Pigsty

While cinematic cannibalism in Italy is almost solely associated with the so-called “cannibal boom” that lasted roughly from 1977 to 1981 and sired exquisitely exploitative films like Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox (1981) aka Make Them Die Slowly, Guido poet/polymath Pier Paolo Pasolini (The Gospel According to Matthew, Teorema) preceded his less cultivated countrymen by almost a decade with his highly ambitious and somewhat impenetrable flick Porcile (1969) aka Pigsty – an intrinsically anti-capitalist and anti-fascist celluloid work submersed in semiotic scatology that centers on such taboo topics as man-on-pig bestiality, patricide, and cannibalism, among various other decidedly deplorable things that are not typically featured in arthouse films. Considered by many to be his most complex and arcane cinematic effort, Pigsty was naturally met with disapproval by discombobulated audiences during its ill-fated screening in Venice and Pasolini responded to the hopelessly confused with the following description, “To understand the film you have to have more heart than head (better yet, if there is head used so much the better): because there is to understand the desperate story of a sinner who makes of his sin his sanctity…there is to understand the ambiguous and dramatic relationship between the old capitalism and the new which concludes, even if in the tones of an almost contemplative poem, with a condemnation of them both.” Essentially two films in one (in fact, both segments originally had separate names: “Orgia” and “Porcile”), Pigsty features a dichotomous depiction of two strikingly different but thematically connected times – the first segment portraying a medieval Italian vagabond man who discovers war, battle, cannibalism, and anarchy, and the second segment portraying a fiendishly fetishistic ex-Nazi family who are now wealthy industrialists – the film manages to be part excess-ridden epic poem and part sardonic satire where shit and swine become subversive symbols of the Fatherland during the post-Nazi era of the Wirtschaftswunder (“economic mirace”). A virtual father film to his exceedingly subversive and excess and excrement-ridden, scatological cinematic swansong Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), minus the grotesque imagery, Pigsty was Pasolini’s first attempt to “crystallize horror. To make a Petrarchan sonnet on a theme from Lautréamont” and “making the cinema aristocratic: unconsumable,” which is quite ironic for a self-proclaimed Marxist who vied for a classless collectivist society and wanted to appeal to the mindless masses (which he inevitably did with his mass culture “Trilogy of Life”). With an incriminating (Pasolini has admitted his identification with the medieval cannibal that spouts the words) tagline like, “I killed my father, I ate human flesh and I quiver with joy,” Pigsty makes for quite a potent and pessimistic work that portrays a new sort of era (as well as the "new beginning" of the old one that preceded it) following the destruction of Italy in Europa during the Second World War where ex-Nazis have now taken on the irredeemable role of their former enemy, the capitalistic Jew, as rampant materialists who cannibalize and defecate their own history and national kultur, thus committing fratricide against the Fatherland and the old perennial kultur that originally held it together. 

 In the first segment of Pigsty, the viewer is introduced to a destitute barbarian man (French actor Pierre Clémenti, who worked with Visconti, Buñuel, Bertolucci, Makavejev, and Cavani, among other countless great auteurs) who desperately tries to survive on infertile land around a volcano (the actor would later reprise the role of an unclad character who hangs around volcanoes in Philippe Garrel's The Inner Scar (1972) aka La cicatrice intérieure). After coming upon a battlefield featuring corpses and archaic weaponry, the unnamed man picks up a rifle and helmet and eventually comes across a soldier he stoically slays during a moment of potential mercy, thus beginning his personal war of anarchy against the state. Clearly a hungry fellow who is tired of dining on grass and snakes, the bloodlusting warrior decapitates and devours his enemy and, not long after, a goofy cannibal (Pasolini’s protégé Franco Citti) comes by and joins in. Naturally, the two anarchistic anthropophagites become comrades in arms and slaughter another group of men and take a woman as a slave, thus forming a cannibalistic tribe that continues to slaughter any group of people that has the misfortune of crossing their pernicious path. After a man escapes from the bloodthirsty brutality of the cannibal crew, he notifies the local Christian law enforcement, thereupon inevitably resulting in their capture and a judicial trial where the two hedonistic head-hunters are condemned to death. While the cannibal played by baked Citti meekly begs for forgiveness before the Christian cross in a most groveling manner, the ferocious flesh-eater played by Clémenti continuously repeats, “I killed my father, I ate human flesh and I quiver with joy,” while in a trance-like state as he bravely accepts death. Of course, both beasts of prey become prey of beasts as a result of their ravenous escapades, thus concluding the first segment of Pigsty. As director Pasolini wrote himself regarding the anthropophaginian anti-hero, "I identify in part with the character of Pierre Clémenti (apocalyptic anarchy, and—let us say—total contestation in the existential plane)."

The second segment of Pigsty, as written by Pasolini, “takes place in the industrialized part of Germnany, at Godesberg, near Cologne, which is where Adenauer used to live, in the villa of a big German industrialist like Krupp, say—one of the old industrial families.” Pathologically perverse protagonist Julian (French actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, who is best known for playing François Truffaut’s filmic alter-ego “Antoine Doinel”) is the son of a flagrantly evil ex-Nazi industrialist with an anachronistic Uncle Adolf mustache named Signor Klotz (Alberto Lionello). Julian is a passive nihilist and cowardly cuckold of sorts who has next to nil interest in politics, business, or women, but he likes flying kites as an intrinsically immature 'mensch' who engages in infantile escapism, yet most of all, he loves riding dirty in his father's pigpen as a pathological pig porker, but no one knows about his swinish secret. Although he has no interest in touching her, Julian has a leftist girlfriend named Ida (played by Anne Wiazemsky, who also starred in Pasolini's Teorema) who futilely attempts to get her beau involved in revolutionary politics as a member of the 1968 German student movement. After finally confessing his subversive vice for swine, Julian falls into a catatonic state and Ida and the boy’s mother (Margherita Lozano) try to figure out the source of his sickness and seemingly split-personality. Meanwhile, Julian's father explains to his wife while in bed that, "The days of Grosz and Brecht aren't over...I could have been drawn by Grosz in the form of a sad pig," but the industrialist's fears are in vain as he essentially has nothing to worry about because, aside from kraut commie artists George Grosz and Bertolt Brecht being dead, the wealthy degenerate can sleep safely knowing, as he says himself, "Germany!...What a capacity to digest!...And what a capacity to defecate!...Nobody more than us Germans!...Over the heart of our Puritan sons!"

 Indeed, while Mr. Klotz devours Teutonic kultur (filling his majestic mansion with antique furniture and renaissance paintings) and industry, his son stands by passively and sexually services swine.  When not playing an angelic rendition of Horst-Wessel-Lied (the co-national anthem of the Third Reich) on his antique harp, Signor Klotz confides in his slavish servant Hans Günther (played by Italian auteur Marco Ferreri), a name most likely in reference to real-life National Socialist eugenicist Hans F. K. Günther, and verbally battles his arch-enemy Herdhitze – the pseudonym of a man whose real surname is Hirt and who gassed tons of Jews and collected the skulls of “Bolshevik Jew commissars” during the Second World and received “plastic surgery, Italian style” to hide his true identity. After making a toast to “Jews and Pigs,” Klotz and Hirt-Herdhitze decide that their mutual blackmail schemes against each other cancel each other out, thus they agree to merge their industrial empires (a scene Pasolini stated was a reference to the merger of Montecatini chemical works and Edison electric company, which resulted in the first big Italian industrial conglomerate). After awakening like a somnambulist, Julian enters the pigsty for the final time and not long after, Signor Klotz and his compatriots get the news from a group of refined proletarians that the sole male heir to the Klotz empire has been slopped up by swine, but are told to speak, “not a word to a soul” about the young man’s death-by-sow as passive and silent spectators of history.  As Pasolini wrote, "I identify also with Jean-Pierre Léaud (eaten by the pigs, cannibalized rather than a cannibal)—ambiguity, fleeting identity, and everything which the boy says in that long monologue to his girl friend who then leaves."

