Wakefield Poole's Bible!

Obviously largely for monetary reasons (after all, apparently around 90% of the world's population is heterosexual), a number of gay men directed heterosexual pornography during the Golden Age of Porn era. Indeed, erotic auteur filmmakers like Chuck Vincent (Roommates, Voyeur), Michael Zen (Reflections, Falconhead), and the Amero Brothers (Bacchanale, Blonde Ambition) are just a couple of the homos that proved they could make better hardcore ‘breeder’ flicks than most of the heteros. In fact, even homo auteur Wakefield Poole (Bijou, Moving!)—a true pornographic pioneer whose directorial debut Boys in the Sand (1971) was the first gay porn flick to ever receive crossover success and gain mainstream credibility for fuck flicks, even predating Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat (1972), which successfully attempted to capitalize on the former’s success—also took a stab at making a straight skin flick with his considerably underrated and misunderstood erotic arthouse work Wakefield Poole's Bible! (1973). Originally intended as a hardcore flick (the director changed his mind due to legal trouble that the porn industry was having with the government at the time), Poole’s softcore biblical blue movie is a three segment work with a similar structure to Boys in the Sand that focuses on three classic stories from the Old Testament, though it is shockingly ‘lighthearted’ and even silly for a work that takes an innately sensual approach to the supposed word of god. Indeed, not unlike the biblical cinematic adaptations of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bible! takes a relatively respectful approach to the bible though, aesthetically speaking, the film has more in common with the frolicsome surrealist costume pieces of maestro Federico Fellini. A work that more or less destroyed the filmmaker’s career (Poole once described it as the, “greatest porn disaster ever”), the flick proved to be too artsy fartsy and softcore to achieve mainstream crossover success and was only well received by critics and European countries like Germany (Poole also once described the film as his, “masturbation film” and “jerk-off movie,” as it was his most artistically ambitious project). Directed by a sod son of the South who spent every Sunday as a child singing in church, Bible! may be somewhat underwhelming where erotic takes on the Old Testament are concerned, but it is certainly subversive in the sense that it was adapted from a “woman’s point of view” in that it rationalizes the treacherous behavior committed by fairer sex in the bible. Indeed, in Poole’s wanton world, Eve naively bites into the apple because she gets rather horny after Adam gives her a good fucking, Bathsheba cheats on her husband Uriah the Hittite with King David because she is sexually repressed and her hubby is cheating on her with a low-class handmaiden and Delilah, who is portrayed by a black woman with a shaved head that somewhat looks like Grace Jones, betrays Samson because he is a heartless bully who had the gall to kill a cutesy Fellini-esque midget. Sort of like Poole’s erotic equivalent to Kenneth Anger’s crowning celluloid achievement Lucifer Rising (1972), Bible! is not only an epic piece of sensuality spirituality, but also a conspicuous piece of cinephilia that is virtually silent (like Poole’s previous work Bijou, the film only features one single line of dialogue) and pays tribute to classic works of film history, including Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Oscar Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Indeed, in Poole’s unabashedly bawdy and aesthetically overwhelming orgasmic biblical realm, god’s voice is an orchestra and the world is created via a pink atomic explosion, thus also making the film sort of like a counter-culture approach to the Old Testament, albeit minus the drugs and psychedelic rock. 

 In an organically heavenly scene shot in the Virgin Islands, the world's first man Adam (played by Bo White, who is probably best known for role in Christopher Larkin’s 1974 gay melodrama A Very Natural Thing) climbs out of the “bowels of earth” and makes his way to a scenic beach where he eventually collapses on the sand due to physical exhaustion. Meanwhile, Eve (played by model Caprice Couselle, whose sole other film role was in the 1975 gay cult flick Saturday Night at the Baths) rises from the ocean in a scene modeled after Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and makes her way to the beach where she finds zonked out Adam. Having never met other humans before, let alone those ones from a different gender, the two begin to experiment by touching and caressing each other in a totally intrigued fashion that eventually climaxes into full-on sex. After they share carnal knowledge for the first time, Eve remarks, “I’m so hungry” and the film seamlessly segues into the Bathsheba segment, which is in a salacious screwball style and begins with the sexually repressed eponymous character (played by Georgina Spelvinan of Devil in Miss Jones fame) and her warrior hubby Uriah (Robert Benes) eating breakfast together in a scene that is an homage to the famous scene from Welles’ Citizen Kane depicting the gradual dissolving of the antihero's marriage. Bathsheba does what she can to get her husband’s attention, but her efforts are in vain as Uriah is carrying on a hot and heavy affair with a trashy handmaiden with a talent for tempting men with her sleazy burlesque dancing. Ultimately, Bathsheba decides she will tryout her temptress talents as well by stripping in front of King David (John Horn), who is playing peep tom from above her bathtub. While Uriah briefly interrupts the carnal game of voyeurism and exhibitionism and David briefly leaves a result, Bathsheba eventually gets her deep-seated desire of being bedded by the King after the latter chases the former around a room in a scene that is in the style of goofy sped-up silent era chase scenes. 

 Unquestionably, the greatest, most aesthetically ambitious and just plain bizarre segment of Bible! is the third and final act, which depicts Samson (Brahm van Zetten) as a big bad humorless bully who gets his just deserts after he ruthlessly kills a playful midget (Willie Hermine).  Indeed, in a simple prank that turns tragic, the daring midget steals Samson's dagger and pays with his life because of it. With the help of her master Delilah (played by model turned actress Gloria Grant who later became a makeup artist that worked on big mainstream films like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and I Am Legend), the midget's female lover (Cathy Hermine) will get her revenge. Indeed, after Delilah seduces Samson by stripping and giving him a super sensational sponge bath, the burly brute falls asleep and the vengeful little miss midget and her flamboyant headdress-adorned philistine comrades avenge the death of little Willie. While Delilah pleasures Samson as he falls asleep, the midget cuts seven locks of hair from his head with a dagger and a group of homoerotically dressed philistines blind the giant with fire, thus concluding the final segment of the film. For the epilogue of Bible!, the Mother Mary (Bonnie Mathis) receives immaculate conception after a scantily dressed male angel (Dennis Wayne) chases her down in a desert and touches her with two gigantic wands, which causes flicking lights to cover her body that impregnate her with god’s mongrel bastard son. In the final and rather tongue-in-cheek scene of the film, a neon sign appears reading “No Vacancy” at the Bethlehem Inn.

