Death Warmed Over

Before a then relatively unknown Peter Jackson made his satirically grotesque splatter flicks like Bad Taste (1987) and Dead Alive (1992) aka Braindead, kiwi auteur David Blyth (Red Blooded American Girl, Wound) more or less single-handedly ushered in New Zealand horror cinema with his conspicuously convoluted yet undeniably addictive berserk celluloid monster Death Warmed Over (1984) aka Death Warmed Up aka Robot Maniac aka Neuro Killers aka Re-Animator I starring British actor Michael ‘Hercules’ Hurst, which is notable for being awarded the Grand Prix at the Fantasy Film Festival (aka ‘Festival International de Paris du film fantastique et de science-fiction’) by no lesser a filmmaker than Chilean-born auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky. While surely a genre flick influenced by everything from The Island of Doctor Moreau to George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and everything in-between, the flick was not directed by a typical horror hack but by an iconoclastic auteur that was once considered New Zealand’s equivalent to Luis Buñuel. Indeed, before directing Death Warmed Up, Blyth was responsible for directing the queer avant-garde psycho-sexual short Circadian Rhythms (1976) and the rather underrated surrealist Buñuel-esque anti-bourgeois fantasy Angel Mine (1978), so it seemed somewhat unlikely that he would direct a splatter flick geared towards a more general audience. Of course, as reflected in its fairly overt homoerotic subtext and rather raunchy one-liners like, “I love the smell of blonde pussy in the morning,” Blyth’s hysterically paced horror flick is not exactly your typical completely mindless spatter show. Co-penned by Michael Heath who was previously responsible for writing the Kubrick-esque Ozploitation classic Next of Kin (1982) and the underrated kiwi cross-genre Ronald Hugh Morrieson adaptation Summer (1982) aka The Scarecrow, Death Warmed Up is like a car accident that you cannot help but stare at in disbelief as a work that seems like it was created by a collective of nihilistic methheads where the storyline is just as frenetic and erratic as the in-your-face steadicam-based cinematography. More or less completely overlooked in Blyth's native New Zealand where it was described in the press as a “depraved waste of taxpayers money,” the film would ultimately develop its most loyal following in Europe.  Probably the most notable fan of the work is Jodorowsky who indubitably paid the film its greatest compliment when he stated in an interview: “…the film appealed to me because of its irrational side. David Blyth creates an unexplained atmosphere from which we have to draw conclusions, and, in passing, he settles scores with his paternal archetype and with his sexual vision of the world. So what sets off a negative apocalypse is a sexual act between two adolescents; from the moment these two youngsters make love in an open, healthy manner, the world explodes as if in retribution. From all these points of view, this can be said to be a personal film, made with very little money, but one which multiplies its resources. I also divide directors into those who need several million dollars, and those who love the cinema so much that they make miracles on small budgets and multiply the loaves by putting all their efforts into the image.” Featuring an involuntarily parricidal hero, ambiguously gay mad scientist with a fetish for both bloody brains and blonde boys, pernicious mutant punk rockers, an old fat white chap in an unconventional form of blackface, and reasonably decent gross-out gore effects, Death Warmed Up is certainly what cult films are all about as a piece of wayward celluloid idiosyncrasy that plays by its own rules while also playing with outmoded horror cliches. 

 Like Death Warmed Up itself, the life of protagonist Michael Tucker (Michael Hurst) very much resembles a nightmare, or at least it does after he kills both of his parents. At first, Michael is just your typical New Zealand Anglo-Saxon schoolboy, but things change when he goes by his father’s work one day and witnesses his neurosurgeon daddy Professor Tucker (David Weatherley) getting in a heated argument over dubious research with his unhinged megalomaniac partner Dr. Archer Howell (Gary Day) who believes his brain surgery experiments can extend human life despite the fact that his experiments on rats concluded with the rats dying with major brain lesions. To Michael’s horror, Dr. Howell spots him during the argument and then later chases the boy down and awkwardly recommends that he take a shower, homoerotically stating, “You’re all sweaty. Let's get you cleaned up.” While Michael showers, Dr. Howell admires the young boy’s unclad body and then out of nowhere shoves a huge needle filled with some strange serum into the boy’s bum, thus making him homicidally crazy. Ultimately, Dr. Howell gives Michael a shotgun and drops him off at his home where he rudely interrupts his parents' carnal pleasures and proceeds to shoot them dead, even symbolically blasting a hole where his mother’s vagina used to be in what one might describe as brazenly anti-Oedipal behavior. For his unconscious crimes, Michael is locked up in a mental institution, even though he was not in control of his actions. Needless to say, when all is said and done, the protagonist wants his revenge and he will have it, but it will ultimately come at the price of everything, especially his sanity, but also love and a long well lived life. 

