Gerontophilia

Naturally, it is only a matter of time before every homo enfant terrible auteur filmmaker grows up a little bit and puts away the gratuitous shots of bulging cocks, senseless low-camp gross-out debauchery, and various other forms of hetero-terrorizing aberrosexual agitprop to assemble a more serious and sentimental piece of sod celluloid that is designed to be appreciated, or at least tolerated, by a heterosexual audience. While queer Jap-American auteur Gregg Araki (Nowhere, Mysterious Skin) pussied out long ago with his softcore screwball comedy Splendor (1999) starring Kathleen Robertson (who inspired the filmmaker to dabble in heterosexuality for a short-time), homocore queen Bruce LaBruce (No Skin Off My Ass, Hustler White) just recently decided he wanted to try and debase the mainstream with his most recent feature Gerontophilia (2013), which has been advertised as a sort of gay Harold and Maude (1971). And, indeed, like Hal Ashby’s obscenely overrated film, LaBruce’s latest work was specially tailored for ultra-hip hipsters and faint of heart leftist types as the superlatively sappy and subtly sick story of an 18-year-old Canadian frog twink that seems to suffer from a mild cause of autism who falls head-over-heels for an 81-year-old high yellow negro that climaxes with a dick-shrinking pseudo-existentialist road trip involving PG-rated gay inter-generational miscegenation and a young queen getting upset over the fact a bunch of other young queens are attempting to steal his old jigaboo queen. By far LaBruce’s biggest production to date as a work with a $2 million budget, Gerontophilia was apparently inspired by teenage old-fart-fucker Marcus Ewert, who made himself the cocksucking concubine of sexually introverted alpha-Beats Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs during the late-1980s when the men were already senior citizens. Ultimately, LaBruce's distinctly debasing rectal-reamer romantic comedy absurdly attempts to make the superlatively sleazy and uniquely unnatural into something ‘cute’ and ‘lighthearted,’ which is enough to make any sane person, to misquote the original pimp Hermann Göring, reach for their revolver. Easily LaBruce’s most lazy, contrived, and benign yet simultaneously repugnant work to date, this ‘gentle’ geezer-pleaser dramedy is the sort of film that will probably only appeal to those oh-so rare unlucky individuals that got molested by their grandfather and enjoyed it, as well as geriatric gay men who long to ‘break-in’ virginal teenage boys and turn them into grandfather-fucking freaks. Indeed, if LaBruce was attempting to tap into a larger audience with Gerontophilia, he probably failed, though there are probably enough unhinged middle-aged women and pre-twinks out there to get wet for lead Pier-Gabriel Lajoie, who radiates boyish innocence and naivety and thus makes for the perfect sex object for debauchees. 

Like many gay men, 18-year-old French-Canadian twink ‘Lake’ (played by heterosexual Pier-Gabriel Lajoie) spends a lot of time with wayward women, included his crypto-dyke girlfriend Desiree (Canadian child actress Katie Boland) and a whore mother named Marie (Marie-Hélène Thibault) who works at a strip club and forces her son to call her by her name instead of mom. Since all the women in his life make for worthless nurturers, Lake has been forced to become a sort of nurturer and caretaker himself, hence why he probably develops an erotic infatuation for elderly men, which he initially attempts to satisfy by doodling grotesque nude sketches of old farts with saggy skin. One day while working as a lifeguard at an indoor pool, Lake is forced to perform CPR on an old man he finds floating unconscious in the water, but he finds himself in an exceedingly awkward situation when he pops a boner in front of two younger girls after sucking face with the old timer, which ultimately causes him so much embarrassment that he decides to quit his job despite the fact that he needs money for college. Luckily, Lake’s mommy Marie gets beat up at the strip club she works at and starts a new job at an old folk’s home where she also manages to find her son employment. Of course, working in a retirement home is like being in a whorehouse for Lake, who finds himself stealing the patients’ pills and molesting horny old heterosexual geezers while high on said stolen patients’ pills. Eventually, Lake develops a pathological obsession with spoiled dark meat after giving a sensual sponge bath to a seemingly comatose 81-year-old high yellow elderly negro with faded blue eyes named Melvyn Peobody (played by gay Black Nova Scotian stage actor Walter Borden), whose jet black homo-hating son paid the tab for the old folk’s home but will not even let his poof padre see his grandkids. 

 The retirement home that Lake works at is run by conspicuously corrupt pill-peddling scumbags who intentionally keep the patients over-drugged to the point of perpetual unconsciousness so they do not have to deal with them.  On top of that, one of Lake's co-workers seOf course, Lake catches onto this early and begins trading Mr. Peobody’s pills for alcohol, as the two ‘lover’s get drunk and play cards together. Meanwhile, Lake’s closeted dyke girlfriend Desiree, who fetishes deranged cunts like Lizzie Borden and Aileen Wuornos, finds his scrapbook of old dirty men drawings and begins to realize her boyfriend bones old farts, thus eventually resulting in the dissolution of their phony relationship. After they break-up, Desiree gets drunk at a bar and makes out with a Sapphic metalhead while Lake swallows a bunch of pills with rum as a chaser and suffers a hallucinatory A Nightmare On Elm Street-esque dream featuring a nod to David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) in which he enters a ruined hospital on his skateboard and begins ritualistically licking giant grotesque wounds on Mr. Peobody’s back. 

