Senso

The female cuckold is certainly an underused figure in cinema, especially nowadays, which is probably partially the result of feminism and other sorts of social plagues that prop up women in a superficial way, but whatever the reason, it is certainly a damn shame. Out of all the films about cucks with cunts that I can think of, two classic melodramas especially stick out in my mind: William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949) and Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954). While both films feature wealthy yet naïve women who become almost willing victims to Don Juan-like characters that were played by bisexual men, Wyler’s film seems like classless counterfeit twaddle compared to the aesthetically aristocratic majesty of maestro Visconti’s visually orgasmic celluloid opera. An aesthetically revolutionary work for Guido cinema that also marked the director’s transition from commie-inspired neorealism to lavish and kaleidoscopic melodramas that make the great Technicolor of the Hollywood Golden Age seem like pumped up kitsch masquerading as high kultur, Senso was also Visconti’s first color film, yet it looks like the product of a seasoned master of colors who approached cinema the way a Renaissance painter would a painting. Based on the decadent 1882 novella of the same name written by Camillo Boito—an Italian architect and engineer of half Polish extraction who also happened to be a talented art historian and novelist who dabbled with dark themes like incest and necrophilia—Senso is a salacious slice of high-melodrama about ill-restraint, lust, treachery, decadence, and deceit set around 1866 in Risorgimento-era Italy during the end of the Italian-Austrian war of unification about a proud yet sexually repressed middle-aged countess in an unhappy marriage with an old fart who falls for an Austrian suave and dapper young Austrian Officer of the manipulative man-whore sort. Featuring Symphony No. 7 by Anton Bruckner as adapted by Nina Rota as a musical score and an antihero named in tribute to Gustav Mahler, the work also was one of the director’s first films where he would flex his Teutonophilia (of course, both the composers mentioned were technically Austrian, but the film was made with a post-WWII context kept in mind, as Bruckner’s music recalled the German occupation to viewers at the time the film was released). A work that somewhat attempts to ‘rehabilitate’ Italian nationalism, albeit from a revolutionary leftisti/‘proto-Bolshevik’ perspective, Senso makes an attempt at connecting the Italy of yesteryear to the present by using references to timeless feuds (i.e. Aryan occupation of Italy) and important historical locations (i.e. Salò, which is where the Nazis set up their puppet state in late 1943 after the Allies beat Mussolini’s ass) that would certainly be pertinent to Guido filmgoers when the film was first released. Originally featuring an ending that was banned by censors in the Italian government due to its unflattering (yet probably realistic) depiction of Austrian soldiers as drunken horndogs and eager defilers of women, Senso is a masterful example of subtle and elegant cinematic subversion with a truly timeless aristocratic flare.

 Opening at La Fenice opera house in Venice during a colorful performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s 1853 opera Il Trovatore aka The Troubadour during on May 27, 1866, Senso immediately lets the viewer know they are about to watch a rare operatic melodrama that seems like an immaculate reproduction of the time it depicts. At the conclusion of the character Manrico's reciting aria Di quella pira, the opera is rudely interrupted by a brazen and belligerent bunch of Italian left-wing nationalists who not only want the Austrian occupiers out of their country, but also the Austrian troops out of their opera house, for no Aryan could possibly understand the great Goombah opera. The rowdy protest was organized by an aristocrat named Marquis Roberto Ussoni (Massimo Girotti), whose unhappily married countess cousin Livia Serpieri (played by Italian diva and real-life Baroness Alida Valli, who was of partial Austrian aristocratic ancestry) is also in attendance at the opera, though unlike her flamboyant relative, she hides her patriotism and merely watches her cousin do all the work while she charms Austrian military men. As a result of his subversive activity and insulting an Austrian officer named Franz Mahler (played by American actor Farley Granger, who is best known for his roles in the Hitchcock classics Rope and Strangers on a Train), Roberto is sentenced into exile, but that does stop his sexually repressed cousin from starting a secret lurid love affair with the Austrian soldier who got her beloved relative banished. An oddball and decidedly deracinated officer who openly admits to his lover that he couldn't care less about the military, has no sense of patriotism/nationalism, and is described by his comrades as a predictably unpredictable philanderer who oftentimes disappears for long periods of times with strange women, Franz is not exactly the most ideal mensch for a cheating woman to fall in love with, but Countess Livia—a woman married to a wealthy Italian collaborator who kisses the ass of the Germanic occupier—is no longer in control of her emotions or so she learns when it is already too late, thus making her the perfect prey of a scheming Aryan Don Juan, who is quite conscious of his narcissism and even openly admits to his mistress: “I never pass by a mirror without looking at myself.” 

