Reckless (2014)

While it is unfortunately not uncommon for Hollywood to take successful European films and remake them in a decidedly dumbed down fashion for subtitles-shy American philistines who cannot be bothered with artsy fartsy things like nuance and subtext, among other things, it is not exactly common for European filmmakers, especially Dutchmen, to remake semi-mainstream hit indie thrillers, yet the somewhat popular Dutch filmmaker Joram Lürsen. Indeed, despite being a TV hack turned mainstream director that is responsible for romantic-comedies like Alles is liefde (2007) aka Love is All and Alles is familie (2012) aka Family Way and sappy family films like In Oranje (2004) aka In Orange, Lürsen managed to create a vastly superior film to the British psychological crime-thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009) written and directed by J Blakeson with his latest feature Bloedlink (2014) aka Reckless aka De Verdwijning van Vera Muller. While a fairly faithful remake with some of the same exact shots and most of the same scenarios, Lürsen’s version is ultimately more tightly directed, culturally subversive, and just plain more hardcore. A three-person chamber piece that is largely set in a single apartment, the film indubitably feels like it is based off of an original play but is actually the brainchild of Blakeson, who dreamed up what would probably be the greatest homo thriller since Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Leopold and Loeb flick Rope (1948). Luckily, Lürsen took Blakeson’s original idea and ultimately proved that he is the superior cinematic craftsman. Of course, considering his hit film Love is All (which, incidentally, was remade in both Belgium and Germany) is more or less a raunchy Dutch rip-off of the retarded British rom-com Love Actually (2003), it seems that Lürsen is a sort of perennial artisan as opposed to a serious auteur, but I digress. Aside from receiving a screener of the film from Artsploitation Films and wanting to see how it compared to The Disappearance of Alice Creed, I decided to watch Reckless because I wanted to see how Dutch leading man Tygo Gernandt (Van God Los aka Godforsaken!, The Black Death) sized up as quasi-psychopathic cocksucking kidnapper. Although he is a fairly popular actor in the Netherlands, I am mainly familiar with Gernandt for his early role in the Aryan Kaganof classic Naar de klote! (1996) aka Wasted! as an innately impotent longhaired pothead neo-hippie bum whose reasonably more masculine girlfriend cheats on him with a wigger pseudo-gangster degenerate with whom she is dealing ecstasy. Undoubtedly, in Lürsen’s film, Gernandt demonstrates he is just as good at playing authoritarian shit-stabbing criminals as he is at playing exceedingly emasculated pot-addled breeders. 

 A work that is notable for featuring one of the most bizarre love triangles in thriller cinema history, Reckless is ultimately more intriguing than The Disappearance of Alice Creed because it features an added racial dynamic that was totally absent from Blakeson’s film. Indeed, the film features a ‘bisexual’ male femme fatale (or ‘homme fatale’) as played by an actor of Tunisian Arab stock who ultimately double-crosses both his white male and white female lovers in what one might describe as an allegory for multicultural Holland if one did not know better. Undoubtedly, Reckless is a great example of a film that would be completely banal to write about without revealing certain spoilers, as it is a work that deceives the viewer just as much as the characters deceive one another. Surely, one of the most clever aspects of the film is that it tricks most viewers into watching what one would describe as a somewhat ‘queer’ film, especially considering that it belongs to a genre that is traditionally rampantly heterosexual and stars male actors that are hardly homophiliac when it comes to choosing film roles. Of course, the film’s initially hermetic ‘heteroflexible’ themes are among the things that make it so potent, unforgettable, and suavely sleazy. Indeed, while Reckless is unequivocally a thriller, it also features a winsome hint of trailer trash melodrama that ultimately makes all the difference when it comes to distinguishing the film from countless other disposable works of the obscenely outmoded genre. In short, if Hitchcock had a too-cool-for-school Dutch grandson with a fetish for S&M and bondage, he might have directed Reckless. 

