Less Than Zero

Although I think Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, Glamorama) is a mostly untalented, uninteresting, and exceedingly overrated writer who pollutes people's brains with his frivolous degeneracy, I like, to some an extent or another, virtually all of the films based on his novels, if not for all the wrong reasons. Indeed, it seems that even with an incompetent director, Ellis’ signature emotionless satirical attacks on the members of his decidedly decadent and seemingly psychopathic white collar upper-class background seem to translate better on screen, with music and actors accentuating the ‘hip’ flatness of his scribblings. Unquestionably, one of the worst, if not the worst, film based on Ellis’ work is Less Than Zero (1987), which is loosely based on the writer’s debut 1985 bestselling novel of the same name. Of course, as a film featuring real-life cockhead Robert John Downey, Jr. playing a fictional cockhead who peddles his ass and mouth to men for blow, the film is not all bad, as a soulless and largely aesthetically worthless cinematic venture that more or less perfectly expresses the essence of the spiritually and culturally vacant zeitgeist that it depicts. Directed by Polish-British TV director turned mainstream auteur Marek Kanievska, who previously directed Another Country (1984) starring real-life butt-darting Brit Rupert Everett as a butt-darting school boy turned commie true believer who defects to the Soviet Union because he believes the English class system persecutes cocksuckers and that the reds will accept his cocksucking with open arms, Less Than Zero is certainly no less critical of capitalism and the upper-class, as it depicts Los Angeles as a plastic radio rock Sodom inhabited by dapper drug zombies and Barbie doll debutantes where wimpy pseudo-suavely dressed WASP psychopaths sell their coke-addled friends into sex slavery, young models cannot get enough cock and cocaine, and every night is one big stupid party plagued by vulgar flashy fashion statements, putrid pop rock and rap, and mind-numbingly boring small-talk and business talk. Centering around a weak dork played by perennial weak dork Andrew McCarthy (Mannequin, Pretty in Pink) who comes back to his hometown in Los Angeles for Christmas break after his first six months in college, only to discover his best friend and (ex)girlfriend have degenerated into erratic cocaine addicts who think life is one big party, Less Than Zero is ultimately an emotionally vacant film about emotionally vacant people who suffer senseless self-induced personal tragedy, thereupon making it vaguely humorous in a sick unintentional sort of way. Indeed, a sort of half-entertaining antidote to the sentimentalist pseudo-angst of John Hughes flicks where one of the ‘heroes’ drops dead in the end due to his own mindless self-indulgence, Kanievska's badly bastardized Ellis adaptation is ultimately a reminder of how worthless the 1980s were, with the west coast upper-class reflecting everything that is repugnant about white America. Featuring arguably the most airheaded Jewess ever depicted in cinema history as played by Jami Gertz and the always annoyingly arrogant WASP wuss James Spader as a dope-dealing preppie villain, Less Than Zero is like a melodrama for Abercrombie & Fitch automatons who need a guide towards expressing actual human emotions.

 It is 1987 and three over-privileged L.A. friends graduate with “money and happiness” on their mind, yet they will ultimately have a hard time obtaining both, especially the latter, hence why 2 of the 3 rich kids become preppie dope fiends. As a graduation present from his exceedingly wealthy father, an extroverted cokehead gooftball named Julian Wells (Robert Downey, Jr.) is given enough money to start a record label, so he opts out of getting a higher eduction, though his friends, lovers Clay Easton (Andrew McCarthy) and Blair (Jamie Gertz), are planning to move away to college.  In six months, the friends are no longer the best of friends anymore, as sex, drugs, and rock n roll come into play. An aspiring model that is afraid to move away and has more boobs than brains, Blair ultimately decides to stay behind at the last minute and eventually starts a love affair with her boy toy Clay's best bro Julian, who eventually loses all of his money after his rather naive record deal scheme falls through.  As someone who cannot handle failure, small-time cokehead Julian turns into a full-blown blow addict to relieve his inner pain, which ultimately only further compounds his problems. During Christmas break, Clay heads back to Los Angeles, though he is not interested in seeing his friends who literally and figuratively screwed him over, but they need his help, so he really does not have a choice and eventually gets lost in the narcotic-fueled nightmare that is his decidedly degenerated comrade's lives. Indeed, Julian is so in love with gutter glitter that he owes $50,000 to a suave and pathologically cynical psychopath named Rip (James Spader) who, on top of being a white collar drug dealer that mainly supplies the rich man’s candy, is a preppie pimp who has a rather lucrative business prostituting out his more desperate buyers to rich Hollywood homos. To his credit, Rip is a proud prick who has no problem exploiting people as demonstrated by his remark to Clay during a party, “These people are assholes. You know, who gives a fuck about these people?”  Of course, even though Julian fucked his girlfriend, Clay cares about his blow-addled friend, so naturally he and Rip are going to have a wuss war of sorts involving passive-aggressive behavior and the sort of sassy remarks that candy ass rich boys from California make.

 Being a rich kid, Julian does not understand the concept of work and thinks that by borrowing enough money to start up a nightclub, he will be able to get out of the perennially growing hole he is in, but he of course screws that scheme up and continues to obtain large quantities of coke from Rip. Of course, passive predator Rip does not give him the drugs for free, as he coerces him into sucking the cocks of rich queers to pay off his tab. Meanwhile, Clay rekindles his seemingly soulless relationship with braindead brunette bimbo Blair, who also snorts a lot of blow, though she is not as bad off as Julian as she does not need to blow men to support her rather expensive habit. Somewhat reluctantly, Clay attempts to help Julian with his hellish addiction, even being by his friend's side when he goes through drug withdrawal, but his friend's sobriety only lasts a day or so. Indeed, when Rip has one of his henchman whip out a crackpipe and wave it in Julian’s face, the cokehead turned crackhead begins smoking the blue-veined Havana once again. When Clay goes looking for Julian at a fancy hotel that Rip has rented out for his cultivated cocksucker clients, he finds his friend blowing some wealthy blonde guy. Though Clay manages to get Julian out of the hotel, he later has a PBF (pretty boy fag) fight with Rip and one of his henchman, with Blair jumping in to to help her weakling boyfriend. In the end, Clay, Blair, and Julian drive through the desert late at night so the latter can reach sobriety, but the teenage cokehead ultimately ends up dying of heart failure at sunset. Of course, with their friend dead, Blair agrees to go back to college with Clay, so at least some good came out of Julian's premature death. 