While auteur Wakefield Poole hoped Bible! would do for Women’s Lib what his hit homo crossover flick Boys in the Sand did for gay emancipation, the film met the deplorable fate of bombing at the box office and almost immediately falling into obscurity, thus virtually destroying the director’s career in the process. Indeed, while Poole subsequently attempted to revive his career by directing a number of relatively low-budget homo hardcore flicks, including a sequel Boys in the Sand with the rather predictable title Boys in the Sand II (1984), his fate as a filmmaker had already been sealed and he decided to totally give up the trade after the big AIDS scare began (indeed, among countless other male porn stars, Boys in the Sand star Casey Donovan and Bijou star Ronnie Shark eventually succumbed to 'gay cancer'). Unquestionably, Bible! demonstrates that Poole was an artist who just happened to direct porn as opposed to a hack pornographer attempting to be ‘artsy,’ for the flick permeates a sort of exquisite erotic cinematic eloquence that makes the works of big pornographic auteur talents like Radley Metzger and Cecil Howard seem like decadent exploitation trash by comparison, and it is not simply because it is a softcore flick. Indeed, like much of the director's oeuvre, Bible! demonstrates that Poole was nothing short of a cinematic poetic, albeit one who found his source of inspiration in carnal sensuality and especially big dicks.  Featuring the pathological body worship of Leni Riefenstahl, the high-camp eccentricity of Federico Fellini and Werner Schroeter, the respectable religious heresy of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Derek Jarman, and the throwback silent era style aesthetic majesty of Kenneth Anger, Poole’s work is just not the sort of film that was made to be a cheap jack-off tool for the sort of lonely proletarian men who lurked around 42nd Street in NYC during the 1970s, hence why the film was much better received in more cultured countries like Germany (or so Poole describes in an interview featured in the 2013 Vinegar Syndrome release of the film). Only marginally spiritually subversive, the film seems to be in the spirit of Pasolini’s famous 1966 quote, “If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.” Indeed, despite what some medieval-minded American Christian Evangelists have to say, I like think that if there is a god, he would welcome Poole into the Kingdom of Heaven simply for being the creator of Bible!, which certainly has a more metaphysical feel than Mel Gibson's big budget splatter flick The Passion of the Christ (2004).  Indeed, if you're looking for a biblical flick with more homoerotic undertones, you would most certainly be better served with one of Cecil B. DeMille's Technicolor epics. 

-Ty E

Night of the Occultist

Although very few of his fans seem to realize this, avant-garde cine-magician and devout Thelemite Kenneth Anger's (Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Kustom Kar Kommandos) imperative influence on early ‘porn chic’ era gay hardcore flicks is unquestionable. Indeed, starting with his first major work Fireworks (1947), which resulted in the director being arrested on obscenity charges in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court of California, to the homoerotic sadomasochism of Scorpio Rising (1953), which also went to the California Supreme Court and was protested by Yankee Führer George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party for purportedly disgracing the National Socialist party swastika flag, Anger’s oneiric and oftentimes orgasmic oeuvre more or less acted as both the aesthetic and thematic prototype for some of the best fag fuck flicks ever made. As belated exploitation cinema expert and historian Bill Landis wrote in his Anger angering work Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger (1995)—a rather incriminating and wholly worthwhile book that offended the American underground auteur so much that he put a curse on the author (interestingly, Landis died unexpectedly from a heart attack in 2008 at the premature age of 49, so maybe the curse actually worked)—regarding the cinematic trend that was pioneered by the celluloid semen demon: “In a less academic realm, the homosexual pornographic cinema Anger had given birth to was flourishing. Many filmmakers were now using the segmented format Anger had established with SCORPIO RISING—Wakefield Poole in BOYS IN THE SAND and Toby Ross in REFLECTIONS OF YOUTH and BOYS OF THE SLUMS. The most unusual and publicly visible of these directors was Fred Halsted, a heavy user of Tuinals and acid who had been around the L.A. leather scene since 1960.” More recently, Anger experimented with full-blown pornography for his decidedly disappointing digital video effort I'll Be Watching You (2007), which the director described in an interview with the UK magazine Electric Sheep as a, “tribute to my late friend Michael Powell and his 1960 film PEEPING TOM.” Of course, it should be no surprise that someone would actually direct a not-so-inconspicuous gay hardcore homage to Anger and his films. Indeed, Night of the Occultist (1973) directed and produced by pseudonymous auteur ‘Kenneth Andrews’ (indeed, the mysterious auteur could not have used a more blatant tributary pen name) is more or less a Kenneth Anger fanboy fuck flick that is so bad at parroting the seemingly half-crazed Crowleyite cine-magician that it almost seems like a perverse parody piece gone terribly wrong, albeit in a strangely charming way that is nothing short of unforgettable.

 Initially, Night of the Occultist starts rather stereotypically for a gay porn flick with an ostensibly heterosexual man reminiscing over a fight he had with his wife over the dubious future of their deteriorating marriage while rolling around his bed restlessly with his balls hanging out of his tighty whities in a rather unflattering fashion. Indeed, proto-preppie protagonist Chuck Paxton (played by Qwave Dalton aka Quave Dahon, who later appeared in Roger Earl’s brutal classic 1975 S&M flick Born to Raise Hell) remembers how while being “inside” his wife Mary, he was thinking about any and everyone but her. After four years of marriage, the tall blond Nordic-like protagonist moved out the home that he lived in with his wife and now lives on his own and is constantly haunted by the ghosts of his less than sexually satisfying past as an unhappily married man with a sexually starved spouse. A sort of pseudo-playboy that lives in his own lurid one-man fantasy world of banal bourgeois luxury, Chuck spends his days working a terribly prosaic job at a bank, but when he comes home at night he becomes the master of his own domain.  Indeed, after putting on an obscenely ostentatious silk robe that screams “gay,” Chuck reads a newspaper, listens to some generic champagne music, and masturbates on his sofa as if narcissistically wallowing in his own self-loving glory. Of course, Chuck's domestic lifestyle will change drastically after looking through a newspaper with the glaring headline “SEX SOLUTIONS THIS WEEK” and reading an ad for an “Egyptian sexologist” who he thinks may be able to help him regarding his lack of sensual interest in his wife.  Not seeing the warning signs that sexologist might be a Svengali-like individual with ulterior motives (for starters, "666" is part of his phone number), Chuck the limp fuck calls the eroticism specialist and soon makes his way to crypto-magician's scantly furnished office.

 Not surprisingly considering the doctor's dubious profession, Chuck is immediately repelled upon meeting the so-called ‘Sexologist’ aka ‘Occultist’ (Gareth Burton), whose flamingly flamboyant button-up shirt, goofy LaVey-esque facial hair, propensity to talk pseudo-sophisticated esoteric mumbo jumbo, and preposterously pretentious persona reeks of carny-like charlatanism.  Of course, it is also a little odd that the Sexologist claims to be descended from ancient Egyptian royalty despite the fact that he looks like a little Irishman.  Chuck manages to take the Sexologist slightly more serious when he mentions that he is a “descendent of the royal priest of ancient Egypt” and a “graduate of the University of Cairo” and explains that he wear the flamboyant “getup” to appeal to the “average man.” Before Chuck knows it, the Sexologist absurdly attempts to coerce him into dabbling in homosexuality as a patently preposterous potential cure for his spouse-based impotency. Indeed, after Chuck confesses that he no longer can have sex with his wife Mary after four years of an initially sexually satisfactory marriage, the Occultist posing as a sexologist begins channeling Crowley and describes an ancient ritual in his country called the “Sacrifice to Osiris” where, “an adolescent boy is sodomized by four priests in the shadow of the great pyramid.” From there, the film cuts to an expressionistic scene of the “Sacrifice to Osiris” ritual, though the “adolescent boy” is really a 30-something-year-old man with a goofy goatee and the so-called priests look like a bunch of rejects from sort of third rate Mexican amateur wrestling organization as they sport silly cardboard costumes that seem like they were made by a couple autistic teenagers who read one-too-many Harry Potter books. Before breaking out into a fierce fog-fueled fivesome of the four-on-one sort, the ersatz-adolescent sucks off all the priests to initiate the rather ridiculous ritual. Needless to say, the bearded boy is more than a little sticky and shaky after being manhandled by four men in majorly moronic masks. 