 When Lake’s mother gets raging drunk and accuses her son of sodomizing an 81-year-old negro, a struggle ensues between the two that results in the old whore breaking her leg. With his mother incapacitated, Lake decides to realize Mr. Peobody’s death wish of seeing the Pacific Ocean before he dies, so he gets his ex-girlfriend Desiree to help him kidnap the kindly old queer negro from the retirement home. While the two have tons of sleazy grandfather-grandson-like sex on the trip with Mr. Peobody absurdly posing as the boy’s granddad, Lake becomes quite jealous when various other considerably perverted poof’s begin hitting on his antiquated chocolate man. Indeed, Lake even gets into a heated girl fight with some Judaic-looking twink at a gay bar where neither girly man manages to land a single punch. Unfortunately, when Lake eventually gets the gall to proclaim his love to Mr. Peobody after they have sex in a motel room, the old high yellow homo is already dead. Only five people (including the organist!) attend Mr. Peobody’s funeral, which depresses Lake, but he at least becomes happy when he notices his belated senile sod lover’s homo-hating son making out with his mother. Indeed, Lake figures that if his mother marries his dead lover’s son, then Mr. Peobody would become his grandfather, thus adding a tinge of incest to their already tastelessly taboo romance. 

 Aside from Harold and Maude and Beat bitch boy Marcus Ewert, auteur Bruce LaBruce seems to have also had more personal reasons for directing Gerontophilia. Indeed, seemingly no longer intrigued by the martial phallus prowess of gay-bashing neo-Nazi skinheads and selling out to the oppressive heterosexual bourgeois institution of marriage, LaBruce married an older Cuban negro a couple years back, though one not nearly as hold as the one in the film. Aside from negrophilia, LaBruce revealed in an interview with www.vocativ.com regarding his personal interest in gerontophilia: “I am now middle-aged, and I hope I will run into gerontophiles in the near or distant future who will appreciate me as a sexy, stimulating and fascinating sexual object. It’s also a good metaphor for any sort of taboo or transgressive sexual peccadillo, a celebration of anyone who goes against the grain of society or nature. Young is fun, but old is bold.” As for his self-admitted (extra)gay agenda with the film, LaBruce stated in the same interview: “With my movie, I chose to represent an inter-generational love and sex relationship that is as extreme as possible and still within legal boundaries. But it still disturbs people in its extremity, if in a deceptively gentle and subtle way.” Of course, aside from men that partake in such behavior, I think it is most peoples’ gut reaction to be decidedly disgusted at the uniquely unnatural sight of an elderly negroid and a youthful Franco-Canadian fag fucking. To LaBruce’s credit, he makes no claim that he is a proponent of nature as demonstrated by Gerontophilia character Desiree's words of support to her ex-boyfriend Lake regarding his particularly perverse proclivity towards wrinkly old melanin-strong flesh, “I think that what you’re doing and what you are is really brave. And the fact that you’re acting on it, you know, like it’s revolutionary […] You’re fighting against nature.” If fucking old negroes is revolutionary, then I am proud to be a racist and homophobic counter-revolutionary.  Easily one of the most, if not the most, understatedly unhinged films to date, Gerontophilia is a quirky queer celluloid nightmare from the bowels of an old folk's home in homo Hades that demonstrates that the revolution is already over, as no so-called ‘heteronormative’ world could produce such a playfully pernicious poof piece. Indeed, LaBruce's cinematic STD is arguably the most corrupt thing to come out of cocksucking Canada since Gaëtan Dugas.

-Ty E

The Farmer's Daughters (1976)