 While Livia initially manages to keep her hot and steamy love affair a deep dark secret by renting out an apartment on the other side of the city and meeting Franz there so they can make love, the Countess becomes crazed with heartbreak and jealously when the Austrian officer fails to meet her at one of their planned sensual sessions and goes all around town looking for her sweetheart, even visiting his military barracks and making a fool of herself. With war breaking out, Livia is forced by her husband to flee to the country so as to avoid possible death, but before she leaves, the Countess is told by a maid that a man has come to see her, so she gets excited and goes to meet her. Livia’s husband follows her, but the Countess does not care and confesses to her cuckolded hubby about her affair. Unfortunately for Livia, the man that came to see her was not Franz but her cousin Roberto, who has came back from exile and is more politically active than ever. Believing that his wife was only attempting to hide her cousin, Livia’s husband ignores his wife’s confession of extramarital deceit and attempts to win Roberto’s favor, as he know that as an Italian collaborator, he may face a bitter backlash from his fellow Italians. Upon her bittersweet reunion with his cousin Roberto, Livia is told to temporarily hold a jewelry box full of money and jewels which will be used to supply weapons for partisans who intend to fight the Austrian occupiers. Of course, little does Roberto realize that his cousin has become a slave of love to the very man that was responsible for his exile. 

 Although Livia flees to the country, Franz somehow finds her whereabouts and pays her an unexpected visit that will ultimately determine her romantically tragic fate. Of course, Livia is exceedingly happy to see Franz, who is only there to ask for money from his “wealthy patron.” A coward as well as a con man, Franz tells Livia about how certain Austrian soldiers can get exempted from battle by bribing corrupt doctors who certify that they are unfit for battle. Naturally, as a desperate woman who does not want her love to die on the battlefield, Livia gives Franz the money that Roberto told her to hold that was intended to fund the Italian partisans, who are destroyed as a direct result of her actions, as they are too ill-prepared to battle Aryan Übermenschen. Indeed, Livia is guilty of a double betrayal, or as she confesses herself, “Now I was irrevocably tied to him. For his sake I’d forsaken and betrayed everything for which the others were so desperately fighting – those dreams for which they had struggled so long to make reality.” While the Countess receives a letter from Franz saying he is safe, he warns her not to visit him, but her anxiety has gotten the best of her and she does so anyway, even traveling through hordes of injured soldiers returning from battle to see him. When Livia arrives at Franz’s apartment, she immediately notices he is living a life of luxury and lechery, as a would-be-playboy who is drunk with alcohol and guilt. After Franz states to Livia, “You shouldn’t have come. You were wrong to come, and you’ll be sorry you did. You see…I’m not an officer now. I’m not a gentleman now. I’m a drunken deserter. And I stink to high heaven of cowardice and vice!” the Countess hears the voice of a young woman crying out her lover’s name. Indeed, Franz has been using Livia’s money to pay for a regular prostitute named Clara (played by Marcella Mariani, whose acting career was tragically cut short when she was killed in a plane crash at the mere age of 19), who is much younger and more beauteous than the aged Countess. After forcing Livia to meet Clara and hatefully proclaiming, “I’m not your romantic hero. And I don’t love you anymore. I needed money and took it – that’s all,” Livia runs out of her meta-treacherous lover’s apartment while he calls her a “trollop” and even tells her break her neck on the way out.  Hysterical, heartbroken, and on the verge of insanity, Livia decides to go to the headquarters of the Austrian army to reveal that Franz is guilty of treason. After telling an Austrian general her story, Livia warns that her actions will make her nothing short of a murderer, but she does not care and tells the military man to carry out his duty. In the end, Franz is executed by firing squad and Livia runs into the night while calling the name of the man she condemned to death. 