 For nearly the first five minutes of the film, the viewer watches ex-con Victor aka ‘Vic’ (Tygo Gernandt) and his somewhat younger brown Arab underling Ricardo aka ‘Rico’ (Marwan Kenzari of Jim Taihuttu’s Wolf (2013)) as they silently buy materials and build a soundless padded room in a dilapidated apartment for an upcoming kidnapping that they plan to carry out. Ultimately, the two plan to kidnap a young and fairly slutty looking blonde named Laura Temmink (Sarah Chronis) and then demand that her stinking wealthy Fortune 500 realtor father Leo pay four million Euros in ransom money to get her back. While he initially seems like a brown slave and cowardly cuck of alpha-prick Vic, who is indubitably the most the more domineering of the two, Rico has a secret scheme that his unwitting comrade has no clue about. Upon grabbing Laura off the street and putting her inside the sort of unnoticeable plain white van that one would assume a serial killer might use, the two men put a gag ball device into her mouth that is typically used by people involved with BDSM role play and drive her to a secret apartment where they have installed a sort of pseudo-S&M prison room. Indeed, upon tying her legs and feet to the bedposts of the bed, Vic and Rico quickly cut all of her clothes off, including her underwear, with scissors and then take photos of her unclad body in bondage with a digital camera to send to her father (!) to prove to him that they have kidnapped his daughter and that she is in a precarious situation that seems to have an unsettling ‘sexual’ component to it. After snapping photos of their victim, the two criminals put a sack over her head and lock her in the room by herself while she is still strapped to the bed. 

 Since the two criminals do not want their victim to croak, they irregularly bring her water, though Vic warns her the first time he takes her gag device off, “If you scream we have to hurt you. OK? We don’t want to kill you, but if it’s necessary we will. First pain, then death.” When Laura attempts to plead with them by lying and stating, “Please let me go. My daughter needs her medication,” Vic assertively replies, “Don’t. Don’t. We know everything about you. You don’t have a daughter. You help yourself and us if you just do as we say.” Of course, Laura does not like Vic’s response, so she bites him in an aggressive animalistic fashion and he responds by smacking the shit out of her and firmly stating, “Listen, you cunt, there are two people who can get you out of here. That’s us…He and I. So we’re your new best friends from now on.” From there, Vic informs Laura of what hand signals she needs to give him and Rico anytime she needs to use the bathroom, telling her, "If you wet yourself, it’s your problem.” Anytime Laura has to take a leak, Vic and Rico are forced to pull her pants and panties down and make her piss in a jug while she is still lying down and bound to the bed. It is quite apparent that Rico is not exactly comfortable with snapping S&M photos of Laura and making her piss in a jug, but his reasons for having these feelings are quite different than what the viewer might expect. 

 Vic is an absurdly anally retentive and obscenely obsessive compulsive guy who literally monitors every single little move that his turd-colored comrade makes. When Rico attempts to drink some beer after getting done tying up Laura, Vic will only allow him to have a single can, telling him “we’re not amateurs.” When Rico refuses to eat dinner after a long hard day of quasi-S&M style kidnapping, Vic becomes fairly paranoid and accuses him of becoming “sentimental” and a “sissy,” so the seemingly melancholy Arab finally gives in and eats. Somewhat curiously, when Vic decides to leave the apartment to run some errands, Rico visits Laura in her padded room and freaks her out by sniffing her body. Meanwhile, Vic makes a deal with Laura’s father to give her back for four million Euros. To demonstrate to her father that they are serious, Vic films Rico with a knife to Laura’s throat as she pleads to her daddy to do whatever they say or she will be dead. 