Although it might seem patently absurd to the uninitiated, there actually are some advantages to homos directing heterosexual hardcore flicks, or at least there were during the Golden Age of Porn when fags like the Amero Brothers (Bacchanale, Blonde Ambition), Zachary Strong (Confessions of a Teenage Peanut Butter Freak, Visions of Clair), Chuck Vincent (Visions, Roommates), Michael Zen (Reflections, The Filthy Rich: A 24 K-Dirty Movie), and Zebedy Colt (The Devil Inside Her, Unwilling Lovers) and even trannies like Kim Christy (Dream Lovers, Squalor Motel) were directing some of the most subversive, artistically merited, and idiosyncratic fuck flicks of their zeitgeist. After seeing various works by these directors, I certainly have my theories as to why sods might make for more ‘interesting’ pornographers.  Aside from probably being more interested in creating art or at least something more interesting than simply directing ‘banal’ and ‘disgusting’ heterosexual sex, queer pornographers seem to get off to depicting heterosex in a warped and exceedingly degraded fashion. Of course, it is not just gay pornographers that did this, as every homo auteur from Andy Warhol to Andy Milligan to Pier Paolo Pasolini to Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Pedro Almodóvar had a proclivity towards portraying straight sex as corrosive, abusive, and/or deadly.  Among the aforementioned queer pornographers, few were nastier, more venomous, and just plain sadistic than ‘Zebedy Colt,’ who seemed to use pornography as an aesthetically terroristic tool to reap revenge against ‘breeders’ and rednecks who probably regularly kicked his ass when he was younger. Born Edward Earle Marsh and originally a Hollywood child actor who appeared in classics like Babes in Toyland (1934), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) starring Errol Flynn, and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), Colt began using the pseudonym he is best known for in the late-1960s when he began innovating “queer cabaret” and recording the pioneering poof album “I’ll Sing for You” with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, but it was not until he was middle-aged that he began using the name to direct and star in fuck flicks, with The Farmer's Daughters (1976) being arguably the most infamous of his decidedly depraved and debasing directorial efforts. Also notable for featuring pre-fame actor and literary figure Spalding Gray (Swimming to Cambodia, Gray’s Anatomy)—a self-loathing Anglo who once stated in an interview, “I appear to be a Wasp Brahmin, but I'm really a sort of neurotic, perverse New York Jew” and who apparently was partially inspired to commit suicide by jumping in the East River after watching Tim Burton's Big Fish (2003)—as the leader of a gang of pussy-pillaging escaped convicts who leads the gang-raping of a poor farmer’s wife and three daughters during a demented game of “Simon Says,” The Farmer’s Daughters is a fiercely fucked hardcore hixploitation flick that could have only been directed by a pernicious pissed off pansy faggot who wanted to take revenge against society and profit doing it. 

 Starring ‘auteur’ Zebedy Colt as farmer ‘Shep,’ wife Kate (Gloria Leonard) and three daughters, Martha (Susan McBain), Jane (Nancy Dare) and Beth (Marlene Willoughby), The Farmer’s Daughters is indubitably one of the sickest filmic fantasies ever committed to celluloid. The film starts with wife Kate pleading to her hick hubby, “Not now Chip, not in the middle of the day,” but farmer Shep cannot wait and states, “Shit woman, when I get horny, I want what’s mine…now were gonna fuck” and proceeds to bang her in their bedroom while their three daughters watch outside. While initially less than interested in being defiled by her hubby, Kate eventually comes around and confesses to Shep, “You’re a wicked man…I guess that’s why I love you so much,” to which he hilariously replies, “give me more poontang.” Meanwhile, outside, a resentful farmhand named Fred (William Cort) says to the farmer’s three daughters regarding their parents fucking talents, or lack thereof, “Shit, don’t mean nothing. I’ve watched them fuck plenty of times. Don’t know how to do nothing. Always the same way…him on top. You can’t learn nothing from them.” Assumedly horny after seeing their parents screw and wanted to see whether or not the farmhand is a ‘good lay’ or merely a ‘lame fuck,’ the three salacious sisters take him inside and gang-rape him, even ‘queening’ his face. After they make him bust his load after milking his cock like a cow udder, sister Martha spits Fred’s cum in his face. After that, the three girls put him in bondage and whip him with a flyswatter. After warning him not to tell their parents, the triad of sicko sisters communally piss on poor Fred and proceed to rape him again. Of course, little do the three sisters realize that they are about to be on the receiving end of a gang-rape. 

 Led by their dorky pseudo-redneck leader George (Spalding Gray), three ex-convicts, including a negro named ‘Butch’ (John Black) and a Jew-y dork named ‘Pat’ (Philip Marlowe), make their way to Shep’s farm by happenstance while evading police and immediately notice the farmer’s frisky daughters. Before defiling the daughters, anti-gentleman George leads his mischievously merry men to Shep’s bedroom and proceed to rape the farmer’s wife, with black buck Butch being the first one to penetrate the disgraced matriarch with his mahogany mean meat.  When dorky convict Paul attempts a little bit of violent irrumatio on Kate, she fights back by biting his boner. While Spalding Gray tells Shep “Just watch your lady have fun,” the farmer must endure seeing his beloved wifey being vaginally debased by the depraved criminal delinquents. Eventually, the three daughters make their way back to the homestead and find their parents unclad and bound and Shep tells them to make a run for it, but the fugitives soon catch them. After one of the girls calls them convicts, the criminals proclaim that they are “underprivileged” victims who “didn’t have a happy childhood like you kids,” so Mr. Gray comes to the conclusion, “Yeah, we didn’t get a chance to play no game, so we're making up for it now” and forces the three sisters to play a twisted game of Simon Says involving the three sisters being raped by the three convicts while their parents watch. 