 Notably, director Luchino Visconti originally intended to cast Ingrid Bergman and Marlon Brando for the lead roles. While I think that Alida Valli made for a wise replacement for Bergman, the less than Aryan looking Farley Granger was not exactly the best choice for the role. Rightfully determined to find a blond actor to play a blond Don Juan beast, Visconti apparently tried to hire various other popular heartthrobs for the role, including Tab Hunter, but he ultimately settled for Granger, whose hair he even attempted to dye blond. But then again, Granger was perfect for the role if one interprets the film from a less than philo-Semitic angle. Indeed, aside from the fact he is rather swarthy and played a character loosely based on a real-life gay Jewish child murder in Hitchock’s Rope (1948), Granger plays a role in Senso that Visconti intentionally named after the late-Romantic Jewish composer Gustav Mahler (indeed, in Boito’s source novel, the character’s name is ‘Remigio Ruz’). Additionally, Granger’s character could not be more anti-Aryan and stereotypically Jewish in character, as a cowardly and deracinated draft-dodger who is afraid of battle, as well as a cunning schemer who debases women from other nations, with the aristocrat always being the main target of the wandering Jew. Somewhat ironically, Visconti chose to use Anton Bruckner—a composer heavily associated with National Socialism who had a lot in common with Uncle Adolf (they were both Austrian-born Wagnerites from peasant backgrounds)—instead of the seemingly more fitting Mahler for the score. As Roger Hillman noted in a chapter on Senso in his book Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology (2005): “In a Viennese musical journal of October 1932, one critic takes to task the New York Bruckner Society for spreading propaganda for Mahler alongside Bruckner. He sees this as an affront to European sensitivities, and he counterpoints the two composers as “the Aryan Bruckner, our German composer, and Mahler, with the disintegration attendant of his Jewishness…On the one hand edification, on the other a destructive tendency, even modernism! This, too, makes interesting reading when approaching the sundered character of Visconti’s figure Mahler, who appears to the strains of Bruckner.” 

  Although producers hoped Senso would be a hit in the United States (hence its America male lead), it never really received a proper release in America, as it was only played at a couple Italian-language theaters that catered to unassimilated Guidos, thus making the film a lost masterpiece of sorts, at least among the Yanks. Somewhat interestingly, a butchered 94-minute English-language version of the film featuring dialogue written by Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles was released in England and later the United States under the somewhat sleazy sexploitation-like title The Wanton Countess, but of course the film somewhat betrays Visconti's original vision.  Additionally, nearly a half a century after the film's initial release, quasi-pornographer Tinto Brass (Salon Kitty, Caligula) also remade Senso under the title Senso '45 (2002) aka Black Angel, though he made the story much more cynical, replaced Bruckner with an original score by maestro Ennio Morricone, and changed the setting from Risorgimento-era Italy to the Fascist era, with the female protagonist falling for an SS officer instead of a first lieutenant in the Austrian army. On top of that, frog Television hack Gérard Vergez adapted Boito's novel for the French TV series La grande collection (1991-current) in 1993 under the original title Senso in a work starring Chiara Caselli (who Americans probably best know for her roles in Gus van Sant's 1991 masterpiece My Own Private Idaho and Liliana Cavani's 2002 hit Ripley's Game) as the lead and featuring Jean-Pierre Aumont. A socio-politically-conscious melodrama like Gone with the Wind (1939) of the lavish, luscious, and sensually-charged sort, albeit much more cultivated and aristocratic, Senso is a rare look at history and class from the perspective of a true blue, blue blood who ultimately proved he was right when he said, “Melodrama has a bad reputation because it has been abandoned to schematic and conventional interpretation.” Indeed, it is harder to think of a film that is more simple yet sophisticated, as a work with a misleadingly simple storyline that is layered with subtext and allegorical aesthetic references that only the most cultured of viewers will understand, at least in any more meaningful way. 

-Ty E

Visions (1977)

