Horror Hospital

Call me a softcore Anglophobe, but I have an acute aversion to British comedy, especially if it is blended with the horror genre (another genre the Brits seem to have a keenness for making rather banal), with a film like Shaun of the Dead (2004) reflecting the height of retarded aesthetic repugnance to me. Needless to say, I have never seen a single limey horror-comedy that I actually enjoyed, at least until recently after inadvertently discovering the strange and largely forgotten figure of Antony Balch while doing research on the Fernando Arrabal-penned S&M-themed erotic arthouse flick Weird Weirdo (1969) aka Le grand ceremonial directed by Pierre-Alain Jolivet. Balch was originally a film distributor who created catchy English titles for cult, arthouse, exploitation, and foreign sex films like Weird Weirdo and Don't Deliver Us from Evil (1971) aka Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal and screened them in the various movie theaters he ran. A personal friend of many important filmmakers, including Kenneth Anger, Balch got his start in filmmaking collaborating on shorts with junky literary outlaw William S. Burroughs, who he met at Madame Rachou’s Beat Hotel. Indeed, after collaborating with Burroughs (who gave the auteur a ‘special thanks’ in his cut-up 1962 novel The Ticket That Exploded) on a couple experimental avant-garde shorts like Towers Open Fire (1962–1963), The Cut-Ups (1967), and the abandoned documentary project Guerrilla Conditions, Balch decided to take up the curious cause of feature-length exploitation filmmaking after hooking up with horror producer Richard Gordon (Fiend Without a Face, Radley Metzger’s The Cat and the Canary). Working with an incomplete script, Gordon and Balch (who provided half of the funding for the film) created the genre-smashing erotic-exploitation-horror-comedy hybrid Secrets of Sex (1970) aka Bizarre—an offbeat film anthology mocking sex that is narrated by an Egyptian mummy and was co-penned by no less than five people (Burroughs’ bud, Brion Gysin, was also apparently involved)—which was a huge success in the UK. It was not until his second and final collaboration with Gordon, Horror Hospital (1973) aka Computer Killers aka Doctor Bloodbath aka Frankensteins Horror-Klinik, that Balch managed to direct his first somewhat ‘straight’ horror flick. Of course, as a work directed by a queer dandy of sorts who was described in Barry Miles’ Burroughs bio as being, “gay, well dressed with dark hair and an eager smile. After a few drinks he could be quite camp: ‘The trouble with fish is that they are so fisheee!’ he once shrieked in a restaurant,” Horror Hospital is far from your typical UK horror flick, as a conspicuously campy work that mirthfully mocks the counter-culture generation and wallows in witty and playful forms of iconoclasm. Written by Balch and his comrade Alan Watson at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival (the director came up with the alliterative title first before actually dreaming up a storyline), Horror Hospital ultimately evolved into a sardonically campy Gothic horror flick that would predate similar yet much more successful works like Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Indeed, a fiercely farcical film that seems like it was directed by the Bela Lugosi-obsessed British bastard son of Andy Milligan and Paul Morrissey, Horror Hospital is like the Performance (1970) of horror comedies, as a work that even features its own Mick Jagger clone (interestingly, Balch’s dream-project was to adapt Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, but the film apparently fell apart when its star, Mick Jagger, was concerned that the director might be coming on to him). 

 Jason Jones (Robin Askwith) is a long-haired rocker with a rather dubious IQ who bares a striking resemblance to Mick Jagger (but acts more like Brian Jones) and who made the major mistake of joining a band with a prissy tranny degenerate as a singer (as portrayed by the film’s co-writer Alan Watson in an uncredited role). Indeed, the band stole Jason’s song and kicked him out of the group, or as the songwriter complains while watching the band perform his song without him, “Look at that. They stole my song. A week’s work up the spout.” Jason also makes sure to verbally ream the gender-bending meta-man singer with the following hilarious remark, “Silly little red faggot swirling about in his own smoke. Who does she think she is? Greta Garbo? He looks more like a lemon meringue pie in heat,” and he is subsequently beaten by the tranny rocker due to his disparaging remarks. Undoubtedly, Jason is in need of a vacation and after seeing a flyer for a travel agency called “Hairy Holidays,” he meets up with a sleazy and exceedingly effete gay travel agent named Mr. Pollack (portrayed by Dennis Price, who is best known for starring in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and who died the same year Horror Hospital was released), who gives the rocker a discounted price to an ostensible health farm called Brittlehurst Manor (the exteriors of the building were shot at English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s home) after getting aroused after looking at the bulge in the young man’s pants. While riding on a train to the health farm, Jason meets a hot young chick named Judy Peter (Vanessa Shaw), who seems somewhat uneasy around the rocker, at least until he calms her worries by remarking, “There’s no need to get so uptight about things. I’m not going to rape you.” As Judy explains, she is also going to the heath farm, albeit to visit her Aunt Harris (Ellen Pollock), who works there. Judy has never met Aunt Harris because her mother refused to allow her daughter to meet her sister due to the fact that she ran a whorehouse in Hamburg, Germany right before the Second World War.  Unfortunately, little do Jason and Judy realize that Brittlehurst Manor is not a health spa, but a house of horror where a wheelchair-bound mad scientist modeled after Bela Lugosi’s character from The Devil Bat (1940) named Dr. Storm (portrayed by Hammer horror star Michael Gough, who is probably best known for portraying ‘Alfred’ in all four films of the Hollywood Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher Batman films) does experimental brain surgery on hippies and turns them into mindless yet obedient zombies. Naturally, Dr. Storm has a couple of henchmen, including a Jewish midget named Frederick (Skip Martin) that always sports a yarmulke, Judy’s Aunt Harris aka ‘Madam Olga’, and a legion of leather-jacket-adorned Droog-Gestapo biker zombie thugs. 

 Upon arriving at Brittlehurst Manor, Judy is berated by her Aunt Harris for coming (apparently, she wrote her niece a letter telling her not to come, but she never received it, as wily dwarf Frederick disposed of it) and she and Jason are given a room to share together, even though they are not lovers. Needless to say, Jason and Judy soon become hot and heavy lovers, though they both feel a bit uneasy about staying at the health farm, not least of all because they spotted a bloody bed in another room only minutes after arriving there. When Jason and Judy go to eat dinner with the rest of the hippies staying at the health farm, they notice that their comrades are pale, mute, seemingly braindead, and have giant scars on their foreheads. After one of the female guests is subdued by the biker zombies after she has a violent freakout, Jason and Judy go back to their rooms, only to discover that blood is coming out of the sink in their bedroom. After being horrified by the rather unconventional sight of seeing blood flying out of faucets, the two lovers are visited by Dr. Storm, dwarf Frederick, and Aunt Harris, who warn them not to leave their room. After having hot and steamy sex for the first time, Jason and Judy make the major mistake of leaving their room, thereupon resulting in both of them soon being captured by the leather-bound biker zombies. The next day, travel agent Pollack attempts to blackmail Dr. Storm, so the good doctor has him decapitated with his Rolls Royce, which features a large blade on the side that cuts off people’s heads. When Jason sees Pollack’s corpse from an upstairs window of the mansion, he violently grabs Frederick and demands that the imp tell him what is going on around the health farm, with the dwarf confessing, “I’m just as much a prisoner here as you are…I’ll talk to you later.” After that, Jason is given a tour of the health farm gymnasium where the mindless zombie hippies do back flips and accept torture without complaining. As Dr. Storm explains regarding his patients, “You see…Just like puppets, and I’m the puppet master…puppets who feel no pain.” Dr. Storm then reveals that he has drugged Judy and he plans to give her, and eventually Jason, brain surgery. Naturally, Jason runs away and Dr. Storm yells to him, “It’s no use Jason. You won’t get very far.” Of course, Dr. Storm is right, as while Jason manages to kill a zombie biker by knocking him into quicksand, two other zombie bikers capture him and put him in a dungeon room where he is tortured with “knock out gas” that causes him to hallucinate. Meanwhile, Aunt Harris begins getting paranoid that the police might find out about their experiments, but Dr. Storm warns her that no one gives a shit about young hippies disappearing, stating, “As for these young people, they come and go like flies these days. Dirty ones at that. Their disappearance will hardly be noticed.” 