 Not surprisingly, Bret Easton Ellis absolutely hated Less Than Zero when it was released as he felt all the characters were miscast aside from Downey and Spader’s, though he has slightly warmed up to the film over the years. Ellis would later state regarding why he thought the film was a failure: “Well, who was happy with it? I don't know anyone who was happy with it. The director wasn't happy with it, and it was this compromised movie for many, many reasons. I don't think it began that way - I think that Scott Rudin and Barry Diller, who were the ones who brought it to 20th Century Fox, had a very different movie in mind. I think when there was the regime change at the studio with Leonard Goldberg taking over, who was a family man who had kids, it became a different beast. I grew up around Hollywood, and I had no real desire to see the book made into a movie. I thought, 'Well, we'll take the money, and 98% of all books optioned never make it to the screen, so....” Of course, there are countless differences between the film and novel. For instance, while protagonist Clay is a banal tight ass in Kanievska’s flick, he is a bisexual hedonist of the one-night-stand-oriented and coke-snorting sort in Ellis’ source novel. Additionally, the novel features, among other things, an appearance from a 12-year-old female sex slave who villain Rip keeps drugged in his bedroom and who is apparently raped by a character named Trent that is barely even featured in the film.  In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion, Ellis would mention the film in his sequel to Less Than Zero, Imperial Bedrooms (2010). Additionally, Ellis would make reference to Less Than Zero star Jami Gertz in his novel American Psycho (1991), with the serial killer antihero Patrick Bateman asking about the actress at a video store and zoning out while fantasizing about fucking the actress after a video store clerk remarks that he does not know who she is (indeed, aside from people who have seen superlatively shitty 1980s teen movies, no one knows who Gertz is nowadays). While Less Than Zero is rather weak in terms of wantonness and nihilism in comparison to the source novel, director Marek Kanievska is not totally to blame as he apparently shot a raunchier and more debasing work than the pansy cut that exists today, but 20th Century Fox studio took the film away from the director during post-production and edited out all the more provocative and depressing scenes. Of course, one also cannot leave out the fact that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael Cristofer wrote the original screenplay for the film, which was more faithful to the book, but it was ultimately rejected for being too degenerate and depressing, as the people at Fox were probably hoping to make some sort of monetarily successful Breakfast Club (1985) rip-off (ironically, the film was still a commercial failure). 

Undoubtedly, out of all of the Ellis related films, including The Informers (2008) and The Canyons (2013), Less Than Zero is easily the weakest, least provocative, and most contrived, as a sort of coke-fueled West Coast St. Elmo's Fire (1985), minus anything resembling character development and nuance. As the quasi-documentary This Is Not an Exit: The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis (1999), which features no-budget adaptations of segments from the novelist’s various works (including Less Than Zero and American Psycho), reveals, Less Than Zero could have been an even bigger disaster than it already is, as Kanievska's mise-en-scène is easily the most potent thing about the film. Unquestionably, as the novelist himself agrees (he once stated of the work, “I think the movie itself is the one movie that captured my sensibility in a visual and cinematic language”), Roger Avary’s 2002 The Rules of Attraction adaptation is an Ellis flick done right, as a film that is easily superior to the novel.  As I mentioned before, Less Than Zero is mainly of interest because of its portrayal of real-life coke addict Robert Downey Jr. as more or less playing himself, with the added bonus of the Hebraic actor smoking cocks for crack rocks, thus making it a mildly entertaining example of pseudo-art imitating life and vice versa.  Unquestionably, the film also features some of the most innately vapid and unsympathetic characters in film history, even for a 1980s flick, as a film that should probably be buried in a time capsule.  Indeed, when people of the future ask why rich whites became culture-less whores of Zion who helped lead American to abject ruin, they can simply watch Less Than Zero and see how that zeitgeist (and everyone after it) had the spiritual and moral prowess of an elderly French hooker. But then again, one cannot completely loathe a film featuring Slayer's cover “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” and Glenn Danzig singing a crappy ballad featuring negresses doing backup vocals.

-Ty E

Peeping Tom

Maybe it is because I do not give a shit if anyone knows that Hitchcock is nowhere near one of my all-time favorite directors, but I do not have to think twice about saying that I am more a Peeping Tom (1960) kind of guy than a Psycho (1960) kind of guy. While I cannot remember the first time I saw Hitchcock’s Psycho or how many times I have seen it total, I have only seen Peeping Tom twice, with my first time being about a decade ago and my second time being a day ago. While I still think Hitchcock’s proto-slasher flick is a groundbreaking masterpiece in its own right, even if it did have a strong influence on the mostly aesthetically worthless slasher sub-genre, there is just something about a crazed kraut would-be-auteur murdering dumb bimbos with his tripod whilst filming their reactions as they die that is slightly more captivating than seeing a weirdo bourgeois fag like Anthony Perkins roaming around in an outmoded grandma dress. The once-infamous film that more or less ruined the career of highly respected English auteur Michael Powell (Black Narcissus, The Tales of Hoffmann) and introduced sex to celluloid for the perennially frigid British public (the work is noted for being the first mainstream British film to feature nudity), Peeping Tom is, among other things, arguably the greatest film ever made on the subject of scoptophilia (which is actually mentioned in the film and described by a rather Jew-y psychiatrist character featured in the movie as, “The morbid urge to gaze”), as a work that seems just as critical of the viewer as it is self-critical on the director's part as a perniciously playful work where an aspiring filmmaker quite literally kills, including himself, for his art. The story of a terribly deranged and equally lonely young dude who treats his movie camera like it is his cock and refuses to go anywhere without it, Peeping Tom is a work with many layers as a result of both intentional and seemingly unintentional idiosyncrasies. Indeed, one of these more blatant idiosyncrasies is Austrian-German actor Karlheinz Böhm aka Carl Boehm—an actor that became famous in his native country starring in wholesome Heimat films and alongside Romy Schneider in the historical period piece Sissi (1955)—whose Germanic accent is quite clear in the film and must have added an extra subtextual creepiness to the British who had yet to (and arguably still have yet to) get over the Second World War and blamed the krauts for destroying their glorious empire (indeed, the Brits may have eventually defeated Germany in WWII, but politically speaking, it was a total loss for them). A work created in the collapsing empire that also created the dreaded Hammer Horror films and later waged a war against the entire genre in the early 1980s via the Video Nasty phenomenon, Powell’s somewhat eccentric semi-self-reflexive excursion in voyeurism is indisputable proof that our more prudish brothers over the pond can indeed produce masterful horror films, yet Peeping Tom is more than just as masterful proto-slasher flick, as a sometimes strangely touching work featuring a somewhat obscured tragic love story. Indeed, the story of a seemingly ½ autistic aspiring filmmaker who falls for a seemingly ¼ autistic aspiring novelist and vice versa, Powell’s work features what is quite arguably one of the most sad and awkward romantic subplots in film history. Undoubtedly, what sets Böhm’s character apart from pathetic ‘human’ killers like Norman Bates and Peter Lorre’s character in M (1931) is that the all-too-human serial killer of Powell’s film is oh-so close to being normal that his self-prophesized death via celluloid becomes all the more ‘touching.’  It should also be noted that the character's affliction is a direct result of having a camera shoved in his face during his entire childhood.  A sort of masterful admittance of guilt on Powell’s part as a filmmaker who had thrived for many decades on stealing the souls of other people via celluloid, Peeping Tom is arguably the most charming condemnation of cinema ever made for which the filmmaker himself would ultimately be wrongly condemned. 