Although seemingly anti-Teutonic in persuasion, Pigsty was described by Pasolini as follows: “The explicit political content of the film has its subject, as its historical situation, Germany. But the film is not about Germany, but about the ambiguous relationship of old and new capitalism. Germany was chosen as a way to illustrate a case. The implicit political content of the film, instead, is a desperate mistrust of all historical societies: Thus it is a film of apocalyptic anarchism.” In a sense, Pigsty is Pasolini’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in that, aside from being rather arcane and exceedingly enigmatic like Kubrick’s epic sci-fi masterpiece, it chronicles the (de)evolution of humanity from a cannibalistic anarchic savage to a meticulous and materialistic murderer of the authoritarian kind who has assembled an industrial line form of death and cultural destruction. Of course, where Kubrick arguably hints at a “great new beginning” for mankind with the star-child featured at the conclusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Pasolini foresees a deleterious post-cultural dystopia where man eats man via technological industry and quite figuratively shits him out. In fact, the poet wrote the following regarding the meaning of the film: “The simplified message of the film is this: society, every society, devours both its disobedient sons and the sons who are neither obedient nor disobedient. The sons must be obedient, and that’s that…” Of course, as someone whose father, Carlo Alberto Pasolini, saved the life of Benito Mussolini in 1926 when 15-year-old anarchist Anteo Zamboni's attempted to assassinate the Duce and thus incidentally securing the fascist reign for nearly two more decades, gay Marxist Pasolini was most certainly a disobedient son, yet, quite ironically, it would be his Republican partisan brother Guido who was killed by a bunch of cannibalistic Communists. Before he was executed, Guido Pasolini apparently shouted to his commie captors, “the only justice Communists knew was a bullet in the back of the head.” It seems that Pier Paolo Pasolini was in denial about the fact that the political persuasion he actively promoted for what would be most of his life was responsible for more death and destruction during the the 20th Century than both fascism and capitalism combined, as well as the “horrible universe” he wrote of, but, of course, while communism has essentially collapsed in Europe, the sort of culture-distorting cannibalistic capitalism the director esoterically depicted in Pigsty has only gotten all the more piggish.

In short, where is Pasolini we need him?!

-Ty E

The Holy Land

 

Despite the fact that Hollywood is almost exclusively owned and run by Hebrews, especially of the “Israel First” Zionist persuasion, one rarely sees any films depicting the true face of the Jewish Holy Land and the trouble the nation faces in a 24/7 war zone where one hates thy neighbor, so I was rather intrigued when I discovered an independent Israeli film about a young and virginal orthodox rabbinical student who breaks off his pathological study of the Torah and Talmud and parties with Russian prostitutes, Jewish-American bar owners, and terrorists of the Judaic and Palestinian sort. Directed by controversial (especially to kosher folks) Jewish American auteur Eitan Gorlin, an American Orthodox Jew who was educated at a Zionist Yeshiva school in Israel, The Holy Land (2001) is the sort of rare film – be it from Hollywood or otherwise – that takes some low blows at the circumcised cock of little Israel in its candid portrayal of wack-job Jewish American terrorists who blow up buses full of Palestinian women and children, Jew-on-Jew hatred between religious and atheistic Israelites, rampant Islam hating, the fascistic terrorism of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the proliferation of Yankee Yid ‘settlers’ of the AK-47 stroking sort, Arab traitors who have sold their souls to genocidal enemies, and the literal sex slavery of Eastern European Slavic women by slave-trading Semites of the psychopathic pornographer persuasion. Despite it rather incriminating and incendiary depiction of Israel, The Holy Land is in the fairly palatable form of a semi-formulaic coming-of-age tale that features a synthesized mix of melodrama, comedy, sub-eroticism, a tinge of thriller, and sociopolitical commentary and that is not much harder to follow than a piece of Michael Bay's gratuitous explosion excrement, thus making it an ideal film to watch for those many American individuals who have yet to realize that the Hebrew nation is not a towelhead land, but the true source of America's woes in the Middle East. Inspired by director Gorlin’s experiences while living in Israel during the early to mid-’90s during the first intifada as someone who served in the Israeli army, The Holy Land is a postmodern parable of sorts that takes its central plotline from an abstruse segment from the “Bava Batra” (aka “The Last Gate”) of the Talmud that is often ignored or intentionally misinterpreted by Rabbis because it more or less recommends that Jews test their faith by “going under cover” in civilian goy clothes and fornicating with a prostitute (even better if she is a gentile), thereupon getting sin out of their system so they can attend to practicing archaic rituals like wailing spastically in front of a wall. Of course, as the protagonist of The Holy Land learns through terribly tempting trial and error, Slavic shiksa girls are typically hotter and have more fun than frigid Israeli girls, evil kraut Hermann Hesse novels make for much more entertaining reading than the Talmud, and taking bong hits of marijuana gets you just as high, even if it is not kosher. 

 Opening with authentic stock footage of unholy hell in the Holy Land with footage of Third World style guerrilla warfare between Palestinians with off-screen narration from a Russian girl speaking in broken English regarding a warning her mother gave her about going to Israel as a virtual slave and how after her less than delightful experience in the desert dystopia that she concluded, “I hope the Jews and Arabs kill each other until nobody left,” The Holy War immediately establishes a feeling of nihilistic hatred, but then cuts to a highly contrasting scene of the protagonist sucking from his mother’s teat as a wee babe. Flash forward twenty years later to 2000 and we see the Hebraic hero Mendy (Oren Rehany) is now interested in women’s bosoms for entirely different reasons as he masturbates to porn magazines in his Orthodox parents’ bathroom and ejaculates quite crudely in the bathtub as the sort of eccentric and erotically disadvantaged character you would expect to see in a Todd Solondz (who, incidentally, had plans to be a Rabbi as a child but ended up being the even sicker spiritual son of Woody Allen) film. On top of spilling his Semitic seed in the place where his entire family bathes themselves, Mendy proves to be quite the heretical Hebrew because he prefers reading kraut writer Hermann Hesse’s wholly unkosher novel Siddhartha (1922) and is reprimanded by his rabbi because he believes, “the Torah is the truth. This book isn’t the truth.” A rather strange Rebbe who fondles the shoulders and hands of his Talmud-scholars-in-training (in the audio commentary for the DVD, director Gorlin hints that he is a homosexual pederast), the teacher recommends, citing an obscure passage from the Talmud, that Mendy should leave Jerusalem and go to a Tel Aviv goy town incognito and make love to a gentile flesh-peddler so he can get his lustful desire out of his system as he believes that the boy's religious doubts will be settled and that he will be able to focus on the Torah and holiness. 