 Ultimately, things get fairly more interesting in the film when Laura signals to Rico that she has to defecate while Vic is away. When Rico makes the mistake of agreeing to turn around while Laura is taking a shit in a bucket after she complains “I can’t do this with someone watching me,” he gets hit in the head with said bucket by the kidnap victim, who also manages to grab his gun. After Laura somewhat senselessly fires a round from the weapon into the wall of the room, Rico declares “it’s me,” takes off his mask, and reveals that he is her lover. Naturally, Laura is quite angry with her dubious brown beau, but Rico rationalizes his behavior by saying he did it for her to rob her much maligned father, stating, “You always said you hated him. He never gives you anything. He thinks the way you live sucks. You said yourself that he doesn’t give a shit about you. This is it, Laura. This is the way to get money off him. We talked about it, but didn’t know how. This is it.” After moronically revealing Vic’s name to her and that he plans to rip his partner off, Rico promises to Laura, “You and me will have the money and go to some tropical beach.” When Laura complains, “You told me you loved me,” Rico acts like the stereotypical lying would-be-pimp ‘playa’ by replying, “I do love you. So much. It’s the only reason why I did this.” When Rico tells Laura that he planned to tell her about his plan after receiving the ransom money, she sarcastically replies, “So what would you have told me? 'Sorry I chained you to a bed like some S&M whore. And that I ogled your pussy with some retard.’” Of course, when Rico informs Laura that all she has to do is ‘play victim’ for another day or two and they will receive four million euros in ransom money from her father, she agrees to go along with the charade and allows him to tie her back to the bed after Vic knocks on the door and demands to be let back in the apartment. 

 While Vic has no idea that Rico and Laura are lovers, the second day in the apartment he begins becoming extra paranoid when his comrade spends a little too long in the bathroom, so he kicks down the door. Unbeknownst to Vic, Rico had just swallowed a bullet shell from the round that Laura shot off. While Vic proclaims, “I don’t smell anything” upon entering the bathroom after Rico makes the claim that he was in there for a long time because he had to take a dump, he finally stops being paranoid and stops giving his super swarthy sidekick a hard time. In fact, Vic theorizes to Rico regarding his mysterious bowel movements, “Adrenalin…That’s what causes it. Suddently having to crap, foul taste in your mouth.” As demonstrated by the fact he refuses to sleep one night, Vic is about to go over the edge as a result of his paranoia in regard to the kidnapping, but his worries are not just in regard to money. Indeed, after remarking to Rico that they will both be “set forever” after getting the ransom money, Vic romantically embraces his ‘partner’ and adds that in two days they will be on a plane "and away from here. You and me together. Away from this hell hole. A new beginning. A new life. The first few days we’ll barely leave the hotel. We’ll just stay in our room.” While the two men kiss, Vic tells Rico, “I love you” and he replies by saying the same exact thing he previously said to Laura, “I’ve never loved anyone so much. Never,” thus indicating he is probably a psychopath of sorts. 

 Of course, everything goes downhill for everyone involved when Rico makes the mistake of untying Laura from the bed while Vic is away. Indeed, while Rico is making out with Laura on the same exact bed that the little lady was just tied to, the poor little rich girl manages to handcuff him to a bedpost while he is naked and then she calls 911, though she has no idea where she is and thus cannot give the dispatcher her whereabouts. After the failed attempt at getting the police to rescue her, Laura finds a handgun on a table in the apartment, goes back into the makeshift dungeon room, and demands that her deceitful lover hand her the keys to the apartment so that she can escape. Ultimately, while acting like he is going to hand her the keys, Rico manages to drive his foot into Laura’s neck while he is still handcuffed to the bed. At this point, Laura attempts to shoot Rico but the gun still has the safety on and does not fire and her beau mocks her while choking her by stating, “Safety catch, stupid bitch.” 