 Beginning with a scene from the perspective of a camera viewfinder of a faceless man with blue-eyes secretly filming and ultimately killing a trashy blonde prostitute who only charges two quid for her sensual services, Peeping Tom immediately forces the viewer to become conscious of the fact that they are getting a cheap thrill from seeing a seedy snuff flick. The killer cameraman in question is a seemingly benign blond beast by the name of Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm) who, on top of being a camera man’s assistant who moonlights as a quasi-pornographer who takes salacious softcore pin-up snapshots for a shop owner who secretly sells the images to informed patrons as part of an underground black market business he has going, is the forsaken progeny of a brilliant yet seeming psychopathic scientist named Professor A.N. Lewis (quite fittingly played by director Michael Powell himself) who used his sole son as a guinea pig for various psychological experiments on the reaction of the nervous system to fear. Indeed, during his childhood, Mark had cameras in his face during his most humiliating and horrifying moments, including when he paid respects to his prematurely deceased mother's corpse, as his mad scientist father would intentionally strike fear and dread in his son to further his ‘scientific research.’ Naturally, Mark’s rather unconventional childhood completely screwed him up and turned him into the deranged dude he is today, as a young and handsome man who is approached by various beauteous women yet seems to be only able to achieve orgasm by watching the fear in a woman’s eyes as she dies in front of his movie camera. Indeed, Mark has a blade (or what he calls a “spike”) at the end of the tripod of his camera and he drives it into his victim’s body in an erotic way whilst filming their death. On top of that, Mark has a distorted mirror attached to the end of his camera so that his victim’s become witnesses to their own deaths, thus making their reaction all the more horrified (Scottish auteur Donald Cammell would later incorporate this theme into his somewhat artsy fartsy 1987 serial killer flick White of the Eye). Of course, complications come into Mark’s life when he meets a young and somewhat dorky female writer named Helen Stephens (Anna Massey), who seems rather attracted to the pathetic killer’s glaring peculiarities.  Indeed, Mark is both an occupant and the landlord of a home he inherited from his scientist father and Helen and her blind mother are his new tenants. When Mark informs Helen that he is her landlord, she is rather shocked, remarking you, “walk around as if you haven’t paid the rent.” Of course, little does Helen realize that, every night, Mark is editing and screening snuff films while she is asleep in the room below his.

 When Mark makes the amateur mistake of killing a stand-in, Vivian (Moira Shearer), on the film he is working as a camera assistant on, he finds police officers, including a certain Chief Inspector Gregg (Jack Watson), hanging around the movie set.  Of course, being a deranged dude and all, Mark is more intrigued than petrified by the presence of the police, as it gives him the rare opportunity to document their criminal investigation (in fact, Mark also goes back to the site where he killed the prostitute, even capturing the moment when the hooker's corpse was put in the back of a hearse).  Meanwhile, Mark begins to develop an almost normal romantic relationship with Helen, though he is rather ill-equipped when it comes to properly courting a young lady, but he at least attempts to make a serious effort to make her happy. Indeed, while Mark refuses to go anywhere without his camera (his entire life is like an unending documentary as shot from his singular cockeyed perspective) as if it is his cock, Helen actually convinces him to leave it behind during their first date and though he suffers from minor ‘camera withdrawal,’ by the end of the night, he seems more interested in his quasi-lover than his camera. Although she has no idea what he means, Mark tells Helen that he will never film her, lest he gets overexcited by her fear and kills her as well. Ironically, it is Helen’s blind mother Mrs. Stephens (Maxine Audley) who becomes almost instantaneously aware that there is something not quite right about Mark and warns him to stay away from her daughter and that he needs to get some serious help. Of course, Mark becomes quite excited upon learning that Helen is about to have her first novel, which is about a ‘magic camera,’ published, as she offers him the opportunity to shoot photographs for the book, which he gladly agrees to do for free. 

 When a German Jewish psychoanalysis aka “sneezer geezer” named Dr. Rosan (played by real-life Austrian Jew Martin Miller, who became famous for his onstage parodies of Adolf Hitler) is brought on the set by the police to determine if there are any glaring peculiarities among the crew members, Mark foolishly does not think twice about approaching the soul doctor to ask him about his affliction, thus learning that he suffers from a bad case of scoptophilia which, according to the discernibly dubious Herr Döktor, can be easily uprooted over time via regular psychoanalysis sessions. Of course, Mark’s conversation with Dr. Rosan alarms Inspector Gregg, who has his men follow the assistant cameraman around town. Of course, that does not stop Mark from killing a pin-up model named Milly (English glamour model Pamela Green)—a decidedly ditzy super slut who explains earlier on in the film that she has bruises on her face because, “I went out with my boyfriend. Getting married next month. Trouble was my fiancé saw us”—while police officers are lurking around the building. Needless to say, when Helen wanders into Mark’s room when he is not there and becomes curious enough to run his projector to see what kind of films he makes, she is in for quite the surprise. Of course, Mark walks in on her while she is watching the murder footage and when Helen asks regarding the footage, “it’s just a film. Isn’t it?,” the snuff auteur, who is honest to a fault like so many other basketcases, stoically states, “No. I killed them.” In his own weird way, Mark proclaims his love to Helen by confessing regarding the murders, “I made them watch their own deaths. I made them see their own terror as the spike went in. And if death has a face, they saw that too. But not you. I promised I’d never photograph you.” After the police discover Milly’s corpse, they naturally realize Mark is the killer and head to his home. Realizing there is no turning back, Mark decides to direct the ultimate climax to his life's film by filming his own death, stating to Helen right before he drives his tripod blade into his throat, “Helen, I’m afraid. And I’m glad I’m afraid.” Of course, one must respect a man who is willing to die for his art. 

 In a clip featured in the documentary A Very British Psycho (1997), director Michael Powell states regarding his marvelously macabre yet unnervingly touching masterpiece Peeping Tom, “The film was full of compassion…for a diabolical murderer…but then for me, he was not a diabolical murderer, he was a cameraman.” Indeed, while Powell implicates both the viewer and the filmmaker (i.e. himself) with his film, his remark from A Very British Psycho makes it quite clear that he did not have a guilty conscience about it at all. Of course, as demonstrated by the fact that the film was unanimously trashed by critics upon its release and ultimately destroyed Powell’s career, Peeping Tom unquestionably induced a deep sense of guilt in filmgoers upon its release as it made them not only realize that they had an unhealthy addiction to voyeurism, but also that they got a sadistic kick from filmic murder and mayhem. It should be noted that the film was penned by British Jewish cryptographer turned screenwriter Leo Marks, who became interested in cryptography after his father introduced him to Edgar Allan Poe's story The Gold-Bug (1843) as a child, used ‘coded poems’ while working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War while waging an occult war against Uncle Adolf, and later would provide the voice of Satan in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Anyway, what many film critics seem to ignore regarding Peeping Tom is Marks’ depiction of psychoanalysis as a sort of esoteric devil’s art that had the capacity to transform a perfectly normal little boy into a deranged killer. Ironically, the film also depicts psychoanalysis as the only true potential cure for Mark’s affliction. Going back to Scorsese, the great Guido American filmmaker would once insightfully remark regarding Powell’s meta-slasher flick, “I have always felt that PEEPING TOM and 8½ say everything that can be said about film-making, about the process of dealing with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it and the confusion between the two. 8½ captures the glamour and enjoyment of film-making, while PEEPING TOM shows the aggression of it, how the camera violates... From studying them you can discover everything about people who make films, or at least people who express themselves through films.” To his credit, Powell would use the failure of Peeping Tom to further embrace his lifelong obsession with scoptophilia, as he would later direct a rather young, voluptuous, and ultimately underage Helen Mirren in the Australian film Age of Consent (1969) where an old artist played by James Mason eventually finds the inspiration to paint once again after coming into contact with a busty unclad teenage girl. As for Karlheinz Böhm, he would demonstrate that he was just as good at playing unsympathetic, if not rather charismatic, deranged bourgeois dudes in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s underrated darkly comedic Sirkian thriller Martha (1974). A wonderfully wicked cinematic work where a crazed aspiring filmmaker (he even has his own director’s chair) catches crusty cunt street rabble in the crosshairs of his camera and subsequently penetrates them with his tripod in what can only be described as the ultimate cinematic climax, Peeping Tom is ultimately a reminder that it feels good to wallow in fear, murder, and death, so long as, to quote Wes Craven’s singularly classless and tasteless 1972 Bergman (non)remake The Last House on the Left, you remind yourself that, “It's only a movie.” 