 Of course, things don't go quite as planned when Mendy falls in love at first sight with a goyish Russian prostitute named Sasha (played by Israeli actress Tchelet Semel with a somewhat unbelievable Russian accent) who gives him a handjob that lasts no more than a single second. Mendy also befriends a strangely buff and bodacious alpha male Jew from America named Mike (Saul Stein) who is a longtime friend and fuckbuddy of Sasha and used to have an adventurous job as a war photographer, but now owns a somewhat seedy bar that is patronized by strange characters, including self-loathing Arabs, anti-Arab Jewish professors, and killer kosher Kahaneite terrorists/settlers who are in a holy war with impoverished Palestinians who dare to occupy land that they hope to make part of greater Israel. Mendy essentially abandons Orthodox Judaism as a prodigal son of sorts and takes a job at Mike’s bar. When not attempting to vie for the innately unlovable and sexually demoralized Sasha’s affection, Mendy hangs out with an Arab Judas and charismatic conman named Razi (Albert Illooz), as well as an unsavory psychopath that calls himself “The Exterminator” (Arie Moskuna) who carries around an AK47 at all times and takes pride in killing Palestinians. In trouble of losing his bar, Mike gets involved with a smuggling scheme and terrorism, thereupon including Mendy and Sasha by proxy. Not just a simple streetwalker, Sasha is a sex slave that is owned by a grotesque Israeli who forces her to star in fetishistic porn flicks and is quite desperate to get out of her direful situation, thus she offers to marry Mendy because he has an American passport and she wants her freedom in the ostensible land of the free. Looking for more of a romantic relationship as opposed to mere bought buggery, perennial virgin Mendy tries to turn Sasha straight, but seeing as his lecherous lady love can only get wet for bad boys (as she states herself) and with all of his friends involved in a pernicious terrorist plot, things might be too late for the lapsed Orthodox Jewish boy to make a real mensch out of himself. 

 During the last 30 minutes of The Holy Land, terroristic settler "Exterminator" yells to Mendy’s Rabbi – who gives the boy an ultimatum that if he does not come back to Orthodox Judaism, he will tell his parents about his sinful way – that he, “can’t stand that sniveling, stuck-in-the ghetto diaspora Judaism either,” in a scene that sums up one of the major themes of the film: religious Orthodox Judaism versus quasi-fascistic and atheistic secular Zionism. Considering America has the largest Jewish population in the world (despite making up only about 2.2% of the U.S. population as of 2008), the fair majority of which being secular Zionists, it should be no surprise that The Holy Land was rejected by no less than three Jewish film festivals, of which director Eitan Gorlin stated in an interview for www.salon.com regarding American Jewry’s campaign to hide the unflattering truths regarding exploitation and militarism in Israel, “There’s a real desire among a lot of people to control images and messages and the story of Israel. People are used to propaganda: “You’re either with us or against us.” I like to think the film has ambiguity. Some Jewish film festivals are more a celebration of our culture. They just don’t want to go there.” With Jews that are more dedicated to eating bacon cheeseburgers and marrying goy gals as people who blasphemously founded a nation before their messiah came out of cultural and political reasons as opposed to religious ones, The Holy Land is quite oddly a religious work about a people who have abandoned their God. With ex-Israelis like Jazz musician Gilad Atzmon writing such scathing things about his people as, “We must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously” and “American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forged irrelevant. American Jews do control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least,” and films like Gorlin’s The Holy Land, one can only wonder if it will be the Jews themselves who will commence the pogroms against their own people once again. For a group who relatively recently founded their first nation in thousands of years as a direct result of Auschwitz and who oftentimes proclaim to be the world’s foremost victims, it is rather strange that a Jew would call himself “Exterminator” (Gorlin based this character off of a real person) and make a sport of gunning down feral Palestinian children for pelting rocks.  Personally, as an unrighteous gentile, I could not always tell the difference between an Israeli and Palestinian, at least in the context of The Holy Land, aside from the fact that one group uses the United States as a vassal of unconscious Shabbos Goys, while the other lives in a city-sized concentration camp provided by their Semitic brethren.  That being said, I doubt anyone, aside from Americans Jews, would care if the Israelis and Palestinians wiped out each other out overnight as fantasized about by the resentful Russian girl at the beginning of The Holy Land.  After all, when a simple Yeshiva student cannot even complain in peace without being scammed by Slavic sex slaves, driven to substance abuse by Jewish jock philistines, and coerced into terrorism by a physically foul fellow that looks like he could be Rick Moranis' pedophile uncle, there is truly trouble in the Holy Land.

 -Ty E

Wound

Although starting his filmmaking career as New Zealand’s only arthouse punk auteur with Buñuel-esque films like the phantasmagoric short Circadian Rhythms (1976), the supremely sardonic and anarchistic anti-suburbia fantasy flick Angel Mine (1980), and the first NZ splatter flick Death Warmed Up (1984), “Kiwi Gothic cinema” pioneer David Blyth (Red Blooded American Girl, My Grandpa Is a Vampire) eventually made his way to Hollywood and made the drastic change of becoming a director of the pathetically p.c. kids TV-series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and even a pansy ranger Christmas movie, but thankfully he has gone back to the colony and is back to his subversive, surrealist roots. On top of directing deranged documentary works like Bound for Pleasure (2004), a close-up and personal look at dominatrix dames, and Transfigured Nights (2009), an unsettlingly voyeuristic view of “wildly perverse, fetishistic pleasures of web cam mask performance” (including an ex-Vietnam Vet who has a fetish for dressing like a female pig in leather and who bring an all time low to transvestic fetishism), bad boy Blyth has returned to the realm of experimental narrative film after a two decade break with the kiwi arthouse horror shocker Wound (2010) – an innately deranged depiction of one insane incest victim’s sadomasochistic struggle with psychological pandemonium and her attempt to reunite with her equally fucked up and fetishistic estranged daughter in a film that falls somewhere in between the nefarious nightmare realm of David Lynch and gorgeous and atmospheric arthouse gore of Jörg Buttgereit, except even less linear in structure and which the director summed up follows in an interview as follows: ““Wound” is a woman’s pictorial descent into madness, seen as a series of events or visual mental shards from Susan’s tragic life as she fights a losing battle for her sanity in an indifferent and uncaring world.” Described by none other than Brit of celluloid blasphemy Ken Russell (The Devils, Altered States) in the following manner, “A two-headed doll! Iron-phallused Pig-man stealth! Birthing your own twin! The nightclub of dream-wandering! If your family of origin doesn’t kill you, you may just make it…Gorgeous images and repulsive dream-surgery into the recesses of female consciousness. Enter at your own peril! A masterpiece!,” Wound is certainly a daunting and deranging work to experience, sort of like watching a Russian execution video while in a mescaline-induced state as a deathrock mix-tape plays in the background, thus it will only appeal to the few, the proud, the aberrant arthouse connoisseur as an uncompromising work that manages to create an unholy marriage between surrealism and splatter, as well as foul fetishism with family matters. Needless to say, if you have ever suffered erotic debasement via a degenerate daddy, Wound – a work of audacious aesthetic terrorism that pours artsy acid in the grotesque gash that is post-cultural Occidental society – is not the sort of film to watch on Father’s Day, or any day for that matter.
 

