape her, but the little lady is not completely satisfied and tells him to do it harder. Unfortunately, Syl’s ex-Boyfriend randomly pops in to save the day before Cavanosa can sexually savage her some more. Luckily, Cavanosa beats up the ex-Boyfriend and ties him up in the bathroom and everyone else proceeds to drink tea at a small dinner table (indeed, Syl, Cavanosa, and Mother manage to all get along for a second or two). Ultimately, Cavanosa lets the ex-Boyfriend go and then puts Syl on a leash like a dog. With Syl by his side, Cavanosa decides to get rid of all his childish possessions and destroys the rest of his mannequins in a large bonfire outside. After Syl throws Cavanosa’s favorite mannequin into a lake, the two proceed to make passionate love. Later on, Cavanosa asks his lover “Do you think mommy is dead?” and Syl sets him straight by slapping him in the face like a little bitch boy. Indeed, in the end, Cavanosa has finally gotten over his mommy issues and can now go on with a normal romantic relationship, as a sadist who has found his masochist.

Apparently, Fernando Arrabal’s original play version of Weird Weirdo concludes in a less classically romantic fashion with Cavanosa finding another masochist madam in what is a bitingly ironic conclusion. Personally, I did not mind the somewhat unexpected Hollywood-like ending of the film, as Weird Weirdo already has enough unhinged perversion, nasty nihilism, and flagrant misogyny and misanthropy crammed into it to keep me happy. The only thing that I found somewhat outmoded and annoying about the film is a pseudo-documentary scene towards the end where a news reporter asks random strangers who they think might be responsible for killing chicks and dumping their bodies at the railway station. While one 'racist' fellow proclaims that there is no way that an indigenous French man can be capable of such crimes (he assumes an Algerian is the culprit), another man blames the cops, remarking that if the police spent less time beating up far-left student activists and focused their efforts on the killer, they would have found him by now. Of course, as a fundamentally feminist-free work featuring a female kleptomaniac who falls in love with a deranged dude of the murderously sadistic sort who incessantly threatens to kill her, Weird Weirdo is not exactly a left-wing work, at least in the traditional sense, even if it is an adamantly anti-bourgeois film. Indeed, compared to French left-wing counter-culture works of the same era like those directed by Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard, among countless others, Weird Weirdo seems radically reactionary. On top of featuring a number of otherworldly and equally titillating tableaux, the film is nearly immaculately accented by an eerie and ethereal yet melodic soundtrack created by relatively unknown French composer Jack Arel (a regular collaborator of Jean-Claude Petit who co-composed the song “Psychedelic Portrait,” which was featured in an episode of the British cult TV series The Prisoner). It should also be noted that the film received its English title ‘Weird Weirdo’ from Beat filmmaker/film distributor Antony Balch (Secrets of Sex aka Bizarre, Computer Killers aka Horror Hospital)—a collaborator of William S. Burroughs who directed the short films Towers Open Fire (1963) and The Cut Ups (1967) and produced the 1968 version of Benjamin Christensen's silent masterpiece Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages featuring narration from Burroughs—who bought the film and distributed it in the UK (Notably, Balch was also responsible for re-titling Joël Séria’s sacrilegious cult masterpiece Don't Deliver Us from Evil (1971) aka Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal). Indeed, for fans of surrealism, bizarre counter-culture cinema, the Panic Movement, celluloid sadomasochism, wayward misogyny and/or curious cult cinema, Weird Weirdo is certainly worth digging up and devouring with a date who does not mind a bit of sadomasochistic cinematic debauchery. 