 Flash forward seven years later, Michael has been released from the loony bin and has a sort of ‘Nazi chic’ makeover as reflected in his charming bleach blond Hitler Youth haircut and matching eyebrows. Meanwhile, Dr. Howell, who previously received a grant from a heinous sounding group called the Rothschilds Foundation, has fully realized his dream as a sort of evil corporate mad scientist and now owns a gigantic hospital-cum-prison called ‘Trans Cranial Applications’ (TCA) on a luxurious island. Needless to say, Michael decides to pay Dr. Howell a visit on the island, but he also absurdly decides to bring his girlfriend Sandy (Margaret Umbers), as well his best bud Lucas (William Upjohn) and his girlfriend Jeannie (Norelle Scott). To get to the island, Michael and his friends take a ferry on which they run into some mutants, including a rather sickly fire-crotched hunchback with a somewhat lycanthrope-like appearance named Tex Murno (Bruno Lawrence), who was apparently the first victim of Dr. Howell’s surgery. When Lucas decides to piss on a random car, he and Michael soon find themselves fighting two mutants named Spider (David Letch) and Jannings (Geoff Snell), who ultimately get their asses kicked by the Aryan studs. Spider and Jannings are both ‘patients’/‘employees’ of Dr. Howell and they will ultimately be spending most of their time attempting to hunt down Michael and his friends. After finally arriving on the island and getting in a road battle with Spider that ends with the baldheaded punk mutant getting run off the road, Michael drives his friend into a bizarre local town where he spots his nemesis going to a place called ‘Ranji Gandhi & Sons Fruitery’ owned by a goofy Indian (played by Jonathan Hardy in ‘brownface’) whose eyes practically pop out of his head when he talks. While Michael and his friends have a fun little time at the beach where the two male leads sport super gay speedos (Michael Hurst seems like he has an erection), things ultimately begin going down hill for the group, who will soon be battling giant mutants at a mad scientist’s somewhat kitschy compound, which seems like it was designed by Steve Strange of the New Romanticist group Visage. 

 At Michael's recommendation, the friends decide to hang out in some underground tunnels where they soon find themselves being chased by Spider and Jannings on motorcycles. When one of the mutant goons runs into Lucas’ girlfriend’s Jeannie, she hits her head on concrete and is severely wounded. Luckily, loverboy Lucas takes his revenge and ultimately causes Jannings to impale himself on a pole. When Spider brings half-dead Jannings by Dr. Howell’s compound and the good doctor refuses to help, the sinisterly goofy mutant decides to seek his revenge. Indeed, Spider frees dozens of large mutant ‘patients’ at Dr. Howell’s compound that immediately begin brutally murdering everyone in sight, including cute chicks in futuristic new wave uniforms. Eventually, a group of the unruly monsters led by Spider begin attacking Michael and his friends at a bar, but eventually Dr. Howell’s Chinaman sidekick and a group of militaristic medics show up and force the friends to go back with them to the hospital where the homicidal havoc is raging on. To make a long story short, Jeannie gets burned alive after throwing radioactive material at a mutant, Lucas is killed after taking an axe to the gut from Spider, and Michael finally gets his much desired revenge by repeatedly stabbing Dr. Howell in the stomach with a scalpel in a discernibly fetishistic way. Before he is killed, Dr. Howell states to Michael in a homoerotic fashion, “I had a vision…You were a part of that vision.” After killing Dr. Howell, Michael and his much suffering girlfriend Sandy leave the madhouse, yet the protagonist seems all the more deranged despite killing his nemesis and he even gets violent with his lover when she attempts to comfort him. When Sandy tells Michael, “It’s over,” he responds by curiously remarking, “It hasn't even begun” and by driving to the site of a group of cars and trucks in flames where he is ultimately killed via electrocution after a power line falls on him. Undoubtedly, to say Michael is a tragic protagonist would be an understatement. 