As a sadomasochistic bitch who cuts off her daddy’s dick within the first five minutes of Wound, schizo Susan (Kate O'Rourke) is not exactly a woman whose sense of judgment the viewer can trust, thus the film becomes a hallucinatory horror show where concrete reality and mental derangement become dismembered in a blender of S&M surrealism, anti-erotic excess, Gothic gratuity, and longing for something darkly romantic but totally intangible. With a pedophile fiend for a father who probably could be described as the ‘New Zealand Josef Fritzl,’ Susan makes it clear why “incest” and “patricide” go together like aristocrats and gulags, but she has a more pressing matter on her mind. At the ripe age of 19-years-old, Susan gave birth to a beautiful still-born baby girl, yet, quite inexplicably, a Gothic school gal named Tanya (Te Kaea Beri) who was born an orphan, and may be the daughter Susan thought was born dead, is on the prowl for her mommy dearest. When not trying tirelessly to make sales for her telemarketing job and basking in sexual abuse from her S&M Master John (Campbell Cooley), Susan is daydreaming day and night about an ostensible daughter that was spawn from the most unholiest sin. With the rotten, worm-eaten apple not falling far from the devitalized tree, night owl temptress Tanya is also engaged in an all the more sickening branch of S&M that includes being senselessly buggered by a swine-mask sporting degenerate whose only other piece of ‘clothing’ is an iron-cock with a deathhead on the end and whose bloated body covered in heretical tattoos makes him seem like some sort of satanic Maori tribesman who took the Gothic blues lyrics of Glenn Danzig a little too seriously. A strikingly haunting and oftentimes hysterical collection of phantasmic tableaux that never relents in its metaphysical prodding and pillaging of the viewer’s soul, Wound is a work that only offers solace to the deceased, but only aesthetically pleasing torment to the living, or so protagonist Susan finds out during her deluge of the mind. With visions of romantic suicide pacts on train tracks, a two-headed monster being born through a ghastly gigantic vagina, visitations from a matricidal daughter who wears death on her sleeve, elderly S&M madams, and non-rides to nowhere on an antiquated Victorian train full of lost souls with a punk rock fashion sense, Wound pours buckets of blood of the anti-Electral love sort.

In an interview for the website Schurr Sound, Wound director David Blyth stated the following regarding the contemporary Hollywoodized Occident, “In the Victorian times, children were present when dead bodies were being dressed and that was part of them understanding the process of death. Now in our western white society the coffin is closed. It’s only actually the Maori culture that has an open coffin and a healthier attitude to death.” Of course, Wound is a work that not only wallows in death, but also in unchecked perversions in a fundamentally anti-life society where pathological fetishism is rampant, even of the incestuous sort. In fact, the father-daughter castration scenes in the film were inspired by a real scenario course case Blyth read about in a U.S. newspaper. As Blyth has mentioned repeatedly in interviews, Wound is a work that fundamentally explores the “unconscious mind,” most specifically of the badly diseased sort, thus the film can be looked at as a renegade reaction to a sick and intrinsically repressed society and a depiction of a deepening laceration in the Western collective unconscious, as well as an incendiary indictment of the decadent wasp patriarch whose role in society in no more prestigious than that of a glorified sperm donor who spends his free time masturbating to images on the internet of young girls around the same age as his daughter. As a man who has gone to Hollywood hell and back, and has created sentimental kiddy horror films starring Al Lewis aka Grandpa Munster, David Blyth has proven not only that his subversive spirit has not withered with age, but also that his view of humanity, especially in regard to those from the post-colonial Occident, is no less pessimistic as a weeping wound of the auteur's mind's eye that continues to bleed in every shot of film and digital video he shoots.

 -Ty E

Cannibal Holocaust

Over a decade ago or so, I began my search for a certain infamous Italian cannibal film that I was led to believe was the Holy Grail of horror and splatter cinema and considering the film was never released in the USA in any home format (as it is today), not to mention the fact that it was not exactly as easy as it is today to find such rare films online, it felt like a rather hopeless situation in terms of seeing the film, so I inevitably caved and swallowed my pride, went to a horrific horror convention flooded with flabby fanboys who masturbate to Friday the 13th Part III (1982) while wearing Wal-Mart hockey masks, and did the unthinkable by buying a bootleg copy of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) directed by Ruggero Deodato (Waves of Lust, The House on the Edge of the Park) from a superlatively slimy and sleazy bootlegger from NYC. While the act of paying a parasitical urban pirate money for a film he had no part in creating disgusted me just as if I bought crack from some jaded jigaboo, I had no idea that the less than pristine print of Cannibal Holocaust was going to shock me in such a severe manner that I realized that my lifetime of being desensitized due to my horror movie addiction was not nearly as bad as I had originally assumed, thus leading me to similarly ‘infamous’ cinematic works like Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Tinto Brass’ Salon Kitty (1976), Roger Watkins’ Last House on Dead End Street (1977), Gerald Kargl’s Angst (1983), Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik (1987), Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002), and countless other conspicuously controversial cinematic works that have made it all but impossible for me to take any Hollywood film seriously in terms of ‘taking risks’ and shocking the viewer. While Italian cannibal films are not exactly my favorite film subgenre, I still regard Cannibal Holocaust as king and can honestly say it is the only guido flesh-eater flick that I have taken the trouble to view more than once. In fact, after nearly half a decade without seeing it, I decided to re-watch Cannibal Holocaust recently and once again realized why it is the only "found footage" film I can stomach, as well as one of the only films that I am not surprised was banned not only in its native country of Italy, but also a number of other countries and why it still remains banned today in some places as one of the only exploitation films that brings minor poetry to senseless animal slaughter. 

 A surprisingly seamless yet savage film-within-a-film, Cannibal Holocaust has been described as a potent piece of cinematic social commentary, as well as repugnant, reprehensible, and racist film with no redeeming qualities. Frankly, I couldn't care less if some sissy ethno-masochistic xenophile that lurks in an overpriced independent coffee shop is even vaguely correct in his assessment of the film, but it is a fact that director Ruggero Deodato has cited the less than politically correct Italian documentary filmmakers Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara, and Franco Prosperi of Mondo cane (1962) fame as a major influence behind the film. Like Jacopetti, Cavara, and Prosperi’s documentaries, Cannibal Holocaust does not wallow in cuckold ‘cultural sensitivity’ as it portrays “noble savages” (the Yanomamo and Shamatari tribesmen featured in the film are authentic, but only the Yanomamo partake in a form of post-mortem ritual cannibalism) in a uniquely unflattering light, even if the film has an absurd tacked-on message, "I wonder who the real cannibals are?," in a feeble and superficial attempt to condemn imperialism and whatnot. What is more important is that Spaghetti Western maestro Sergio Leone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in America) wrote a letter to director Deodato after watching Cannibal Holocaust, which stated, “Dear Ruggero, what a movie! The second part is a masterpiece of cinematographic realism, but everything seems so real that I think you will get in trouble with all the world.” And, indeed, the film caused all kinds of hell around the world, hence its relative scarcity until rather recently. Featuring a pseudo-documentary entitled “The Last Road to Hell” (which features real murder scenarios from around the glorious Third World) within the film in the tradition of Jacopetti and Prosperi's Africa Addio (1966) and Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971), as well as film reels of a film crew's ill-fated attempt to create a documentary about Amazon Rainforest tribes while raping, pillaging, and terrorizing people, Cannibal Holocaust is more than ample proof that the Occident, as well as the rest of the world (whether they like it or not), has reached an apocalyptic stage since the less ominous days of Italian Neorealism. If you’re a braindead gorehound and want to learn about the innate culture-distorting ills of multiculturalism without having to read a single line from a banal book written by some poof of a pencil-pusher, Cannibal Holocaust is probably the film for you. 