-Ty E

Gus Van Sant’s Last Days

Undoubtedly, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was one of the last people that should have been rich and famous, let alone a hero and icon for an entire generation. I say this not in a cheap and pathetic attempt to belittle Cobain’s output as a musician, but in regard to his character and behavior as a tragic individual who failed his entire life, only to destroy everything he had, namely his own life, when he achieved something that most people can only dream of. Indeed, as a man who came from a broken home that ruined his outlook on life at a young age, suffered debilitating mental illness (he was apparently diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder as an adult), once wrote a song entitled “I Hate Myself And Want To Die,” and had such a warped mind that he once stated, “I am not gay, although I wish I were, just to piss off homophobes,” Cobain was essentially a raving vagrant who became rich and famous and, somewhat unwittingly (when it comes down to it, it was the record company executives and MTV scumbags that peddled his degeneracy), poisoned countless minds, ultimately inspiring an entire generation to get into hard drugs and fetishize suicide. The fact he killed himself (or at least died young) seemed inevitable and in Gus Van Sant’s experimental arthouse flick Gus Van Sant’s Last Days aka Last Days (2005), one sees a perturbing portrayal of the metaphysical torture and all-consuming loneliness Cobain was suffering from leading up to the days before he decided to end it all and blow his brains out. The third and final film in Van Sant’s experimental “Death Trilogy” (following Gerry (2002) and Elephant (2003)), the film was a decade in the making and was originally intended as a ‘straight’ biopic, but Cobain’s control-freak widow Courtney Love—a whacked out woman that is hated by legions of Nirvana fans for obvious reasons—put a stop to that. Probably the most anti-romantic yet strangely poetic depiction of a rock star ever made, Last Days essentially follows the emotional wreck of a rocker as he moves around quite uncoordinatedly like a wounded animal about to take its last gasp. Starring pretty boy Michael Pitt (Funny Games, Boardwalk Empire) in the lead role (this must have been Pitt’s dream as his self-professed favorite film is Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991)), Last Days is a decided ‘downer’ (which is incidentally the name of one of Nirvana’s more punk tunes) as a movie that viewers typically either love or love to hate. Personally, as a minor Gus Van Sant and Michael Pitt fan, I was quite disappointed with the film when I first saw it, as I was expecting it to at least top Elephant in its visceral approach to the moments leading up to the subject's death, but of course, this film does not feature a climatic school massacre scene. After rewatching Elephant recently, I decided it was about time to give Last Days a second chance after having almost a decade for the film to digest in my mind. A transcendental realist nightmare that takes the viewer on a experience that, try as they might, will not be shaken from their mind anytime soon, Last Days is penetrating psychodrama of the voyeuristic sort where it seems as if Pitt’s body has been corrupted by Cobain’s half-dead soul. Tripping and falling down small hills, sitting on the ground in a fetal position while wearing a dress, and pissing in a river in a rather slobbish manner, the ‘Kurt Cobain’ (the writer/director opted for naming the character ‘Blake’ instead of Kurt) of Van Sant's film is a metaphysically dead soul barely grasping on to life, but he has just enough life in himself left so that he can end said life and rid himself of the parasites that have feasted on his fame and the debilitating drug addiction that has devoured his purity and very being. Like John Cassavetes meets Béla Tarr (like with Elephant, Van Sant cited Sátántangó (1994) as having a huge influence on the film) as channeled through the 1990s grunge scene, Last Days is undoubtedly the most melancholy and foreboding yet strangely detached suicide-themed film since Fassbinder’s In a Year with 13 Moons (1978). Of course, Cobain makes for a less interesting subject than that of a butcher turned tranny who cut off his cock to impress a psychopathic holocaust survivor. 

 Morbidly depressed rock star Blake (Michael Pitt) is so mentally out of it that he trudges through the woods as if he is about to drop dead at any moment. When he reaches a river, Blake decides to strip off all of his clothes aside from his underwear and proceeds to piss in the water in an awkward manner as if he is some redneck lowlife who has had one too many cans of cheap beer. That night, Blake somehow manages to figure out how to get a bonfire going and sits by the fire all by his lonesome, as if involved in some sort of private ritual. The next day, Blake walks back to his home and mumbles to himself such nonsensical things as, “Cause I’m afraid…You can’t do anything. You can’t do anything. I can’t. I don’t know what I’m—God, it’s just—I don’t know. Just a—I Just,” as a man that is truly and literally at a loss for words. Various people are looking for Blake and his friend Donovan (played by Ryan Orion in a role modeled after Cobain’s real-life friend Dylan Carlson, who lent the Nirvana singer the shotgun he would kill himself with) has even hired a fat and goofy private investigator (played by Ricky Jay in a role based on real-life PI Tom Grant, who believes Cobain was murdered) to help find him. Meanwhile, a group of parasites led by a fellow named Scott (played by Scott Patrick Green in a role based on Cobain’s drug dealer/Courtney Love’s ex-boyfriend Michael 'Cali' Dewitt who some suspect killed the rock star) occupy Cobain’s house and attempt to prevent anyone from seeing him, including Donovan and the PI. At one point, Blake enters the room where Scott and his compatriots are sleeping and puts his shotgun to their heads in a somewhat joking manner, as if he would love to rid them from his life but lacks the testicular fortitude to do so. Somewhat strangely, Blake finds the shotgun after finding a note in his fridge reading, “The gun is in the bedroom closet” as if someone is attempting to bait him into killing himself. When an overweight negro salesman from Yellow Pages named Thaddeus Thomas (played by a real Yellow Pages salesman playing himself) knock’s on Blake’s door, the Rocker lets him in and entertains his sales pitch. Apparently, Blake posted an ad in the Yellow Pages the year before for a locomotive parts company (?) and Thaddeus convinces him to renew the advertisement. While speaking in a rather contrived salesman-like manner, Thaddeus senses there is something wrong with the strange and seemingly stoned dress-wearing white man that he is talking to and even asks him if he is OK. After Thaddeus leaves, he remembers he forgot some books and goes back in Blake’s house, only to find the Rocker passed out, so he tiptoes around his body as if in fear for his life. When two Mormon recruiters (twin brothers who are both named Elder Friberg) drop by the house, Scott listens to their religious spiel and mocks their claim that they talk to god. When one of Blake’s friends, Asia (played by Italian actress/auteur Asia Argento in a role modeled after Cali Dewitt’s then-girlfriend Jessica Hopper), finds him passed out on the floor after getting in a weird trance while listening to R&B group Boyz II Men (the sort of negrophile garbage that would replace Nirvana/Grunge in popularity after Cobain committed suicide), she merely moves him aside as if he is a piece of furniture. When Scott and his friends temporarily leave the house and see Donovan and the PI driving up to the home, they yell obscenities at them  like “fucking asshole” and “dickhead Don.” When Blake hears Donovan calling his name, he runs away into the surrounding woods as if scared for his life.  Indeed, Blake does not want to be found.