-Ty E

I Am My Own Woman

As far as I know, I Am My Own Woman (1992) aka Ich bin meine eigene Frau directed by aberrosexual agitpropagandist and all-around gay agitator Rosa von Praunheim (Die Bettwurst, A Virus Knows No Morals) is the only biographical film ever made about the life and times of an East German tranny. Additionally, it is also probably the only Brechtian docudrama ever made about a tranny, be they German or otherwise, thus making it seem like a film that would only appeal to a bourgeois art fag in art school, yet it also happens to be one of von Praunheim's most mature, if not patently propagandistic, works as a rather sentimental work from a rather unsentimental and very scatological kind of guy. Based on the 1992 autobiography of the same name by Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (born Lothar Berfelde), who survived both the Nazis and Stasis and appears as ‘herself’ in the film, Praunheim’s decadent yet perversely dignified PBS-esque quasi-documentary depicts the stranger-than-fiction story of a born-tranny who, among other things, killed his National Socialist leader father with a wooden stirring stick(!), was almost raped by hordes of semi-Asiatic Soviet soldiers after being mistaken for a woman, became the man-muse of a degenerate Prussian aristocrat, opened up a popular phony antique museum full of factory-made everyday items, was awarded with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and somehow managed to find a very special place in two different authoritarian worlds where men in dresses are more than just a little bit frowned about. Taking a rather bizarre and meta-reflexive approach to the documentary format as a sort of documentary/docudrama/narrative film hybrid of the pathologically Brechtian sort, I Am My Own Woman not only features two actors portraying the subject during ‘her’ younger years, but also Charlotte von Mahlsdorf him/herself, who constantly interrupts scenes of episodes from her exceedingly eccentric life to explain, among other things, how they are exact reproductions of what happened in his/her real-life. A hermetic history of homo kraut underground and beyond, Praunheim's critically revered doc demonstrates that the malignant debauchery of the Weimar era was not merely an isolated phenomenon of Teutonic history, as sexual degeneracy in the Fatherland has always existed, albeit it was mostly regulated to the underworld in the past. Centering around a seemingly benign but ultimately mischievous and semi-psychopathic creature who passive-aggressively got what s/he wanted whenever she wanted just like so many other calm and calculating women, von Praunheim’s film is interesting in that it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that von Mahlsdorf had an innately bourgeois broad brain and was not simply some sexually confused wack-job like Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs (1991). While just as patently perverted as the director’s previous works in many different ways, I Am My Own Woman marked the beginning of a more serious, sentimental, and controlled von Praunheim who had unofficially taken on the job of being Germany’s foremost gay anthropologist, ethnologist, and documentarian. A bizarre Oedipal tale where the subject literally kills his father, but instead of wanting to make love to his mother, he wanted to be her instead, I Am My Own Woman is a work that has to be seen to be believed (and, indeed, it is certainly hard to believe some of von Mahlsdorf’s curious anecdotes, as they read more like a Teutonic tranny The Twilight Zone than historical fact). 

 As Charlotte von Mahlsdorf states at the beginning of the film, “My life’s ideal is the Gründerzeit period (1880-1900) and I’ve made my dream come true. For over 30 years my furniture collection has been housed here at my Gründerzeit Museum in Mahlsdorf. I live here like a woman at the turn of the century.” Von Mahlsdorf attributes his/her obsession with the Gründerzeit era to her beloved anti-Nazi granduncle whose house s/he was born in. As someone who confesses that, “Even as a child I liked to dust and clean,” it should be no surprise that von Mahlsdorf got her first job at an antique shop in 1942 while still just a teenage boy (as portrayed by Jens Taschner). A self-described “transvestite,” von Mahlsdorf found solace in staying with his aunt, who was a transsexual bull-dyke who had no problem walking around in public wearing men’s clothing during the Nazi era. Ultimately, von Mahlsdorf became aware that he was not the only man who felt like a woman when his aunt introduced him to Jewish sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s book The Transvestites aka Die Transvestiten, which he read religiously when not being buggered by a hyper horny stable boy. While von Mahlsdorf found much love and support in his Sapphic aunt and granduncle (who warned him of “brown-shirted criminals” like his father), he faced virtual hell-on-earth at his family home in the form of his Nazi leader Papi (Utz Krause), who the protagonist describes as “absolute evil” and who whipped his son’s bare ass in a homoerotic fashion for playing with dolls. When von Mahlsdorf’s father gave him the ultimatum that he either chose between him or his mother, the momma's boy decided to take decisive action and brutally beat his father to death with a wooden stirring tool and, as a result of his actions, he was sent to Tubingen for a psychiatric examination by a certain Doctor Ritter and ultimately sentenced to four year in a reformatory in 1945. Luckily for the twink tranny, Nazi Germany was losing a war, so he managed to get out of the reformatory early, though he faced much danger while walking around the destroyed streets of Berlin, which were being bombed by Soviet dive bombers and stalked by hardcore National Socialists who were looking to lynch traitors and deserters. In fact, Von Mahlsdorf was also almost executed for being a supposed deserter, but a Nazi officer saved his life at the very last minute. Needless to say, as a child of war, von Mahlsdorf had to grow up fast.  In other words, he had to be his 'own woman' and like most desperate women, he used his body to advance his sorry lot in life.

 When not dodging the advances of Red Army rapists (during one scene in the film, a Russian goes to rape him, but cries, “Impossible! German women have cocks!” after lifting his dress and getting a nice little surprise), von Mahlsdorf (as depicted by von Praunheim dude-diva Ichgola Androgyn) was helping delivering pigs at a swine farm and giving transvestite balls at Friedrichsfelde Castle, which was in a state of disrepair before the Teutonic tranny helped fix things up in 1946. Apparently, the “crème de la crème of the Prussian aristocracy” held tranny balls at the castle over a century before von Mahlsdorf ever showed up, thus proving that Prussia always had its own esoteric poof world. Eventually, von Mahlsdorf became the extra loyal ‘servant girl’ and sex object of a rather rotund WWI officer named Herbert von Zitzenau (Robert Dietl) in a relationship that would span about a decade until the debauched aristocrat predicted his own death in 1957 after entering a hospital and ultimately subsequently succumbing to a fatal heart attack. As the no-bullshit transvestite states regarding her innate attraction to fat old farts, “I’ve always been erotically drawn to older men. It’s the same for me as many women: one feels protected.” From von Zitzenau, von Mahlsdorf learned much about homosexual history during the Kaiser’s time, as well as a series of S&M-style sexual role-playing games he would later use with his “Lebensmensch” Jochen (Rainer Luhn), who he met in a public restroom. Mahlsdorf’s relationship with Jochen lasted for 27 years until the latter’s death in 1987. In 1959, Mahlsdorf began what he would be best remembered for by opening a Gründerzeit era museum at a 200 year house called 'Mahlsdorf' manor, hence his pseudonymous aristocratic name. Of course, the Stasi attempted to takeover von Mahlsdorf's business and by 1974 it got so bad that he began giving away his antiques to friends, lest they fall into cold commie hands, but in the end s/he persevered and won her personal war against the bolshevik beast. 