 During the beginning of Cannibal Holocaust, one learns about a missing American film crew comprised of director Alan Yates, his girlfriend Faye Daniels, and two cameramen Jack Anders and Mark Tomaso who traveled to the Amazon to make a documentary about warring indigenous cannibal tribes. A bleeding heart liberal cultural anthropologist named Harold Monroe (played by Jewish-American pornstar Robert Kerman aka R. Bolla of Debbie Does Dallas (1978)) from NYU ends up leading a rescue team to find the forsaken filmmakers. When he arrives in the Amazon, Mr. Monroe hooks up with a guide named Chaco, a charismatic barbarian of a man who snorts cocaine off a knife, and his twinkish assistant Miguel. With the help of a coke-snorting Yacumo tribesman who was taken hostage by the military, the group delves deep inside the rainforest where no other white men would dare to tread, killing real animals on the way and witnessing tribesmen performing adultery punishment against whorish wives, which involves rock-cock dildos being rammed up the philandering women's vaginas. Eventually Monroe and his motley crew locates the warring Ya̧nomamö and Shamatari tribes. After saving the lives of some of the more yellow-bellied Ya̧nomamö, Monroe and his crew are invited back to the tribe’s tree village, but not without suspicion of their weird white man ways, and after having a naked swim with some of the penis-prodding tribeswomen, the anthropologist is taken to a spiritual shrine used to ward off evil Europid spirits where the bones of the missing American filmmakers are located. Naturally, pissed off that those disenfranchised Indians dare to eat cultivated gringos, Monroe freaks out and has a hysterical hissy fit and fires off a couple rounds from his gun, but things cool down when the anthropologist trades a magical tape recorder to the savages for the fallen film crew’s film reels and the two groups celebrate by dining on fresh human meat. Of course, Monroe proves his cultivated open-mindedness and dedication to diversity by chowing down on the remains of savage, if not rather reluctantly so. 

 When Monroe returns back to his inhospitable cosmopolitan habitat of NYC, he is offered by a team of sleazy and shallow executives at the generically named “Pan American Broadcast Company” to host a show of a broadcasted documentary that is being made from the footage he recovered tentatively entitled, “The Green Inferno.” Monroe is shown one of director Alan Yates' previous documentaries, The Last Road to Hell, which features footage of exterminated Africans and piles of corpses of color. The anthropologist also learns that Yates was known to stage some of the footage to make it more enthralling and soon Monroe is exposed to how far the fiendish filmmaker was willing to go to get the perfect wide-angle rape shot and stunning savage-on-savage slaughter. Quite reluctantly, Monroe reviews the ‘found-footage’ that he is supposed to host and learns a number of unflattering things about his foredoomed filmmaker friends, including their taste for butchering and eating giant turtles, burning down entire villages of tribesmen and then forcing them to watch how white folks from America have sex, savagely defiling a savage woman via gringo gang-rape and subsequently impaling her body and blaming it on the savages as a sick sex ritual, blowing away tribesmen with their ‘boomsticks,’ and a variety of other odious displays of behavior that gets Alan Yates and his film crew brutally butchered and eaten by armies of the Ya̧nomamö. Disgusted with himself for being an American white man like Mr. Alan Yates, Monroe leaves the final screening disillusioned, but at least the TV executives decide to destroy the footage. 

 Not unsurprisingly, Cannibal Holocaust was confiscated by authorities a mere ten days after its premiere in Milan, Italy, but director Ruggero Deodato had bigger problems as he was not only charged with obscenity, but also murder as the courts believed the simulated death scenes in the film were real and that the actors that played Alan Yates and his compatriots really met true death, which is the sort of audacious auteur infamy that few other filmmakers can boast. As for Cannibal Holocaust star Robert Kerman, he had the following to say about his experience with mad maestro Ruggero Deodato, stating he is, “A maniac – totally nuts! He was often stressed and he lost his control sometimes and would shout. That really pissed me off. I always had the feeling that Deodato drove everybody crazy. And those animal scenes! I thought those pictures were created by special effects men, but no way was it…I told Deodato I would curse him if he kept on filming those animal mutilation scenes…Those scenes are disgusting and perverted.” Of course, one has to be doing something right when they have the propensity to piss-off and gross-out a Hebraic hardcore pornstar who once admitted, “I hope that porn is the most unrighteous thing I do. If we go out of our way to be scumbags, that's the sin; when I do porn, I offend Shakespeare more than God.” The great irony of Cannibal Holocaust is that despite being considered one of the most decidedly disturbing, exceedingly exploitative, and ceaselessly shocking films ever made, it also happens to be quite breathtaking and even majestic in parts, which is only all the more accentuated by Riz Ortolani’s melodious and highly memorable musical score. While not a work of ‘art cinema’ itself, Cannibal Holocaust is a singular exploitation piece in that it transcends the celluloid ghetto it ostensibly belongs to as a work that proves that films featuring naked brigades of savages castrating and cannibalizing evil white men and primitive women being impaled on poles can be not only aesthetically and thematically redeeming, but also endlessly enthralling. Also, clearly a relentless misanthropic, director Deodato does not care about sparing your emotions and if you came to Cannibal Holocaust hoping to get your jollies off by seeing hordes of denuded exotic primitives being wild and wanton and Amazonian miscegenation between savages and the racially sacrilegious, you’re in for a rude awakening! 