 While Rico manages to get free, he becomes convinced that he has killed Laura after failing to resuscitate her after driving his feet into her throat to the point where she loses consciousness and he breaks down as a result, even barfing in the toilet as a result of shock (of course, he pukes out the bullet shell, so he is forced to swallow it again). When Vic gets back, he reveals to Rico that they are going to do the tradeoff with Laura’s father for the ransom money. While Vic manages to revive Laura when she initially fails to wake up, he still has no idea that something is out of the ordinary. After telling Rico to go get their van so that they can prepare to transport the girl to the drop off site, Vic goes to untie Laura and is in for quite the surprise when a cellphone falls out of her pocket which reveals that she has called 911. Although initially refusing to tell him where she got the phone, Laura soon spills the beans after Vic smacks her around a good bit and states regarding their mutual lover, “he’s going to screw you over.” While Laura tells Vic pretty much everything about Rico’s plans, the hardened criminal never gives any hint as to how he plans to respond to the situation. Before taking Laura to the drop-off sight, Vic acts somewhat passive-aggressively with Rico and then somewhat ironically says to him, “Goddammit, man. What would I do without you?” and gives him a loving hug. Of course, when Vic tells him he loves him, Rico replies, “Yeah. I love you more.” 

 After dropping off Laura at a dark half-ruined abandoned factory in the middle of nowhere where they handcuff her to a pipe, Vic takes Rico to a wooded region where the ransom money has been supposedly placed. When Vic has Rico look in a hole where the money is supposedly placed, he discovers nothing inside and complains “We’ve been screwed over,” but his comrade replies, “We haven’t been screwed over. I’ve been screwed over. By you.” Of course, at this point, Rico realizes that Vic has figured him out and begins pleading for his life like a little bitch by trying to prey on his comrade’s love for him by stating while sobbing, “Vic… remember at first in jail? I was scared. I was so scared, but you protected me. You, Vic. Vic, please. Believe me, you’re the only one. The only one for me.” As it turns out, Vic and Rico met and became gay lovers in prison, though it seems the latter adopted homosexuality as a form of ‘protection.’ Of course, the fact that Vic protected Rico in prison makes his betrayal all the more despicable. While Vic is portrayed as a sort of pathological psychopath for most of the film, he breaks down and begins sobbing while attempting to gather enough strength to liquidate his lover. Vic tells Rico regarding the consequences of his betrayal, “You know what you did? You’re dead and so is she. I have no choice,” adding regarding their dubious romance, “You’re tired of her and you’re a liar. Everything was fake. Everything. Douchebag. Every kiss, every time.” When Vic goes to ask Rico if he ever kissed Laura, the Arab homme fatale manages to push him and run away in the woods. While Rico manages to get away from Vic, he is severely wounded after his comrade manages to shoot him. As for who survives in the end and gets away with the money, I won’t give that spoiler away. 

 Of course, one of the greatest payoffs for the viewer during Reckless is when the two unwitting members of the bizarre love triangle both come to realize that their ostensible lover has another lover of a different gender. In that regard, I would not be surprised if some LGBT-lobotomized film critic goes on to describe the film as ‘homophobic’ and/or anti-bisexual propaganda just as certain ‘sensitive’ reviewers absurdly complained regarding Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) when it was first released. While Lürsen’s film does not exactly portray homos as the morally superior and infallible perennial victims that the Hebraic cultural-distorters in Hollywood would have you believe they are, it is a rare film that manages to make so-called ‘queer’ themes accessible to the heterosexual majority, even if it manages to do so in a sort of deceptive way that makes it quite clear that source writer J Blakeson was desperate to make people embrace his sexual proclivities. Make no mistake about it, Reckless is certainly no masterpiece and is fairly mainstream as far as Dutch cinema comes, yet it makes a refreshing change from typical thriller genre twaddle, even if it does not exactly compare to a genre-revamping work like, say, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette (1976) in terms of thematic subversion. Surely, Reckless is the sort of thriller that Hollywood might produce if they had more faith in the intelligence of the American filmgoer and were not so concerned with portraying every single fag film character in a putridly positive light. Naturally, Hollywood would also not dare release a film where a brown man of dubious racial origins is portrayed as a considerably craven and despicably deceitful scumbag of the seemingly psychopathic sort who was the personal bitch boy of a white man while he was in prison. Of course, as the various half-caste bastard children in Europe and America certainly reveal, brown bro Rico’s romantically treacherous behavior with his white lovers in Reckless is arguably the most realistic and culturally redeeming aspect of the film, hence its innate superiority over Lürsen’s The Disappearance of Alice Creed. 