 In what is easily the most trance-like and meditative scenario of Last Days, Blake goes back home and has a one-man band jam session in an exceedingly long dolly shot scene where the camera moves away from the outside window of the room. When a rock executive (played by Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth in a role modeled after Cobain's Jewish manager Danny Goldberg) comes by the home, she berates Blake and sarcastically asks him if he has told his baby daughter that, “I’m sorry that I’m a…rock and roll cliché?,” adding, “If you stay here you’re just gonna…” as if she knows that the Rocker is about to drop dead. Later that night, Blake plays with kittens while Scott and his crew listen to the Velvet Underground song “Venus in Furs.” When one of his parasitic friends, Luke (Lukas Haas in a role modeled after Dewitt’s friend Rene Navarette), attempts to ask for Blake’s advice regarding a song he is writing, Scott gets pissed and says, “Leave him the fuck alone and come upstairs with me, all right?” and the two proceed to go upstairs and have gay sex while the grunge rocker plays some songs on acoustic guitar. Not long after mumbling to himself, “Everyone is treating me like a criminal,” Blake is approached by Scott, who complains about how he needs money for a plane ticket and a heater and instead of asking his friend to borrow some money, he merely takes it out of the Musician's pocket without asking, thus signifying the innately abusively and parasitic nature of their relationship. From there, Blake leaves the home and goes to an underground punk show where he bumps into an ostensible friend (played by Gus Van Sant’s filmmaker friend Harmony Korine), who tells a story about how he played Dungeons & Dragons with members of the Grateful Dead and how great Jerry Garcia is at playing a ‘Dungeon Master.’ Korine attempts to offer Blake a hit of acid, but the Rocker merely walks away without saying a single word. The next day, a ‘Tree Trimmer’ (Chip Marks) finds Blake’s corpse lying in a greenhouse. Magically, Blake’s buck naked spirit leaves his body and assumedly enters ‘Nirvana.’  Of course, after learning of Blake's demise, Scott and his crew decide to make a quick getaway to LA so they are not implicated in their friend's dubious death.

 Undoubtedly, one of the more interesting aspects of Last Days is that Cobain’s death is neither depicted nor explained (aside from a scene where he assumedly writes a suicide letter), thus leaving it to open interpretation for the viewer, which is interesting considering the fact that many people, especially his fans, believe that he did not commit suicide but that he was actually murdered. Notably, Cobain’s Widow Courtney Love, who director Gus Van Sant developed a friendship with a number of years before the film was made (after making various attempts to get a Cobain biopic made), is not depicted in the work. It should also be noted that Love’s own father, Hank Harrison, who has written two books on Cobain’s death, believes that his daughter might have been involved in a conspiracy to kill the Nirvana singer and even says such in British documentarian Nick Broomfield’s controversial work Kurt & Courtney (1998). Additionally, musician ‘El Duce’ (the drummer and lead singer of the self-described ‘rape rock’ band The Mentors) made the claim that Love offered him money to kill Cobain and in Broomfield’s doc he even mentions that he knew who killed the Grunge King, but that he would “let the FBI catch him.” Two days after conducting the interview, El Duce died in an exceedingly dubious manner after being hit by a train in the middle of the night. While Van Sant’s Last Days does not exactly accuse anyone of Cobain’s death, it certainly points the finger at psychopathic drug addict fiends that were feeding off his soul. Luckily, Last Days does not attempt to make Cobain seem like a hero/martyr, but instead portrays him as a pitiable individual who was in over his head and had virtually no one to reach out to. While not exactly a masterpiece, Last Days is probably the closest a film will ever come to paying any sort of ‘objective tribute’ to Cobain’s death, even as a largely fictional work, as Van Sant did not seem to have much of a real agenda with the film aside from attempting to get inside the grunge musician’s mind during his ‘last days’ and inserting one of his random signature gay sex scenes. As Van Sant stated in an interview with Film Threat in response to the fact that the viewer is unsure as to how Blake actually dies, “You see it from the tabloid point of view, just from the hillside and you’re not really part of it.” A film about a man who was arguably the worst role model in human history (at least, the worst white one) and who, against his own will, acted as “the spokesman of a generation” and was ultimately even more exploited after his death than when he was actually alive (I remember distinctly seeing a store selling ‘Kurt Cobain Death Certificate’ t-shirts immediately after he died), Last Days is probably the only mainstream depiction of Kurt Cobain that the Nirvana frontman himself would have appreciated (after all, he was a huge fan of My Own Private Idaho) and for that reason alone makes the film worth seeing.  Of course, if you're considering blowing your brains out, Last Days is probably the last film you should see.