 When a swarthy hippie dork named Abraham Warren (Kurt Christian aka ‘Baron Kurt Christian Von Siengenberg’) shows up at the hospital of horrors looking for his girlfriend, Aunt Harris decides to quit and is soon killed by a grotesque monster that looks like a humanoid turd. Of course, Abraham is also thrown in the dungeon with Jason, but the two young hippies are soon freed when dwarf Frederick gives two zombie biker guards neon green drinks spiked with ‘Mickey Finn,’ steals the guards' keys, and unlocks the door to the prison cell. Of course, they are caught again after Abraham spots his girlfriend Millie (Barbara Wendy), who has been turned into a zombie, in the company of Dr. Storm and his leather-fag gestapo agents. As the good Doctor explains to his prisoners/guests during dinner, he used to be a handsome lady’s man that was the disciple of a revolutionary scientist named Academician Pavlov, but as Storm states, when Stalin came to power, he installed “many young scientists, stupid adolescents who didn’t know what they were doing. Very soon my laboratories were overrun by these young turks, and I was made to leave.” Dr. Storm decided to go to Helsinki, Finland where he established a zoo where he experimented on animals, but he soon got bored working with furry creatures and began experimenting on humans instead, using Aunt Harris as a means to procure German prostitutes that he used as guinea pigs, explaining regarding his experiments: “In one of my experiments I applied Academician Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflexes to sexual behavior. In my view, Freud had failed. I succeeded in controlling human desire, but there was still a missing link. My subjects could not yet fulfill the desires I had created in them. They were not a very pretty sight after the operation.” Dr. Storm also explains that he became a cripple after a “hunting man had the impertinence to enter my fortress” and accidentally set the place on fire, thus paralyzing the deranged doctor in the process.  After dinner, Jason, Abraham, and dwarf Frederick are locked in a room together, with the latter revealing that he is the bastard son of one of Dr. Storm’s Hamburg hookers and he has been the mad doctor’s “whipping dog” ever since. The three manage to escape after Frederick jumps out of a window, kills a zombie guard by hitting him over the head with an ax, and unlocking the door for his two new friends, but the brave dwarf, who always dreamed of being a hero (this is one of the many long running jokes throughout the film), is subsequently killed after he is thrown down some stairs by one of the biker guards. Before he dies, Frederick attempts to tell Jason and Abraham something about Dr. Storm. Indeed, as the hippies soon learn, the Doctor is really a human monster (the ‘humanoid turd’ I mentioned before) who lost all his skin during the same fire that left him paralyzed.  Ultimately, Jason and Abraham catch the undead Doc in his naked fecal-matter-like monster form sexually brutalizing Millie. The boys decide to give Dr. Storm “some of his own medicine” by decapitating him with his own killer Rolls Royce. In the end, Jason, Judy, and Abraham manage to get away and Dr. Storm’s decapitated corpse and head sink into quicksand, but somehow the monster mad scientist manages to come alive again, thus setting up for a sequel to Horror Hospital that was never made. 

 While Horror Hospital was the most successful movie that Antony Balch ever made, the rather idiosyncratic auteur never made another film, though he apparently had a number of projects in mind before he died, including an unkosher comedy entitled The Sex Life of Adolf Hitler and a horror flick co-written by Hammer horror screenwriter Christopher Wicking, who once commented regarding a meeting with the eccentric filmmaker in a 1988 interview with Shock Xpress magazine: “I had a crazy meeting with him, when he wanted to do some picture or other. He spent most of the time walking across the furniture. Languorously, he would walk across three or four chairs. He went into another little world. He was a sad figure in a way, because he was well before his time.” Indeed, rather unfortunately, Balch succumbed to stomach cancer at the premature age of 42 in 1980, thereupon putting a permanent end to his all too brief filmmaking career. Undoubtedly, Horror Hospital demonstrates that Balch were certainly a filmmaker that was ahead of his time, as a sort of Werner Schroeter of trashy high-camp horror comedies. In fact, Balch was actually deemed an important enough filmmaker in France that a frog writer named Adrien Clerc recently released a book about his life and career entitled Guerilla Conditions, la folle épopée cinématographique d'Antony Balch avec William Burroughs, Richard Gordon et tous les autres (2014). Retarded enough in parts to work as a stoner flick but also rather scathing in its depiction of hippie potheads, Horror Hospital is like an anti-Head Head flick that makes one big clever, if not intentionally corny, joke about the counter-counter generation and related subcultures while at the same time totally deconstructing virtually every single classic horror movie cliche. Heavily influenced by Michael Curtiz’s Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and the works of Bela Lugosi (Balch owned various prints of his films and would screen them at his home) yet set in the post-Beat counter-culture era, Horror Hospital ultimately demonstrates how much society, culture, and cinema has degenerated since the end of the Second World War, even if that was not Balch’s intention. Featuring the killer queen among killer queens as the main villain (Dr. Storm may proclaim to be rampantly heterosexuality, but he acts like a bitchy old cabaret dancer) and some of the most ludicrous murder and sex scenes of its era, Horror Hospital is an excess-ridden exercise in combining the elegant with the risqué and even lowbrow, thus demonstrating that auteur Antony Balch was the foremost dandy of exploitation cinema. Call me crazy, but I think Balch would have also made an adaption of Naked Lunch that would have put Cronenberg’s version to shame.

-Ty E

Young Törless

Love him or loathe him, German auteur Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum, Swann in Love) almost singlehandedly rebooted Teutonic cinema during the post-WWII era with his debut feature Young Törless (1966) aka Der junge Törless starring a young teenage Mathieu Carrière (who had attended the same Jesuit boarding school in France that the director previously attended) in the eponymous lead role. Indeed, along with Alexander Kluge’s Yesterday Girl (1966) aka Abschied von gestern and Ulrich Schamoni’s It (1966) aka Es, Young Törless was such a striking cinematic revelation among the West German public that it was dubbed by the media as something totally new, ‘Young German Cinema,’ which would eventually become New German Cinema. Learning the cinematic craft from working as an assistant director for French New Wave auteur filmmakers like Louis Malle and Alain Resnais and desiring to make a sort of celluloid bridge between his zeitgeist and that of the great Germanic filmmakers of the silent era like F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, Schlöndorff assembled the somber black-and-white coming-of-age flick Young Törless, which was adapted from Austrian writer Robert Musil's 1906 literary debut The Confusions of Young Törless (1906) aka Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß. Indeed, impressed by the writer's unfinished two-volume magnum opus Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften aka The Man Without Qualities (1930–43), Schlöndorff decided to checkout and ultimately cinematically adapt and update Musil’s prophetic novel Young Törless, which not only interested the auteur because he attended a boarding school like the protagonist of the book (albeit, a French Jesuit one as opposed to an Austrian military one), but also because, as the director described in the featurette A German Movie: “The other thing that attracted me in Musil’s novel is that it seemed like a metaphor for what happened much later in German history, meaning the dictatorship of the Nazis and the abuse and the holocaust.” Heavily influenced by Fritz Lang’s late era expressionist masterpiece M (1931), Young Törless, which is set during the pre-WWI era at a military boarding school located in a remote rural region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, follows an inquisitive teenage protagonist with a ‘beyond good and evil’ mentality who watches passively as his new friends and classmates routinely physically, sexually, and emotionally torture a weak and cowardly student who was caught stealing by one of his cornholing comrades. Casting a real Jew named Marian Seidowsky (who would later star alongside Fassbinder in Schlöndorff’s 1970 adaption of Baal) whose Polish Jewish family managed to survive the Second World War in the role of the victim Anselm von Basini in a performance modeled after Peter Lorre’s pathetic pedophiliac serial killer character Hans Beckert from Fritz Lang’s M, Schlöndorff’s cinematic debut is a vaguely S&;M-themed political parable that allegorically depicts via a small military academy microcosm how the German bourgeoisie (as represented by protagonist Thomas Törless) watched passively during the National Socialist takeover and the discrimination of Jews. A work that proved that Teutonic filmmakers still had testicular fortitude (although, the director would eventually lose this testicular fortitude), Young Törless was such a subversive work upon its release that it caused the West German counselor in Paris to walk-out during its screening at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize, and slam the door while shouting, “This is not a German movie.” Young Törless is also the first film where Schlöndorff would attempt to establish a dubious link between fascism and faggotry, thereupon making it a work that might offend more weak-minded LGBT-lobotomized viewers. 