 Predating The Blair Witch Project (1999) – one of the most critically and especially commercially successful independent films ever made (grossing over US$248 million worldwide) – by nearly two decades yet taking the whole “found footage” gimmick to a much deeper and more depraved level, Cannibal Holocaust, despite its lack of availability until relatively recently (Grindhouse Releasing released a great DVD of the film in 2005 in the U.S.), has managed to develop an almost religious cult following over the decades that proves the particularly perverse potency of the film. With proponents like Troma Führer Lloyd Kaufman of all people, who compared the animal slaughtering scenes in the film to Bolshevik auteur Vsevolod Pudovkin's theory of montage, writing, “In Cannibal Holocaust, we see the actors kill and rip apart a giant sea turtle and other animals. The brain has been conditioned to accept that which it's now seeing as real. This mixture of real and staged violence, combined with the handheld camerawork and the rough, unedited quality of the second half of the movie, is certainly enough to convince someone that what they are watching is real,” Cannibal Holocaust proved horror films can be made that truly horrify the viewer to the point of shock and bring one to actually reexamine their entire Weltanschauung on a worldly cross-cultural scale, thus actually making them use their gray matter for once, which is truly an achievement for a genre in which its entire basis lay in striking the nerve of man’s most archaic emotions. A film that demystifies the power of news media and supposedly authentic documentary films, Cannibal Holocaust, to reference The Wizard of Oz (1939), figuratively reveals the “man behind the curtain,” puts him on trial, and has him executed by a savage swarm of sanguinary mud people who may have a virtual incapacity for reason, but who know when someone is truly deserving of death, which is indubitably one of the few truly 'universal' laws of humanity. An incendiary indictment of both degenerate Westerners of the pathologically materialistic persuasion and naive cultural anthropologists of the commie Boasian blend who believe in hocus pocus like “cultural relativism” but are shell-shocked when actually experiencing primitive peoples first hand, Cannibal Holocaust is easily the foremost anti-globalization horror work ever made and an inexplicably anti-agitprop agitprop work that intensely illustrates, quite ironically, via a pseudo-ethnology cinéma vérité work in the vein of French leftist anthropologist/filmmaker Jean Rouch – a xenophiliac man whose supposedly sympathetic documentary depictions of peoples of the dark continent was oftentimes viewed by native filmmakers as having “distorted African realities” – that different races and cultures have an innate incapacity for living in harmony together and that the more the peoples of the world come together, the more barbaric murder the planet will experience on a mayhem-ridden multicultural scale. However, more than anything, Ruggero Deodato has managed to package more practical anthropological insights and lessons in the subjectivity of documentary film/electronic media than one would probably receive at the undergraduate level at an American liberal arts university and if anyone can reach the deluded and damaged minds of fierce philistine gorehounds, they must be a savage genius of the Svengali Italian Stallion sort. 

-Ty E

Despair

 

Out of all of the films in German New Wave alpha-auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s cinematic oeuvre, I unhesitatingly regard Despair (1978) – a cinematic adaption of the 1936 Vladimir Nabokov of the same name – as the director’s greatest failure as a filmmaker as an ambitious and audacious work that had all the ingredients for what could have been a completely chilling yet cruelly campy S&M arthouse masterpiece, but ultimately fell short of being a piece of celluloid perfection due to language barriers and business-inspired artistic compromises, among other things. Fassbinder’s most expensive film at that time, even costing more than all of his precious cinematic works combined, and funded using tax-shelter money, Despair was a rare German film of its time in that it had guaranteed international distribution from a major US studio, thus it was rather disastrously decided that the work would be shot simultaneously in English (making it the first of two films Fassbinder shot in English, preceding Lili Marleen (1981)) and German, thereupon resulting in a curiously culturally-mongrelized (in the culture-distorting Hollywood sense) and somewhat contrived high-camp work missing a soul and a bit of the filmmaker’s signature auteur flare. Featuring gay English actor Dirk Bogarde (The Servant, The Night Porter aka Il Portiere di notte) – one of the stars of Fassbinder’s self-professed #1 favorite film The Damned (1969) aka La caduta degli dei directed by Luchino Visconti – Despair received a less than warm reception when it played at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival and the star was so disenchanted with the film that he inevitably disowned own it, complaining that the director erratically re-cut the film during a manic moment of melancholy. Not by any means fluent in the language that Despair was widely released with it, Fassbinder would go on to describe his lost-in-translation direction of the film as follows in an interview with Gian Luigi Rondi, “It’s true, there was a whole bunch of words I didn’t catch… but in film it’s much more important how language sounds than what its concrete content is. From my point of view, even in German the most important thing is the melody of a sentence, its tonal coloration, its modeling. And then Dirk Bogarde was in the cast. I didn’t need to understand his English, any more than he needed to understand my German. During the shooting an almost extrasensory form of communication developed between us; he understood what I wanted, and I understood perfectly what he was doing.” Of course, judging by Sir Bogarde’s rather severe reaction to the whole ordeal, one must question Fassbinder’s remark regarding the supposed 'chemistry' (Fassbinder was known for being afraid of and artistically handicapped by 'big stars') he had developed with the actor, but the filmmaker never reneged his opinion that Despair was one of the best films he had ever made, even listing it as number three in a top ten list of his personal favorites of all the films he had ever directed. Depicting the slow but steady mental disintegration of a white Russian émigré and tycoon mogul named Hermann Hermann (Dirk Bogarde) with a rather radically discordant racial persuasion (his father was German-Russian and his mother was a member of the Jewish Rothschild banking dynasty) who comes up with the dubious and duplicitous scheme of faking his own death after taking out a hefty insurance policy and killing a proletarian man he believes to be his doppelgänger (but looks only slightly like him), so he can start a new life in Switzerland, Despair is probably the closest a film has ever come to cinematically depicting the haunted German psyche during the Weimar Republic era and on the eve of the National Socialist takeover as analyzed in German-Jewish Frankfurt school film theorist Siegfried Kracauer revolutionary text From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947).   Needless to say, also like Kracauer's propagandistic pop psychology book, Despair sounds more delectable in its seemingly mind-fucking magnificence than it actually is.

 A reasonably successful capitalist who has taken over his Russian family’s chocolate company and relocated abroad in Germany due to the capitalist-killing chaos of the Russian Revolution, Hermann Hermann (Bogarde) is really nothing more than a glorified cuckold at home who can only ‘rise to the occasion’ with his cock (or so only one can only assume since he is always fully clothed) when engaged in softcore sadomasochism like having his lecherous wife lovingly licking his boots. A patent pushover who mistakes petty pomposity with personal prestige, Hermann passively ignores the fact that his busty and blonde yet slightly bloated wife Lydia (Andréa Ferréol of Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973) and The Tin Drum (1979) aka Die Blechtrommel) is carrying on a lurid love affair with her own cousin Ardalion (Fassbinder Superstar Volker Spengler of Satan’s Brew (1976) and In a Year of 13 Moons (1978)), a horribly horny hack of a painter who looks like a gay and grotesque version of Vincent van Gogh, had the Dutch painter packed on 50 pounds and had a botched lobotomy. Despite the fact he has no problem telling Ardalion to his face that he is, “nothing but a Ukrainian peasant pretending to be a bohemian,” Hermann does not have the gall nor the balls to be brawl with the exceedingly effete fellow who is quite blatantly buggering his wife, thus one can only assume that he is quite apathetic when it comes to penetrating his salacious spouse as she is clearly a woman he does not love and vice versa, but a trophy wife with big tits and nil brain. A nauseatingly narcissistic fellow who most naively tells people that regarding his relationship with his wife, “She needs a patronizing type like I need a patronizable woman. Were a perfect couple. I like literature…She likes trash. I’m clear thinking…she’s scatter brained. We are a perfect match…Like a lock and key,” hysterical Hermann eventually comes to terms that he is stuck in a demeaning and deferential dead-end marriage and is living a life of lingering lethargy and lunacy, thus he must breakthrough and develop a new identity.  A forsaken fellow who is also facing bankruptcy and the loss of his glorious chocolate factory, Hermann begins to confuse the words "merger" and "murderer" as his life becomes all the more miserable.  Needless to say, when a merger with another chocolate company falls through, murders begins to sound like a much better option.  A typically Nabokov-esque “unreliable narrator” (or in the case of the film, a demented schizophrenic), Hermann was described by Fassbinder, who put a new spin of the character with the help of screenwriter Tom Stoppard, as follows in an interview, “The crisis experienced by the hero…who suddenly has the feeling that the rug’s being pulled out from under him. You could list a whole series of reasons for that: the political, economic, and social problems of those years; but the real or, at least, the most important reason is his sudden insight that everything’s pointless and that nothing has meaning anymore. Why? Because old age is approaching, the age when a person just doesn’t expect anything new, when a person no longer gets satisfaction from looking for things, desiring things, coming up with ideas.” A desperate man living in desperate times who already lived through the virtual hell of the Russian Revolution, Hermann comes up with a complex, albeit ultimately imbecilic, conspiracy that involves calculated coldblooded murder that will offer him one last chance to transcend the banality of his current life as a posh pansy for something more 'real,' but rather unfortunately, the batshit crazy candyman has trouble discerning between reality and his own audio-visual delusions. 