-Ty E

Party Monster (2003)

With the recent release of the King of the Club Kids, Michael Alig, after serving 17 years in prison after being convicted of 1st degree manslaughter in 1997 for killing his Latin drug dealer Andre "Angel" Melendez, injecting his corpse with Drano, dismembering his body, and throwing it in the Hudson River, among others, I felt that there was no better time to re-watch the film that influenced the campy cocksucker's parole officers to deny him parole in 2006. Indeed, a film about the rise and fall of the NYC Club Kid scene, Party Monster (2003), which is based on Alig’s best f(r)iend and fellow alpha-Club Kid James St. James’ 1999 memoir Disco Bloodbath: A Fabulous but True Tale of Murder in Clubland (which was later changed to ‘Party Monster’ in 2003), depicts a group of talentless fag and fag hag narcissists led by the ultimate alpha-fag narcissist Alig that adopted Andy Warhol’s Factory lifestyle (in fact, as St. James once stated, “I think Michael’s big break was when Warhol died...”) of imaginary self-centered superstars and hedonism to ungodly extremes of excess that would ultimately lead to murder. Co-directed by subversive queer producers-cum-auteurs Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey (they would subsequently direct the documentary Hidden Fuhrer: Debating the Enigma of Hitler's Sexuality (2004) which takes a look at the evidence as to whether or not big H was gay), who previously directed the documentary Party Monster: The Shockumentary (1998), which the film is also largely based on, Party Monster, despite its seemingly exploitative and vulgarly campy essence, is a debauched docudrama that is quite faithful to the facts right down to little details regarding the curious case of Michael Alig and his Club Kid cohorts, as a work that never degenerates into hagiography (knowing Hollywood’s homophilia nowadays, one can expect that if Gus Vant Sant had directed the film, it would have portrayed Alig as a misunderstood hero of sorts). Admittedly, when Party Monster was first released over a decade ago, it was sort of a dream come true for me because, like many kids my age growing up during the early-1990s, I would often joke about Macaulay Culkin being gay and having been molested by Michael Jackson, so for him to make a very unexpected comeback as a hysterical homicidal homo seemed like pure kismet. Directed by two men actually connected to the Club Kid scene and starring a number of the original Club Kids wearing the same the repulsively flamboyant costumes that they wore during their prime as coke, cock, and ecstasy addled drug children, Party Monster depicts the height of Reaganite degeneracy (indeed, in the Shocukumentary doc, Alig and his friends confess they were all part of that materialistic mentality) where trust fund degenerates delighted in their own degeneracy and demanded that the entire world worship them for it despite the fact they lacked any sort of talent or trade. An unflattering, if not reasonably objective, portrayal of the bastard son of an eccentric German immigrant woman from a small town in Indiana with an unhealthy obsession with horror movies who learned how to con and charm people as a child by peddling candy at inflated prices and who, naturally feeling misunderstood, inevitably came to NYC to become rich and famous, which he almost did but also developed multiple drug addictions and homicidal tendencies, Party Monster is ultimately a damning depiction of the American dream gone awry set in arguably the most spiritually sick city in the world. 