 Luckily for the traumatized farm family, farmhand Fred witnesses the sexually sinister game of Simon Says and pulls a shotgun on the convicts, but when the girls run to him for protection, the vengeful male rape victim yells in a hysterical fashion that makes him seem like a undersexed postmenopausal woman, “Get away from me you cunts. No one humiliates Fred Turner and gets away with it. I’ve hated you so long, this is going to be a pleasure.” After shooting Butch for laughing at him, Fred forces mother Kate to give him a blowjob and declares, “It’s not Simon Says anymore. It’s Fred Says.” After demanding that Beth lick his cum off her mother’s face, the renegade farmhand forces the daughters to get in a Sapphic threesome with their mother. When Fred makes the mistake of putting down his guard after getting too overexcited upon forcing the two surviving convicts, George and Butch, to urinate on the girls, farmer Shep uses the opportunity to seize his shotgun and kill all the rapists. Of course, whether farmer Shep will ever get over seeing his wife and three daughters in a foursome together is questionable. 

 Without a doubt, The Farmer’s Daughters is one of the most poorly directed and eclectically inept works that I have ever seen from the porn chic era. Indeed, it seems Zebedy Colt utilized shock value in a half-assed attempt to obscure his lack of directing talents. Of course, with his later works like The Devil Inside Her (1977) and Virgin Dreams (1977), he eventually became a slightly more capable ‘auteur,’ though his innate sadism and undying hatred for hicks surely remained. In fact, Colt was such a cold and callous cocksucker that he managed to strike fear in depraved Jewess Annie Sprinkle—a wickedly wanton woman who become infamous for holding something called a “Public Cervix Announcement” where she allowed audiences members to gaze at her cervix with a speculum and flashlight—of all people during the making of The Devil Inside Her to the point where she “never had any more rape fantasies” as revealed in the documentary Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real (1999). Colt’s unwavering obsession with incest seems to more reflect his own sick mind than those hicks and rednecks that he dedicated his life to attacking with his hopelessly amateurish fuck flicks. Judging by his vulgarly kitschy and overly melodramatic queer ballads and failed acting career, Colt will ironically be best remembered for directing some of the most unsexy and odiously obscene ‘breeder’ blue movies ever made, with The Farmer’s Daughters being arguably his crowning achievement as the most flaming queen of the porn chic era. A sort of masturbation aid for aspiring serial rapists and white trash serial killers like Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Elwood Toole, The Farmer’s Daughter is as radically repellant as old school fuck films can get as a work that makes The Last House on the Left (1972) seem like an episode of Happy Days. As for Spalding Gray, I almost have more respect for him after seeing The Farmer’s Daughters, though I'd rather endure another Colt flick than suffer Swimming to Cambodia (1987) again. 

-Ty E

American Babylon

Before prematurely concluding both his porn and filmmaking career with the apparently forgettable shot-on-video effort Decadence (1988), Roger Watkins aka ‘Richard Mahler’—the man who forever delightfully debased the horror realm with his misanthropic work of nefariously nihilistic Mansonite artsploitation The Last House on Dead End Street (1977)—blessed the world of bizarre blue movies with his penultimate piece of eccentric celluloid excess American Babylon (1987) aka Babylon USA, which like Fred Halsted's Sextool (1975), was one of only a handful of porn flicks that was shot on 35mm film stock. A film made to mock the raincoat crowd and Pee-wee Herman types, as well as the banal and equally bored American suburban bourgeoisie that could afford the pricey projectors and film reels to jerk-off in the dark in the privacy of their own basements, Watkins’ reluctantly wanton work is positively penetrating anti-porn at its most darkly humorous. Indeed, a piece of mischievously mirthful meta-cinema and porn-within-a-porn-within-a-porn about a basement-dwelling porn addict who watches fuck flicks in a literal raincoat and a motorcycle helmet and his considerably whipped neighbor/’best friend’ who calls his conspicuously cunty wife ‘mother’ and is good at taking orders from other people, especially wanton women, American Babylon depicts via a secretly seedy suburban microcosm the pathetic loneliness that oftentimes ‘comes’ with pornophilia, extramarital affairs, and religious fever. An iconoclastic assault on Christian evangelism, marriage, middle-class living, and porn addiction, Watkins’ work is nothing if not a totally and shockingly singular work made on the brink of the death of porn chic, which probably has largely to do with the fact that the auteur had total creative freedom with the film, or as he stated in an interview with David Kerekes featured in Headpress 23: Funhouse (2002): “CORRUPTION and AMERICAN BABYLON are two I had absolute, total control over.” A timely work created around the time when the porn industry drastically degenerated into the soulless and malignant smut tumor it is today and started producing plot-less and artless shot-on-video twaddle that was meant to sexually excite the most moronic of debauched dullards and delinquents, American Babylon is a sort of unofficial declaration of the pornographic apocalypse. 