Admittedly, surrealist operatic porn seems like a superlatively stupid and patently pointless concept, but then again it also sounds quite intriguing, especially if you’re a somewhat peculiar person like me who only watches old school blue movies for potential aesthetic value. As far as I know, the only somewhat operatic fuck flick that exists is the lost classic of lechery, Visions (1977) aka Larrys saftiga porrdrömmar directed by stage manager/director turned porn auteur turned ‘legit’ exploitation hack Chuck Vincent (Blue Summer, Roommates) under the curious Hispanic pseudonym ‘Felix Miguel Arroyo.’ While best known for humorous yet hot porn flicks starring sensual superstars like Veronica Hart, Samantha Fox, and Jamie Gillis, Vincent is best known for creating a seriously dark, phantasmagoric, experimental, and just plain bizarre feature with Visions, hence why he probably opted for using a pen name instead of his own, as it certainly does not seem like it was directed by the same pornographer. A sort of marginally melancholy heterosexual equivalent to Wakefield Poole’s avant-garde fag fuck flick Bijou (1972) as a mostly silent film that is largely set in a sort of pitch black pornographic pandemonium featuring giant genitals and phantom butt-fuckers, Vincent’s transcendentally salacious piece of celluloid has been described by some reviewers as the porn film you might expect Nordic Northern American auteur Guy Maddin to make, yet the film is far too serious and ‘sexually sound’ to have been directed by the incest and all-around-perversion-obsessed man that directed such idiosyncratic works as Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) and Careful (1992). Indeed, one of the most intriguing things about Visions is that everything is played ‘straight’ and is never tongue-in-cheek, which is quite unusual for a man whose specialty is comedy-driven cumshots. Of course, like the equally artistically endowed auteur pornographer the Amero Brothers (Bacchanale, The Death of Scorpio), Vincent was a rampant homo who made rampantly hetero porn flicks during the great Golden Age of Porn aka ‘Porn Chic’ era. Indeed, a work featuring a fairy-like fellow with a prepubescent mustache performing cunnilingus on an extra-exotic flapper sitting on a swing juxtaposed to the potent yet hardly pornographic sounds of Richard Wagner’s “Die Walküre” aka “The Valkyrie,” as well as a watching passively as the ghost of his beloved wife sucks the cocks of jagged rock formations, Visions is a curious collection of vice-ridden Gothic and absurdist visions contained with tantalizing and oftentimes even tasteful tableaux that reminds one that there is oftentimes a rather thin line between art and pornography, for both typically wallow in ritual and fetishism. 

 Melancholy musical composer Larry (played by Wade Nichols of Armand Weston’s 1978 pornographic Oscar Wilde adaptation Take Off and Radley Metzger’s 1979 work Maraschino Cherry) cannot get over the tragic death of his lover (Susan McBain), so he spends all his free time composing music while imagining his wife dancing to his compositions. One night while practicing at a study, Larry is approached by a philosophizing Janitor (W.P. Dremak) who asks him if he does anything aside from practice like party. Of course, as Larry explains regarding his music, “this is my party.” After giving Larry a swig of liquor, the Janitor proceeds to get on his figurative soapbox and begins berating the composer’s work for its lack of soulfulness, stating in bastardized American English: “Larry…I’m gonna tell ya’ something. Your playin’ ain’t so hot. Oh now, you got all the notes right, but it’s empty…you lack mystery in your music…soul…you understand what I mean? You gotta get a life-force in it. All those longhairs had to do it, like that, uh, Beethoven fellow…didn’t he die of cirrhosis or syphilis or something like that? Yeah, and Mozart…MOZ-ART…now he was a wild one too. How do you think they wrote great music? By feeding great emotions! Did you ever fall in love with anybody? Really in love with them – more than yourself. I did.” After Larry once again sees a vision of his dead wife, he leaves the studio room to follow her, which makes the Janitor think that he has offended him with his harsh words, so he yells to the musicians, “I think you’re gonna be great one day. I really do.” When Larry enters another room, he bumps into two dorky looking burglars (David Christopher and Michael Thorpe) and is soon hit over the head and knocked unconscious by one of the goons, thus transporting him to a sexually surreal netherworld of gigantic genitals and operatic orgies. 

 After entering the sexually surreal underworld, Larry follows his sensual somnambulist-like lover through various rather risqué orgy rooms. After a long romantic rendezvous with his lover on a fur-adorned bed in what seems to be a cave which is lit up by hundreds of cameras, Larry loses his significant other after being temporarily woken up by the Janitor, who ultimately fails to fully revive him. From there, Larry enters a vice-ridden vaudeville-themed room featuring a cunt-licking Uncle Sam with a faggy frog mustache, a swing-riding flapper with exotic make-up, a midget ringmaster (played by Luis De Jesus aka ‘Mr. Short Stud’), a raunchy redhead, and a construction worker who looks like a member of the Village People. Although Larry does not really join in their somewhat sinister seeming sexscapades, he does get erotically embroiled in an angelic all-white orgy room where he is treated to a long session of skull-buggery, which is topped off with classic coitus. After suffering a heart attack after being checked by two dorky paramedics, Larry enters a hardcore hedonistic hell where he is tiedto a stake and is forced to witness the sadistic torture of the two burglars that hit him over the head by big black beastess and her equally cruel Caucasoid comrade. After one of the burglars faces death via medieval sword to the chest, Larry is set free by his captors and is reunited with his lover who takes him to a dark yet fiery room where they make love and are ultimately united forever. Indeed, while the Janitor yells to Larry’s corpse, “Larry, don’t leave us. You can make it,” the musical composer decides to stay with his love for eternity by accepting death. 