 When Michael Alig (Macaulay Culkin) was 10 years old, his Sunday teacher taught him how to French kiss, “among other things,” and around the same time he taught himself how to be a parasitic capitalist by buying candy in bulk and selling it to his co-students at a 200% markup rate, thus the so-called ‘King of the Party Kids’ learned everything he needed to know about being a psychopathic poof conman while he was still just a wee lad. When he became an adult, Alig left his remote hometown in Indiana and headed to New York City to seek fame and fortune and soon realized he was practically made for the shitty city. After enough pestering and flattering, Alig convinces an underground socialite/trust fund transient by the name of James St. James (Seth Green) to teach him the “rules of fabulousness” in terms of gaining a reputation in the underground. After begging a one-eyed nightclub owner named Peter Gatien (played by Dylan McDermott in easily his most interesting film role ever) to host his parties at his nightclub, Alig soon becomes the uncontested Führer of the Club Kids. While St. James is Alig’s arch nemesis as both queens are determined to one-up one another in terms of popularity and reputation, Peter acts as a sort of father figure to the bastard Club Kid. On top of setting up parties in tribute to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ pioneering splatter flick Blood Feast (1963), Alig also pioneers a number of illegal parties in places ranging from an 18-wheeler truck driven by a tripping tranny (played by Marilyn Manson in drag) to a trashy fried chicken fast food joint. On top of conning people into giving him money for parties, Alig is so slick that he even manages to convert an ostensibly heterosexual fellow named Keoki (Wilmer Valderrama) into a homo and even transforms him into a ‘Superstar DJ’ in the process. Unfortunately, Keoki soon develops a coke problem and Alig gets back at his boyfriend by using all his white powder, which he shares with their cat (or ‘lovechild’), thus ushering in the beginning of the King of the Club Kid’s life-destroying addiction to drugs. Indeed, on top of keeping his slavishly hedonistic Club Kids under control, including his German-born mother Elke (played by Diana Scarwid of Mommie Dearest (1981)), by feeding them drugs and alcohol, especially ecstasy, Alig also invents his own childish droog-like language (using invented words like ‘skrod’, ‘skrink’, ‘Skrinkle’, ‘Skroddle’, etc.), which he actually convinces his followers to use.

 With the growing popularity of the Club Kids, Alig and his low-camp comrades are featured on talk shows (although John Stamos portrays the talk show host in the film, Alig and his friends went on the Geraldo Rivera show, as well as the Jane Whitney Show where they found solidarity with GG Allin of all people!) and even do national tours to recruit members, as if the Club Kids are like some degenerate sodomite SS. During one of these performances, Alig, who is dressed like a campy Hitler with an Uncle Adolf mustache and a really gay lederhosen outfit, espouses his wanton psychopathic Weltanschauung to audience members, declaring, “Greetings, citizens. We are living in the age where the pursuit of all values other than money, success, fame and glamour, has either been discredited or destroyed. Money, success, fame, glamour.” One of the people to see Alig and his human accessories on TV is a gay Latino named Andre "Angel" Melendez (Wilson Cruz of My So-Called Life fame), who comes to NYC and becomes a top drug dealer among the Club Kids. While Alig has no problem devouring Angel’s drugs, he hates the Hispanic homo as he sees him as a dimwitted fraud and shameless copycat. Alig also starts a pseudo-romance with a hot fag hag named Gitsie (Chloë Sevigny) and spends a lot of time with a dapper hat maker turned drug dealer with a rather flat affect named Robert "Freez" Riggs (Justin Hagan). Eventually, Alig and Angel get in a fight over a longstanding drug debt and Freez ends up bashing the winged Latino in the head with a hammer. From there, Alig and Freez smother Angel with a pillow, poor Drano down his throat (although, according to the real-life Michael Alig, they also injected his veins with the cleaner), cut off his limbs, put his dismembered corpse in a cardboard box, and threw it into the Hudson River. Ever the braggart, Alig even goes so far as boasting of the murder and since the cops want to bust his boss Peter Gatien, he stays out of prison for a period of time, even going on a “Second Honeymoon” to drug rehab with Gitsie (indeed, Alig overdoses), but Angel’s body eventually turns up. In the end, Alig’s rival James St. James becomes quasi-famous for writing the “Great American Novel” aka Disco Bloodbath (the book the film is based on) while the King of the Club Kids is denied fame due to his imprisonment, though he brags, “You know, prison isn’t all that different from a night club…everything’s for free and I don’t have to get out of bed in the morning. And I can get all the drugs and sex I want.” 