 Ultimately, the Occultist convinces Mr. Paxton to devote his free time to hooking up with local homosexuals, but first he must “get to know them” and “investigate” before diving into full-on shit-stabbing. To find real live fags, Paxton first goes to a gay bar called “Go Go Bar” that advertises “Nude Boys” and features two rather effeminate go-go surfer boys with long pseudo-blonde hair and swarthy black pubes dancing exceedingly gaily on stage. Chuck also later checks out a porn theater where they have a new 3-hour hardcore show every Thursday. At the theater, Paxton finds himself giving his own ‘one man show’ in the shadows while watching a rather crude vintage boy-on-boy blue movie that makes Night of the Occultist seem like a lavish erotic epic. For whatever reason, Chuck also develops a somewhat peculiar predilection towards doing the five-finger-shuffle while driving around in his fancy convertible. Upon stopping into an nondescript handyman shop/garage to get his trusty lighter fixed, Chuck is initiated into the wild and wanton world of sacrilegious sodomy after the store clerk—a greaser with a greasy pompadour—takes him aside and aggressively smokes his pole like the most masculine of lumpenproles.  Indeed, being a bourgeois bank boy, it is only natural that Chuck learns to fuck from a real working-class mensch.  After Chuck busts his load and the greaser once again takes his member in his mouth, Night of the Occultist abruptly cuts to a full-blown 6(66)-man S&M sodomite orgy set in some sort of dark and fiery homo Hades featuring whips, big dicks, bondage, and mischievous men whose skin has taken on a red demonic tone. During the final shot of the film, which is certainly the most Scorpio Rising-esque scene of the entire flick, a close-up of the words “The End” written on the bare bum of Chuck, who is hogtied and sporting a leather-jacket, is juxtaposed with the Occultist narrating, “And so this orgiastic ritual continues into the night and tomorrow the participants shall resume their respective roles in conventional society,” thus reflecting the literally occult-like nature of homosexuality during the 1970s.  Indeed, by using black magic in the LaVeyan sense (“the change in situations or events in accordance with one's will, which would, using normally accepted methods, be unchangeable”), the Occultist/Egyptian sexologist has managed to convert heterosexual protagonist Chuck Paxton into a hyper horny hedonistic homo who has learned to have one hell of a time hanging out in hemorrhoid hitman hell. 

 It should be noted that Night of the Occultist was one of the three big “hits” of the now-defunct gay porn studio Jaguar Studios, which is probably best known for their “serious” male-on-male melodramas The Light from the Second Story Window (1973) directed by David Allen and Stu Drexyl and The Experiment (1973) penned and directed by Gorton Hall. Clearly, Night of the Occultist was the studio’s most idiosyncratic production as an aberrant-garde flick featuring the lo-fi aesthetic of Mike Kuchar’s underground cult classic Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), the heretical hermetic mysticism and bike boy fetishism of Kenneth Anger, the uniquely unhinged underworld counter-culture cocksucking of Steven Arnold's sensual surrealist masterpiece Luminous Procuress (1971), and the gritty, raw, and mostly macho ritualistic sadomasochism of Fred Halsted. Indeed, if you're planning to watch the film with the intention of using it as some sort of preternatural masturbation aid, you will surely be disappointed, as the work features nothing new in terms of blue movie buggery and will mainly only interest the more discerning sin-ephile who thrives on uncovering dirty little forgotten gems of celluloid excess. Indeed, with its horrendous yet strangely hypnotic audio (much of the dialogue is completely inaudible and features far too much reverb), no-budget neo-expressionistic set-design (aside from the naked dudes, the set of the “Sacrifice to Osiris” scene seems like it could have been designed by some of the same people that worked on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), untalented yet unforgettable acting performances, and preposterous pretense towards being serious ‘erotic art,’ Night of the Occultist is nothing short of a lost cocksucker cult classic that reminds libertine cinephiles why they are obsessed with obscure cinema in the first place.  While best known for influencing MTV music videos and inspiring Martin Scorsese's obsessive implementation of pop music, Kenneth Anger is probably personally more proud of the fact that he influenced more ‘sinister’ and underground cinematic forms and this is nowhere more obvious than in Night of the Occultist, which may not be up to par with Wakefield Poole's Bijou (1972), Fred Halsted's LA Plays Itself (1972), or even Jacques Scandelari's New York City Inferno (1978), but it is certainly one of the most endearingly (pseudo)evil erotic fag fuck flicks ever made.

-Ty E

Western 4.33

One of the greatest things about the truly singular oeuvre of South African auteur Aryan Kaganof (Kyodai Makes the Big Time, SMS Sugar Man) is that you never know what to expect when watching one of his films for the first time aside from assuming that it will be in some way an aesthetically and thematically subversive experience that tests the bounds of the cinematic medium. Naturally, when I received a copy of Kaganof’s experimental documentary Western 4.33 (2002), I knew I would by seeing something that totally transcended the nonfiction format as demonstrated by the director’s previous S&M-addled experimental documentary effort Beyond Ultra Violence: Uneasy Listening by Merzbow (1998), but I did not realize it would manage to turn an ancient colonial slaughter into a elegantly nuanced celluloid poem that ties the past to the present without looking ridiculous or pathetically postmodern. Deriving its name from the classic Hollywood film genre and the best known composition by American experimental composer/Zen Buddhist mystic John Cage, Western 4.33—a Dutch-Namibian co-production shot in Namibia that was funded by a grant given by Nederlands Fonds Voor De Film and has go on to win tons of prizes in both Africa and Europe—is simultaneously a contra Karl May anti-western, transcendental historical re/search project, posthumous collective necrology for the Herero people, and a visceral atavistic expression of the post-colonial Europid geist from a filmmaker with a rather idiosyncratic cultural background. Notably, regarding the western genre, Kaganof once stated, “The most cinematic genre in film is the western genre; there is no precursor in theatre or literature and therefore it is most closely tied to what movies are […] I have always loved the genre and as I studied it, I realised that it was a propaganda machine to substantiate genocide.” Indeed, while Kaganof’s daunting avant-garde doc features an arid desert, a foreboding atmosphere, and even a ghost town of sorts, there is no honor for any white man—be he a stoic cowboy or otherwise—as a meditation about an unflattering Teutonic colonial past that does not feature a single Aryan subject. A ‘metaphysical documentary’ about the tragic deaths of tons of negroes at a German-run Namibia concentration camp during the so-called ‘Herero Genocide’ between 1904 and 1908 that was sparked after the Herero people decided to revolt against their Aryan masters (somewhat ironically, the revolt was largely led by German-Lutheran-educated king of the Namaqua people, Namibian Hendrik Witbooi, whose tribe often fought with the Herero people and other Namibian tribes), Western 4.33 attempts to conjure up a meditative and entrancing atmosphere of doom and gloom as opposed to dwelling on sterile statistics that people have a hard time identifying with.  Shot on Super-8 film stock that was later blown up to 35mm and featuring a hypnotic musical landscape featuring an eclectic collection of songs by rather diverse artists, including Alec Empire, Sun Ra, Macy Gray, Calexico, Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Schumann, Harold Budd and various others, Kaganof’s ritualistic doc ultimately manages to do more to honor the memory of the Herero Genocide in 32-minutes than Spielberg’s sappy sentimentalist epic of Zio-ganda excess Swindler’s List does in its nearly 200-minutes of aesthetically insipid sensationalism. 