 Like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) meets a heterosexual take on Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) with a splash of gentile vaudeville, Vincent’s Visions is not only a visually fantastic fuck flick that is more about phantasmagoria than frivolous fetishism, but is also a genuinely romantic porn picture that will most likely be more enjoyable to lovers than erotically-challenged losers who live with their grandmothers and are merely looking for a cheap and quick masturbation aid.  Indeed, more than anything else, the film seems like the most ambitious and desperate attempt of a real creatively repressed artist who is forced to make a living as a pornographer at truly expressing express himself.  Needless to say, as a work of celluloid art, Visions is a somewhat incoherent cinematic vision, but as porn, it is an unequivocal singular masterpiece that manages to reasonably successfully seamlessly combine poetry and pornography in a way that sometimes makes you forget that you're watching a woman sucking the cock of a rock.

-Ty E

Under the Skin

Mainstream big budget arthouse films are certainly a strange and mostly oxymoronic anomaly of cinema, with Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) being more recent examples of this bastard cinematic breed that is known to divide filmgoers of all different types. Unquestionably, Judaic Brit Glazer’s film has probably managed to divide viewers more than any other film of 2013 as an artsy fartsy sci-fi flick that features seductive ½ Nordic Jewess Scarlett Johansson as an oftentimes naked femalien fatale who harvests the bodies of mostly ugly and short Scotsmen by luring them to her deadly apartment with her busty body and tricking them into walking into an innards-and-bones-draining abyss. Directed by a man who got his first big break in filmmaking by directing music videos and adverts, Under the Skin is naturally big on aesthetics and style and low on emotion, subtext, and nuance, yet a good portion of filmgoers and film critics have treated it as the most innately baffling, arcane, and inexplicable films ever made, thus demonstrating the complete and utter lack of cinematic literacy among the general public. Indeed, Glazer’s work seems like it was directed by the bastard broad of a rape committed by a senile Tarkovsky against the philistine daughter of Kubrick, as an undeniably aesthetically striking and ethereally atmospheric work with about as much emotional depth as the truly inhuman erotic extraterrestrial played by Ms. Johansson. Partially experimental in the sense that Johansson went driving around in a van with hidden cameras and hit on random unwitting Scottish men in what are ultimately totally unscripted scenes that capture that rather rare event of average-to-ugly men being seduced by a somewhat wanton woman that is considered one of Hollywood's top sex icons, Under the Skin is a film that manages to combine cinéma vérité and Candid Camera with a sort of pseudo-Kubrickian technical perfectionism and marginally philosophical pessimism for mankind. Loosely based on the 2000 surrealist sci-fi novel of the same name written by wandering Dutch novelist Michel Faber (who, although currently residing in Scotland, is 100% Dutch), Under the Skin is a work of modernist sci-fi (post)folk horror that manages to mix contemporary special effects with Heimat-like landscape scenes in a work that makes Glasgow, Scotland seem like a scenic and beauteous yet mostly melancholy and decidedly dispiriting place that is inhabited by a surplus of physical and emotional cripples who would bring great disgrace to their ancestors. By no means anything resembling a masterpiece, Glazer’s film is a sort of blueprint for what Hollywood should (but never would) strive for if they wanted to create more demanding audiences, as a work that straddles a reasonably healthy line between cinematic art and accessible entertainment. Indeed, I must admit that coercing Johansson into getting completely unclad for the film was a clever way to con normal people into seeing a patently pretentious arthouse science fiction flick. While Under the Skin may not be anywhere near as great as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), it is certainly the most innately idiosyncratic and (anti)erotic mainstream sci-fi flick since Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) starring David Bowie, which also deals with the central theme of an alien coming to earth and ultimately becoming debased by mankind. 