 In Party Monster: The Shockumentary, the real-life Michael Alig is so flagrantly arrogant and confidant that he will get away with his sick criminality that he gives the following superlatively shallow excuse as to why he killed Angel, “he was a…he was a copycat…he was one of those copycats we hate so much and so we killed […] I killed Angel and… That’s the kind of thing that gets me in trouble” (keep in mind that this interview was filmed 3 months before Alig was arrested). Indeed, as far as I can tell from seeing him speak in interviews and documentaries, the real Alig makes Macaulay Culkin’s portrayal in Party Monster seem at least somewhat more empathetic and likeable by comparison. As far as I am concerned, the only good thing that ever came out of the whole Club Kid pseudo-kultur was the movie Party Monster, which is the modern day equivalent to a midnight movie and a true instant cult classic if there ever was one, as a highly quotable work with seemingly infinite replay value. Aside from appearing in Party Monster: The Shockumentary, Alig and his cracked out cocksucking Club Kid comrades also appeared in the obscure ‘gaysploitation’ flick Shampoo Horns (1998) directed by Spanish auteur Manuel Toledano. Additionally, Alig is also the main subject of the upcoming documentary Glory Daze: The Life and Times of Michael Alig (2015) directed by Spanish actor-turned-director Ramon Fernandez (indeed, it seems the Spanish have a special affinity for Alig for whatever reason). Incidentally, the trailer for Glory Daze mentions nothing about the fact that Alig is a killer. Upon being released from jail on May, 5 2014 after serving 17 years behind bars, Alig was also the subject of a ‘public letter’ written by gay wop journalist Michael Musto which declared, “You not only killed Angel, you basically murdered nightlife.” Additionally, Musto had the gall to dictate to the King of the Club Kids that he should do the following, “Charity work—any charity work—would be a good way to take you out of yourself and to give back to the world in a way that might bring some gratification. Starring in reality shows or throwing parties (if anyone would let you) might sound appealing, but going down those hollow paths won’t lead to anything substantive. Those kinds of résumé entries were for the old Michael Alig. The new one needs to catch up with technology, adapt to our city’s more privileged populace and come up with something digital that will be creative, constructive and conciliatory. Use your imagination while quelling your baser instincts.” Of course, as a man who used to date a neo-nazi skinhead, loved the word “spic” (not to mention the fact he killed one), routinely pissed in people’s drinks (and would coerce other people into drinking piss and vomit), and wrote libelous articles claiming his friends were involved in the less than flattering trade of enslaving 12-year-old boys and forcing them into white sex slavery, Alig would certainly look like a pathetic phony were he to attempt to turn over a new leaf and become another Hollywood humanist hack, especially with an innately incriminating biopic like Party Monster in existence that has immortalized his moral insanity, drug addiction, and scatological sadism. Like a contemporary Paul Morrissey flick minus the moral compass, Party Monster is not just an endlessly fun and entertaining film that is as addictive as coke yet shot on the price of crack, but also an epitaph for an entire degenerate generation of excess who thought that they were pure gold, but were more akin to excrement, thus making Michael Alig an aberrant alchemist of sorts. As for Macaulay Culkin, he should have won an Oscar for his performance in a truly singular role where he singlehandedly destroyed his reputation as a loveable childhood actor forever. 

-Ty E

Elephant (2003)