 Unfortunately, not only was the original 16mm print of Death Warmed Up apparently accidentally burnt by a careless intern at the film vault where it was kept, but a second 35mm blowup was also lost, hence why all the DVD releases of the film look like they were transferred from VHS. Interestingly, Death Warmed Up would not have ever been made were it not for a tarot reading given by none other than Alejandro Jodorowsky. Indeed, apparently director David Blyth was so obsessed with Jodorowsky after seeing El Topo (1970) at the NZ Film Festival that he traveled to London looking for the filmmaker-cum-guru and found out through some friends that he was living in Paris. Upon arriving in Paris, Blyth found Jodorowsky at a shop called Arcane 22 and was told after receiving a tarot reading that he should immediately go back to New Zealand and begin working on another film which would ultimately be Death Warmed Up. In a strange yet rather fitting instance of happenstance, Jodorowsky ended up being the President of the Jury when the film competed at the Paris Fantasy Film Festival where it won the Grand Prix. Notably, Jodorowsky would later state regarding Blyth and his film, “I could understand someone disapproving of David Blyth's film, saying that it was a curious film, not Cartesian enough, with blood in it, idiotic, but nevertheless I don't think I'm wrong in saying that this director is going to have an interesting career in film. In fact I told him, when I read the Tarot for him, that he was going to become very famous, and very rich, and that he would go and shoot in the United States, where people would do their utmost to deprive him of his vision.” While Blyth never really became that rich or famous, he did go on to work in Hollywood where he was most certainly deprived of his vision, hence why he would be forced to direct episodes of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and various other completely commercial works that one would never expect to be directed by the kiwi Buñuel.  Luckily, Blyth eventually decided to leave Hollywood and move back to his homeland where he began directing experimental documentaries and brutal arthouse splatter flicks like Wound (2010), which is arguably the director's most subversive and grotesque work to date.  Admittedly, the first time I watched Death Warmed Up, I had a rather hard time getting into it and had to turn it off after 30 minutes or so, but after becoming fairly familiar with Blyth's oeuvre I wisely decided to give it another try and now can confess that I am a converted fan.  As a truly bizarre and idiosyncratic sci-fi-horror that is like The Island of Doctor Moreau as savagely raped by Liquid Sky (1982) and Class of Nuke 'Em High (1986), albeit with creepy cocksucker undertones, Blyth's movie is pure and unadulterated celluloid trash that could have only been sired in the 1980s and I mean that in the best possible way.  After all, any film featuring a curious combination of seemingly unrelated ingredients, including naughty nurses in fetishistic New Romanticist-esque uniforms, hilariously vulgar Indian racial caricatures, ambiguously gay mad scientists of the twink-obsessed sorts, murderous mutant punk rockers, and a sunny paradisaical island, among other things, is worthy of any truly enterprising cinephile's time.

-Ty E

The Assault (1986)

Undoubtedly, every modern western nation has its overrated token Judaic literary figure as it would be considered nothing short of antisemitism for white Europeans and Americans to not put at least one Semitic scribbler, especially if they are a proud shoah survivor like Eli Wiesel, on a grand pedestal, even if they are not even remotely worthy of such a honor. In the Netherlands, Harry Mulisch—a fellow who, along with his Jewess mother, managed to remain rather unscathed during the Nazi occupation because his Austrian gentile banker father worked for a kraut bank that dealt with confiscated Jewish assets—is undoubtedly considered the most famous post-WWII Jewish writer and unlike that obscenely overrated weasel Wiesel, he is somewhat deserving of his great fame. Aside from his novels, Mulisch is also famous for his rather flagrant arrogance which bordered on megalomania as reflected in statements like, “I don’t just remember it; I am World War II.” Possibly as a result of his bizarre situation as a Dutch Jew who was not persecuted during the Second World War and because his Aryan father collaborated with the Nazis and was thus later imprisoned as a Nazi collaborator, Mulisch took a more intricate view of the Nazi occupation and its aftermath as personified in his best-selling novel De Aanslag (1982) aka The Assault which, unlike most Dutch novels, was translated into more than 30 languages and spawned a hit film adaptation that was just as successful as the book, even if it is not as famous as it probably should be in the United States where reading subtitles is certainly not the norm. Indeed, the film is notable for being the first Dutch film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1986 and was directed by Fons Rademakers (Mira, Because of the Cats aka The Rape) who incidentally was also the very first Dutch filmmaker to be nominated for an Academy Award via his work Dorp aan de rivier (1958) aka The Village by the River in 1959. 

 Although distributed by the kosher kitsch kings at Cannon Films who mostly churned out senseless action-packed schlock and proudly anti-artistic celluloid swell featuring big tits and big guns, The Assault (1986) aka De Aanslag is a classic epic war-drama with a quasi-arthouse style and 140+ minute running time that is probably the only Nazi occupation work of its kind that is worthy of being compared to Paul Verhoeven’s Soldaat van Oranje (1977) aka Soldier of Orange which, incidentally, was also penned by prolific Dutch screenwriter Gerard Soeteman (Turks fruit aka Turkish Delight, Spetters). A film that spans over four paradigm-shifting decades, beginning at the end of World War II and concluding in the 1980s, The Assault is also probably the closest thing to a Dutch equivalent to Edgar Reitz’s magnum opus Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany (1984) in terms of its subtly melancholic depiction of the serious social changes of a Germanic nation over the course of a number of decades, with the Second World War ultimately being the most obvious catalyst for these mostly deleterious transformations. A carefully crafted political-thriller in a slowburning yet sometimes action-packed Greek tragedy form, Rademakers' film tells the story of a barely likeable Dutch doctor who unravels the unpredictable fact and curious circumstances that led to the deaths of his entire family at the hands of the Gestapo after a Dutch Nazi collaborator is killed outside of his family home by members of the resistance. A work about the irony of fate where there are no clear-cut heroes and where supposed good guys’ actions are just as deleterious and deadly as supposed bad guys’, The Assault is a film that might sometimes feel like an unintentionally hokey Hollywood film in its occasionally contrived direction and crappy pseudo-classical music, but ultimately features relatively complex philosophical themes that expose Steven Spielberg for the reductionist Zionist agitpropagandist that he is, as Schindler's List (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Munich (2005) seem like insults to the human experience and history when compared to Rademakers' film, which does something rather rare for its (sub)genre in that it depicts the consequences of war from all different perspectives.  Indeed, The Assault is probably the only film you will ever see where an elderly resistance fighter is still consumed with hatred for his ex-enemies despite the war ending about four decades before and the son of a Nazi is depicted as the most mentally, emotionally, and economically forsaken of all the characters.  Of course, unlike the United States, the Netherlands, like most of Europe, only faced pain and misery as a result of the Second World War.