 Teenage intellectual Thomas Törless (Mathieu Carrière) is a young man who has probably misread too much Nietzsche (notably, Musil was heavily influenced by the “philosopher of the hammer”) and believes himself to be above ‘good and evil.’ Törless’ father believes his son is too indecisive and asks a more militaristic and conservative student named Beineberg (Bernd Tischer)—an ideologue and master race type of the old school Prussian sort—to watch over his progeny when he drops him off at the military academy. A born iconoclast of sorts, Törless is punished during his first day of school for mocking the banal nature of his teacher’s lecturing techniques and is thus forced to copy out Horace’s sixth ode by the next day. Meanwhile, the most pathetic and cowardly student in the entire military academy, Anselm von Basini (Marian Seidowsky)—the stereotypically Jewish acting/looking son of an impoverished widow—is threatened by a nasty young man named Reiting (Fred Dietz) who demands that the degenerate aristocrat pay him back money that he owes him by the next day, or else he will become his personal slave. Needless to say, Basini makes the desperate mistake of stealing money from alpha-male Beineberg’s drawer to payback Reiting. When Reiting accuses Basini of theft, the meek boy, who clearly suffers from a persecution complex of sorts, reacts in a stereotypically Hebraic manner by retorting, “How dare you say that! What a nasty thing to say! That’s vile slander! You’re just picking on me because I’m weaker.” After much arguing, Basini eventually confesses to the crime, but absurdly claims that he did not steal the money, but “only borrowed it in secret.” Meanwhile, Beineberg takes Törless to meet a single-mother prostitute with a bastard baby named Bozena (played by English Gothic horror actress Barbara Steele, who starred in Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960) and Corman’s Poe adaptation The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), among countless other classics of the genre), who hates the Austrian bourgeoisie, especially the Viennese (her baby is the unwanted product of an affair she had with a Viennese bourgeois gentleman). Bozena can sense the young student’s unease and seeming sense of superiority, so she remarks to Törless while making out with Beineberg, “You don’t like me talking about your mother? You people always think you’re better than us. You don’t think your mother and I are alike, huh? […] You’re wrong…terribly wrong. I know your families better than that. I spent enough time in Vienna. I know what goes on there.” Bozena also tells the boys that they are just like their parents as, “hypocrites, cowards and liars” who pretend to be respectable and dignified, but act quite differently behind closed doors. As Törless will soon find out, Bozena is quite right. Bozena also alludes to the fact that certain young military cadets are involved in homosexuality by stating in defense of the fleshy ‘goods’ that she has to peddle: “It is better than what you do in your dorms.” Indeed, Törless will also learn that sadomasochistic sodomy is a timeless secret tradition at seemingly benign Austrian military schools.

 During the night, a hermetic world comes to life in an attic at the Austro-Hungarian military academy where an unofficial secret society of students smoke from hookahs like proto-beatniks, dream of taking pilgrimages to India in an Hermann Hesse-esque fashion, discuss sex and look at pornography, and—most importantly—make future cryptic metapolitical plans for their school and classmates, with Beineberg being the uncontested Führer of the group. During one of their nightly attic meetings, Reiting discusses how “a lot of pleasure can be had from him” regarding criminal Basini, but idealist Beineberg wants the thief formerly exposed and kicked out of the school, as he has a more conservative view regarding crime and punishment. Ultimately, the conspiring friends agree to have their fun with Basini, whose thieving hand they whip the next day. On top of being physically assaulted, Basini is told by Reitling and his crew that they have decided not to squeal to the school authorities regarding his crimes, but that he will now have to live the lonely life of a virtual slave and plaything who’s every action with other classmates will be the subject of their consent and whose expenses and income will be strictly scrutinized. When Beineberg discovers that Reiting has been looking at pornography and engaging in violent gay sex with Basini in the attic, he becomes enraged and decides he wants to also take part in torturing the pathetic slave, stating, “What I’ve got in mind is pure asceticism. To rise above this world, you must kill off everything that enslaves you to it.” While fondling a knife in a fetishistic fashion, Beineberg declares he must “kill off” all the supposed “superfluous emotions” (aka pity, empathy, forgiveness, etc.) that he has for Basini and become hard like a true Aryan Übermensch. In a scene modeled after the underworld trial scene at the conclusion of Fritz Lang’s M, Beineberg, who resembles one of Erich von Stroheim’s various portrayals of Prussian villains that sport fancy gloves and super spiffy uniforms, presides over a secret show trial in the attic against Basini where he is charged with committing a break-in, stealing money, acting on his own against his comrades expressed wishes, attempting to set comrades against one another, and placing himself in the sexual servitude of a dimwitted degenerate like Reitling. For his crimes, Basini is beaten and tortured, and Törless even gets in on the action at point, forcing the slave to say, “I’m a thief,” but the protagonist will ultimately slowly but surely come to realize he has become a silent perpetrator in a sick game.

 Of course, later Törless realizes the severity of the brutality he has engaged in and writes in his journal, “I must be sick, insane. Why else would things that others find normal disgust me?” That night, Törless takes Basini to the attic where the slave immediately begins taking off his clothes, as if he expects to be sexually manhandled by the rampantly heterosexual protagonist (of course, in Musil's novel, the protagonist does get involved with homosexuality). After yelling at Basini for undressing, Törless berates the bitch boy for subjecting himself to Beineberg and Reitling’s brutality. Törless also becomes disgusted by Basini’s lack of guilt when it comes to stealing and engaging in aberrant sexual servitude.  Undoubtedly, Basini is a hard person to feel sorry for yet his treatment at the violent hands of young authoritarian homos is also unjustifiable, hence Törless' moral and philosophical dilemma regarding the entire situation. Naturally, Beineberg's thirst for torturing Basini only grows with each passing day, so he decides to see how far he can take it by hypnotizing the boy and stabbing him with a needle. When Basini falls over while being tortured under hypnosis, Beineberg accuses him of faking it and has his friends beat him to a bloody pulp. The next day, Basini begs for Törless’ help and Reitling witnesses the interaction and accuses them of having a secret alliance. Of course, Törless tells the truth regarding his relationship with Basini and when Reitling demands that he also get in on the sexually sadomasochistic action, he refuses to as he finds the whole situation boring, stating, “Things just happen. Anything’s possible. There’s not an evil world and a good world. They exist together in the same world. That’s the whole truth.” Later that day, Beineberg threatens Törless by telling him that if he does not get involved with torturing Basini, he will tell everyone at the school that he is the thief’s accomplice. While Törless attempts to warn Basini that night that he is in for a world of hurt, the cowardly thief is not prepared for the lynch mob style torture he will suffer the next day. Indeed, after some students block off all the doors and exits of the school gymnasium so as to prevent any teachers from interrupting their acts of mob-mentality-based collective torture, all the pupils of the school gang up on Basini and Beineberg, who leads the mob, mocks his widow mother by reading out a pathetic letter she has written regarding the family’s dire monetary situation. When Basini makes a fruitless attempt at fighting back for the first time in his entire life, he is beaten up by all the boys and hanged upside down in a mock lynching of sorts in a perniciously playful scenario that one of the teachers at the school describes as “downright diabolical.” While Törless attempted to save Basini during the attack, his efforts are ultimately too little and too late. Shaken up by the whole situation, Törless runs away from the school and seeks solace in prostitute Bozena. When Törless finally goes back to the school, he explains his actions to the school’s headmasters by going on a pretentious speech about his reasoning for never tattling on Basini and how he has learned from the entire experience that good and evil are natural everyday events that one must be on guard for. After giving his little philosophical spiel and abruptly leaving the room, the main headmaster declares, “This young man is under such emotional strain that this school is no longer the place for him. His intellectual nourishment must be monitored more carefully than we can do here.” In the end, Törless happily leaves the school after his loving mother picks him up in a horse and carriage.  If the protagonist learns anything by the end of the film, it is that one cannot be a passive spectator to human brutality, as it leads to dictatorships, atrocities, and whatnot.