 In the late 1980s, von Mahlsdorf hired two bull-dykes to help him run his museum and one of them describes how she, “almost choked to death laughing” upon meeting the elderly tranny. As Mahlsdorf describes, “like all women in East Germany who turned 60, I got my pension and was able to visit the West for the first time in many years,” but being the year 1988, the transvestite would be saddened to discover that all except one of her former lovers that lived in the West were already dead. During the late-1970s, von Mahlsdorf starred in various East German movies and TV shows in small bit roles as transvestites, but her proudest accomplishment was starring in the first (and ultimately last) gay East German film, Coming Out (1989) directed by cult auteur Heiner Carow, who is best known for his work The Legend of Paul and Paula (1973) aka Die Legende von Paul und Paula. As von Mahlsdorf states, “The 9th of November, 1989, was not only the premier for the film COMING OUT, it was also the day of “coming out” for all of East Germany.” Indeed, the Berlin Wall finally opened up so that East Germans could freely travel to the west and vice versa without being molested by Stasi guards. Of course, with capitalism eventually hitting the Stalinized East, von Mahlsdorf found herself unable to pay the bills and had to sell many of her precious antiques which, as s/he states herself, were irreplaceable. Indeed, rather ironically, after 30 years resisting the Stasi, the ostensibly democratic German government managed to annex her Gründerzeit Museum. On top of that, a group of 70 or so neo-nazis crashed von Mahlsdorft’s “First gay-lesbian spring party for East and West since the Wall” and beat up all her friends, including women, without scruple. In the end, von Mahlsdorf tries to establish a link between the old National Socialist regime and gutter-dwelling neo-Nazi skinheads, as if they are at all comparable in any meaningful way.  Of course, von Mahlsdorf is a simple-minded person and sees anti-gay as anti-gay and nothing more.

 At the very end of I Am My Own Woman, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf declares while warmly smiling while in the company of her best friends, “I am a totally happy person.” Unquestionably, I believe her as von Mahlsdorf seems like a rather happy-go-lucky person throughout the film, but I found some parts about her story to be somewhat dubious as all the pieces of the tale fit together a little bit too perfectly. Indeed, despite there being a scene in the film where the teenage von Mahlsdorf is asked by a doctor why he hasn’t joined the Hitler Youth and s/he responds, “Because it doesn’t interest me,” in real-life he was indeed once a member of the Hitler Youth and joined the group in 1942 just like all boys his age did at that time (after all, it was the law and the boys had no choice, so it is odd that von Praunheim would lie about this). To von Mahlsdorf’s credit, s/he was not the good little politically correct type who meekly cowered to the truly fascistic dogma of the LGBT crowd, as s/he caused a controversy that lost her many supporters at a Berlin lecture on 12 March 1997 after remarking: “That lesbians and gays can't have children is after all quite natural. Nature too seeks out what it can use, what can reproduce and what can't. If we look at it like that, if lesbians and gays did have children, then we'd have a lot more unemployed people today.” Undoubtedly, if I learned anything from watching I Am My Own Woman, it is that gays and even transvestites always have a special and important place in society, even if they live in a culture that is purportedly homophobic. Additionally, as von Mahlsdorf’s relationship with WWI officer Herbert von Zitzenau proves, homosexuality was more or less openly accepted in Germany among even the Prussian aristocracy, which certainly is at odds with the mainstream cultural Marxist narrative that Germany is a historically homo-hating and fag-bashing nation. Of course, I Am My Own Woman is not the only documentary that von Praunheim has made about a transvestite, as he later directed a 50-minute film entitled Der rosa Riese (2008) aka The Pink Giant about tranny rapist serial killer Wolfgang Schmidt (now known as Beate Schmidt) aka “The Beast of Beelitz” aka “Pink Giant” who sexually abused and murdered 5 women between the ages of 34 to 66 years old and even killed a 3 month old baby by slamming it against a tree stump. Indeed, by comparing the subjects of I Am My Own Woman and The Pink Giant, it becomes quite apparent that transvestites come in various shapes and forms, with some being sweet old ladies like Mrs. Doubtfire and others being murderous psychos like Buffalo Bill.  Of course, the gay mainstream wants you to believe all old transvestites are like von Mahlsdorf and Mrs. Doubtfire.  As I Am My Own Woman reveals, you do not need the Pink Gestapo to be your own woman if you're a transvestite.

-Ty E

Tales of Ordinary Madness

With all the novelists and philosophers that have claimed to be speaking for the loser masses known as the Lumpenproletariat, Amero-Kraut dipsomaniac Charles Bukowski (Factotum, Notes of a Dirty Old Man) was probably the only one who was not full of shit, as a virtual real-life bum and self-destructive addict that, not unlike the millions of alcohol-addled American men that look and act just like him, would have probably dropped dead in a gutter completely unknown and unloved were it not for his unconventionally charming writings. Italian auteur Marco Ferreri (Dillinger Is Dead, La Grande Bouffe)—a man who also liked to call out bullshit when he saw it, especially regarding the decadent bourgeois, albeit in sardonic celluloid form—seemed to have taken notice of Bukowski’s lack of bullshit, as indicated by his rather underrated work Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981) aka Storie di ordinaria follia starring American Guido Ben Gazzara (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Buffalo ’66), great Guido goddess Ornella Muti (Flash Gordon, Once Upon a Crime), and exceedingly eccentric cult diva Susan Tyrrell (Andy Warhol’s Bad, Forbidden Zone). Adapted from stories featured in the 1972 Bukowski collection Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, including the short story The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, Ferreri’s rather elegant yet exceedingly fucked film features a rare booze-and-boobs-addled “no bullshit” depiction of America, namely Los Angeles, that reminds the viewer why America has never and will never be the land of kings and queens, but instead, a gigantic anti-cultural world toilet of the anti-organic sort swimming with decidedly desperate and depraved untermenschen who live for the bread and circus (or, should I say, cheap beer and crusty cunts) and nothing more. As a native goombah, Ferreri opted for transforming Bukowski from an ugly kraut with an ugly Polack surname into an ugly old wop with an ugly Anglo surname. Featuring the sort of lavish and meticulous set-design and Mise-en-scène you would expect from Italian maestro Luchino Visconti, albeit set in a proletarian pandemonium form full of intentionally aesthetically vulgar mustard greens, vomit yellows, feces brown, and dried up blood reds, Tales of Ordinary Madness is fitting is an (anti)tribute to a nation full of forlorn physical and psychological cripples, criminals, bastards, mongrels, addicts, and other miserable sub-subhuman serfs whose ancestors had been flushed out of Europe. Focusing on a wanton wino writer antihero who stoically states, “I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t want to see anybody. I just wanted to be invisible for a few days. To get down in the dirt and lose myself with all the others…the defeated, the demented, and the damned. They’re the real people of this world and I was proud to be in their company,” while watching a group of multicultural bums fight, Ferreri's Bukowski flick is a rare 1980s Reagan era film that depicts America as it really was, as a culturally vacant (sub)human sewer as seen through the blurry eyes of a true blue American prole philosopher-poet. 