 While Hermann falsely believes him to be his 'double' and an immaculate doppelgänger, destitute peasant philosopher Felix (Klaus Löwitsch) – a poor but prideful man who believes that, “Philosophy is an invention of the rich. So is religion…poetry. I don’t believe in love either” – could not be anymore diametrically opposed in character to the cowardly choco-capitalist.  Although H.H. is a sexually and physically impotent tyrant (at least in his own mind) of a weakling who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, has never done a minutes worth of physical labor in his entire life, lives a lavish and heedlessly hedonistic lifestyle, and generally hides inside his head as opposed to confronting the outside world, Felix is a stoic man's man who lives off the land, has a powerful body, and takes pride himself, thus the two characters represent the two extremes of Occidental man and naturally, for modernity to go on, the decadent and deracinated mensch must kill his archaic comrade. While Hermann seems to have sexually repressed homoerotic feelings for Felix as especially obvious when the worker gets naked and shows off his proletarian physique, he has a pernicious plan to kill the down-and-out drifter as he believes they are physically identical, thus enabling him to fake his own death with a simple change of clothes and identities and cashing in on a new life insurance policy he has just obtained and subsequently escaping to neutral Switzerland so he can begin a new life.  As a man who tells his insurance salesman, "I have neither priest nor doctor.  I need them not at all.  So why shouldn't I confide in my insurance consultant?," Hermmann, aside from suffering from schizophrenia, also seems to be plagued by acute autism of the deracinated aristocrat sort. Of course, anyone viewing Despair knows that Hermann is hopelessly fated to fail, thus giving the character a certain vague tragicomedic charisma in his feeble and feckless campaign for freedom from a forlorn life of personal failure and unfulfilling fetishism. As someone who opportunistically bought forged personal identity cards to fit in with changing political trends, including going from a blackshirt fighting reds in the white army to a “Caucasian” fighting SA brownshirts in the red army, Hermann at least has enough honesty to admit to himself (as well as a potential business client) that he is merely a, “yellow belly in a brown hat” whose life has amounted to nothing. Throughout Despair, Hermann says a lot of contradictory things about his mother who he has admitted incestuous feelings and goes from described her as a, “fat bourgeois addicted to chocolate,” to a “pure Russian of princely stock.” Of course, as a Rothschild (assuming Hermann is not lying), Hermann's mother comes from a positively parasitic family that made its fortune by loaning money to opposing sides during all major European wars during the last couple centuries, thus the candyman was born with both blood and chocolate on his hands.  Fassbinder certainly had complex and rather empathetic feelings regarding the character, stating, “What do people like Hermann Hermann usually do when it becomes clear to them that they’re at a turning point where they have everything behind them and nothing ahead of them? They pull into their shell, they resign themselves, and rather than admit that their life’s over, they’d prefer to spend the rest of it in a sea of compromises and resignation. The few who rebel, on the other hand, even if in a totally irrational way, those people achieve something, they discover something that gives them new hope. So no exoneration, but if you’re comparing him to the person who gives up in the face of life, I prefer the person who’s at least still capable of hope, even madness.”

 In a writing Fassbinder did on Despair during pre-production of the film, he concluded the essay with the following sentence, “Of this despair and the painful search for something in motion, and the courage to recognize a utopia and to open yourself up to it, however poor it may be—of these things I tell in this film.” Of course, the L'Enfant terrible auteur used the artistic medium of cinema as a means to, “recognize a utopia,” albeit an innately imaginary one, with Despair being a project of potential celluloid paradise that was ultimately held down by its star power, international film crew, monetary motivated utilization of a foreign language, and big budget. Utilizing some of the sets from Swedish master auteur Ingmar Bergman’s commercial and critical failure The Serpent's Egg (1977) – a work also set in pre-Nazi Germany and centering on a foreigner character (played by a foreign actor) that many people felt did not ‘work’ artistically and featured nonsensical casting (David Carradine is certainly not Bergman material) – Despair almost seems like it was a foreordained film from the very beginning. Ironically, protagonist Hermann Hermann – a man who claims the schizophrenic ancestry of, “my father was a German speaking Russian from Ravel. My mother was a Rothschild” – is a fellow who, like Fassbinder himself (especially in regard to Despair), is an idiosyncratic entity with a capacity for greatness, but ultimately fails in carrying out a meticulously constructed master plan due to cognitive dissonance and confusion. With his utilization of Dirk Bogarde instead of one of his Superstars (Kurt Raab comes to mind…) and focusing on debauched and deranged aristocrats as opposed to marginal and melancholy members of the middle-class, Fassbinder must have have been trying to realize the dream of directing a Teutonized Luchino Visconti period piece of the arthouse Euro-sleaze perusasion with Despair – the first film where the director replaced a good percentage of his original film crew with professionals from all around the world, hence the too “polished and pretty” feel of the work. Sort of like the debauched and abridged blueblood equivalent to Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) in its depiction of the perturbed protagonist’s precarious personal life and plagued psyche and how it parallels the increasingly chaos of the wanton Weimar Republic, Despair ultimately seems, not unlike Effi Briest (1974), more like a fantasy project for Fassbinder where he was able to uses a professional crew, nice budget, and take his directing skills to new levels in terms of technique, but unfortunately the film seems less like an intimate ‘auteur piece’ and more in the vein of a Tinto Brass big budget exploitation flick on psychosexual steroids made to appeal to both decadent bourgeoisie Americans and European alike, but no notable audience ever seemed interested in the film as a piece of smutty yet sleekly stylized S&M cinema that was not even approved of by its posh poof star Dirk Bogarde.  Of course, a failure by Fassbinder is always more interesting than a supposed masterpiece by Wim Wenders or Jean-Luc Godard, thus making Despair worth seeing for fans of German New Cinema's prodigal yet princely son.  After all, what other film features odiously obese gay Austrian Peter Kern as a Nazi SA brownshirt who works for a chocolate company and whose beautiful brown uniform is described by protagonist H.H. as, "most appropriate, a chocolate-colored jacket!"