 Beginning with a gritty black-and-white shot of a shadowy highway sign at sunset with an inter-title crediting voices to Zola and Blixa Bargeld, one probably would not assume Western 4.33 is a ‘documentary’ about the Herero genocide upon watching the first couple of minutes of the work, as it initially seems like some sort of lost avant-garde Ozploitation flick, which is only further accented by dreary shots of a deathly dry desert highway that is surrounded by dead bushes and scorching rocks. Of course, that all changes when a headshot of a seemingly melancholy negro sporting a Fila beanie appears. The black man in question is a young truck driver named B.T., who is more or less a symbolic cipher, and he driving from Johannesburg to Luderitz in Namibia in his big rig.  Among other things, B.T. is dwelling on the loss of his girlfriend, but he is also thinking about the premature death of his great-grandfather in a German concentration camp on Shark Island off the coastal town of Luderitz. Of course, the viewer will not be able to tell this while B.T. speaks in a South African dialect, as auteur Aryan Kaganof chose not to subtitle these scenes, with his reasoning being: “The Germans never took the trouble to understand what the Herero were saying.” Indeed, the viewer will not learn about the fate of the Herero people until at about the 22-minute mark during a completely silent 3 minute and 44 second long scene that is meant to unnerve the Hollywood-lobotomized filmgoer where tri-language subtitles (English, German, and Afrikaans) scroll across an iconic image of starving members of the forsaken tribe. As the subtitles reveal: “There were five concentration camps in Namibia, then called German South West Africa, between 1904 and 1908. In January 1904 war broke out between the Herero Nation and the German colonial administration in Namibia. After the Battle of Waterberg the Herero Nation either succumbed to the desert or were picked up by German patrols and put in concentration camps. The official morality rate in all five camps was 45% […] Missionary reports put the death rate at between 12 and 18 a day. As much as 80% of the prisoners sent to the Shark Island concentration camp never left the island. Cold, hunger, thirst, exposure, disease, and madness claimed scores of victims, and cartloads of their bodies were carted every day over to the back beach, buried in a few inches of sand at low tide, and as the tide came in the bodies went out, food for the sharks.”  With no sound or music during this insightful scene, the viewer is forced in an awkward situation where they are forced to develop their own emotions regarding the facts, though the other scenes in the film make it quite clear that it is not exactly a comfortable feeling, but one of ghastly dread and trauma.

 In the only color sequence featured in Western 4.33, protagonist B.T.’s (ex)girlfriend walks alongside a blood red building in slow-motion while provocatively sucking on what seems to be a red popsicle. Apparently, this scene is supposed to be a metaphor for the “rich menstrual blood” of the African woman, who represents “mother Africa” to the human race (of course, the Out-of-Africa Theory has been more or less debunked, not least of all because, unlike Eurasians, Africans lack Neanderthal DNA and contains signs of ancient interbreeding with extinct hominid species). Personally, I found this scene to represent how little ancient genocides matter to lovelorn young men with carnal lust, for with every holocaust there is at least one woman to regenerate the race and move forward with history because although a good percentage of the Herero people were starved, shot, and slaughtered, they ultimately persevered whereas the Germans disappeared from Africa not long after the genocide.  Of course, the Germans found no true Heimat in Africa, hence their failure to tame the Dark Continent and its perennially rooted inhabitants.  Indeed, much has changed since the days when the Germans were briefly involved in colonial conquests yet the scars still remain in the form of dilapidated concentration camp ruins.  Kaganof has attempted to reopen these scars and they bleed throughout his film.  Most of Western 4.33 is comprised of elegant yet raw static shots of the ruins of ancient German concentration camps and an old kraut mining town, including a beauteous scene of a seemingly glistening Lutheran church, which is reflected in a small pond in the foreground and represents the faded dream of a New Germania in Africa.  At the conclusion of the film, a rich black-and-white shot of the sun setting over the ruins of a concentration camp is juxtaposed with foreboding ambient noise. Ultimately, the film lets the viewer know that the ghosts of the past live on today, even if were are too blind or apathetic to see them. 

 It should be noted that the Herero Genocide was not officially recognized as a genocide until 1985 when United Nations' Whitaker Report classified it as such. While the German government apparently recognized the events in 2004, they still refuse to meet the Herero people’s demand of paying reparations (with all the money the Germans have paid to the Jews and Israel, who can blame them?!). Recently, meta-subjective Teutonphobic books like The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (2011) have attempted to follow in the hysterical Hebraic Daniel Goldhagen tradition of depicting Germans as bloodthirsty and innately genocidal maniacs, but of course compared to the French, British, and Belgians, the Krauts only caused minor terror to the Dark Continent. Of course, the so-called Haitian Revolution also demonstrates that genocide is not exactly a distinctly “white thing,” as the cultural Marxists, Afrocentrics, and ethno-masochistic white cultural cuckolds will have you believe. One also cannot forget the current ethnic cleansing of white Afrikaner farmers by blacks, which has been completely ignored and denied by the black-run South African government. Indeed, what Kaganof’s Western 4.33 reminded me was that the tables have turned when it comes to ‘Lebensraum,’ with the ghosts of the colonial past making black Africans even more determined to rid themselves of the ‘white plague.’ Unquestionably, Kaganof has achieved the seemingly impossible with Western 4.33 by making a pleasingly preternatural doc about a nonwhite tragedy that does not seem like a pandering piece of self-righteous swill, Trotskyite agitprop, or nihilistically neurotic ethno-masochism. Indeed, a sort of work of hypnotic ‘humanist horror’ (and I am mean ‘humanist’ in a positive way), Kaganof’s film almost seems like the visceral expression of the Herero collective unconscious, which is no small accomplishment considering the director is a white man. Somewhat interestingly, the film became more popular shortly after its release in 2002 due to the fact that a Herero group living in South Africa sued both the German government and several German companies for reparations, thus demonstrating Kaganof’s revolutionary vision as a filmmaker. Indeed, if there is a filmmaker that could make a film about the holocaust that does not seems like it was designed as pro-Zionist agitprop piece and/or to coerce European countries into paying reparations (like Switzerland), it is Kaganof, who somehow managed to turn the little known story of how negroes tribesmen were made into shark food into one of the most artful, poetic, expressionistic and visceral documentaries ever made. 