 As narrated at the beginning of The Assault, “It’s January 1945. Almost all of Europe is liberated…celebrating, eating, drinking and making love. But here in Haarlem it’s still war. And winter. The winter of starvation.” Indeed, elderly men are dropping like flies via starvation as a result of the Hongerwinter (‘Hunger Winter’) famine, but 12-year-old protagonist Anton Steenwijk (played by Marc van Uchelen, who eventually became a filmmaker but later committed suicide in 2013 at the age of 42) seems totally unaffected by the misery of World War II and is even friendly with a much hated classmate named Fake Ploeg whose father is a Dutch Nazi collaborator and is purportedly responsible for the death and torture of various members of the shadowy Dutch resistance. When Nazi Fake Ploeg Sr. is killed in Anton’s neighborhood and the neighbors, a semi-sexy nurse named Karin Korteweg (Ina van der Molen) and her widowed father, inexplicably move the corpse in front of the protagonist’s family home, the Gestapo ultimately burns down the protagonist’s house, kill his entire family and 19 other people as a reprisal for the assassination. Indeed, when the Gestapo showed up at the Steenwijk home and noticed that Anton’s father had a copy of a book by Dutch Sephardic Jewish philosopher Spinoza sitting out, the Nazi in charge felt they had their culprits, especially considering the protagonist’s 17-year-old brother Peter (Casper de Boer) was caught attempting to move Ploeg’s corpse and run away with the dead Nazi’s gun. After being separated from his parents and watching his house being burned down by Nazis with blowtorches, Anton is put in a prison cell with a young female Dutch resistance fighter (Monique van de Ven) who refuses to tell the boy her name but gives him the advice, “…one thing you should never forget for the rest of your life. Don’t forget that the Krauts set your house on fire. Who did it, did it…And not someone else.” When Anton reveals to the woman what happened to him and his family, she begins to cry and remarks, “You know, if the resistance hadn’t done it…that Ploeg would have killed a lot of other people.” Although their interaction is brief and the protagonist only manages to see the resistance fighter’s large sensual lips, Anton will remember the encounter with the “communist whore” (as she is described by a Nazi officer) for the rest of his life. 

Ultimately, Anton (Derek de Lint) is driven to Amsterdam the next day by some German soldiers and goes to live with his uncle after learning his parents and brother have been executed. Flash forward to 1952 and Anton is a medical student that, “doesn’t meddle with politics, no more than he does with his past,” but that changes when he goes back to his hometown in Haarlem for the first time since his parents were killed, “because a friend passed his Master’s degree in dental surgery.” While walking around his old neighborhood, Anton is spotted by his old neighbor Mrs. Beumer (Elly Weller) who reveals to him that his belated mother attacked SD men and that both his parents were “killed like animals.” When Mrs. Beumer reveals that a monument has been erected to his parents and the rest of the people from Haarlem were killed by the Germans, Anton visits it by himself and seems quite melancholy, but he subsequently buries the past and does not revisit it again until 1956 when he has a chance encounter with his old childhood ‘friend’ Fake Ploeg Jr. at a violent communist riot in Amsterdam. Like his belated Nazi father, Fake is a staunch anticommunist and seems quite resentful that Anton is now a doctor. As Fake explains, his mother was put in a concentration camp for NSB members/Nazi collaborators simply because she was the widow of a Nazi, so he was forced to go to trade school instead of college and now works at an appliance shop doing “repairs and the like.” Fake clearly suffers from a persecution complex and rants regarding his need to battle communist scum in Amsterdam, “My father is right. Everything they say about communists now, he was already saying in the war…And it’s those damn communists who killed him.” Needless to say, Anton is not impressed and when he suggests that Fake’s father was responsible for the murder of his parents, the discernibly angst-ridden anticommunist goes berserk, throws a rock at the mirror, and runs out of the protagonist's apartment, though he briefly comes back to tell him that he will always remember that he was the only person in Haarlem to be nice to him when he was a kid and everyone in town hated him because he was the son of a Nazi collaborator. Undoubtedly, out of all the people in the entire film, Fake is clearly the one that was mostly deeply affected by the aftermath of the war, though virtually ever single character wears the internal scars of the singularly catastrophic event. 