 Interestingly, while Schlöndorff portrays the Basini character in Young Törless as a victim who suffers unnecessary punishment at the hands of sadistic proto-fascist crypto-homos, the character is also depicted as a morally retarded thief and groveling coward who more or less welcomed his poof punishment, thus hinting that the director thought that certain Jews were indeed guilty of certain crimes after World War I, though they did not deserve the punishment they ultimately received. As the director explained in the featurette A German Movie, he had some reservations about casting a real Jew for the role of Basini, explaining regarding his eventual decision to cast Marian Seidowsky (who had been introduced to the director by his classmates): “And, of course, what could I say? I mean, these were 15-year-old boys in the middle of the 60s who came and brought to me, as the victim, a Jewish boy living in their school. I was, first, too scared to use him…I thought that we were getting too close to the metaphor here…and, on the other hand, I had taken such a liking to him and he was so eager to do the part that I started working with him.” Apparently, the other teenage cast members, who were also non-actors (except for Mathieu Carrière, who previously appeared in Rolf Thiele’s 1964 Thomas Man adaptation Tonio Kröger), told Schlöndorff that Seidowsky would be perfect for the part because he was a real-life crybaby who epitomized the character of Basini. While Seidowsky would go on to star in two more of Schlöndorff films, including Baal (1970) and Morals of Ruth Halbfass (1972) aka Die Moral der Ruth Halbfass, as well as the early Fassbinder flicks Gods of the Plague (1970) and The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), he developed cancer at the premature age of 29 and subsequently committed suicide by shooting himself at a hospital in Munich (or so Schlöndorff would describe in his autobiography Licht, Schatten und Bewegung). Of course, Young Törless was not the last film Schlöndorff directed that followed in the anti-Teutonic spirit of quack Hebrew psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich by depicting militarists/fascists as sadomasochistic sodomites, as he would later portray German Freikorps soldiers as cold-hearted misogynistic homos in Coup de Grâce (1976) and would even include a boy-buggering SA Brownshirt pederast in his Academy Award winning work The Tin Drum (1979) aka Die Blechtrommel. Indeed, Schlöndorff was not the only promoter of this ethno-masochistic, if not homo-hating, trend of attempting to depict Prussianism and fascism as sort of proto-leather-fag subcultures, as German leftist sociologist Klaus Theweleit released a two volume Reich-inspired work in 1977 entitled Männerphantasien (which was later translated into English in 1987 under the title Male Fantasies) that attempted to portray masculine Freikorps soldiers and National Socialists as sick and sexually sadistic sodomites who derived sexual pleasure from torturing and killing people. Whatever I may think of Schlöndorff’s hopelessly cliché post-WWII 68er-Bewegung-esque politics, I cannot deny that Young Törless is a revolutionary work of Teutonic cinema that helped sire one of the greatest and most important film movements in German history, not to mention the fact that the work would surely be considered ostensibly ‘homophobic’ by today’s prissy PC standards, thus demonstrating how out of hand politically correct authoritarianism and the Pink Gestapo has gotten. 

-Ty E

Welcome to New York (2014)

Very rarely does one see movies, especially Hollywood movies, made about high-profile Hebraic criminals. Of course, when such films actually do get made, like Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which depicts the hedonistic Quaalude-addled times of psychopathic stockbroker Jordan Belfort in a 'fun' and 'cool' way, the kosher conman is portrayed in an absurdly favorable light, as if the chosen amongst God's chosen are held to a different standard when they commit crimes. Like The Wolf of Wall Street, Abel Ferrara’s latest feature Welcome to New York (2014) depicts the lies and crimes of a Jewish criminal, but luckily this film makes no pathetic pandering attempts to bend over for world Zion. Indeed, based on the 2011 arrest of former IMF chief and French presidential contender Dominique Strauss-Kahn—a pseudo-Frenchman of Alsatian Jewish and Sephardic Jewish extraction who is not surprisingly a member of the French Socialist Party (PS)—for sexual assault and attempted rape, Welcome to New York has already been condemned as being supposedly “anti-Semitic” and faces a dubious future in terms of an American theatrical release. Indeed, Strauss-Kahn’s ex-wife Anne Sinclair—a big financial supporter of Israel who comes from a family of wealthy Jewish art dealers based in Paris and New York City (she is the maternal granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg, who represented Pablo Picasso, and made a ton of money during the Second World War)—complained in an editorial that Ferrara’s film is an “anti-Semitic” work where the “filmmakers project their fantasies about money and Jews.” Although he has never seen the film and claims he never plans to, Strauss-Kahn recently had his lawyer Jean Veil reveal on France's Europe 1 Radio that he is getting ready to sue the makers of Welcome to New York for supposed “defamation owing to the accusations of rape and insinuations which run throughout the film.” After watching Ferrara’s Strauss-Kahn flick, I have to say it is, rather unfortunately, not at all anti-Semitic, unless one is deranged enough to believe that portraying a man of Jewish blood who is convicted of attempted rape in a negative light is anti-Semitic. Indeed, like most of Ferrara’s work, Welcome to New York deals with the very Catholic theme of redemption, but as the film reveals, there is no redemption for an over-privileged and obscenely arrogant sex addict with seemingly infinite power who can afford to do whatever the hell he wants, or so he thinks until he attempts to molest the wrong poor negress maid. A work where Ferrara goes back to his unflattering roots, Welcome to New York is easily the director’s most sexually explicit work since his debut porn flick 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy (1976). Rather unfortunately, the film is not the comeback masterpiece that the director probably hoped it would be, even if it is infinitely more interesting than Ferrara’s previous pseudo-apocalyptic abortion 4:44 - Last Day on Earth (2011). More than anything, Welcome to New York is an unintentionally humorous frog sideshow act set in modern-day Sodom where a morbidly obese Gérard Depardieu grunts, humps, and flaunts his shriveled pénis and bulging gut off in a rather foul fashion that is more likely to humor the viewer than make them deeply consider the moral failings of a powerful Franco-kosher sex addict. Indeed, a largely improvised work, or as Ferrara revealed in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter: “Every performance is an improvisation. The writing of a script is an improvisation. We wrote the script and we worked on the scenes. Chris Zois, the writer, was on the set. He was there with the actors. OK for some of the actors, Baby Jackie [Jacqueline Bisset], the lines were important. For Gerard, the lines weren’t important. For me, I don’t want to hear the fucking script, especially if I worked on it,” Welcome to New York is a decidedly degenerate little mess of a strangely merry yet misanthropy-inspiring movie where Depardieu proves that, despite his rather odious obesity, he can still act with a singular sort of anarchic tenacity that reminds the viewer why the French have historically romanticized criminals and egomaniacal sexual deviants. 