-Ty E

Friday the 13th: The Orphan

Even as a kid, I hated most movies about or made for kids, as I felt they were patronizing and portrayed children with a sort of obnoxious pseudo-sophistication and moral righteousness that made me question whether or not the filmmakers were pedophiles (of course, as tragic child actor Corey Feldman revealed a couple years back, a number of them apparently are). In short, I tend to try to avoid virtually any and every film featuring a child protagonist, but there are certainly exceptions where a kid hero can be an advantage of sorts. Indeed, the somewhat unclassifiable coming-of-age horror flick Friday the 13th: The Orphan (1979) aka The Orphan aka David directed by one-time-auteur John Ballard benefits from the fact that it features what is most certainly one of the most bat-shit crazy and hysterical boy protagonists in cinema history. Better known for its somewhat unfortunate title and the fact the producers of the Friday the 13th slasher franchise had to pay the producers of Ballard’s film to use said title, the work is based on the short horror story Sredni Vashtar by Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) written between 1900 and 1911 that was also adapted by Andrew Birkin and countless other filmmakers about a sickly 10-year-old boy who hates his cousin-guardian and ultimately invents an eponymous god that he summons to seek revenge against his pseudo-parent after she dares to sell his hen. Despite being released in 1979, director Ballard began shooting in 1968 and the film was not released until about a decade later after the filmmaker was forced by two presumably financially enterprising and artistically retarded female producers to cut out about 30 minutes of what was originally a 110 minute cut that was edited by Ralph Rosenblum, who edited a number of Woody Allen flicks, including Annie (1977) and Interiors (1978), as well as Sidney Lumet’s Eugene O'Neill adaptation Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) and Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1967). Undoubtedly, it is obvious while watching The Orphan that Rosenblum’s seamless editing was ripped at the seams, as the film seems so compulsively spastic in its editing. Seeming like a sort of Southern Gothic tale made for psychopathic prepubescent boys, the film, which originally had the working title ‘Betrayal,’ was notably directed by a Harvard and NYU educated child progeny who became an accomplished oil painter at the mere age of seven. Admittedly, as a result of assuming it was another disposable 1970s horror flick, I had no interest in seeing the film until reading about it in classic tome NIGHTMARE USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (2007), of which author Stephen Thrower stated, “THE ORPHAN is one of the most literate, intelligent and unusual films covered in this book,” but luckily I did as it proved to be one of the most bizarre, idiosyncratic, and terribly misunderstood American genre flicks.

Part tragic coming-of-age flick, part hallucinatory hagsploitation nightmare, part surrealist horror show, part misguided minstrel show, part 1930 period based melodrama, and part arthouse revenge-thriller, The Orphan probably will not appeal to most diehard horror fans and especially not Jason Voorhees fanboys. Set in the post-WWI era, the film tells the increasingly disturbing and nightmarish story of a curious and excitable 10-year-old boy who is forced to live with his exceedingly bitchy, anal retentive, and sexually repressed old spinster aunt after both of his wealthy parents end up dying tragically. Of course, as a young boy who invents a religion with a taxidermied monkey as the godhead and whose best friends are a middle-aged African negro who was a traveling companion of his explorer father and an Irish maid, the eponymous protagonist is not your typical boy and it ultimately comes as no surprise when he completely snaps and becomes a seemingly schizophrenic psychotic killer of sorts. Featuring the sort of deadly family dysfunction and somewhat ‘eccentrically’ executed killings one would expect from an Andy Milligan flick, the film certainly owes comparisons to Jack Clayton’s classic Henry James adaptation The Innocents (1961) and Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), but also Richard Blackburn’s Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (1973) and especially Philip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin (1990), as one of the most feel-bad coming-of-age films ever made. 