 Although he spends a good portion of his early adult years having short month-long relationships as if he has intimacy problems and lacks the capacity to devote himself to a single woman as a result of his tragic experiences during childhood, Anton decides to get married after meeting a Dutch girl while on a trip in East London named Saskia de Graaff (also played by Monique van de Ven) that has the same exact lips as the mysterious resistance fighter he met when he was 12-years-old. While at a funeral for his father-in-law’s resistance fighter friend, Anton overhears an old fat man named Cor Takes (John Kraaykamp) aka ‘Gijs’ discussing his role in assassinating Fake Ploeg. After introducing himself to Gijs, the elderly resistance fighter justifies killing Ploeg by stating, “He’d use a whip with a wire to flay the skin off your face. He’d push your bare bottom against the hot stove. He’d put a garden hose in your ass so that you would puke your own shit. He had to be taken care of.”  Surely, Anton becomes somewhat annoyed with Gijs because he realizes that if he had not killed Ploeg, his family would have never been executed by the Gestapo. While talking together, Anton is startled to learn that Gijs was the lover of the sensual-lipped female resistance fighter he met when he was a kid. Gijs also reveals to Anton that the female resistance fighter’s name was Truus Coster and she was executed by the Gestapo at some sand dunes near Amsterdam. 

 After learning about the true identity of resistance fighter Truus Coster, Anton starts a strange and somewhat reluctant relationship with Gijs that ultimately makes him become obsessed with the death of his parents and the mysterious circumstances revolving around the death of Fake, like why his neighbor Karin and her father moved the Nazi’s corpse in front of his family home. Although having a young daughter with her named Sandra, Anton divorces Saskia and eventually marries another woman named Elisabeth (Mies de Heer) with whom he has a son named Peter in tribute to his dead brother. While at an anti-nuclear protest that he is blackmailed into joining by his dentist friend Gerrit-Jan (Kees Coolen), Anton bumps into his ex-neighbor Karin and he does not waste anytime  asking her why she and her father moved Ploeg’s body in front of his family’s house, thereupon resulting in their deaths. After explaining that her father was so consumed with guilt as a result of being indirectly responsible for his family’s death that he moved to New Zealand and eventually committed suicide, Karin explains that they decided to drop Ploeg’s body in front of his house instead of their neighbors the Aarts because the latter family was hiding Jews in their home and they did not want the Nazis to find them. After discovering that his family’s demise was the accidental circumstance of protecting a hidden Jewish family, Anton seems to come to terms with the past and can finally move on with the future. 

 Ironically, despite the resentment that many Dutch people still hold for the Germans as a result of the Second World War, the Netherlands is home to what is probably the only monument dedicated to a German Wehrmacht soldier in the entire world. The monument was made in tribute to a German solider named Private Karl-Heinz Rösch who was blown up at the mere age of 18 just moments after saving the lives of two small Dutch children at a farm in the small southern Netherlands village of Goirle during an Allied attack on October 6, 1944. In a somewhat strange way, I think The Assault expresses the same message as the Rösch monument as it completely demystifies the official narrative regarding ‘good’ and ‘evil’ during the Second World War, as both works of art demonstrate the impact of individual acts during wartime. Indeed, while the protagonist of the film is told by various people to never forget that ‘the krauts’ were responsible for torching his family home and killing his parents, the character also encounters nice German soldiers and realizes that some members of the resistance were just as much of murderous thugs as the most merciless members of the Gestapo. While the protagonist’s parents were indeed executed by the krauts, their deaths were the direct result of a series of misunderstandings and unfortunate circumstances that are especially common during times of war when one small slip can result in death. As source writer Harry Mulisch, who was a lifelong left-winger, stated of his own father’s stranger-than-fiction circumstances as a man who ultimately paid a major price for protecting his Jewish son and wife, “It’s a terrible paradox of the war. My father took great risks to save my mother and was later condemned as a collaborator.” While I think the conclusion was somewhat preposterous and some of the scenes were hopelessly contrived, The Assault is an engulfing work that acts as a sort of antidote to the mundanely dichotomous black-and-white morality of virtually all Hollywood WWII films. While the protagonist seems to think otherwise when he learns of the true circumstances leading up to his family’s death, his kinfolk ultimately died pointless deaths which, although quite typical of war, seems to be a concept that most Americans do not want to accept as reflected by the fact that they call virtually anyone that dies in a pointless Zionist war a ‘hero.’  Apparently, during his Oscar acceptance speech, director Fons Rademakers naively attempted to convince American audiences to get over their seemingly undying fear of reading subtitles and embrace films from other countries.  For better or worse, The Assault is indubitably one of the most ‘accessible’ Dutch films ever made, even if it forces the viewer to slightly look beyond good and evil as far as morality is concerned, thus making it the perfect introductory work for novices of cinema from the Netherlands.