 Opening with poet-philosopher antihero Charles Serking (Ben Gazzara) doing a spoken word performance at a mostly empty opera house while drinking a bottle of liquor wrapped in a brown paper bag and proudly proclaiming, “Style is the answer to everything... a fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without style. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art. Bullfighting can be an art. Boxing can be an art. Loving can be an art. Opening a can of sardines can be an art. Not many have style. Not many can keep style. I have seen dogs with more style than men - though not many dogs have style. Cats have it in abundance. When Hemingway put his brains to a wall with a shotgun, that was style,” Tales of Ordinary Madness immediately establishes an offbeat libertine tone that has disposed of all conventional morals and pretense in a vomit-covered trashcan. After getting bored with a banal folksinger that performs after him, Serking wanders around the opera house and finds a busty blonde teenage runaway who claims that she is only 12-years-old, but that does not stop the proudly perverted poet from attempting to get in her middle school panties. Determined to find out her true age, Serking grabs the runaway’s tits and after feeling them for a couple seconds declares, “Your tits are too big…their at least 8 years old apiece. It adds up to 18. You’re a liar.” Undoubtedly, when it comes to the ladies, the gutter philosopher does not discriminate, as he loves all ages, shapes, sizes, and persuasions of women, so long as they have a nice warm wet hole that he can enter. As Serking narrates, he has “come to the conclusion that the touring poet act was a mistake, but then again, my life’s been one big one, so I am told,” so he decides to head back to the Los Angeles hellhole of an apartment that his ex-wife Vicky (Tanya Lopert) rather reluctantly retains for him. When Vicky throws a can of Serking’s beer out of a window to protest the fact that he has rather poor health as a result of decades of drunkenness, the Poet becomes so enraged that he begins to strangle his ex while shouting, “You owe me for that beer, bitch! Cough it up!,” like a wounded animal. Needless to say, Serking has to get away from Vicky, whose voice is quite grating, so he heads to the beach and soon spots a hot middle-aged blond named Vera (Susan Tyrrell) and declares that he has, “hit the jackpot when I spotted this blonde number. She was that rare kind that gives you an instant hard-on. All sexual sleaze with the ass of a wild animal…my kind of game. She was radiating heat, putting out signals and I was hooked.” Needless to say, Serking stalks Vera all the way to her apartment and quasi-rapes her. After they have ‘passionate’ coitus, the Poet asks her how she liked it and Vera responds, “Yes, I liked being raped,” though she later decides to call the police and accuses Serking of “carnal violence” in the form of forced oral sex.

 Undoubtedly, Serking’s life takes a rare temporary turn for the better when he meets a girl he describes as “devastating” and “the most beautiful girl in town.” Although a pussy-peddler by trade, Cass (Ornella Muti) claims to have previously been a member of a Catholic convent. She is also a suicidal sadomasochist who even freaks an old drunk degenerate like Serking out when she randomly drives a giant safety pin from one side of her mouth to the other, as if attempting to prevent herself from speaking. Serking tells Cass that her self-destructive behavior hurts him and his uncommon sensitivity ultimately touches the metaphysically wounded hooker, so the two head back to the poet’s apartment, only to see that his ex-wife has locked him out of his room. When Serking eventually gets Vicky to unlock the door to his apartment, he decides to write instead of fuck, which impresses Cass, who states of the Poet, “You’re the only man I’ve ever known who wasn’t in a rush.” Indeed, the two do not screw until the next morning, but when they do it is quite passionate, as Serking porks Cass from behind while grunting the word, “love.” Naturally, Cass comes by to see Serking the next day, only to walk in on him receiving a foot massage from a quasi-cross-dressing Mansonite-like bull-dyke with a shaved head who has the words, “Love, He Said” written in red on her forehead. Cass demands that Serking get rid of the dyke and then passionately proclaims, “I want to be fucked and have nothing left for the others. Nothing.” Ironically, Serking absurdly demands that the hot Hooker pay him for sex despite the fact that he is a physically repellant human-booger and she is a great Guido goddess, which she, quite inexplicably, gladly does. After choking Cass and prophetically declaring, “I’ll kill you, you understand,” the two make love on the floor in front of the bald bull-dyke and the hooker states, “give it to me…take my soul with your cock.” When Serking bails Cass out of jail a couple days later for hustling, the prostitute proudly declares, “you’re my man forever,” which seems to somewhat annoy the Poet as he subsequently decides to pay a morbidly obese single mother for sex. While shoving his head up the morbidly obese single mother’s cave of a cunt, the fat woman sings, “It’s ok, it’s ok,” thus causing the Poet to subsequently cry like a little baby.  Indeed, it seems like Serking would like nothing more than to crawl back into his mother's womb.

 Fed up with his day-to-day life as a dipsomaniac poet, Serking decides to enter the wino underworld and stays at a homeless shelter for a couple days where he bears witness to bum fights and the unconventional wisdom of hobo philosophers. When the Poet gets so drunk one night that he ends up sleeping in a car at a used car dealership, he awakens to the owner and his preteen son double-teaming him with baseball bats.  While the used car salesman would like nothing more than to see his son beat Serking to death, he eventually tells his son to stop pulverizing the Poet because he fears a lawsuit.  Bored with his sabbatical at the hobo shelter, Serking goes back to his apartment and learns that his ex-wife, who now has a new wop boyfriend, is engaged. Vera also proudly states regarding her new and seemingly gay goombah boy toy, “You won’t believe how he eats my pussy.” When Serking finally goes back to his lady love Cass, he breaks down and smashes a bottle after noticing that she has attempted suicide by slitting her own throat with a broken beer bottle. Determined to cheer his quasi-girlfriend up and strengthen their somewhat dubious relationship, Serking takes Cass on vacation to a scenic beach house where he used to live before becoming famous. While making love on the beach, Serking asks Cass to marry him, but she says nothing. After sex, the Poet falls asleep, only to learn upon waking up that his lady love has abandoned him without leaving so much as a note. When Serking goes back to his apartment, he finds Cass laying on his bed holding a letter from a publishing company. After reading the letter and learning that he has been accepted by a major NYC publisher to come to the superlatively shitty cultural void of a city to write, Serking also receives some bad news after discovering that Cass is bleeding from her gash, even though it is not that time of the month. Indeed, Cass has driven an earring through her vagina because, as she states, “I’ve closed it, for you and for everybody…forever.” Needless to say, Serking’s career in NYC does not last long, as his new boss eventually tells him that he needs a doctor and not a publisher, thus bringing him back to square zero. Upon arriving back in LA, Serking is horrified to receive the news that Cass has finally successfully committed suicide, so he goes to her traditional Catholic viewing where she is dressed in nun garb and causes a major scene by opening her casket and fiddling with her cold corpse. Completely dejected by the senseless death of the “most beautiful woman in town,” Serking hits rock bottom and crawls into a cheap liquor bottle. It is only when an underage girl agrees to get naked for him (he just asks to see her tits, but she bares her bush as well) that he finds the strength and inspiration to compose poetry again. 