 Meek ‘house husband’ Thomas (played by actor/porn star Michael Gaunt, who appeared in everything from the late-1960s BBC children series Jackanory to Lucio Fulci’s 1980 classic City of the Living Dead) arrives home calling for his domineering wife Mary (played by Chelsea Balke, who starred in Sharon Mitchell’s delightfully titled 1985 work D.O.D.: Dick of Death), but instead finds a sandwich, glass of milk, and note reading, “Honey, Tuesday night is aerobics night. See you after a time. Your loving wife, Mary.” Rather annoyed by his wife’s absence and her use of the nonsensical non-phrase “See you after a time,” Thomas decides to head over to the house of his small, swarthy, and sleazy neighbor Robert (played by pornographic ‘character actor’ Bobby ‘Clown Prince of Porn’ Astyr), who is a pathetic yet exceedingly arrogant and narcissistic porn addict who spends virtually all of his time watching fuck flicks and denies sexual pleasure to his undersexed wife Joan (Tish Ambrose, who appeared in virtually all of Watkins’ fuck flicks). Indeed, when Joan begins masturbating in an attempt to turn on her horndog hubby, he bitches with a gutter-grade NYC Jewish accent, “Joan, I really wish you wouldn’t do that. It’s distracting. Enough is a fuckin’ nuff'.” Together, Robert and Tom watch vintage black-and-white films together like “Teenage Pigment In Heat” a film by ‘Bernard America.’ An early casualty of porn addiction who lives and breathes amateur blue movies, Robert excitedly describes the poorly directed fuck flick to Thomas as follows: “Get a load of this footage, Thomas. No adult cinema, this. No, no contemporary triple X theater, this is a dirty movie. The screen just literally drips guilt. The debasement is what does it. Look at the cunt. You can’t tell but I know it. It’s just dripping wet and stinks to high heaven.” Indeed, Robert is so enamored with porn that he will not even notice Thomas beginning an affair with his wife Joan right in front of his face. 

 Spiritual cuckold and human doormat Thomas is indubitably his wife Mary’s little bitch and he has no problem admitting it, even to women who he is cheating on his spouse with. When Thomas fails to drink the milk she left him while she was at aerobics, she complains, “son-of-a-bitch didn’t even drink his milk” and forces him to drink it later, but not before berating him a number of times. When Thomas walks in on Mary, who he lovingly calls ‘mother,’ masturbating, he ruins her orgasm by driving his face into her gash, but he makes up for it by dining on and penetrating her naughty bits. After sex, the two go to bed, but they are both awakened by a phone call from Robert’s wife Joan, who demands that Thomas meet her at 2 pm the next day at a local pizza joint because, as she says to the whipped married man, “I want to suck your cock.” Of course, being a cowardly cuck who can be easily manipulated by any woman, Thomas follows Joan’s orders and soon finds himself receiving head in the lady’s room of the pizza joint, though he complains, “Joan, this is a public restroom. Anyone can walk in here” during the middle of the blowjob. After blowing his load, Thomas, proclaims, “Gee Joan, that was swell. I’d really love to do it again sometime, if it is at all possible,” to which his friend’s wife replies while semen is dripping from her face, “I can't hardly wait.” Indeed, the next time Thomas comes over to Robert’s place to watch a fuck flick called “Butt Girls in Bondage,” he is treated to a handjob from Joan, whose husband is so hypnotized by the hardcore reel that he does not notice that his “best wife” (indeed, Robert seems to think he has more than one wife) is stroking the pole of his “best friend.” When Robert later walks in on his wife Joan being fucked by a butch bitch with a strap-on while Thomas masturbates nearby while absurdly sporting old school beatnik garb, he does not even notice a thing and goes on to pathetically proclaim how glad he is that he just found his Swiss army knife like the proud man-child that he is. 

 Unquestionably, American Babylon becomes much more bizarre and intriguingly inexplicable during the last 20 minutes or so. After Robert tells a bogus bullshit story about how he once had an affair with two bisexual sisters that just magically happened to show up in the upstairs bedroom of his home while he was vacuuming downstairs with his beloved Hoover vacuum cleaner (indeed, he seems more aroused by the thought of his vacuum than the two imaginary incestuous sluts he encountered), the film begins to deconstruct. To differentiate between sections of the film, director Roger Watkins opted for shooting the film’s main narrative in color and the fictional fuck films that the characters watch in black-and-white. Of course, by the end of the film, the main characters are also depicted in black-and-white, thus rudely demolishing the imaginary ‘Fourth Wall’ of the film and making the viewer well aware that they are watching a porn flick. Indeed, when the character Robert states to Thomas, “Only a fool would believe a story like that. I mean, think about it,” after he fails to differentiate between fact and fantasy, he is really speaking to the viewer from the perspective of auteur Watkins, who seems to have only the bitterest contempt for his audience. During the last 10 minutes or so of American Babylon, a title card for an imaginary film entitled “Menopausal Males in Bondage” (A film by Thomas and Robert) appears and various scenes from the movie appear in an abridged recapping of the entire film, thus forcing the viewer to come to terms with the fact that they have been ‘had’ by the director and are, not unlike the characters of the film, ‘Menopausal Males’ in bondage to pornography and impotency.  Like Thomas and Robert, the viewer lives their life vicariously through television characters and dope-addled porn stars.  Also, towards the end of the film, Thomas’ wife Mary shoots her TV with a shotgun after becoming quite agitated with what she sees on the screen, thus suggesting that porn and television are just two heads of the same incapacitating and lobotomizing American beast. In the end, American Babylon concludes with a pop-art-like portrait of Abraham ‘Honest Abe’ Lincoln, who not only symbolizes America’s degeneration since the last century, but also how the nation itself is founded on myths, with pornography itself being a perverse product of this mythmaking. 