 After a fairly aesthetically pleasing kaleidoscopic opening montage featuring happy photographs of the protagonist and his dead parents and retro images of Harvard University banners and WWI era American soldiers, among other things, juxtaposed with outmoded ragtime music, the viewer is introduced to boy protagonist David (Mark Owens), who narrates to the viewer how he fought a couple of his male relatives when they forced him to look at the corpse of his father at the viewing. On top of being told by a mean-spirited androgynous little girl that he is now an orphan, David is forced to kiss the cold corpse of his truly deathly pale father, who he loved very much, even though his father was oftentimes away travelling around with his Afro-negro comrade Akin (Afolabi Ajayi), who is what one might describe as a ‘magical negro.’ After his parents die, David’s maternal Aunt Martha Fairchild (Peggy Feury of Matt Cimber’s The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)) moves into the large rural family estate to become his legal guardian and she immediately begins bitching, stating of her new luxury home, “I can’t believe my sister slept here.” Akin, who lives in a shack on the family estate, immediately realizes that Aunt Martha is a deleterious influence and decides to stay with the protagonist until he becomes strong and independent, or as he states like some sort of wise negro tribal elder, “I’m going to stay here until I feel that David has the strength to stand on his own two feet. Once he knows what his father stood for, there is no way she can influence him.” Despite being a rather wealthy and handsome chap, David’s father was a sort of wild child and perennial wander who could not help but spend much of his time dicking around the Dark Continent (or as one of his less than sympathetic relatives states, “jackassing around Africa”). Like his father, David has an aversion to Christianity and is a pagan at heart, though he decides to codify his own religion involving a taxidermied monkey named ‘Charlie’ as his god. While Aunt Martha bitches to him, “Your know, David, our family has always made a contribution to the Christian community…and we expect you to do the same. Frankly, we can’t afford to have you grow up to be like your father,” the protagonist is just like his dead daddy in that he is more interested in being an African pagan tribesman than a sterile bourgeois ‘cultural Christian’ fraud and social automaton.

By today’s candy ass pussy standards where people throw around made-up pseudo-academics words like ‘microaggression’ to highlight completely imaginary forms of racial discrimination, David and his negro friend Akin have what one might describe as a somewhat strange and awkward relationship, with the protagonist asking the strange African questions like, “Why are you black?” and him replying, “I’m not. Nooooo…You’re are black and I….I’ll be white.” In a somewhat curious scene, David touches Akin’s steel-wool-like hair and remarks “That’s wild,” and the humble homeboy proudly replies, “I’m glad you like.” In fact, Akin likes David so much that he always asks him to smoke out of his hookah with him. Unfortunately, Aunt Martha spots David and Akin together while lying on a leopard skin rug and she goes completely berserk and attacks the protagonist. When Akin attempts to physically restrain Aunt Martha, she hatefully, if not hilariously, yells, “Don’t you touch me, you black nigger Man!” and complains that she does not want her nephew being around “dirty” things like the decidedly dark negro. Not surprisingly, Aunt Martha demands that Akin leave the estate immediately and even goes so far as ordering the jolly black brother to kill David’s pet chicken Apple Betty before he leaves. While demanding that he not say goodbye to David before he leaves, Akin manages to write a letter to the lad reading, “David, your aunt has ordered the destruction of your hideout. I have killed the animal but she’s to blame. Prayers are no longer good. You must stand on your own two feet and face her.”