-Ty E

Maléfices porno

The French have a fine reputation for freaky fucking, xenophilia, miscegenation, and colonialism, so it is only natural that some fucked up frog would eventually direct a ridiculously racially-charged porn flick featuring a monstrous mandingo negro partaking in Europid flesh in a bestial fashion, but I never thought I would discover a work as wantonly whacked out as Maléfices porno (1978) aka Maléfices pornographiques aka Cavern Bondage directed by one-time-auteur Eric De Winter. Indeed, the film was deemed so degenerate in frogland upon its initial release that it was banned for two years, with the censor board writing regarding the work on 8 February 1977: “This film poses a problem of unusual severity. Outside images heavily and specifically sexual, developed in the most squalid conditions - the film climbs quickly to a level that exceeds the simple ranking on the list of pornography within the meaning of Articles 11 and 12 of the Law of the 30 December 1975. More problematic, in fact, are sequences of cruelty and sadism - tortures; scenes of blood; sexual abuse - racism - a long scene where a black man is obligingly reduced to a sexual object - terror finally - the vision of the bride diving naked and unconscious in a sulfuric acid bath. Despite the poor achievement of the direction that mutes the effect, the Control Commission has considered that this dishonorable film was not only injurious to the human person, but a danger to the mental and psychological integrity of an important part of the audience, even adult. It has accordingly concluded, unanimously, that the threshold of a total ban was reached.” Indeed, I can certainly see how some spineless and spiritually castrated government bureaucrats in post-colonial France might be worried by a film featuring whites babes torturing the genitals of a King Kong-like negro who later rapes an impotent white degenerate. Originally mad with the intention of appealing to the American S&M crowd, Maléfices porno, which was apparently shot in a cave north of Paris, was then revamped by auteur De Winter to appeal to the distinct tastes of fur-lickers. As a result of the pansy politically correct censors, the film was severely butchered and only exists today as a 57-minute cut, which was recently rereleased on DVD as a limited run of 300 copies by Serious Publishing. A phantasmagorical and somewhat psychedelic porn flick about a sexually impotent and unhappily middle-aged frog fellow of the rather physically repulsive sort who fantasies about inflicting brute carnal force on virginal white chicks and a beefy buck negro, Maléfices porno could be seen as an unconscious allegory for the degraded place of Frenchmen in the post-colonial/post-feminist age. Probably the most conspicuously exploitative racially-charged ‘horror’ flick since Ouanga (1936) aka The Love Wanga, Maléfices porno is a seriously perverse reminder why (sado)masochism and miscegenation go hand-in-hand. 

 An impotent frog cuckold (Gilbert Servien) who skinny arms yet a big gut attempts in vain to masturbate while his wanton wife (Laurence Jarry) gets involved in a less than titillating threesome with some dorky dude with a glaring bald spot and another woman. That night while lying in bed with his oversexed spouse, the supposedly horny yet ultimately sexually hapless Husband attempts to get his lover to screw him, but she complains, “You know that you can’t,” and confirms his lack of sexual virility by taking a peep at his perennially flaccid member. Before turning the lights off and going to bed, the Husband reads a trashy pulp novel on voodoo, which assumedly sends his mind into the gutter because when he falls asleep, he dreams of being a depraved sexual dictator with a limp dick who seems to have stolen his wardrobe from Coffin Joe. Taking place inside a poorly furnished cave covered in debris, Maléfices porno depicts in debasing detail what happens when an impotent frog fantasies about being a real man. At his command, the Husband has his Wife bring in two young women—a blonde and brunette—whose assholes he probes and pokes with his fingers in a rather raunchy fashion. When the less than well hung Husband gets bored with the girls, he has them cut-up with a blood-splattering buzzsaw. To liven things up a bit for him and his equally lethally lecherous lady love, the Husband brings out a gigantic buff negro named ‘L'Hercule’ aka Hercules (played by Manu Pluton, who previously appeared in Jacques Scandelari’s 1973 artsploitation masterpiece Beyond Love and Evil and later starred a “murdered Arab” in The French Connection II) and states of him while probably putting the bound black beast on display, “Look, look at this beautiful monster I’ve bought in Barbès.” A platinum blonde slave in a angelic white robe is also brought out so that the Wife can eat out her pussy. After chowing down on her Sapphic slave’s mighty meat curtain, the Wife begins torturing big black Hercules by waving her tits in his face while he is in bondage.  Needless to say, the giant jigaboo is hungry for white pussy, but he will also develop a distinct taste for hatefully penetrating middle-aged French manholes.

 After cutting off his exceedingly gay yellow thong with a dagger, the Wife begins stroking and sucking the gigantic jigaboo's burnt black snake, but of course, she pulls her despoiled mouth away before the negro slave can spill his dark seeds. Of course, the Wife eventually rides the black buck, though she finishes him off by jerking him off, for she surely wanted to avoid being impregnated with untermensch seed. After humping Hercules, the Wife forces the platinum blond to pissing in her hubby’s mouth. Like a demented prison dyke, the Wife also forces the brutalized blonde to munch on her meaty main vein and her impotent slave-driving Husband gets so jealous that he drives a butcher knife into the poor girl’s stomach. After diddling his Donkey Kong dong with a whip, the Wife begins driving pins into Hercules’ ebony skinflute while sadistically stating, “What’s up, cute boy? I’m going to put your big dick inside you up to your belly. You’re going to like that.” Needless to say, when Hercules manages to escape from his bondage, he goes berserk and savagely sodomizes the Husband, who takes it like a little bitch. When the Husband wakes up screaming from his debauched dreamed turned exceedingly emasculating nightmare, he decides his wanton wife must die, stating to himself, “What joy when this bitch is going to dissolve in a fat broth! It’s her fault if I can’t raise mast again. It’s her fault only. It’s her fault if I can only have sex in blood. In blood and death. Yes, it’s her fault. That bitch! She’s heavy but soon she’ll weigh nothing.” As he drops his unconscious wife into bathtub full of what looks like a curious cocktail of vomit and diarrhea but what really is sulfuric acid, the Husband says, “So long…bitch…So long,” and proceeds to laugh manically. 