 As Gérard Depardieu tells some journalists at the beginning of Welcome to New York as to why he chose to portray Dominique Strauss-Kahn (under the pseudonym 'John Devereaux'): “Because I don't like him […] I don’t trust politics. I’m an individualist…I’m an anarchist. I don’t like people that mix politics…I hate them.” Indeed, debauched IMF chief Devereaux hopes to be the next president of France and his power-hungry Zionist supremacist wife Simone (Jacqueline Bisset) is determined to make sure he achieves that goal. Unfortunately for him and his much suffering family, Devereaux is a self-professed “sex addict” who even gets excited upon hearing about his daughter’s sex life. Indeed, Devereaux may be so repulsively fat that he even has trouble walking a couple feet without perspiring, but he has a little friend named Viagra that gives him the sexual pseudo-potency he needs to engage in multiple orgies and threesomes every single damn day. The first place we see the antihero display his debauchery and self-entitled arrogance is at his international bank's Washington, D.C. headquarters, which he has turned into a not so discrete high-class makeshift whorehouse of sorts that is occupied by tall Nordic callgirls with tasteless tramp stamps who offer free blowjobs to more dignified clients of the bank. Of course, the party does not really get started until Devereaux flies to NYC and goes to an orgy where he, a small and effeminate frog of the stereotypically swarthy sort, and a small French-speaking Capoid-like negro indulge in a number of expensive streetwalkers in a luxury hotel room. Looking for a little bit of privacy, the IMF chief takes a prostitute into a backroom, forces her to give him head in a ridiculously rough fashion (he almost seems to pass out in the process since he is so fat), slaps her large tits fairly hard, and finishes the happy hooker off by performing cunnilingus on her. After drinking some whisky-cognac-Viagra milkshakes with his multicultural entourage, Devereaux ends the hotel party, but the party has just begun for him, as he has two high-dollar Russian hookers come to his hotel room later that night. After watching the two Slavic skanks engage in streamy Sapphic sensuality, Devereaux joins the fun by penetrating one of the girls’ doggy-style while she performs cunnilingus on her comrade. Clearly not satisfied with the multiple orgies he has partaken in during that single day, Devereaux attempts to force a less than homely negro maid to give him a blowjob after she unwittingly walks into the quasi-demonic degenerate's room after he gets out of the shower. Addled with arrogance and sexual aggression, the IMF pig declares “do you know who I am?” to the Maid, but she begs “no please” and eventually manages to flee the room after being semi-molested. After eating at a fancy French restaurant with his daughter and her new boyfriend and bragging to them about how he confessed to the press that he is a proud womanizer, Devereaux heads to JFK airport, but he does not make the flight as two cops, a black and East Asian, arrest him after being charged with attempting to rape the black maid the night before.  Indeed, at least momentarily, the party has ended for the Semitic socialist party animal.

 Of course, in his unwaveringly arrogance, Devereaux proclaims he has “diplomatic immunity” upon being arrested, but the hardened NYC cops are immune to his pathetic pleas of pretense. Being too fat for normal handcuffs, Devereaux complains his hands hurt and a tough cop rightfully retorts with the remark, “too fucking bad.” After endlessly bitching to the cops that he wants to make a phone call, Devereaux is finally able to get in contact with his family, with his no less arrogant Zionist wife Simone complaining upon hearing the bad news, “I should just let him sit in jail…he’s destroyed everything I’ve worked for.” After being denied bail (they don’t want him to pull a Roman Polanski and run off to France or Israel), Devereaux is taken to prison by two black cops who mock him for being so pathetically fat and slow. One of the black cops also yells at the IMF pimp for his arrogance, warning him, “You ain’t no tough guy here, man…stop that shit.” After being pushed around by a couple negro thugs in a holding cell, Devereaux faces the complete and utter humiliation of being strip searched by two black officers, who laugh at his incapacity for putting his clothes on in a timely fashion, with one of the policeman jokingly remarking, “Some workout, huh, putting your clothes back on.” Since he is a stinking wealthy swine, Devereaux eventually manages to get out of prison after paying $1 million dollars in bail and agreeing to pay $60,000 a month for a court-approved apartment. Naturally, Devereaux is verbally reamed by his wife Simone, who clearly wears the pants in the relationship, upon being reunited with her. When Devereaux attempts to play the victim to his beloved by stating his life has been turned upside down by the recent series of events, Simone becomes infuriated and shouts, “Your life has been upside down since the day you were born. I tried…God knows I tried…YEARS…to make you into a man. Do you know what a man is? You don’t know what a man is. A man knows about consequences…protecting the wife…a man doesn’t follow his dick into every dark alleyway and whore that crosses his path.” Of course, Devereaux also uses the excuse that he is a “sex addict,” adding, “I didn’t get a blowjob, you know…it was a setup […] I just jerk on her mouth…that’s all. That’s my sickness.”  Naturally, as a man who believes he suffers from a sickness, the disgraced IMF pig feels no need to cease his depravity, even while embroiled in an international sex scandal.

 Naturally, Devereaux immediately goes back to banging random women, including a statuesque French-speaking negress that he meets at a 'ethnic' art museum. After watching a private screening of François Truffaut’s Bed & Board (1970) aka Domicile conjugal in his lavish apartment, Devereaux is once again verbally attacked by his wife Simone. After rationalizing his sex crimes by pleading to his wife, “It’s a crime that I want to feel young?,” Devereaux proceeds to attack his beloved’s family for being war profiteers, so Simone hatefully states to her hyper horny hubby, “You couldn’t put your face where my father put his ass.” Of course, Devereaux eventually gets around to sexually assaulting another woman, even in a manner more violent than he attempted with the black Maid, but luckily the young lady gets away. Naturally, Devereaux is eventually cleared of all charges after the Maid is discredited (which was his lawyer’s goal from the get go), thus saving the sexual predator from being the sexual prey of hordes of dark-colored honky-hating prisoners (indeed, the IMF head would have served a 20 year sentence had he been convicted of rape). When Devereaux goes to a psychiatrist, he complains that his wife wants to leave him, his girlfriends have left him, and that no one returns his calls, as if it is a big surprise. When the psychiatrist asks the dejected Judaic frog about his feelings on the whole ordeal, Devereaux passionately states: “I’m sorry to say that, but I feel nothing. I don’t feel guilty, I don’t give a shit about the people […] No one can save anyone. And, do you know why doctor? Do you know why? Because…no one wants to be saved. That is the irony I only recently understood…no one wants to be saved.” Indeed, at least Devereaux is honest. After Devereaux accuses his wife of paying someone off to free him of the sexual assault and rape charges, Simone harps on about her disappointment in her hubby, stating to him, “I didn’t want to be president…I wanted you to be president…you would have taken France in another direction,” as if a sick socialist sex predator is the kind of leader an already degenerate, malignantly multicultural, and conspicuously corrupt nation like Frogland needs. To Simone’s credit, she certainly has a point when she says to her husband, “You’re expendable because you act a certain way […] What I will say is…so much has been done for you…and you didn’t appreciate it.” In the end, Devereaux manages to have a conversation with a young Hispanic maid named Marti (Raquel Toro) that does not result in the obese Hebraic ogre attempting to rape her. 