-Ty E

Borgman

Dutch auteur Alex van Warmerdam (Abel aka Voyeur, De Jurk aka The Dress) is a filmmaker whose works I tend to consider hit or miss, but are certainly never boring. Personally, I was ready to give up on van Warmerdam after Grimm—a botched modernist reworking of the popular European fairytale Brother and Sister written by the Brothers Grimm, who have most certainly been one of the greatest influences on the Dutch filmmaker—but then he made his near-masterpiece Borgman (2013), which is certainly his greatest and most ambitious effort since his second feature De Noorderlingen (1992) aka The Northerners. Like most of van Warmerdam’s films, Borgman is a darkly humorous, nihilistic, and rather misanthropic anti-bourgeois neo-fable of sorts, but what makes it somewhat different than the director’s previous works is that it is his closest thing to a ‘horror’ film, though certainly not in the conventional sense of the genre. The first Dutch film in 38 years to be selected to compete in the Cannes Film Festival for the coveted Palme d'Or (Jos Stelling’s beauteously brutal directorial debut Mariken van Nieumeghen (1974) was the first and last film to compete in the festival before van Warmerdam’s film was accepted), the film is a pernicious piece of antichrist celluloid metaphysics where pure and unadulterated, yet admittedly charming and sophisticated, evil prevails in the end. Indeed, aside from its idiosyncratically incendiary humor and post-Grimmian storytelling, van Warmerdam’s fiercely farcical filmic fable is anti-Hollywood to its cold black dead core in that all of modern Americanized western man’s dreams are meticulously destroyed in an intriguingly slow-burning fashion that destroys the viewer’s world and takes them to hell in about 110 minutes or so.

In a June 5, 2014 interview featured at Dangerous Minds, van Warmerdam confesses regarding the eponymous ‘antihero’: “He is an evil version of myself. He does what I would do if I were him.” In a storyline that is superficially similar to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), Borgman depicts an enigmatic stranger entering an oh-so ostensibly perfect bourgeois home and slowly but surely ‘seducing’ virtually every single family member in a somewhat inexplicable, quasi-supernatural fashion. Featuring blatant references to Swiss painter Henry Fuseli’s masterwork The Nightmare (1781), the film features an antihero that looks like a deranged hobo but is ultimately an evil being whose behavior resembles that of the incubus-like ‘Alp’ of German folklore. It should also be noted that the titular character’s first name is ‘Camiel’ and he becomes the gardener of the main family featured in the film, as ‘Camael’ is one of the seven archangels of the Bible and is claimed to be the leader of the forces that got Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden. Notably, van Warmerdam was brought up in the Roman Catholic Church, which refuses to recognize Camael because of the Vatican’s decision to ban the veneration of angels that are not mentioned in the Bible, thus reflecting the Dutch auteur filmmaker’s innately heretical essence. Indeed, Borgman is a work where the figurative ‘Adam and Eve’ are ‘banished’ from their suburban ‘paradise’ on earth, the bourgeois utopian ideal is deconstructed and ripped to shreds, and the bad guys win, among various other uniquely unsavory and superlatively subversive sacrilegious things that make van Warmerdam seem like one of the most spiritually forsaken yet comically clever filmmakers in cinema history.

Opening with the foreboding pseudo-Biblical quote, “And they descended upon the earth to strengthen their ranks,” Borgman instantly establishes a supernatural horror mood that is only further accentuated when a super stoic Catholic priest (Pierre Bokma) with a shotgun and two brutish looking dudes with bad ass attitudes attempt to hunt down and presumably kill a hobo that lives in a sort of makeshift bunker in the woods. The hobo in question is named ‘Camiel Borgman’ (Belgian actor Jan Bijvoet) and he bears a striking resemblance to the eponymous character played by John Barrymore in Svengali (1931). Unluckily for the main middle-class family featured in the film, Borgman manages to escape from the martial priest via a tunnel connected to his underground home and subsequently warns his equally hobo-like comrades Ludwig (director Alex van Warmerdam) and Pascal (Tom Dewispelaere) to escape as well. Somewhat strangely, Borgman thinks it is a good idea to enter an opulent bourgeoisie neighborhood with large houses featuring modern architecture where he proceeds to knock on the doors of random people and asks them if he can bathe in their homes, which he is routinely denied. When Borgman knocks on the door of a middle-age corporate workaholic family man named Richard (Jeroen Perceval) and pretends to be know his blonde wife Marina (Hadewych Minis), he is nearly beaten half to death and then subsequently disappears seconds later seemingly into thin air, though the sinisterly manipulative meta-Machiavellian hobo never actually leaves the property. Indeed, Richard seems to wisely sense there is something ominous and threatening about Borgman and instinctively physically ravages the blatantly dubious vagrant, who actually has the gall to get smart and arrogant with the man whose bathtub he so arrogantly demands to use. Falling victim to irrational female style empathy and the sort of liberal humanist brainwashing you tend to suffer if you watch too much TV or attend a liberal arts college, Marina feels sorry for dirty bum bastard Borgman and when she notices the antagonist squatting in her shed later that night while her husband is at work, she does not call the police but instead absurdly invites him into her home to take a luxury bath where he enjoys a nice meal, wine, and cable television while sitting in the tub. Of course, little does hopelessly naive Marina realize that Borgman will eventually take over her home, family, and entire life, among other things.