 Maybe it is because I am mostly into vanilla sex, but it is rather hard for me to imagine someone deriving sexual satisfaction from Maléfices porno, which is nothing short of aberrant aesthetic torture of the patently pathetic sort. Indeed, the only people that the film might arouse are white cuckold horror fans that fantasize about their girlfriends being buggered by belligerent black beasts, or ruined white sluts with a perverse predilection towards dark meat. Of course, unlike when the film was first released, cuckold porn is apparently rather big nowadays, thus demonstrating that the French are truly the ‘progressive’ perverts that they have always been stereotyped as. Indeed, the only thing I could think about while watching Maléfices porno is that the French seem to have never gotten over the unfortunate fact that they were defeated and exterminated by negro slaves during the so-called Haitian Revolution, which was partly metaphysically influenced by voodoo.  Of course, voodoo does not make an appearance in (non)auteur Eric De Winter’s fuck film for nothing. Aside from being uniquely ugly and absurdly amateurish vintage celluloid smut, De Winter’s film features a seemingly accidental quasi-psychoanalytic depiction of the post-colonial French male mindset. Indeed, one could argue that the antihero’s anal pillaging by a negro sex slave is an aberrant allegorical representation of the Haitian Revolution, though that would probably be giving De Winter too much credit. Of course, as they say, once you go black you never go back, especially after having your rectum ripped by the schlong of a crazed colored King Kong. It should be noted that during the Haitian slave revolt, it was not uncommon for black ‘revolutionaries’ to rape white women on top of the corpses of their husband and children, which certainly makes De Winter’s film seem rather weak by comparison. While I cannot say I got much out of the film aside from a couple giggles, Maléfices porno did make me realize that Jean Rollin is more of an artist than I originally gave him credit for, as De Winter’s would-be-wanton-but-mostly-rotten fuck flick certainly makes The Rape of the Vampire (1968) aka Le viol du vampire seem like a lavish Bressonian arthouse masterpiece.

-Ty E

Shadows of the Mind

While best known for his pleasantly politically incorrect Manson-esque quasi-artsploitation horror flick The Last House on Dead End Street (1977) aka The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell, sub-underground auteur Roger Watkins (Corruption, Midnight Heat)—a man that is certainly a top contender for America's most sleazy ‘auteur’ filmmaker as a drug-addled human trainwreck who used his god-given artistic talent to direct some of the most nihilistic, misanthropic, and pessimistic porno films ever made—would ultimately direct more fuck flicks than horror flicks. In fact, Watkins only directed one other horror flick, Shadows of the Mind (1980) aka A Heritage of Blood, which was credited to the pseudonym ‘Bernard Travis’ and which the auteur vehemently disowned (in fact, it was not until October 2005 that Watkins owned up to directing the film). Indeed, as Watkins stated in an interview featured in issue #23 of Headpress Journal: “It’s a piece of trash. I mean even the porno films I did, I think they are well done for the most part. But this is just inept. It’s just an abomination. The stories I could tell about that mess...”  Somewhat interestingly, ‘Bernard Travis’ was not actually a pseudonym created by the actual director but the name of the film’s money man, who put his name on the film and who Watkins had much ill will towards, even rejoicing when the man kicked the bucket under tragic circumstances. Indeed, Travis later committed suicide and Watkins would jokingly insinuate that he murdered him, stating regarding his nemesis and his lack of a director’s credit for Shadows of the Mind: “Yes, the suicide case. I really scared the shit out of Fenton [the film's producer], because he told me Bernie committed suicide and I said to him “What makes you think it was suicide?” But that guy, Bernie Travis, he put his name down as the director, and that’s shit! It’s bad enough to steal, but are you going to put your name on shit?! And him and his wife put their names down as the writers. Fine with me, I would never allow my name on that garbage—or even [my pseudonyms] Richard Mahler or Victor Janos for that matter.” On top of being the film’s financial backer and pseudo-director, Travis was also the husband of the uniquely untalented lead actress of the film, Marion Joyce, who is not exactly easy on the eyes or ears. Indeed, to put it more bluntly, Joyce seems like a typically spoiled, overweight, and all-around grotesque JAP (aka Jewish American Princess).  Indeed, probably the most horrifying and disturbing element of the film is Joyce's horrendous Hebraic NYC accent. Indeed, Shadows of the Mind seems to be more or less the banally ugly, patently pointless, and aesthetically odious outcome of Watkins whoring himself to an unkosher backer who wanted to make a film glorifying his innately inglorious kosher wife. Needless to say, the film is quite the disappoint seeing as it is more or less considered a ‘lost film’ by the marvelously mischievous mensch who brought the world The Last House on Dead End Street. Indeed, aside from a couple striking gore scenarios and flashback scenes that seem like something out of an obscure Czech New Wave flick, the film seems like a poor man’s equivalent to those horrendous PG-13 horror-thrillers that are incessantly shit out by Hollywood and are specially tailored to appeal to the low IQs of hormone-ridden teenage girls. 

 Almost immediately seeming like one of the most hopelessly schlocky Freud-fetishizing pseudo-Hitchcockian flicks ever made, albeit minus the suspense, Shadows of the Mind centers around angst-ridden anti-heroine Elise Halsted (Marion Joyce)—a meta-bourgeois basketcase that is certainly of no relation to S&M sodomite pornographer Fred Halsted—who went crazy at age 12 after witnessing the rather pathetic pondside drowning accident of her father and stepmother, thus resulting in her long-term institutionalization. Now an adult (it is hard to tell how old she is, but she looks like she is at least in her mid-30s, if not older) who has spent most of her life in a loony bin receiving experimental treatment, Elise finds her rather fragile sanity tested when her ‘progressive’ pill-peddling psychiatrist Dr. Robert Lang (Erik Rolfe) abruptly releases her back into society, thus forcing her to move back to the large family estate where she witnessed her father and stepmother drown. Elise’s only living relative is her self-obsessed hot shot Wall Street swindler stepbrother Leland Sayers (G.E. Barrymore)—a prestigiously pompous littler pisser who drives a sports car and has not bothered to visit his stepsister once since her initial institutionalization—and he wants her immediately recommitted so that he can be the sole heir to the family estate. When Leland rudely arrives at the family home in his candy ass sports car, Elise, who seems more than a tad bit socially retarded, refuses to embrace him and yells at him for never visiting her in the nuthouse. When Leland incites the family groundskeeper Andrew (Anthony Frank)—a creepy dude that likes perversely staring at homely young girls and stroking his scythe as if it is his cock (I hate to say it, but Watkins seems to be paying tribute to Carl Th. Dreyer's 1932 masterpiece Vampyr during this scene)—by insinuating that Elise plans to sell the estate thus leaving him out of the job, the pissed off prole worker goes insane and attacks the hysterical little heiress. Needless to say, groundskeeper Andrew is soon slaughtered with his own beloved scythe. 