Naturally, with his best friend gone and his favorite pet dead, David’s rather fragile mind begins to unravel and he begins spending a good portion of time hanging out in the chicken coop where he intentionally burns his hands over a flame and sees his ‘god’ Charley come alive and his dead father appear with glowing hands and proclaiming, “Don’t you forget me.” In a blatant tribute to Persona (1966), David and his father’s faces become one just as Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann’s faces did in Bergman’s masterpiece. Meanwhile, it becomes quite apparent that one of the reasons Aunt Martha hates David’s father so much is because she might have been in love with him and was quite possibly even once his lover. While looking around the house in a frantic fashion for a photo of David’s father, presumably to masturbate to, Aunt Martha accidentally kills the protagonist's cute little white puppy dog ‘Henry’ upon unwittingly slamming its body into a door. Rather tragically, David walks in just as the dog dies and when he cries, his considerably insensitive aunt has the gall to rebuke him, stating, “Don’t cry, David. He’s dead. Leave him alone.” When David rebels against his aunt by writing “bitch” on a bathroom mirror with lipstick and leaving her a threatening message in the form of a pile of chopped up bread with a butcher knife sticking out of the top, Aunt Martha decides to lock him in his room. In a fairly bizarre and seemingly sexually confused scenario, David decides to mock his aunt by dressing in full drag and complaining in an exceedingly grating fashion by saying things like, “Now, David, you must take your medicine.” Judging by his tragic childhood, fascination with becoming like his father, and tendency to dress in drag while he is pissed off, one can only assume that David will grow up to be a pervert of sorts.

David inherited a breathing problem from his father, so when Aunt Martha opts to tie him to his bed in a cold room that lacks a heater, he naturally becomes quite sick. Luckily, the family maid, Mary (Eleanor Stewart), decides to comfort David by saying things to him like, “Sleep, David, while I watch over you. I love you, like I would my own son.” Naturally, Aunt Martha becomes infuriated that Mary slept with David and ultimately decides to fire the feisty Irish maid, thus causing the protagonist to lose his last friend. To make matters worse, David overhears Mary state to a family friend named Dr. Thompson (Stanley Church of Peter Godfrey’s The Great Jewel Robber (1950)) regarding him, “I don’t care about him. I just want you.” Indeed, in a scene inspired by William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), David hides under a bed while listening to Mary attempting to get in bearded ‘bear’ Dr. Thompson’s pants by negating her affection for the protagonist. For her sins, Mary is subsequently mysteriously murdered while hanging sheets after having her entire body is rolled up in a sheet and repeatedly stabbed.

After being injured after crashing through a greenhouse window upon attempting to escape from his aunt, David is confronted with his greatest fear after being told that he will be sent to a boarding school. Indeed, after Aunt Martha patronizingly states to him, “I know you’ll be happy there. You’ll make lot of friends,” David suffers a hellish A Nightmare on Elm Street-esque hallucination where he is sent to a sort of post-industrial orphanage (which was shot on Roosevelt Island where parts of William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) was shot) full of grotesque negro children where he receives an Auschwitz-esque numbered tattoo on his arm and Dr. Thompson and Aunt Martha in drag operate on him and cut his tongue off. Of course, the ominous orphanage dream throws David completely over the edge and with a psychodramatic montage featuring a flashback scene of the protagonist’s mother committing suicide by putting a gun in her mouth after accidentally killing her hubby with Charlie the chimpanzee attacking Aunt Martha, the film finally reaches its natural conclusion. Indeed, while Aunt Martha is being violently mauled by Charlie in the chicken coop, David appears with a shotgun and pulls the trigger while recalling his mother putting a bullet in her brain. In a scene that hints that the protagonist has been brainwashed by one-too-many holocaust classics, David stares at Aunt Martha’s corpse, which is covered with mice and states “never again.” After liquidating his aunt, David celebrates by eating toast.  Of course, he chows down on the toasted bread in celebration of the death of his aunt, who regularly berated him any time she saw him eating it.