Queer auteur Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) has directed a lot of sickeningly sentimental, liberal feel-good slave-morality-addled movies and has received a great deal of commercial and critical success from doing it, thus proving his wholesome upper-middleclass upbringing did not fail him after all, even if he became a subversive sodomite filmmaker who fetishizes poor young male hustlers as demonstrated by his early works Mala Noche (1985) and My Own Private Idaho (1991), yet he has also used his success as a means to continue making experimental arthouse works that would only appeal to more cultivated (and pretentious) audiences, with his post-Finding Forrester (2000) ‘Death Trilogy’ (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days)—three artsy fartsy works loosely based on true stories revolving around death—being arguably the most artistically fruitful point in the director’s career. Undoubtedly, the best film in the trilogy is the second work, Elephant (2003), which takes a largely fictional, if not realistic and almost cinéma vérité-like, approach to the events of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre when two degenerate high school comrades, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, killed 12 students and one teacher and then proceeded to blow their defective brains out in the school library. Van Sant decided to take on the project after being approached by actress Diane Keaton and HBO to make a film about the Columbine massacre (incidentally, trash filmmakers William Hellfire and Joey Smack had already made a film about the event, Duck! The Carbine High Massacre (1999), which ineptly satirized the media frenzy surrounding the massacre) and he ultimately gave birth to a beauteous little celluloid beast that, although offending certain tight ass viewers due to the film’s lack of pseudo-moral sermonizing and rationalizing of the killer’s crimes, would ultimately win the top prize (the coveted ‘Palme d'Or’) at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. A poetic piece of cultivated Teensploitation that would rise well above the level of the 1989 Alan Clarke film of the same name that heavily inspired its aesthetic and minimalistic observational style, Elephant, at least in my opinion, makes all American teenagers—be they bitchy and bulimic cheerleader sluts or bi-curious mass shooters—seem like emotionally and intellectually stunted mini-monsters who cannot see past their own patently petty existences, thus making the work a sort of art-addled antidote to the sorry sentimental teen angst of John Hughes' Brat Pack flicks.  Indeed, while the ‘bullied’ kids of Van Sant’s film certainly get their revenge against the big bad bullies in the end, rather ironically, their first victim is the most conspicuously nerdy, intolerably introverted, and most consistently bullied girl in the entire school, thus demonstrating the futility and irrationality of their actions. Featuring a homoerotic pre-massacre ‘love’ scene between the two killers before they go thrill killing, Elephant ultimately follows in the marvelously sexually masochistic tradition of Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) in terms of its unflattering depiction of fagdom and considering Van Sant’s lifelong hero worship of junky queer literary outlaw William S. Burroughs and his imaginary ‘wild boys’, one can almost see the director sympathizing with the killers to an extent, albeit in a romantic fantasy-driven sort of fashion. Indeed, Elephant is the sort of Columbine film that only a half-autistic homo could get away with and thus represents a rare piece of American mainstream cinema that makes no artistic compromises, at least for the most part (the film does feature a token negro 'hero', although said hero fails when attempting to take down the homicidal honkies). Comprised of a series of long and voyeuristic scenes shot mostly on a Steadicam and starring mostly non-actors that used their real first names for the characters they played, Elephant is a film that ultimately puts the viewer right in the shoes of the unsuspecting teen victims (as well as the killers), only to blow their brains out once you have become accustomed to them in what amounts to a nasty neo-Brechtian Afterschool Special from high school hell that flings dung on Dogme 95 in terms of its delightful dilettantism. 

 Androgynous albino skater boy John McFarland (John Robinson) is being driven to school by his goofy father (played by Timothy Bottoms, who is probably best known for his role as Sonny Crawford in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 hit The Last Picture Show), but since his daddy is a dipsomaniac and already drunk, he has to act as a sort of parent for his pathetic progenitor and forces him to allow him to drive the car. At the high school, a charming young photographer named Elias (Elias McConnell) takes some snapshots of a young punk couple for his portfolio and promises to give them a print, though he will never actually get the opportunity to make good on his promise. Meanwhile, on the high school football field, a nerdy Jewish-looking girl named Michelle (Kristen Hicks) stares up into the sky as if gazing into the bowels of heaven, which she will soon ostensibly enter. Also on the field is popular jock lifeguard/football player Nathan (Nathan Tyson) who, after playing ball with his bros, meets up with his beloved girlfriend Carrie (Carrie Finklea). When John is caught crying by his female friend Acadia (Alicia Miles) in an empty room at the school, he is given a rather sympathetic kiss in what is easily the most tender scene of Elephant, but the girl soon leaves to attend a gay-straight alliance meeting where its members discuss whether or not you can tell if someone is a homo by their appearance. While exiting the school, John runs into his two friends Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen), who are dressed like ‘goth’ mercenaries and give their friend the following warning, “Get the fuck out and don't come back! Some heavy shit's going down!,” in a rather aggressive fashion.  Although John will try to warn other students not to enter the school, his actions are ultimately in vain. As demonstrated in the next scene, Alex is a sensitive nerd who has suffered routine bullying from philistine jocks with a propensity for throwing spitballs during science class. Like Harvey Keitel’s eponymous character from James Toback’s Fingers (1978), Eric is a sensitive artistic type with a seemingly split personality who finds solace in playing compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven on piano, but has a lot of pent up hatred that he has no true outlet for, not to mention the fact that he is a virgin. Alex and his comrade Eric, who has a much lower IQ and is a physically frail wigger who dresses like Eminem, somehow magically buy a assault rifle (Bushmaster Carbon 15 Type 21 semi-automatic varmint rifle) online, which they practice using by shooting at firewood in a garage so they can prepare for their dream massacre. When footage appears of the Third Reich, including a scene with Leni Riefenstahl (Van Sant’s archenemy?), on television, the two friends have the most mundane conversation ever, with the one asking, “Can you still buy Nazi flags?” and the other responding, “Sure, if you’re a nut,” thus proving that these young men were not inspired to kill by the ghost of Uncle Adolf and his undead army. In fact, Eric is so uneducated that when Hitler appears on screen, he asks, “Who’s that Guy?” (indeed, if kids learn anything in public schools nowadays, it is about how eternally evil Hitler and the Nazis were). 