 Later that night, Dr. Lang and his much younger and vaguely beauteous fiancée Diana Russell (Bianca Sloane) come by the Halsted estate to spend a quaint evening with Elise and her dickhead stepbrother Robert. Naturally, Elise becomes quite unhappy when Dr. Lang arrives with his fiancée, as she is in love with her doctor yet at the same time sees him as a father figure of sorts, thus causing her to associate Diana with her much hated stepmother, who she blames for her less than ideal childhood and poor papa’s premature death. Of course, psychopathic pseudo-playboy Robert—an exceedingly effete little turd that seems like a miserable mix between a meth-addled fag queen and a stereotypically repugnant Jewish stand-up comedian—acts like a first-rate posh prick and makes wisecracks like, “I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight,” which demonstrates his nauseatingly annoying narcissism. Needless to say, Dr. Lang is not amused by Robert’s glaring arrogance and unwarranted sense of superiority, especially after he hits on his fiancée Diana, so he soon decides to take his babe and leave, but his car fails to start, thus forcing him and his lady friend to stay the night at the Halsted home (which Watkins described as an, “rundown Citizen Kane-like befouled Mansion in Westchester County”). Of course, when everyone goes to sleep, murderously jealous Elise goes on an unhinged murder spree which begins with her stepbrother, whose eye she gouges out, and concludes with the seemingly ritualistic burning of Diana. After managing to lock Dr. Lang in a room, Elise, who has covered her face with clownish make-up that makes her look like a six-year-old drag queen, surprise attacks Diana and repeatedly stabs her in the chest with a butcher knife. From there, Elise drags Diana outside, doses her body with gasoline, and sets her on fire while the unlucky little lady is still alive.  As Diana screams in pain while burning to death, Elise laughs maniacally while deriving sadistic glee from the young woman's brutal death.  In the end, the only thing that remains of poor Diana is a burnt skeleton and Elise is sent back to the mental institution, though she probably won't enjoy her stay there as much as she did before, as it is quite doubtful that Dr. Lang will want to continue treating her since she burned his fiancee alive and all. After everything is said and done, it is revealed that Elise accidentally caused her father’s death while attempting to kill her stepmother when they were riding in a small rowboat in a placid pond.  Indeed, after 12-year-old Elise knocked her stepmother into the water by hitting her over the head with a paddle, Mr. Halsted jumped in to save her, thus resulting in both of their would-be-tragic deaths.

 Despite being less than 80 minutes long, Shadows of the Mind feels like it is well over two hours in length, which probably has to do with the fact it does not show a single murder scene until about 40 minutes in and routinely recycles a number of the same flashback scenes, as if the editor did not have enough footage to work with to edit together an entire feature film, thus he decided to merely reuse the same banal scenes over-and-over again. Indeed, this absolutely appalling quasi-melodramatic horror abortion ultimately seems like an over-extended short film, which probably largely has to do with the fact that auteur Roger Watkins was forced to work with contemptible crew of pretentious NYU film school graduates who tried to lead a mutiny of sorts against the director on the set, thus bastardizing his original artistic vision, or as the auteur stated himself in the Headpress interview: “I learnt something interesting on that set. Here’s what I learnt: As I said, I wanted to make films when I was ten. I’m sixteen and I’m good. At twenty-two I’m real good. All of a sudden this asshole Fenton has got me directing this film that I wrote with Paul, and he’s hired these assholes out of film school or visual arts who think they know everything and they know fucking nothing. But because they are all friends, they are like ganging up on me. “I want this… no, no I want this…” It’s just like pulling teeth to get the shot you want, and then when you see it it’s not the shot you want anyway […] Do you know William James? Henry James’ brother? He had this saying: ‘looking glass self.’ You could be the most handsome man in the world, but if everybody around you tells you that you are fucking ugly, you will believe it. I would get all these people who knew nothing and I had to question: “Wait a minute. Do I know what I’m doing? Maybe these eighty-seven jerks out of NYU and out of the School of Visual Arts, maybe they know and I don’t know?” I actually went through a sort of crisis which lasted a few months. Then I said, “No, they know fucking nothing!” But it happens.” Indeed, aside from its sometimes foreboding tone and its handful of scenes of demented ultra-violence, it is hard to tell that Watkins was the man in the thrift store grade director’s seat. 

 Undoubtedly, the most ‘entertaining’ element of the film is its shockingly horrendous acting, especially from the pudgy slag lead, who resembles a gigantic autistic toddler who suffered brain damage after taking one-too-many hits of acid. Of course, you know a film is a plodding pile of philistinic celluloid shit when the director describes it as follows: “Of course the production is a nightmare: You can actually see the “star” looking for cue cards as she tries to deliver her lines; the crew was an inept bunch of shitheads from NYU, each one of them thinking they were a combination of Welles, Buñuel, and Fellini, No, I take that back, each one of them thinking they were a combination of Michael Winner, Roy Ward Baker and numerous other money making hacks.” Rather interestingly, Watkins subsequently directed a dark comedy entitled Spittoon (1981) based on the hellish production of Shadows of the Mind starring the auteur himself as a famous Nazi filmmaker who became famous during the silent era. Unfortunately, Spittoon seems to be impossible to find. Undoubtedly, any film that mocks a work as innately wretched and aesthetically insipid as Shadows of the Mind must be some sort of lost masterpiece.  Indeed, maybe if there was a scene in the film where the lead actress was gang raped by some high ass homies from Harlem, Shadows of the Mind might have been more appealing, but ultimately the film is as limp as a veteran porn star's diseased dick.

-Ty E

Midnight Heat (1983)