-Ty E

Via Appia

If serving a lengthy prison sentence is a ‘rite of passage’ for black gangbangers and barbarian neo-viking bikers, it would seem that receiving HIV would be somewhat the approximate equivalent for sadomasochistic sodomites or so it seems in the curious kraut cocksucker flicker Via Appia (1989) directed by homo-auteur Jochen Hick (Sex/Life in L.A., No One Sleeps) – an aberrant Aryan whose obsession with AIDS and the men who intentionally spread it is only rivaled by his particularly perverse proclivity for feverishly fawning over perverse poofters, especially of the Germanic persuasion, traveling abroad for anonymous tearoom and steamroom sex. Described by Robert Ellsworth of Edge Magazine in what is a patent piece of journalistic puffery as, “a sexy, exciting film…that is both stimulating and suspenseful, an interesting combination of Hitchcock and Jodorowsky,” Via Appia is an unrepentantly homosexualist work that can hardly be described as a contrived and theatric 'Freudian thriller' in the sense of Rope (1948), nor a surrealist acid western full of naked women with marvelous mammary glands and occultnik religious iconography like El Topo (1970), but it does feature a smutty smorgasbord of psychosexual tension and fag fetishism in a certain sin-ridden Sodom of South America. Centering around a Teutonic twink airplane steward in what wakes up one morning to see that a random Brazilian boi he just had a steamy semen-swapping one-night stand with has just written, “Welcome to the AIDS-Club” on his bathroom mirror as if the joke of a very real gay urban legend, Via Appia is a pseudo-documentary-within-a-film about a HIV positive homo who travels to Brazil in search of the ‘gift-giving’ gay hustler who, following in the rather rich S&M semen demon tradition of Canadian flight attendant Gaëtan “Patient Zero” Dugas (the sanitized subject of queer Canadian auteur John Greyson's 1993 AIDs-themed musical Zero Patience) and French philosopher Michel Foucault, deliberately gave the young German man the priceless gift of gay cancer at a time when treatment for such an internecine illness was mostly futile. A softcore gay porn flick featuring countless brown dicks of the racially dubious sort, Via Appia is undoubtedly gay fantasy in a cinéma vérité style that seems like an exotic m(isc)arriage between the wanton wild boys of the Third World as depicted in the novels of alpha-Beat writer William S. Burroughs (notice the xenophiliac original cover of his 1983 novel The Place of Dead Roads) and the gritty ‘poverty porn’ and gutter libertinism of Jewish-Brazilian auteur Héctor Babenco’s Pixote (1981), thereupon making it an exceedingly exploitative, minor kraut cult classic of deranged and deleterious celluloid Dorian Love that only further confirms the unflattering stereotype that fags are the foremost spreaders of one of the world's mostly deadly diseases.

A lot of dirty and dastardly things can happen when you’re a sexually promiscuous Lufthansa German Airlines steward who engages in unprotected sodomy with Third World conmen of the calculating, conniving, and callous cocksucking variety when not helping bourgeois boobs to get nice and comfy on their trips abroad or such is the impression one gets while watching Via Appia. Like real-life fag flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas, flaming Frank (played by Peter Senner in his first and only feature-length film role) learned the hard way that STDs spread quick and come from the most curious of places when one has a cosmopolitan career that involves traveling the world. Now taking routine trips to the hospital to treat the debilitating symptoms of HIV, fucked Frank is quite obsessed with finding the malicious man-eater Mario, who gave the flight attendant a literal kiss of death during an ominous yet orgasmic one-night stand from homo Hades, yet he does not want to seek revenge, but instead seems to feel that confronting his figurative gay Grim Reaper would give him the courage to look death straight in the eyes in an audacious act of unfleeting stoicism. Ignoring the sound advice of his doctor not to travel abroad, especially to a Third World sewer of sin and sexual savagery, Frank and a documentary filmmaker (Yves Jansen) fly to Brazil and soon hire a professional conman and hunk hustler named José (played by real-life criminal Guilherme de Pádua, who, with the help of his wife, killed an actress on the same Brazilian soap opera he starred in). An amateur photographer who takes pictures of strangers’ pricks, as well as his own, Frank finds the ultimate guide of Brazilian buggery in José, who takes him to the most sinfully steamy bathhouses and hustler hotspots in Rio, thereupon resulting in a wealth of rather risqué portraits and many mischievous memories with many miscegenated men, yet maniac mud-packer Mario seems nowhere to be found. Obviously someone who has learned from a master, Frank decides he will be like super sodomite Mario and refrain from telling people about his pandemic sexual sickness, even rhetorically remarking to his filmmaker friend, “Why should I run and tell everybody I’m sick? You don’t live according to what some sauna Joe says,” and “You think I want to be known as a walking virus bomb?” With so many more than men and so little time to live in the most literal sense, Frank has to be less than frank about his bad blood if he wants to have the time of his short life in the sanguinary Sodom and Gomorrah of South America – a place where Nordic sodomite stewards like the protagonist have been known to be maliciously murdered in the past when patronizing the wrong penis-peddler. With creepy and exceedingly emaciated hustlers literally masturbating in the street and an overflowing ocean of studs and twinks in sordid saunas of sacrilege, Frankie certainly has no need to worry about people catching on to the fact that he is a poz-cock giftgiver.  Indeed, to borrow a cynical phrase from the film, Via Appia is not your typical celluloid "the world is full of whores" routine as the homo harlots very much feel at home in their figurative hell of fagdom and biologically kaput kraut protagonist Frank is more than willing to join them.

If Via Appia has an underlying (and, in this case, unhinged) 'message' at all, it is that poof protagonist Frank seemed rather liberated by the fact that he was infected with HIV in a most insidious manner, even if his life is inevitably cut short by this inauspicious and ultimately irrevocable situation. Instead of arguing that having sex with random men at bathhouses while being HIV positive is a bad and, dare I say, particularly pernicious, deplorable, and absurdly dishonest thing to do, Via Appia makes it seem like the ‘cool’ and liberating thing to do as if giving the protagonist all the more reasons to be a pathological powder puff on the prowl. During the beginning of the film, Frank makes it seem as if his planned, would-be-fateful meeting with Mario will make accepting death all the more easy to deal with, but it is ultimately the sort of unsavory behavior that led him to contracting the terminal illness in the first place that gives him a seemingly ‘sick,’ quasi-spiritual sort of solace. Even the filmmaker that follows him along notices Frank’s deleterious behavior, stating, “I don’t want to film someone’s self-destruction.” Aside from stoically accepting death like a ‘real man,’ Frank makes for a rather unsympathetic protagonist, but, to his credit, he does not damn nor seek sympathy, thereupon acting in stark contrast to the sort of sanitized sodomites portrayed in Hollywood movies and the media today, who arrogantly and, quite fag fascistically, demand not only acceptance of their aberration, but also the glorification of it, as if the entire world is one big gay bar. In fact, it would not be a stretch to say that Frank uses his morbid search for Mario as a pathetic and perverse pretense for engaging in voyeurism, exhibitionism, and promiscuous homo sex in an exceedingly exotic land as if he was acting out a lifelong fantasy he developed after listening to Duran Duran’s album Rio (1982) one too many times, because he is “hungry like the wolf” and seems like he is taking his one, “Last Chance on the Stairway” of self-sanctified sodomy. With its audaciously unapologetic message and in its attempt to turn a personal journey for nirvana and harmony into aberrant avant-garde pornography, Via Appia, for better or worse, has more honesty in a mere 5 minutes than a propagandistic poofer melodrama like Brokeback Mountain (2005) directed by Ang Lee has in its entirety.  With an erotic and exotic existentialist ending on a beach that makes for the queer cinema equivalent of the conclusion of François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Via Appia reminds one that life is a bitch, so you might as well have fun in the meantime, even if you contract AIDS in the process.

-Ty E