 More than any of Watkins’ other films, American Babylon reveals the director’s venomous contempt for Christian evangelism, which is most apparent during a scene where the character Robert listens to some carny-like radio preacher and states to his neighbor:  “Thomas, I have a theory about these self-appointed sanctimonious radio proselytizers…I think they’re all suffering from some massive guilt complex. Somewhere in their seedy little pasts, each and every one of them has committed some heinous act for which they can find no absolution. So what they’ve done is beat themselves over the heads with it, and after eons of introspection some kind of dark knights of the soul, they have been metamorphosed into what I like to call ‘Leapers into the Light.’ They are going to beat us over the head with it, buddy, and there ain’t no gettin’ away.”  While Watkins has made it quite clear in various interviews that he got involved in the porn industry for monetary reasons, one certainly gets the feeling while watching American Babylon that he also did it to attack the medieval-minded so-called “Judeo-Christian” (itself, an oxymoron) evangelists who have turned America into the great laughing stock of the world. 

 While Roger Watkins was fairly dismissive of most of his hardcore flicks, he seemed to have a ‘soft spot’ for American Babylon as revealed in his remark in Headpress 23: Funhouse: “I made that with my own money. I like that film. I can’t even find a good tape of it now. I have a bootleg. It’s interesting to me; it’s about boredom. It’s about two men who sit around bored watching pornography. Basically that’s it. I kind of like it. I think the last shot is an eight minute static, b&w shot of these two forlorn guys sitting near a window in a bar listening to ‘Glory Glory Hallelujah’ or something.” Although somewhat inaccurately describing his own film (he was known to have drug problems throughout his entire life), Watkins is correct when he states American Babylon is hard-to-find, as even I had to track down a poor quality bootleg copy, which is rather unfortunate considering it is one of the few true masterpieces of porn, not to mention one of the most sophisticated and iconoclastic works that the industry has ever produced, as the sort of fuck flick Godard might have directed had he been a forsaken drug-addled American exploitation auteur. While some might suspect that the title of the film might have been inspired by the scandalous and oftentimes salacious pages of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (1959), Watkins revealed otherwise, stating, “There was a porn series that made a lot of money – BABYLON PINK, BABYLON YELLOW, Babylon whatever. AMERICAN BABYLON capitalized on all that, but I had written it in a more imaginative way.” Lauded as the “last great adult film to come out of New York,” American Babylon is unquestionably the sort of fuck flick that transcends porn ghetto, as one might describe it as one of the most eloquently obnoxious assaults on both the American porn industry and America in general. A work that depicts suburbia as a sort of American pie that is completely rotten inside where the men are either cuckolded automatons or impotent porn addicts and the women are hyper horny undersexed deviants looking to fuck anything and everything that moves, American Babylon innovatively manages to portray what everyone knows but is too afraid to say by using the taboo art of pornography for a practical purpose, which was certainly one of Watkins’ greatest talents as a filmmaker. Indeed, Watkins is the only filmmaker I can think of who would have probably made socially keen snuff films were he given the opportunity. 