Without question, if there is any pornographic equivalent to Martin Scorsese’s somewhat nihilistic urban ‘crime drama’ Taxi Driver (1976), it is Midnight Heat (1983) directed by exploitation auteur turned auteur-pornographer Roger Watkins aka ‘Richard Mahler’ (The Last House on Dead End Street, Spittoon) and starring iconically unhinged porn chic era leading man Jamie Gillis (Water Power, New Wave Hookers). Indeed, despite being a true blue fuck movie that was made to capitalize off of the more archaic instincts of pathetic old horny geezers who cannot get a taste of real pussy, Watkins’ nihilistically wanton work is even more nasty and pessimistic than Taxi Driver in terms of its uniquely unflattering and oftentimes depraved depiction of post-civil rights era New York City urban decay. Majorly misanthropic to the marvelously mean-spirited core, Midnight Heat is a rare fuck flick where the fucking seems to enhance the pleasantly pernicious plot in a rather aesthetically seamless sort of way, as a work about a philosophical hitman of the pathologically melancholy variety who screws his boss’ wife and daughter and thus must go into hiding and be extra weary of the wanton women he purchases from sub-upscale escort services because some of them are truly killer cunts. While not Watkins’ greatest porn effort as a work that just cannot compete with the Wagnerite wantonness of Corruption (1983), it is pretty damn close as one of the most aesthetically malevolent blue movies ever made. Unlike with Corruption, the filmmaker had to make a compromise or two on the film, or as Watkins confessed in an interview with David Kerekes featured in Headpress 23: “CORRUPTION and AMERICAN BABYLON are two I had absolute, total control over. MIDNIGHT HEAT is good, except for a really stupid sex scene at the beginning because I felt you needed it. I figured if the audience is stupid, then we got to do this to hold them.” Featuring slow-motion footage of real-life hobos, winos, and crackhead negroes that dwell in cardboard boxes, Midnight Heat is a porn film for pessimists who could care less about seeing some old slag’s gaping gash and are much more interested in seeing the sort of forsaken mentality it takes for one to resort to becoming a pornographer in the first place.  In that sense, one could argue that it is Watkins' most autobiographical work. Indeed, directed by a man who was a friend/protégé of Hollywood auteur Nicholas Ray (Rebel without a Cause, Johnny Guitar) and Austrian-born auteur Otto Preminger (Laura, The Man with the Golden Arm) and whose debut feature The Last House on Dead End Street (1977) aka The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell showed much promise as far as nasty and nihilistic exploitation cinema is concerned, Midnight Heat is ultimately the debasing celluloid hate piece of a disgruntled artist who utilized a film style that is usually specially tailored for lonely losers to wank-off to as an outlet for his own lingering resentment, angst, and misanthropy. A conspicuously corrupt and culturally cynical chamber piece from the bowels of the Bowery, Watkins' work reminds one why NYC is a dirtier hole than that of any ghetto-dwelling crack whore.

 Alan (played by Jamie Gillis in the same $39 suit he wore in Corruption) is a hitman who was probably an associate of Arthur Schopenhauer in another life, as he only kills when he has a good philosophical reason to do so (or if the price is right) and spends most of his time staring out windows and thinking about why life and humanity sucks. When Alan has sex with his wife (Sharon Mitchell) and then proceeds to act all moody broody while staring out a window, his lady love complains to him that he is too “cold” and introverted and threatens to leave him, but he could seriously care less and replies in the following jaded fashion: “Do what you want…I can’t stop you.” Alan may not give a shit about his bitchy wife, but he cares enough about screwing both the daughter (Tish Ambrose) and wife (Dixie Dew) of his employer (Frederick Rein) to quite literally risk his life just for the mere cross-generational familial carnal pleasure. Of course, Alan’s boss inevitably catches him in the act, kisses him on the lips in what can be described as an intimidating figurative kiss of death, and makes the following cryptic threat: “I’ll be seeing you in the streets.” Of course, Alan knows he’s a marked mensch and despite being a rather self-destructive dude with what seems to be a death wish, he does opt for going into hiding in a sleazy dilapidated motel located in a hobo, junky, crackhead, and wino inhabited area of the Bowery. While Alan is able to occupy most of his time staring at the window and admiring all the human filth that plagues the streets, he eventually gets bored enough to hire not one, but two call girls. Of course, little does Alan realize that one of the cash-for-gash gals has been sent to kill him, though it does not take long for his murderous hunter intuition to kick in for him to realize that the rotten whore has homicide on her messed up mind. 

 When the high-priced hookers get to his motel room, Alan, who has been having random bouts of erectile dysfunction, decides to have the girls screw together while he looks on passively. While pussy-peddler Diane (Champagne) is a tall and swarthy Mediterranean broad, Shirley (Joey Karson) is a short buxom bleach blonde that has just gotten into the prostitution profession. Though Alan eventually has little Shirley leave as she does not have much to offer, he has Diane stay at his room as he finds something rather provocative about her. Of course, Alan soon begins sharing his personal philosophies with the hooker, stating regarding the hobos and winos around the Bowery, “Ever think what separates us from them? One morning they just woke up and said, “fuck it.” Precious little separates us.” Of course, Alan is also on the brink of saying “fuck it” and throwing his life down the drain, but he still has enough of a sense of self-preservation to know that there is something not quite right about Diane. While Diane has nightmarish flashbacks about being more or less anally pillaged by her hitman husband Tom (Michael Bruce), Alan recalls being cheered up by his hooker friend Nan (Susan Nero), who could not give him a hard-on but certainly could make him happy in other ways. If anything is for sure, Alan and Diane are both majorly melancholy individuals who are involved in debasing sexual relationships. When the two finally decide to share carnal knowledge, Alan screws Diane from behind and during mid-coitus asks her if she was “sent by someone.” With penetrative pleasure clouding her judgment, Diane confesses she was indeed sent to kill him, so Alan strangles her to death while he reaches sexual climax. In the end, Alan once again stares out of his miserable motel room window as if looking into eternity from his own metaphysical prison. Undoubtedly, I recommend that the viewer stick around until after the credits end, as a final free-frame shot features a wrinkled newspaper with the haunting headline, “EIGHT DIE IN HOTEL FIRE,” thus hinting that Alan may have intentionally burned down the place and killed himself in the process. 

 Beginning with the Henry Miller quote, “Sex can become a weapon,” Midnight Heat is certainly a work that demonstrates that sex is a fatal weakness that leads both men and women to the slaughter. Of course, with its fiendishly foreboding tone, unnerving weltschmerz, abrasive third world-esque set-design, and slow-motion shots of staggering bums and dumpster-dwelling dipsomaniacs roaming around the Bowery as if trapped in some sort of post-industrial pandemonium, Watkins’ work is more about existential crisis in the (post)modern age than it is about mere fucking, for the flick is far too decidedly dreary and disconcerting to give any truly healthy heterosexual man a significant hard-on. As Watkins would reveal in an interview with David Kerekes, star Jamie Gillis’ real-life situation was no less dark and disturbing than that of his character in the film, albeit to a more pathetic degree. Indeed, as Watkins stated, “I like Jamie, he’s alright. I like Vanessa. But they’re in a different world […] all they do is fuck and nobody cares anymore. We were always trying to think of new ways to fuck or do something. Jamie was telling me he was living with Seka […] She is this big, blonde porn star. He says to me, “Man, I think I’m losing my mind… Lately, to get off she gets on her knees and I put her head in the toilet and just keep sticking her head in the fucking water while I jerk off. And when I fucking cum, I flush the toilet.”” With random literary references to T.S. Eliot and Henry Miller and a strangely atmospheric and obscenely oppressive theatric chamber piece style, Midnight Heat may be the Taxi Driver of porn flicks, but more importantly it is an aberrant-garde work that nihilistically delegitimizes art by molesting it with sleazy pornography, thus indicating Watkins’ rather conflicted character as a true artist who whored himself out to the lowest bidder. Indeed, the forgotten prodigal celluloid son of Nicholas Ray and Otto Preminger, Watkins may not have achieved much during his erratic and sporadic filmmaking career, but he achieved more than most by adding an element of danger to cinema, which is something that I, for one, can appreciate. 

-Ty E