 Before going on their killing spree, Eric gets in the shower with Alex and says, “Well this is it. We're gonna die today. I've never even kissed anyone before, have you?,” and the two proceed to kiss (for the record, Van Sant has stated in interviews that these two fucked friends are somehow not homos). For about the last 15 minutes of Elephant, the terrible teenage twink twosome carries out their reckless reign of impotent terror, with Alex stating to his comrade before they carry out their crimes, “Most importantly, have fun, man.” The first place the crazed comrades go to is the library, with bullied nerd Michelle quite ironically being the first victim, with her brain splattering all over a bookshelf sitting behind her. In a scene of seemingly unintentional comic relief, Elias takes a photo of Eric and Alex a second before they start shooting. In a female bathroom, Alex assumedly guns down a trio of annoying bulimic girls, Brittany, Jordan and Nicole, with one of them ironically stating how cool it would be if bombs were going off in the school as it would result in no homework (indeed, Alex tried to explode propane bombs but they did not work). Meanwhile, a negro athlete named Benny (Bennie Dixon) passively (using one hand, which barely touches her body!) helps Acadia escape out of a window after a member of the gay-straight alliance is killed and proceeds to attempt to be a hero by sneaking up on Eric from behind, but he is ultimately gunned down a second or two before he goes to attack the school shooter. From there, Eric begins to torment the school principal, Mr. Luce (Matt Malloy), stating, “You know there’s others like us out there, too. And they will kill you if you fuck with them like you did me and Jared.” While Eric pretends to spare Mr. Luce, he ends up sadistically shooting the principal while he is running away, thus demonstrating his innate ruthlessness. When Alex and Eric meet in the school cafeteria after killing the majority of their victims, the former shoots and kills the latter while he is discussing his dirty deeds.  In the end, Alex finds popular couple Nathan and Carrie hiding in a walk-in freezer and plays the children’s counting rhyme "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" with them before shooting one of them, though it is never revealed who was actually shot. 

 With the mastermind of the massacre, Alex, resembling Van Sant’s much beloved actor Keanu Reeves (who appeared in both My Own Private Idaho and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) and the other killer, Eric, resembling the sort of pedomorphic and seemingly anorexic sort of young twinks that dominate gay pornography, Elephant ultimately resembles a sick fantasy film on the director’s part, albeit a somewhat inconspicuous one. It should be noted that the film also features a spoken word track (“Meeting of International Conference of Techological Psychiatry”) by the director’s hero William S. Burroughs, who wrote a series of novels about homicidal homo teen boys (especially his The Red Night Trilogy (1981-87)) and who appeared in two of Van Sants’ films, Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and the anti-American short Thanksgiving Prayer (1991). As Van Sant explained in the French featurette About Elephant, all of the characters featured in the film are more or less archetypes for high school students and indeed, the film has a certain authenticity in its intentionally mundane depiction of teenagers that is quite a relief from the moronic scat-obsessed 30+year-old frat boy philistines that typically appear in corny coming-of-age films and teen sex comedies. Indeed, compared to the other films based on the Columbine massacre, including Duck! The Carbine High Massacre, Uwe Boll’s Heart of America (2002), Ben Coccio’s Zero Day (2003), The Only Way (2004), and We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Elephant is the only film that does not seem like a total piece of putrid exploitative garbage, superficial moralizing, and/or vapid sentimentalism. In an interview with Gerald Peary, Van Sant stated the following regarding why he decided to take a more detached and observational approach to directing the film, “It's not that I don't want you involved in the characters, but I want you involved by watching them, an observation, the way documentarian Frederick Wiseman sits back and lets things occur. We could have invented a more traditional psychological narrative. I have my ideas why Columbine happened, but that's not this film. I wanted a poetic impression rather than dictating an answer. I wanted to include the audience's thoughts.” Indeed, Van Sant may have been arrogant enough to direct a remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho starring a rather repugnant Hollywood comedian like Vince Vaughn, but he does not have his head so far up his ass to go as far as dictating to the audience the answer as to why two teenage upper-middleclass degenerates shot up their school. While not exactly an exciting and action-packed worked, Elephant apparently did inspire at least one school shooter, Jeff Weise—an Ojibwe Indian that the media painted as a neo-Nazi (just like they did with the Columbine killers, despite the fact that Klebold was part Jewish and even practiced Jewish rituals) who killed 9 of his fellow native Americans at his high school (located on Red Lake Indian Reservation) before blowing his brains out—to carry out a shooting spree on March 21, 2005. Of course, anyone who is inspired to kill a bunch of people after watching any film, let alone a slow-moving arthouse film like Elephant, was already insane to begin with. 

-Ty E