 When Abel Ferrara was recently interviewed by AFPTV and asked whether or not his film Welcome to New York was anti-Semitic, the auteur attempted to portray himself as a philo-Semite and responded in his typically verbally spastic fashion by stating, "Am I anti-Semitic? No, I was raised by...well, you know, I hope not, okay. I was raised by Jewish women, so as an Italian boy...I'm like, you know…I’m not an official member of the tribe but I’m there, you know.” In fact, during the same interview, Ferrara stated in a quite groveling manner in defense of his depiction of Strauss-Kahn’s wife’s art dealer father Paul Rosenberg, “He was not a collaborator. He was almost killed by the Gestapo. He was completely the opposite. He was very nearly killed like six million Jews.” Indeed, aside from one single scene that most filmgoers would not understand, Ferrara’s film gives no indication that Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his (ex)wife Anne Sinclair (who divorced him in March 2013) are members of the Hebrew tribe. Of course, what the film does do is demonstrate that Strauss-Kahn and Sinclair are exceedingly arrogant international parasites who, for what was probably the first time in their entire lives, faced minor hardship after the Hebraic presidential hopeful attempted to stick his circumcised prick in the wrong brown prole hole. As with most of his cinematic antiheroes, Ferrara chose not to portray DSK in a cliché one-dimensional fashion, but instead as a weak and pathetic pig who, when everything is said and done, seems rather lonely and unloved (after all, his wealthy wife is a mega-bitch), hence his love of soulless lechery. Unquestionably, the film’s greatest merit lies in star Gérard Depardieu's crazed, flamboyant, grotesque, and even absurd improvised performance. Indeed, not since his quasi-pornographic role in Marco Ferreri’s The Last Woman (1976) aka La Dernière femme aka L'ultima donna, where the French actor waves around his erect member, has Depardieu given such a delightfully depraved and uniquely unhinged performance. If anything, DSK should thank Depardieu for portraying him in such a memorable way, as Welcome to New York surely makes the disgraced French socialist politician seem more interesting and likeable than he really is. Apparently, when Guido commie auteur Bernardo Bertolucci saw Ferrara’s work, he stated, “This film reminds me of a Warhol film.” Indeed, as its sardonic title indicates, Welcome to New York features a damning depiction of the rotten Big Apple that is no less unflattering than the films of Paul Morrissey, as a work that is just as much about NYC as DSK. In that regard, Ferrara is one of the most important filmmakers that New York City has ever produced, as a sort of gutter poet who makes mostly honest celluloid anti-tributes to the superlatively shitty city and its eclectic collection of uniquely unsavory inhabitants. That being said, I can only guess how Ferrara’s upcoming Pier Paolo Pasolini biopic will turnout, but at least a gay communist Guido poet/filmmaker with a nostalgia for his Catholic roots makes for a more interesting subject than a powerful Jewish sex addict.  Indeed, Ferrara's bargain bin Catholic morality is certainly lost on Judaic subjects as Welcome to New York demonstrates.

-Ty E

See the Sea

Unless it is cine-magician Jean Cocteau, frog fag filmmakers are not exactly my thing and that especially includes François Ozon (Criminal Lovers, 8 Women), as the man even managed to defile the work of the great Bavarian celluloid queen Rainer Werner Fassbinder with his aesthetically impotent four act chamber piece Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000) aka Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes. Based on the play Tropfen auf heisse Steine, which Fassbinder wrote when he was only 19-years-old, Water Drops on Burning Rocks—a work that depicts a troubled bizarre ‘love’ triangle between a naïve 20-year-old boy, a psychopathetic 50-year-old businessman, and the 20-year-old boy's beauteous yet terribly dumb blonde girlfriend—is a Frenchized celluloid abortion that pays both aesthetic and melodramatic insult to its Teutonic source writer. Of course, as a man who likes to give credit where credit is due, I cannot totally write-off Ozon as a filmmaker, as he has directed one or two cinematic works that I have come to appreciate, with his 52-minute short See the Sea (1997) aka Regarde la mer being worthy of praise for being a particularly nasty, nihilistic, mean-spirited, perniciously perverse, and uniquely unsettling film that makes one question whether or not the fairy filmmaker has some sort of deep-seated hatred for the fairer sex; or at the very least, there seems to be something innately cruel about a film director that seems to identify with wicked women as many of his films, including his hit Swimming Pool (2003) starring Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier, readily demonstrate. Indeed, by comparison, See the Sea makes Swimming Pool seem like frivolous celluloid child’s play in its daunting depiction of a foreboding relationship between two very different yet strangely complimentary women. Starring auteur/writer/actress Marina de Van (Don’t Look Back, Dark Touch), who disturbed viewers with her disconcerting depiction of a pathological self-mutilator (played by de Van) in her aberrantly allegorical first feature In My Skin (2002) aka Dans ma peau, as one of the creepiest cold bitches in French cinema history, Ozon's medium-length film is a decidedly dark and slow-burning thriller set in a sunny and scenic beachside setting that manages to reconcile the work of Alfred Hitchcock with Michelangelo Antonioni in a film that dares to find beauty in human ugliness and vice versa.  Indeed, if there exists a film that can induce a miscarriage in expecting mothers, it is this aesthetically nefarious piece of celluloid gynophobia.

 Sasha Noyer (played by Sasha Hails, who is probably best known as a writer on the long-running BBC TV series Casualty) is a young British mother with a 10-month-old baby named Sioffra (played by Hails’ real-life daughter Samantha) and she is currently living all by herself (aside from the baby, of course) in a beachside house owned by her husband Paul (played by Paul Raoux, who also acted as the assistant director of the film) located on an island named Île d'Yeu off the western coast of France. Husband Paul is away on business in Paris and Sasha does not know when to expect him back, so she is rather lonely and has both sex and friendship on her whimsical little mind. When a discernibly antisocial and creepily cold drifter named Tatiana (Marina de Van) shows up at Sasha’s doorstep and states, “I’m looking for a place to crash on the island,” the mother initially says, “Sorry, this isn’t a hotel,” but she eventually gives in due to her undying loneliness and rather extroverted character, which demands constant attention, even if it is of the potentially dangerous sort. While Tatiana initially camps in the yard and promises to keep to herself, Sasha is just too social and extroverted to leave the dirty drifter in the lurch, so she offers her dinner and some fancy wine. While eating, Tatiana, who gorges on her food like a rabid pig in heat, reveals that she used to work as a nanny, but she has trouble staying in the same place for too long and prefers to travel alone. When Sasha asks Tatiana if she gets scared while traveling alone, the deranged drifter proudly replies that she is the one that does “the scaring.” Of course, Sasha is too hopelessly naive to get the hint that the stranger might be of a somewhat unsavory and even unhinged character.  That night, Sasha, who clearly has an untamable sex drive, masturbates by grinding her naughty bits on a chair, as if she is a little girl who has just discovered her sexuality. The next day, Tatiana takes a bath while smoking a cigarette and rubbing her genitals with a soap bar in a seemingly uncomfortable fashion. After her rather grotesque bath, Tatiana takes Sasha’s toothbrush and rubs it in her feces (which she leaves in the toilet for the young mother to find).  Indeed, at this point of See the Sea, it is quite apparent that the drifter is a sinister little psychopath with a scat fetish.

 When Sasha, the baby, and Tatiana go to the beach, the latter notices a couple of homos having sex in the woods nearby, which seems to turn on the young mother. After Tatiana opts to leave after complaining of being bored by the sun and surf, negligent mother Sasha decides to leave baby Sioffra all by her lonesome on the beach so she can get in on some of the hot homo action going on in the woods. Indeed, Sasha somehow manages to get a young cocksucker to perform cunnilingus on her in a rather aggressive fashion. Meanwhile, Tatiana plays in an ancient and ruined graveyard where she admires the tombstone of a little boy and even reaches inside a broken crypt to see if she can touch a corpse, thereupon demonstrating her morbid character. That night, Tatiana asks Sasha about her birthing experience in what is easily the most awkward part of this unsettling little short. After Sasha describes how giving birth was “great” and how she opted against an epidermal because, “It was my first. I wanted to really experience the pain…know how it felt,” Tatiana then asks the young mother if her vagina ever tore and describes how, “Some [women] shit out the pussy after” giving birth. When Sasha kindly tells Tatiana to stop asking questions about birth as it might prevent her from ever wanting to have a baby of her own, the drifter states in a matter-of-fact fashion, “I already had one.” When Sasha asks where the baby is, Tatiana says, “It is dead.” After Sasha apologizes for asking, her curious guest sickly replies, “That’s okay. I had it aborted.” Luckily for Sasha, a phone call from her husband Paul breaks the tension of the absurdly awkward conversation. Indeed, Paul is supposed to arrive at the house the next morning at 10am and Sasha invites Tatiana to stay, as she is convinced her husband will have no problem with her company, but the deranged drifter has much different plans in mind. That night, a tear trickles down Tatiana's face as she stares at Sasha and baby Sioffra while they are sleeping together in bed.  Tatiana then proceeds to strip off all her clothes, and assumedly joins the mother and baby daughter in bed. The next day, Paul arrives, but he cannot find Sasha or the baby. Eventually, Paul notices a red tent in his yard, which he opens up, only to find his wife’s Sasha’s naked and somewhat bloody corpse. A rather gruesome scenario, the unclad dead body is tied up with bondage and has a plastic bag wrapped around its head. Meanwhile, Tatiana is on a ship heading to Ireland (the boat has an Irish flag). Of course, Tatiana is carrying baby Sioffra, who is naturally crying, in her arms. 