-Ty E

Glen and Randa

Although just mere speculation on my part, I have to assume that if a nuclear holocaust or any other sort of apocalyptic scenario ever really went down, hippie, hipsters, beatnik, and other passive pansy untermenschen rabble would be the first to die, hence I think a dystopian avant-garde work like Glen and Randa (1971)—a film featuring an almost all-long-haired-hippie-cast oftentimes frolicking around naked and making ‘free love’—is a tad bit too unrealistic. Directed by McJewish auteur Jim McBride, who is probably best known for his semi-autobiographical docu-fiction debut David Holzman's Diary (1967), his Godard remake Breathless (1983) starring Richard Gere, the multi-genre crime-thriller-romance hybrid The Big Easy (1986), and especially the Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire! (1989) starring Dennis Quaid and Winona Ryder, Glen and Randa is a sort of offbeat and laidback pre-Mad Max post-civilization piece about a seemingly half-autistic feral hippie boy and his equally unclad and mentally challenged girlfriend who decide to trek across a rural wasteland to reach the imaginary city of ‘Metropolis,’ which the boy reads about in a vintage Wonder Woman comic book. Sort of like a stripped and bare-bones American independent take on Vera Chytilová’s Fruit of Paradise (1970) aka Ovoce stromu rajských jíme, albeit minus the kaleidoscopic imagery and special effects, as a sort of counter-culture influenced reworking of the story of Adam and Eve, McBride’s film seems like it was actually made for a post-apocalyptic population, as a superlatively slow-moving flick that will surely put to sleep and/or severely irritate most ADD-addled contemporary audiences. Indeed, set in a world where broken televisions, horses, comic books, and outmoded sex technique manuals are quite intriguing to the borderline infantile protagonists, who have never seen such things before, Glen and Randa is a sort of subtle yet paradoxically overemphasized reminder how tainted modern humans have become. A sort of post-Christian pagan parable as co-penned by talented novelist/screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer (Two-Lane Blacktop, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Walker), McBride’s celluloid second genesis is probably the most benign and pure of spirit X-rated films ever made. Certainly a work of its zeitgeist such that the director has confessed that he was high at least half the time he made it, Glen and Randa seems like the more bitter than sweet results of what might have happened had the hippies got their decidedly deluded dreams of “simpler times” and “greater self-reliance.” Despite being listed as one of the top 10 films of 1971 by Time Magazine, the film essentially fell into celluloid ash heap of history immediately after it was released due to poor distribution, among other things, thus making for one of the best and strangest kept secrets of both counter-culture and post-apocalyptic cinema.  Indeed, a film has to be doing something right if I somehow managed to enjoy it despite the fact that it was made by drugged out hippies for drugged out hippies.

 Glen (played by Steve Curry, who is probably best known for being one of the various one-time husbands of busty Warhol superstar turned TV actress Patti D'Arbanville) is a sort of neo-caveman who lives in a primitive post-apocalyptic world and enjoys the simpler things in life like creating stone tools and tickling his girlfriend Randa’s flesh flower with flowers. Despite living in a sub-hunter-gatherer fashion, Glen and his extremely petite girlfriend Randa (played by Shelley Plimpton, who appeared in counter-culture cult classics like the 1960 works Robert Downey Sr.’s Putney Swope and Arthur Penn’s Alice's Restaurant) fight like contemporary lovers, as neither of them seems to agree with one another on anything aside from their mutual love of fucking one another. Despite not having electricity or even clothes, the two lovers find much fun, excitement, and adventure in their lives. Indeed, at the beginning of the film, the two find a totaled car in a train and make love in it. Unfortunately, their tree-based carnal pleasure is probably responsible for the pregnancy that will ultimately result in Randa’s death. Both Glen and Randa live for figurative ‘Forbidden Fruit,’ but it is the former’s desire for finding a seemingly mystical city where people can apparently fly that will inspire the two to take a deadly trek in a land that they know nothing about.  Of course, if their innocence was not already lost beforehand, it is certainly lost after the pilgrimage.

 Things ultimately change for Glen and Randa when they meet a nomadic Magician (Gary Goodrow) on a motorcycle that proclaims he is “not here to steal your food or feel your women” or “grab your stuff or treat you rough” but “here to play” and provide “fun and games.” The Magician seems like a creepy pedophile with unsavory intentions, but he does provide the “fun and games” as he advertised, including introducing the two lovers to the poetry of English Romantic poet John Keats, as well as a beat-up vintage Wonder Woman comic book that will inspire Glen and his lady love to travel to the city of ‘Metropolis’ where people can fly. After reciting, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing,” from the beginning of Keats’ 1818 poem “Endymion,” the Magician states of the poet, “That guy died when he was 25…I guess that’s the name of the game.” Unfortunately for Randa, she will come to know the name of the game all too well. Aside from Keats and Wonder Woman, the Magician also introduces the lovers and various other rural hobos to The Rolling Stones via a scratched LP of “Time Is On My Side.” If something is for sure, Glen and Randa have a lot of time on their hands, or so it seems. 

 While the Magician, who grew up in the Bronx and was apparently 15 years old when “the whole place was totaled,” warns Glen and Randa to forget the city, they decide to ignore his wise words and begin their pilgrimage across the wilderness where they meet a new friend in the form of a horse that they are initially scared of and mistake for a camel.  Indeed, upon bumping into the horse, Glen pathetically pleads to it, “don’t hurt us, we just want to go to the city,” as if the wild beast can talk.  Naturally, as the film will demonstrate, the horse should have more reason to be afraid of the two humans than the other way around.  While the two bring canned foods and boxes of matches upon which to survive, they soon run out of their supplies and before they know it they are eating rolly pollies that they find crawling in a totaled car near a river bank. Glen also manages to catch and beat a gigantic fish to death on the way. Of course, things eventually become rather desperate when the two reach a rocky mountain, so they are forced to eat their beloved horse, though Glen has to literally force that meat down his terribly delicate girlfriend’s throat, as she is disgusted by the whole ordeal of having to devour her new four-legged friend. Unfortunately, Randa also discovers that she is pregnant, so it is probably not a good time for her to be starving in the middle of the wilderness. Luckily, the two lovers eventually reach a scenic beach just in the knick of time where they meet a kindly yet semi-senile old fart named Sidney Miller (played by Woody Chambliss, who appeared in the made-for-TV 1972 cult flick Gargoyles and Robert Fuest’s 1975 career-capitulating work The Devil’s Rain featuring Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey and John Travolta), who has not seen another human being in 20 years and gladly gives them a dilapidated house that, in spite of being covered in moss and missing part of its roof, Randa can reside in until she gives birth. Indeed, to the slight chagrin of Sidney, Glen tosses out a skeleton that is lying on the couch in the home and makes himself comfortable.  Of course, the anonymous skeleton will not be the last piece of human remains that will grace the meta-humble abode.