 Undoubtedly, when it comes to the insanely idiosyncratic oeuvre of Marco Ferreri, one cannot receive a better and more accessible introduction to his work than Tales of Ordinary Madness, which is also, at least in my less than humble opinion, the greatest Bukowski film ever made and I say that as someone who also enjoyed Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly (1987) starring Mickey Rourke. Interestingly, aside from Ferreri and Schroeder’s films, the Bukowski adaptations Dominique Deruddere’s Crazy Love (1987) and Bent Hamer’s Factotum (2005) were also directed by Europeans, thus demonstrating what little Americans think of their handful of true artists. It should also be noted that Hollywood heartthrob turned would-be-arthouse-auteur James Franco has just completed a film entitled Bukowski (2014) about the poet’s early years. Indeed, not unlike works as varied as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977), Peter Lilienthal's Dear Mr. Wonderful (1982) aka Ruby's Dream, and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984), Tales of Ordinary Madness is an audacious outsider's portrait of the United States that depicts the the land of the culture-free and home of the depraved in a no bullshit fashion that is more revealing, authentic, and poetic than any Hollywood film ever could be. While star Ben Gazzara’s appearance and demeanor scream Sicilian-American, his performance in Ferreri’s film is, in my opinion, among the most understated and underrated in film history, especially when it comes to films about novelists. American’s closest thing to a Louis-Ferdinand Céline, albeit of the ugly drunkard Yankee kraut variety, Bukowski proved that, not unlike auteur Ferreri, great pulchritude can be found in human ugliness and vulgarity, hence why Tales of Ordinary Madness is such an effective, if not marginally flawed, film. As someone who has never understood the appeal of drunk sex and alcohol in general, I have to say that Ferreri’s flick is probably the only film I have ever seen where I managed to empathize with a self-destructive drunkard. Indeed, being stuck in a small and slimy dilapidated apartment covered with beer cans, vomit, and a nagging ex-wife is the last place I would want to be, but somehow Ferreri managed to find primitive beauty in all of this, thus providing evidence that it may, in fact, be possible to polish a turd. While I think Bukowski was a pathetic lazy bum who just happened to write some interesting and insightful things, Tales of Ordinary Madness reminded me that he had good reasons to be the way he was, with the following remark made by Gazzara's character being an excellent insight into why one might want to live the degenerate life of a ditch-dwelling dipsomaniac: “As long as you don’t believe in god, you got nothing to sweat […] Death isn’t good and death isn’t bad, it’s just the Joker in the deck. There’s worse things anyways, like living with someone you don’t like or working 8 hours on a job you hate. Now, that’s definitely worse than death.” 

-Ty E

Child of God

For the past couple years or so, I have been passively watching the progression of A List star James Franco’s career from dopey Hollywood pothead heartthrob to ostensibly serious self-funded arthouse auteur and thus far I have not liked much of what I have seen. Indeed, from his mundanely minimalistic Sal Mineo biopic Sal (2011) to his pathetically pretentious pomo homo piece of senseless sod-saluting shit Interior. Leather Bar. (2013), Franco has demonstrated he is an art film hack who is still making highly derivative formative works despite the fact that he directed his first feature The Ape (2005)—a horrendous hipster indie comedy featuring a ‘cool’ ape that would make Marco Ferreri cringe in disgust—nearly a decade ago. Of course, it is also rather pathetic that assumed heterosexual Franco has largely dedicated his directing career to pandering to poofs and queens, as if it will somehow make him more artistic and subversive, even though being pro-fag is arguably the most trendy socio-political persuasion nowadays. While it may be a tad bit presumptuous of me to say, I think it is safe to say that Franco is never going to be a Pasolini, Fassbinder, or even a Ferrara, but his latest feature Child of God (2013) at least proves that he has finally developed an inkling of talent and skill as a filmmaker. Based on the lesser known 1973 Cormac McCarthy novel of the same, Franco’s latest effort is a sort of grotesque Southern Gothic (anti)Heimat flick as haunted by the spirit of Ed Gein. Indeed, drenched in blood, semen, and shit, Child of God is a sort of semi-scatological tale about a feral man in a feral land who becomes all the more murderous and sexually unhinged as he further self-segregates himself from an already secluded society to the point where he becomes a literal caveman and engages in nocturnal necrophilia. So, what does a nice Jewish boy like James Franco know about a confederate corpse-fucking and cross-dressing hillbillies?! Probably less than Steven Spielberg knows about sexual penetration, yet somehow the film manages to mostly work, which probably largely has to do with the fact that lead actor Scott Haze (who previously starred in Franco’s 2013 Faulkner adaptation As I Lay Dying and will star in a number of Franco’s upcoming films) was so committed to the role that he moved into a shitty remote cabin in Southern Bumfuck (Sevierville, Tennessee, where the original novel was set), lost 50lbs, and even spent some time living in caves to prepare himself for playing a uniquely unflattering role that tells me the actor is no limp-wristed pansy, but a deadly serious actor who has no problem ramming his rectum with a large tree branch if need be. A film in the degenerated Prussian-American proletarian spirit of sexually perverted serial killers like Ed Gein and Carl Panzram, Child of God is country fried black crypto-comedy where Franco seems to have attempted to make his very own version of Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977), as work that depicts pre-multicultural 1960s stars-and-bars America as an unholy breeding ground for some of the world’s most misbegotten and decidedly dysgenic Europids (of course, nowadays America not only has some of the most miserably mongrelized whites on this planet, but also an unsavory selection of genetically damned mystery meat). An absolutely poisonous celluloid American pie in three acts (just like McCarthy’s novel), Child of God is an unwitting reminder as to why the land of the kultur-free and the daringly depraved has spawned some of the most idiosyncratic serial killers in world history.