Despite the fact that she does not work and spends most of her time playing around and creating degenerate Pollack-esque paintings by literally flinging paint on a large canvas, Marina has her three small grade school children watched and taken care of by a young maid named Stine (Sara Hjort Ditlevsen), who the female protagonist warns to not tell her husband about the fact that Borgman is squatting in their shed. Rather curiously, Marina’s youngest daughter Isolde (Elve Lijbaart) falls ill after Borgman moves in and the seemingly demonic antihero soon uses the opportunity to brainwash the young girl with seemingly satanic stories like ‘The Story of the White Child that Floats Above the Clouds.’  In fact, Borgman begins regularly telling all three children nighttime stories about how Jesus Christ is a liar and a banal narcissist who does not care about anyone but himself.  Ultimately, by telling the children these stories, Borgman manages to become the sole paternal influence, as the kids' father is also depicted telling them stories but he is nowhere as near as good of a storyteller and seems like an over-the-hill meathead jock philistine compared to the spiritually deleterious vagrant, who utilizes lies and superficial charm to corrupt the souls of his all-too-human prey.  Aside from being able to brainwash Marina to begin hating her husband by sitting unclad on her body while she is asleep like the incubus in Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare, Borgman also has the power to talk to animals, namely dogs, who soon begin roaming the bourgeois family’s home and may or may not be the antihero’s comrades Ludwig and Pascal in animal form. Aside from Ludwig and Pascal, two similarly swarthy guidette-like women, the middle-aged Brenda (van Warmerdam’s wife Annet Malherbe) and 30-something-year-old Ilonka (Eva van de Wijdeven), also ‘work’ for Borgman, who he communicates with via cellphone. Ultimately, Borgman will use his loyal menacing collectivist-minded minions to help him take over both Richard and Marina’s home and family.  Quite notably, all of the members of Borgman’s group have a scar on their back near their shoulder blade, as if they have been given some sort of satanic surgery that has programmed them to become evil followers of the almost seemingly undead sort.  Naturally, Richard and Marina's children and maid Stine will also become unwitting victims to this exceedingly energumenical esoteric influence.

Needless to say, it does not take Marina long to completely fall under Borgman’s uniquely unscrupulous spell and when the antihero decides to leave after complaining that he is bored because he cannot roam around her house freely, the pathetically lonely and seemingly sex-starved housewife becomes desperate and agrees to a curious arrangement that ultimately results in the slow and painful death of the nice elderly family gardener. With the help of his demonesses Brenda and Ilonka, Borgman kills the gardener and his wife, drops their corpses in a lake after attaching a plant pot full of cement to their heads, and then takes over their home as if they are assuming their identities. By shaving his head and beard and sporting a fancy new suit, Borgman manages to obfuscate his identity and is instantly hired by superficial and vain ‘bourgeois-minded’ Richard, as the new gardener, though Ludwig and Pascal also help him obtain the job. Indeed, knowing that Richard is a ‘racist’ who does not want dirty untermenschen roaming around his property and have easy access to his young children and frigid wife, Ludwig and Pascal pay shabbily-dressed bum-like Arabs and negroes to apply for the gardener job so that Borgman comes out looking like the only decent and worthy candidate. When a nice looking old white fellow attempts to apply for the job, Ludwig grabs him before he reaches the front-door of Richard's home and proceeds to brutally beat him. When Richard and Marina’s youngest daughter Isolde, who has completely fallen under Borgman’s sinister spell and whose eyes indicate that she seems dead inside, later finds the old man in the woods, she kills the poor old bastard by crushing his skull with a cement block. Ultimately, moronic Richard is so impressed with Borgman that he not only hires him for the gardening job, but also allows him to stay in a luxury room in their family home and Ludwig and Pascal are soon brought in as ‘assistants.’  While transforming Richard and Marina's garden from a suburban Garden in Eden into a subtly ominous Garden of Evil, Borgman and his chthonian comrades begin putting the final touches on their metaphysically malefic master plan that only the children seem to truly understand.