 Upon talking to Sidney, Glen learns that a city that “used to be a city called Boise” used to exist only 10 miles away from the house but it apparently burned down long ago. Of course, that does not stop Glen from maintaining his almost religious dream of reaching his much idealized imagery utopia of ‘Metropolis.’ Meanwhile, Randa becomes increasingly lethargic due to her pregnancy and Glen ignorantly complains to her that she should stop acting like she is sick all the time, not realizing just how exhausting gestation can be. Glen also finds some old books around the home and begins developing an idealized view of civilization, so when Randa urinates on the floor of the home in a frolicsome fashion, he freaks out and yells the following while pronouncing about half the words wrong: “We’re not animals; we’re people. We have to start living like people.  We have to be civilized.” When Glen finds an old book on various sex techniques, he decides to try them out on Randa, but her pregnancy has made her too incapacitated to derive pleasure from such things. When Glen does finally get her to have sex, he does so in front of horny old geezer Sidney, but their pleasure ends during mid-coitus when Sidney touches the young lady’s stomach and she begins to go into labor. While Randa manages to give birth to a healthy baby boy, she dies in the process, so Sidney burns her body inside the dilapidated home in a ritualistic fashion, with Glen not quite realizing that his lady love is gone forever. At Glen’s demand of reaching Metropolis and against Sidney’s better judgment as an old man who has “never been anywhere else before,” the young man, old man, and baby get in an old small sailboat and begin to sail to an ostensible utopia. The End. 

 Interestingly, in a 30+ minute interview featured as an extra feature on the 2009 DVD release of Glen and Randa by VCI Entertainment, director Jim McBride explains in an unintentionally humorous fashion how he remembers virtually nothing about production of his minimalistic post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick nor what inspired him to direct the film in the first place. When the interviewer asks McBride if he attempted to use certain metaphors in the film, the director denies it and simply states, “It’s just a movie.” As to whether the film was supposed to have a message or not, McBride stoically states, “not really.” In fact, the director more or less discredits the film, even describing it as “embarrassing,” though adding: “I shouldn’t be putting down my own movie on camera for the DVD…and I don’t mean it as a putdown but it really is something of another time that just seems a little odd in the present. You know, it’s useful to look at these ancient artifacts…particularly for a younger generation, because it does reflect something about the times that your standard, pop-culture, Hollywood movies may not have really reflected.” Indeed, Glen and Randa is, in its essence, gloriously outmoded to the point where some younger viewers might think it is a collection of deleted scenes from Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 Woodstock documentary and the fact that McBride stated of the production, “I was stoned half the time and I really don’t remember it all that well […] We really were a hippie production” is certainly no surprise, but luckily it lacks the bellbottoms, bad music, and senseless sense of optimism typical of similarly themed works. With its utilization of a real, half-demolished house covered in plants, rusted derailed train cars submerged in water, and moss-covered antique automobiles in trees, Glen and Randa also has a sort of mystifying intrigue about it that Werner Herzog might describe as “ecstatic truth.” A strangely ‘cozy’ celluloid odyssey of perennial aimlessness that makes the post-apocalyptic realm seem lonely and banal yet at the same time, paradoxically exciting as it would probably be if most of humanity was really wiped out in a devastating nuclear holocaust, Glen and Randa may not be an unsung masterpiece or a super sophisticated analysis on the failing of civilization and humanity as a whole, but it is certainly one of the most idiosyncratic and delightfully ‘lighthearted’ post-apocalyptic flicks I have ever seen, as a sort of American big brother to the equally eccentric and experimental Spanish post-nuclear-holocaust sci-fi flick Animales racionales (1983) aka Human Animals directed by Eligio Herrero, albeit minus the darkly humorous dog-on-girl style comic relief.  Although somewhat disputable, Glen and Randa also has the distinction of being one of the few quasi-pro-doomsday flicks ever made.  Indeed, while the lead characters live like hippie hobos and one of them even dies a painful death that ultimately denies her the opportunity to raise her child, there is a certain purity to their sub-meager existences that almost seems heavenly, which is certainly not something I can say of similarly themed works, which tend to fetishize the modern world, as if the death of Americanization, globalization, technocracy, bureaucracy and other contemporary social ills would be a bad thing.

-Ty E