Aside from being one of the most patently peculiar and genre-bending coming-of-age films ever made, The Orphan is arguably also the most anti-Oedipal and even ‘misogynistic.’ Indeed, while virtually all the adults featured in the film betray the boy protagonist in one way or another, the female characters are especially cold, calculating, and irrational in their treachery. As Stephen Thrower noted in NIGHTMARE USA, it was not exactly common for a young director in the late-1960s to make a film with a sort of pro-patriarchal piece where ‘father knows best’ and where the death of the male parent is depicted as the most deleterious of things that can happen to a boy (notably, the protagonist’s few recollections of his mother are negative, as she is ultimately depicted as the source of the eponymous character’s problems). Indeed, unlike Jason Voorhees, the orphan is no momma’s boy but a young boy who lost his father at a critical age, thus guaranteeing that he will never be as great of a man as the fellow that sired him. In its unintentionally hilarious depiction of a cracked cracker adopting tribal negro garb and customs, the film can only be compared to similarly strange works like Karen Arthur’s The Mafu Cage (1978), which depicts a deranged dame with delicate daddy issues and an unhealthy chimp fetish, among other things. Of course, as one would most certainly suspect from watching the film, director John Ballard is a negrophile of sorts. In fact, aside from being actively involved in the so-called Civil Rights movement during the mid-1960s, Ballard attempted to direct a film entitled ‘Hoops’ about inner city negro basketball players around the same time he was putting his finishing touches on The Orphan, but gave up on the project upon being flown to Hollywood and being told by producers that they wanted a black coach character, which was originally supposed to be played by James Earl Jones’s father Robert E. Jones, changed to a white man. Indubitably, the height of Ballard’s cultural cuckoldry is probably most apparent in a scene that was from The Orphan where the evil Aunt Martha character fantasizes about giving negro Akin a blowjob. Ballard must have realized the scene was the height of libelous Judeo-negro propaganda in its depiction of a supposedly racist rich old cracker lady longing for darkie dong as he would later state of it in Thrower’s book, “I didn’t mind that being taken out.” Negrophilia aside, Ballard at least seems to have some sane views about race as reflected in the following remark he made to Thrower in regard to Blaxploitation cinema, “SWEET SWEETBACK was creative; most of the others were really stupid. It’s the same feeling I have about Tarantino. He has a wonderful talent with actors, but what is he doing? He’s like a wannabe black person.”

Of course, as its sometimes incoherent and wayward structure demonstrates, the film also had a number of other imperative scenes cut that make more sense of the overall story. In fact, Ballard has gone on to confess that the entire structure of the film was mutilated when it was reedited at the behest of its two art-annihilating female producers, or as the director stated himself, “There was a structural design to the film, to do with pastel autumnal scenes at the beginning and cold winter scenes at the end, but because the film was restructured for its final release, this structure is compromised, with scenes from winter added to the early stages.” Indeed, it might be part delusion on my part, but I sincerely think that The Orphan had the potential to be a hit midnight movie and artsploitation classic, but meddling producers and poor distribution put a stop to that, thus making the film now seem like a sort of pretentious yank cinematic cousin to Italian arthouse auteur turned exploitation hack Romano Scavolini’s totally tasteless trash classic Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981). Although too blatantly butchered and ‘politically incorrect’ for arthouse fans and too tame and bloodless for gorehounds, Ballard’s shockingly original and truly one-of-a-kind work most certainly has more artistic merit than all of the films in the Friday the 13th franchise combined. Naturally, it also has to be the most curious film ever directed by a former child prodigy, as one certainly gets the feeling while watching The Orphan that Ballard still has a special visceral hatred for adults, especially women, as a result of some dubious experiences he had with grownups while creating masterful oil paintings while just still a wee lad. I would even go so far as to argue that the film makes it seem as if Ballard never wanted to grow up, at least not in the conventional sense, as the eponymous protagonist of The Orphan dreams of becoming like his dead father who, as a man that spent his entire life going on exotic journeys and playing around in general, was more or less a perennial kid with Peter Pan syndrome. Indeed, aside from Charles Laughton’s masterpiece The Night of the Hunter (1955), I cannot think of another film shot from the perspective of children where adults seem so collectively flawed, deceitful, and just plain despicable. Although a coming-of-age flick that would probably greatly appeal to certain children due to its ridiculously rebellious boy protagonist, The Orphan probably makes for uniquely unhealthy viewing for kids, especially of the highly impressionable, criminally-inclined, and/or mentally imbalanced sort, though, admittedly, I wish I had the opportunity to see the film when I was a budding juvenile delinquent, even if I would have cringed at the titular character's patently preposterous proto-wigger dream of becoming a magical Zulu warrior of sorts. 

-Ty E