 As one of the film's various unnamed narrators states regarding meta-hick antihero (Scott Haze) at the very beginning of Child of God, “He was of German and Irish bloods. His name was Lester Ballard — a child of God, much like yourself, perhaps.” A seemingly half-retarded and aggressively autistic ‘adult orphan’ whose mother abandoned him when he was a wee lad and whose father committed suicide via hanging when he was only nine or ten years old, Lester is ultimately condemned to an animalistic state of perennial homelessness and isolation when his family farm in Sevier County, Tennessee is auctioned off against his will. Of course, Lester tries in vain to keep the farm by screaming things like, “MOVE, MOVE, MOVE…THIS IS MY PROPERTY,” at prospective buyers while menacingly brandishing his beloved rifle, which is more or less an extra limb, but a grouchy old fart soon gets tired of his violently juvenile antics and hits him in the back of the skull with the back on an ax, thus causing the antihero to scream hysterically like a a freshly excreted newborn in what ultimately ushers in the beginning of his new life as a cracked country hobo. With nothing left to lose, Lester treks to no man’s land and ultimately finds himself squatting in a shack owned by some old geezer. Not long after arriving in the area, Lester happens upon a rather unsympathetic half-naked slag (Elena McGhee) who has just been gang-raped and although the deranged loner does not rape her, he smacks her around a little bit (to Lester’s minor credit, she deserved it). Out of spite and just to be an insufferable bitch who is starving for attention, the rape victim falsely accuses Lester of sexually pillaging her, thus resulting in his arrest by a certain Sheriff Fate (Hebrew Tim Blake Nelson portraying a hick) and his proud philistine deputy Cotton (True Blood star Jim Parrack). While in prison, Lester attempts to befriend a murderous negro named “Nigger John” who, as he states himself, is in jail for, “cutting a mother fucker’s head off with a pocket knife.” After singing a melancholy negro spiritual, Nigger John tells Lester that, “white pussy’s nothing but trouble,” which is certainly something the antihero will learn on his own, as a man that will develop a strong affinity for postmortem white cooch. After being released from prison and being warned by Sheriff Fate that if he does not straighten out his next crime will by murder, Lester goes back to wandering around aimlessly, though he does make friends with three giant stuffed animals that he won playing a shooting game at a local carnival. Lester also realizes he has an affinity for wild birds after he catches a pigeon with his bare hands and bites off its head in a scene that marks the end of the first act of the film. 

 During the second act of Child of God, Lester falls in love for the first time upon happening upon on a running car containing two dead young lovers who have assumedly made a suicide pact. With a lifeless babe (Nina Ljeti) who cannot say “no” or insult him being in front of his rather weary yet hopelessly horny eyes, Lester begins fondling the cutesy corpse’s sensual breasts and sniffs its underwear, but of course, he does not stop there, as he is a man of preternatural tastes who, being a rather bestial good ol' boy, lacks self-control. Indeed, Lester does not think twice about committing necrophilia with the young nubile corpse, as he pounds the postmortem pussy so hard that the car begins to shake. Not a man to let something go to waste, especially in regard to a cold gash, Lester brings the corpse back to his house and makes it his girlfriend, even buying it an expensive red dress and making it dinner. Of course, all good things must come to an end and after a fire breaks out at Lester’s shack as a result of his own negligence, the aberrant antihero not only loses his shelter, but also his rotting lover and one of his “friends” (aka a big stuffed teddy bear). Now permanently homeless and completely isolated from the rest of humanity, Lester the corpse-molester completely loses whatever little bit of sanity he had left. Indeed, becoming increasingly paranoid, Lester accuses his only two remaining friends—a stuffed lion and a stuffed teddy bear—of betraying him and executes both of them with his rifle while crying and screaming hysterically, thus concluding the second act of the film.  Needless to say, Lester plans to go on the hunt for some young teenage pootenanny and he is not going to let anyone stop him on his crazed crusade for crusty corpse cunts.

 While only a novice necro during the second act of the film, Lester becomes a serial necrophile killer during the third and final act. Indeed, Lester begins to prey on teenage lovers who make the ultimately fatal mistake of driving out to the middle of the country to make love, as it gives the renegade redneck recluse the opportunity to murder and sexually ravage unlikely young dames in relative comfort without being caught by the cops. After killing the couples, Lester takes the female corpses with him so that he can get down and dirty for nights to come. Now a neo-caveman of sorts, Lester has turned a large mountainside cave into his own personal pleasure-dome where he keeps his various corpse concubines. Taking inspiration from the Ed Gein playbook of country style corpse-copulating, Lester also engages in necrophilic cross-dressing and even sports the scalp of a blonde babe who he had previously shot execution style. Indeed, one day while in his deranged tranny persona, Lester decides to start shooting at an old farmer he does not like, but the farmer shoots back and severely wounds the sexually confused lunatic. Of course, Lester adamantly refuses to confess to Sheriff Fate in regard to his dastardly deeds, so a softcore lynch mob, which includes auteur James Franco, decides to take the law into their own hands.  Before putting a noose around Lester's rather red neck, the mob of rightfully angry gun-totting hicks offer to spare the necrophile if he agrees to show them where he hid the corpses of his victims. Of course, as a lifelong loner and wilderness-rooted feral man with an uncanny talent for self-preservation, Lester manages to escape after leading the lynch mob to a cave where he makes his getaway via a small tunnel. As to what happens to the antihero after that is anyone’s guess, but one can only assume he probably upped the ante in terms of his murderous necrophilic conquests. 

 A rare example of true Americana artsploitation cinema, Child of God is meticulously assembled celluloid trash with a little bit of curious country style class that is, for better or worse, easily the most subversive cinematic Cormac McCarthy adaptation ever made. Irrationally hated by both film critics and filmgoers alike, Franco’s fiercely foul flick is certainly an unhinged exercise in (sub)human excess that is probably nothing short of aesthetic terrorism for most viewers, hence its strange charm. Indeed, undoubtedly the most poetic, aberrantly artful, and semi-cryptically misanthropic film about necrophilia since Jörg Buttgereit’s two arthouse splatter flicks, NEKRomantik (1987) and its sequel NEKRomantik 2 (1991), Child of God offends people not only because it forces (or at least attempts to) the viewer to empathize with an illiterate corpse-fucking serial killer, but also because it depicts such abject human depravity in such an objective yet somewhat eloquently directed way that it reminds viewers that they too have the capacity to act like rabid animals that fiddle with their own feces, fucks corpses, and kill without remorse were they to face similarly less than ideal circumstances in their lives. Taking notes from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 cinematic swansong Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which Franco himself reviewed about a year ago, the film even features an extended scene early on where the antihero defecates and begins roughly wiping himself with a girthy phallic-like tree branch, as if he is attempting to put his shit back into his bunghole. Indeed, Franco clearly did not make the film for those preteen fangirls whose panties moisten at the mere mention of his name, nor did he make the flick to cater to the dubious tastes of mainstream film critics with patently pathetic neo-liberal/cultural Marxist political agendas, as the wickedly wanton work is confederate political incorrectness in blood-flavored and fecal-frosted form. Somewhat notably, Child of God is not Franco's first cinematic excursion in corpse-fucking art, as he previously directed a 14-minute short entitled Herbert White (2010) based on a poem by gay American poet Frank Bidart starring filmic crazy man Michael Shannon as a bourgeois family man who moonlights as a Edmund Kemper-esque serial-killing necrophile. Like John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) meets the director’s buddy Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997), albeit minus the Semitic spastic slapstick, Franco’s film may be somewhat derivative and sloppily assembled in parts, but it ultimately proves the actor turned auteur filmmaker’s career may be worth following after all. Indeed, if Franco ever gets the gall to adapt something like D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (1926) or Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973) aka Le Camp des saints, he will have finally earned my respect.  Amerikkkan Heimat horror from hick hell, Child of God is also a rare film that makes me proud of being an American, which is certainly no small accomplishment, especially since Hollywood reminds me of everything I hate about America.

-Ty E