 While Tatiana is easily one of the most innately despicable and disgusting female characters in film history, protagonist Sasha is not exactly deserving of the ‘mother of the year’ award, as a routinely negligent first-time mommy who leaves her baby by itself on a beach so she can have sex with a strange sodomite who probably has a STD or two (she also leaves the baby unintended in a bathtub), not to mention the fact that she allows her baby to be watched by a blatantly deranged psycho bitch that looks like a feral hobo who barely survived a Muslim gang rape. Indeed, a genuinely shocking and stomach-turning work that makes an early Roman Polanski shocker like Repulsion (1965) seem like a softcore bourgeois melodrama by comparison in terms of its nihilistic depiction of feminine ferociousness, See the Sea is an ominous celluloid assault against the viewer that may be predictable in its nuanced utilization of suspense, yet still manages to chill the viewer in the end. Undoubtedly, the two main characters of the film represent two archetypical, albeit unflattering, extremes of femininity, with Sasha being a well meaning, if not scatterbrained and negligent, mother who genuinely loves and adores her child (even if she is not fit to raise her), and Tatiana being a cold, calculating, and callous cunt of the deleteriously jealous sort who does not even have a drop of the nurturing qualities that one needs to be a mother, hence why she aborted her own child. Indeed, forget Polanski's Rosemary’s Baby (1968), See the Sea has to be the most macabre maternal horror movie ever made, as a work that not only features a mother being murdered and her baby stolen, but also features spine-tingling Sapphic undertones, as if lesbians are the most sinister and sadistic of women, yet at the same time, it almost seems as if the director felt the mother deserved to die due to her ultimately fatal naivete. For a French film, See the Sea is also deceptively simple, as one can more or less tell where the film will conclude right from the get go, yet this does not detract from the work’s pathologically perverse potency, as a nearly immaculately assembled sunny horror story that seems to have been directed by a morally dubious man with an acute hatred for women and maternity, for one can only speculate what would inspire someone to make such a majorly malevolent little movie. Undoubtedly, in its scenic Hitchcockian sexual sadism and unflattering depiction of depraved cocksuckers cruising a beach, See the Sea seems to have had a major thematic and aesthetic influence on the French thriller Stranger by the Lake (2013) aka L'inconnu du lac, thus demonstrating auteur François Ozon’s imperative influence on contemporary French cinema. A wickedly whacked reworking of Wuthering Heights meets Knife in the Water (indeed, yet another Polanski reference!) with a formulaic, if not fiercely foreboding, structure that dares to mix serenity with scatology, Ozon’s sicko short is like the celluloid equivalent of contracting a painful STD on vacation, as a film that will never leave your mind, no matter how much you wish it would. Indeed, if you're looking for a strong antidote to the hobo feminism of Agnès Varda's Vagabond (1985) aka Sans toit ni loi, See the Sea is certainly worth your time and anguish. 

-Ty E

Blank Generation (1980)

Paul Morrissey (Flesh, Blood for Dracula) is not the only filmmaker alpha-pop-con-artist Andy Warhol worked with during his somewhat passive, if not singular, filmmaking career. Aside from his amateur filmmaker boyfriend Danny Williams, who the artist pushed into suicide as disturbingly depicted in the rather incriminating documentary A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory (2007) directed by Esther Robinson (Williams’ niece), Warhol also had his boyfriend Jed Johnson (who was an interior designer and protégé of Morrissey and would later die in the TWA Flight 800 explosion) direct the final Factory film, the Waters-esque black comedy Andy Warhol's Bad (1977), yet there is another auteur he worked with that is often forgotten. Undoubtedly, the most seemingly unlikely filmmaker Warhol worked with was German actor turned auteur Ulli Lommel (Haytabo, The Boogeyman), who started working with the poof pop-artist after receiving acclaim for his dark arthouse horror masterpiece Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe (1973) aka The Tenderness of Wolves, cutting his ties with his longtime collaborator Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and moving to the United States in 1977. Apparently, Warhol was a fan of The Tenderness of Wolves and offered to produce Lommel’s next film, or as the Teutonic auteur stated himself: “When the New York Times wrote in 1977 that “Tenderness of the Wolves” reminded them of Andy Warhol’s work, only better, Andy attended the next screening and after the movie we met and he asked me what my plans were. I invented a love story at dinner with Warhol, Truman Capote and Jacki Kennedy called 'Blank Generation.'” Indeed, for a moment during the late-1970s/early-1980s, Lommel was Warhol’s “soup du jour” and produced two of his films, Cocaine Cowboys (1979) and Blank Generation (1980), which would ultimately become two of the most nihilistic and idiosyncratic cult rock films ever made, as unintentionally damning documents of post-counter-culture American youth movements as seen from a voyeuristic Teutonic gaze. Needless to say, neither of these films are masterpieces, but they are certainly among Lommel’s most interesting and experimental works, with Blank Generation being the most ambitious and artistically successful of the two films. Mixing Richard Hell & The Voidoids with Mozart and Beethoven and featuring a love story between punk rocker Richard Hell and French arthouse actress Carole Bouquet (That Obscure Object of Desire, Day of the Idiots), Blank Generation is a curious and then cutting edge mix of high and low kultur (aka European and American culture) that reminds one how absurd American cultural hegemony is considering krauts were creating great symphonies for European royalty centuries ago while American punk rockers were composing two minute songs with three power chords riffs for urban sub-prole rabble during the late-1970s/early-1980s. Named after the debut 1977 Richard Hell & The Voidoids album of the same name, Blank Generation has been routinely attacked since its release by its star Richard Hell—a mischling Jew who grew up in Kentucky and was a major influence on punk (non)fashion—who once stated of the film that, “there’s not a single authentic, truthful moment in the movie.” Personally, I could say the same thing about Mr. Hell’s music, but that is beside the point, as punk rock is merely a background to a dejecting arthouse romance directed by a man who was then in a relationship with the lead actress, Carole Bouquet, who personifies what one might describe as a mentally perturbed woman of the hysterical, detached and hopelessly scatter-brained sort who does not know what she wants. Lommel’s most ‘Godardian’ work (the director even goes so far as name-dropping the frog commie auteur), Blank Generation is like Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities (1974) meets Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) with a tinge of Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981), albeit set in a fashion-obsessed and emotionally and culturally vapid punk world where no one has a soul.