 Although never actually revealed in the film, Faber’s book is about aliens that are sent to earth by a wealthy extraterrestrial corporation to lure in lonely hitchhikers whose flesh is sold as a delicacy on the alien mother planet (in that sense, the film had the potential to vaguely resemble Peter Jackson's early darkly comedic splatter flick Bad Taste (1987)).  After a long and rather pretentious close-up shots of eyeballs juxtaposed with the unsettling sounds of an alien attempting to learn the English language, Under the Skin begins with an alien motorcyclist (played by real-life British champion motorcycle road racer Jeremy McWilliams)—a sort of ruthless extraterrestrial overseer who makes sure that female aliens successfully execute their jobs regarding the hunting and procuring male earthlings—scooping up the seemingly dead body of a young woman off the side of a road and putting it in the back of a van. Although never clearly indicated, the lifeless woman is an alien who has assumedly failed at her mission, as she has done the unthinkable by developing human emotions like empathy and sadness, as indicated when she sheds a tear (the sole indication that she is not completely dead). An unclad buxom alien babe (Scarlett Johansson) strips her corpse-like alien comrade and puts on her clothes, as she has replaced the disgraced extraterrestrial femme fatale predator as a superficially salacious spacewoman whose is main mission is to procure young, lonely, and horny Scotsmen via her glaring streetwalker chic sexual appeal. To complete her already alluring femme fatale uniform, the alien seductress drives to a mall in her van and buys some pink lipstick. The first young man the Alien attempts to pickup is so intimated by her out-of-the-world beauty and uncommonly aggressive advances that he declines her offer for a free ride, thereupon unwittingly saving his own life in the process.  Of course, most of the men the Alien encounters are not so lucky and not a single one of them gets to probe her pussy.  Indeed, aside from being a cold and calculating extraterrestrial cunt killer, the pseudo-amorous Alien is a genuine cocktease who does not even give her victims a free sample of her flesh before killing them, as she is seemingly asexual, at least when it comes to alien species.

 When the Alien does finally manage to lure a man into her van, she coerces him into following her back to her ‘apartment’, which is nothing more than a perfectly pitch black room with a sinking abyss-like floor, which imprisons the prey in a manner not that unlike a spiderweb. Like the prey of a spider, the men are not killed instantly but most bide their time in almost darkness.  When the unlucky hitchhiker follows the undressing Alien through her apartment as if he is completely possessed and has tapped into the most archaic part of his brain during some sort of atavistic awakening, he strips off his clothes (with his erect penis literally guiding the way!) and eventually sinks into the floor and disappears without even attempting to put up a fight. The next day, the Alien goes to a rocky beach and approaches a Czech man (Kryštof Hádek) who seems somewhat disinterested in her, as if he can sense that she is an evil succubus bitch. When the Czech man attempts to save a drowning couple, the emotionless Alien watches the totally tragic scenario in a completely unmoved fashion while a baby screams hysterically in the background, thus demonstrating her complete and utter incapacity for empathizing with humans. When the Czech man washes up on the shore half-drowned after failing to rescue the couple, the Alien cravenly hits him on the head with a rock and takes his inanimate body with her. Later that night, the motorcycle-riding Overseer comes back to the beach and collects everything at the scene of the tragedy except the drowned couple’s baby, who continues to wail in the darkness (interestingly, the Alien later hears on the radio that although the husband’s corpse was found, the baby and wife are still missing). When the Alien goes to a club and procures a sleazy Chav-like scumbug, the macabre mechanism of the extraterrestrial’s killer apartment is eventually revealed. Indeed, after a human falls through the liquid abyss located on the apartment’s floor, their blood, guts, and bones are eventually sucked out and sent down a large conveyor belt, with the deflated skin of the victim being the only thing that remains. Undoubtedly, these gutless pieces of floating epidermis resemble the sort of grotesquely distorted human figures that you might expect Irish-born Figurative painter Francis Bacon to have painted. 