Naturally, when workaholic Richard unexpectedly loses his much cherished job as an ass-licking corporate whore, he is destroyed, so when maid Stine brings her masculine military recruit boyfriend Arthur Stornebrink (Mike Weerts) over for dinner one night and the family man realizes he is the son of the boss that fired him, a fight breaks out that rather repels Marina, who now hates her hubby and has become completely infatuated with Borgman, who tells her that he will not have sex with her until the time is right, as if the carnal act will be of spiritual proportions. Of course, Borgman has nil interest in Marina and is just stringing the hopelessly horny housewife along so that he can fulfill his particularly pernicious plan. When all three of the children become ill, Borgman has his demoness Brenda come by in the guise of a doctor and she somewhat humorously describes the kid’s sicknesses as being the result of being “overtired” from the “modern world,” adding,“Don’t forget they have a lot to cope with these days: TV, internet, school. In the holidays the child’s body will give up.”  To keep Marina and her children in check, Borgman and his pals also begin drugging the family, with Ludwig and Pascal even taking the three kids into a sewer where they supply them with a dubious red liquid that resembles Kool-Aid.  When Borgman induces a nightmare in Marina where she has her skin ripped off her flesh by her husband during a heated sex session, she wakes up enraged and nonsensically punches her sleeping hubby in the head, so the decidedly disrespected family man fights back by smacking her around and then subsequently drags her into a bathroom where he forces her to take a cold shower. Needless to say, Marina is rather pissed about being smacked around by her much hated hubby Richard, so she asks Borgman to kill him. Ultimately, Richard is poisoned after Borgman’s minions perform a sort of sinisterly high-camp garden-based opera featuring Ilonka performing ballet and Ludwig and Pascal in drag sporting tights and tutus. After Richard croaks, Borgman’s demons perform ‘back surgery’ on Stine and assumedly the kids, thus leaving them with the same back scars as the antihero and his comrades. While Marina expects sex from Borgman, the antihero predictably poisons her as well. In the end after Richard and Marina are killed and buried in their yard, Borgman leaves the home with his comrades and brings the three children and Stine with them.  Like all evil psychopathic leaders ranging from Trotsky to Obama that thrive on lies to maintain power and to get their followers to mindlessly support and/or carry out the most dastardly and despicable of deeds, Borgman understands that to make someone your spiritual slave they still have to be young and impressionable enough, hence his decision to spare none of the adults just as the bolsheviks spared none of the white Russians, especially not the priests, intellectuals, and members of the aristocracy.  In that sense, in few other films does evil triumph in such an effortless and seemingly immaculate fashion than in Borgman.

Unquestionably, Borgman can be interpreted in a variety of ways, both materialistically and metaphysically, but some things are quite certain like its flagrant anti-bourgeois and ultimately ethno-masochistic message. Indeed, aside from a scene where Richard is depicted as a big mean racist who turns down poor brown people of various shades for the gardener job, the same character defends his so-called ‘white privilege’ after his wife complains she feels guilty due to their European opulence by stating, “We were born in the West, and the West happens to be affluent. We can’t help it.” Of course, auteur Alex van Warmerdam demonstrated his sad groveling sense of white guilt and ethno-masochism in The Northerners, which not only portrays traditionalist Dutch folk as sadistic perverts, rapists, murderers, and schizophrenic religious fanatics but also pays quirky tribute to Congolese independence leader and Pan-African revolutionary Patrice Émery Lumumba, as well as features a negro tribesman blinding a ‘fascistic’ hunter of the symbolically sexually impotent sort. Despite the film’s dubious, convoluted message, Borgman can luckily also be interpreted in the opposite way that the director probably intended, especially considering that the eponymous villain looks just like Svengali who, as depicted in George du Maurier's 1895 novel Trilby, is a Jew with Eastern European origins who, aside from seducing and manipulating young girls, also bullies and utilizes cynical humor like the character in van Warmerdam’s film. The fact that the antihero also first targets the women and children while sneakily isolating them from the unwitting father is also a method that the Judaic cultural marxists of the Frankfurt School have used to undermine and destroy white western man via feminism, multiculturalism, so-called ‘sexual liberation,’ and various other slave-morality-inclined underhanded weapons based on great lies that only the figurative synagogue of satan could contrive.  After all, like Borgman, world Judea tends to corrupt a society from within, infecting and subverting every imperative cultural, moral, and spiritual tradition of its host until it is only a distorted shell of what is used to be as especially reflected in the contemporary West.  The fact that Borgman drugs his victims just like contemporary western school teachers and psychiatrists recommend parents do to their children if they have a hard time adjusting to the globalist anti-Occidental multiculturalist LGBT-friendly program just goes to show that van Warmerdam's work is probably the only modern filmic fable that manages to capture spiritual afflictions of our conspicuously corrupt and amazingly morally inverted contemporary zeitgeist, which absurdly values the weak over the strong and emphasizes the minority over the majority.  Interestingly, the family featured in the film is not very sympathetic, thus hinting that the West is already so forsaken in its malignant moral bankruptcy that its defeat by pure evil is nothing short of inevitable. Of course, the greatest irony is that Borgman and the rest of van Warmerdam’s oeuvre could have only been created in a spiritually sick and racially and culturally deracinated nation that has succumbed to the darker side, thus the Dutch auteur must feel blessed in his own warped sort of way. Despite van Warmerdam’s questionable views of his own people and culture, Borgman indubitably follows in a rich Dutch artistic tradition dating back to paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Jan Brueghel the Elder in its modernist interpretation of the Garden of Eden. Indeed, as much as van Warmerdam might resent it, he is unquestionably a product of his culture, people, and religion as is so idiosyncratically and iconoclastically expressed in Borgman, which is a work that could only have been directed by a degenerate post-WWII Germanic mensch who can only laugh at the idea of a figurative hell on earth and world in flames.

-Ty E