Opening in Times Square with a giant glowing billboard featuring the film's title (Lommel would also use this somewhat alluring technique for Cocaine Cowboys), Blank Generation immediately attempts to give an almost mystical feel to New York City, as if one is about to enter a magical fantasy world not unlike The Wizard of Oz (1939), yet the film ultimately attempts to blur the line between fiction and reality, as a sort of punk rock equivalent to Godard's Masculin Féminin (1966), albeit about the children of Sid Vicious and poorly painted Campbell's Soup Cans instead of Marx and Coca-Cola. Overly emotional proto-emo-fag Billy (Richard Hell) has just started a relationship with a French filmmaker named Nada (Carole Bouquet) that he met while she was filming a documentary for French TV about him and his punk band. Right from the get go, it seems like Nada is quasi-possessed by some kind of frigid frog demon that hates men, as she almost instantaneously starts fighting with him, thus causing him to complain, “We're together for 5 minutes and you start fighting.” Meanwhile, Billy is getting fed up with being a popular punk frontman and decides to walk off stage during the middle of a performance, fire his manager Jack (Howard Grant), and complain that he is “fed up” with the whole rock star lifestyle. Billy’s manager later gives him the following ultimatum: “You got two choices: life with a French girl or platinum records. I’ve also got to remind you that you signed a number of contracts.” Needless to say, born loser Billy chooses the French girl and moronically sells all the rights to his lyrics/songs for a measly $5000. Nada calls him stupid for selling his music rights for such a pathetic amount and subsequently dumps him in a cold and antisocial fashion by leaving a ‘video letter’ where she states that he is “driving her crazy” and she is “not the right woman” for him, concluding the tape with the following words: “forget this tape…it shows the beginning and end of an impossible dream.” Indeed, Billy's punk rock dream is degenerating into a lovesick nightmare.  Meanwhile, a German journalist from Hamburg named Hoffritz (Ulli Lommel) arrives in NYC to interview Andy Warhol and Nada immediately goes to him and they start a less than romantic relationship, thus siring a more banal than bizarre love triangle. One day after a show, Billy is followed around by an annoying punk would-be-filmmaker named Lizzy Liebenfeld (Suzanna Love), who claims to be making a pretentious documentary on “episodic film on chance.” Since Lizzy looks vaguely like Nada, Billy somewhat humors her company, though he embarrasses her by taking her wig off and smearing her makeup in a pathetic attempt to make her resemble his French ex-girlfriend. Billy also describes to Lizzy how cold and whimsical Nada was during their brief relationship, complaining, “When she was really interested, she would never say so […] it was like it had nothing to do with us personally…she’d make the most intimate moments look like business […] When she finally left, she didn’t talk to me…she said goodbye on a tape, in close-up on herself, and just vanished.” Lizzy speculates that Nada might still be in NYC, so Billy goes looking for her and soon finds her, symbolically giving her a blank tape for her birthday. Meanwhile, Nada’s kraut journalist boyfriend Hoffritz is about to conduct an interview with Warhol, but a goofy queer guy with flashing goggles who calls himself “Andy’s Assistant” shows up instead and begins playing discordant melodies on an electric violin. When Warhol finally does show up, Nada interviews him for TV, asking him in sub-literate English, “I’d like to know what you think about the sentence of Godard who says that cinema is a place for crime and magic,” to which the pop-artist replies while tripping over virtually every word he says: “Ummmm…Well, I still don’t understand the crime part of the question but, uh, I always think it…about the magic part of the question is when, uh, it really it shows, uh, magic, you know? And when, especially people…some people have that magic that when a camera goes on you…there’s an extra energy or something…for some people, you know, beautiful people…it makes such a difference and when they can get that extra magic on the screen, I don’t understand it but it happens.” After mumbling out his answer in a marvelously mundane and monotone fashion, Warhol asks to take a photo of Nada so he can add it to his growing Polaroid collection. In the end, Nada decides to leave NYC with Hoffritz, though she gets Billy to drive her to the airport. At the last minute, Nada decides to leave Hoffritz and stay with Billy in NYC, but the punker is already gone.  In the end, chance and mere unfortunate circumstances dissolve a passionate, if not destined to be doomed, love affair.

For anyone familiar with Blank Generation and its history, it is well known that star Richard Hell absolutely loathes both the film and director Ulli Lommel, with the punk rocker confessing in an interview featured in the book Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (2010) that he more or less tried to sabotage the film with a poor acting performance, stating: “I got so disgusted that my method of dealing with it was just to kind of go passive. Like passive resistance. I just would not let any expression into anything I did. And it all really was just completely inappropriate. Nothing that happens from one minute to the next—including the dialogue—makes sense. Again, it’s all non-sequiturs. It’s ludicrous […] None of it has any relationship to anything that could ever happen in real life.” Apparently, Hell was originally very interested in starring in the film after seeing Lommel’s masterpiece The Tenderness of Wolves, but he ultimately found the director’s European style of filmmaking intolerable, complaining: “The only thing I could see that he brought from Fassbinder was this bitchiness and this glory in getting petty little feuds started, playing on people’s insecurities on the set. That was something Fassbinder was famous for…this queeny, bitchy cliché gay world. It may not be politically correct to say that, but it’s just a face. And in Fassbinder’s hands, it resulted in some amazing movies, but it’s pretty ugly to me as a world. I didn’t like being part of that way of dealing with other people, insulting them all the time and playing them against each other. It’s kind of like the Warhol Factory world a bit. I felt pretty immune to it because I just thought it was annoying and I wouldn’t buy into it, but that was his style.” When the interviewer of Destroy All Movies!!! offered to edit out what Hell said about Lommel, the resentful punk responded by stating, “I don’t think I’d edit anything out about Lommel, though…he’s a real low life.” When Lommel was interviewed for the same book, he only had good things to say about Mr. Hell, stating regarding his interest in making Blank Generation and the NYC punk rock scene: “I spent lots of time at CBGBs with Andy Warhol, watching the Ramones and Blondie. And then came Richard Hell and I fell in love with his poetry. And I was a big fan of the Sex Pistols and I also hung out with William S. Burroughs, the first punk of them all. I lived at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, the punk rock hotel.”

Personally, after watching the film for the third time (it is certainly more enjoyable on subsequent viewings), I have to side with Lommel, as he may not have depicted Hell in a totally realistic fashion, but he certainly did a decent job portraying the emotional and cultural bankruptcy of the moronically nihilistic scene Richard Hell & The Voidoids belonged to, as a work that demystifies pre-hardcore NYC punk. Indeed, as someone who grew up on hardcore punk groups like Black Flag and Minor Threat, I find Hell’s contribution to the genre to be little more than a superficial (and rather degenerate) fashion statement. You know a guy is not too interesting when a borderline autistic fellow like Andy Warhol, who only makes a mere cameo in the film, shows him up in terms of charisma and intellectual depth. Additionally, while I found the songs by Richard Hell & The Voidoids to seem more like terribly degenerate traditional rock music than revolutionary and truly subversive punk rock, I must praise Elliot Goldenthal, who would later earn an Academy Award for his contribution to Frida (2002), for his rather ethereal and angelic musical score. A work of vaguely melancholy meta-cinema where a young female frog filmmaker literally lives her life through a camera because she lacks the emotional courage to deal with real-life love and romance, as well as a playful piece of cult cinema history featuring arguably the greatest screen performance ever given by Andy Warhol as himself and director Ulli Lommel playing an arrogant kraut, Blank Generation is pretentious self-reflexive cinema at its least pretentious, as an uneven, if not sometimes intriguing and curious, marriage between Godard and punk rock. Somewhat recently, auteur Lommel wrote, “The two movies that keep me company to this very day are “Tenderness of the Wolves” and “Blank Generation”. The first one brought me to Warhol and the other one celebrates my collaboration with him.” Indeed, it was only natural that there would be a link made between Warhol and Fassbinder, as both men mastered the art of celluloid Superstars and Factory style communal filmmaking.  Of course, no one would ever suspect it would be a rampant heterosexual (who not only shared carnal pleasures with Carole Bouquet, but also Godard's muse Anna Karina, Margit Carstensen, and countless other screen beauties as well) that would establish the historical link between the two revolutionary filmmakers.

-Ty E