 Eventually, everything comes falling apart for the femalien fatale when she begins doing what led to her predecessor's downfall by developing human emotions and feelings of empathy for her human prey. It is the job of motorcyclist Overseer to inspect the female alien to see if she is beginning to develop any human emotions, which he does by staring deeply into her cold and seemingly lifeless pupils. One night while prowling the streets in her van, the Alien spots and picks up a horribly disfigured fellow of the friendless and assumedly virginal sort that looks like the Elephant Man (the role was played by a real-life disfigured man named Adam Pearson who works in TV production and suffers from facial neurofibromatosis) and she eventually manages to swoon him by complimenting his “beautiful hands” (notably, Pearson apparently suggested to Glazer how a woman might successfully seduce him, which was ultimately incorporated into the film's screenplay). While the Alien also lures the Elephant Man back to her extraterrestrial murder factory of an apartment and seduces the poor disfigured man into being consumed by the abyss (he states, “...dream, yes, dreaming...” while in a seemingly hypnotized state as the Alien takes her clothes off), she later has second thoughts after noticing a trapped fly and decides to let her prey go, though she does not bother to give him his clothes back, thus the deformed monster mensch must suffer the public humiliation of going au naturel in the countryside. Indeed, the disfigured dude escapes to the Scottish Highlands but unfortunately the crotch-rocket-riding Overseer decides to hunt him down and catches him just as he makes way into the backyard of his suburban home. 

 Meanwhile, the Alien decides to ditch her job, so she abandons her van and attempts to live like a normal human being. Of course, nothing quite works, as the Alien lacks both the psychological and biological characteristic of a real human. Aside from gagging/choking upon attempting to eat like humans do by taking a bite out of a pie, the Alien makes for a rather pathetic lover. Indeed, after meeting a guy at a bus stop whose home she temporarily stays in, the Alien attempts to consummate coitus for the first time, but freaks out when the man’s member gets too close to her nether-regions. After spreading her legs and holding a lamp over her bearded clam to get a good look at what is inside, the Alien flees the man’s home out of assumed fear and embarrassment and seeks isolation in a 2,000 acre forest where she finds a bothy to sleep in. Not long after arriving in the forest, the Alien runs into a low-class middle-aged Logger who warns her to watch her step, though he adds regarding the area, “It’s a nice place if you want some solitude.” Of course, the Alien learns otherwise when she is rudely awakened the next morning to the same Logger molesting her body with his sneaky hands. Needless to say, the Logger subsequently attempts to violently rape the Alien but he is quite taken aback after accidentally ripping the extraterrestrial’s fake white girl epidermis, thus revealing that “under the skin” she is not actually human, but a dark phantom-like being. Indeed, after the Alien decides to tear off the rest of the skin off, a svelte and featureless black body is revealed that completely lacks all the warm positive qualities one associates with the physique of mankind. Before she knows it, the Logger returns and doses the Alien with gasoline and lights her on fire. In the end, the Alien burns alive, with her ashes floating back to the sky where she once came from. As for the motorcycling Overseer, he stands stoically on a hill while looking for his missing space slut in a rather aesthetically pleasing shot that resembles a landscape painting by German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. 

 Undoubtedly, I would be lying if I did not admit that I was reasonably entertained by Under the Skin, even if it is a purely aesthetic-driven work of the rather shallow sort that ironically critiques the supposed innate shallowness of human beings, especially males, which is made most clear at the end of the film when the rapist Logger kills the femalien fatale played by Scarlett Johansson that he previously wanted to fuck after it is revealed that her human pulchritude is only skin-deep and is purely counterfeit.  Admittedly, I have read various interpretations of the film, especially of the frigid feminist and male cuckold sort, and I have found most of these critiques to be complete and utter bollocks (to borrow a goofy word from where the film was set), yet reading these reviews/articles made me realize that Under the Skin has gotten people thinking, which is quite a rarity in cinema nowadays. While I somewhat doubt it was the director's conscious decision, I personally interpreted the film as a tragic metaphysical horror depiction of the archetypical ‘Seductive Jewess’—a descendent of Salome and every Rothschild daughter—as a work where a true racial outsider seduces and kills dumb European goy boys for the benefit of her kinfolk. Of course, what better Seductive Jewess than Scarlett Johansson for the role as someone that is proudly Hebraic yet looks rather Aryan due to the fact that she is the progeny of a Swedish man (isn't it ironic that virtually all of the most attractive Israelites have mixed blood and look the least stereotypically Jewish?!), even if her behavior and the expressions in her eyes say otherwise. It should be noted that ‘British’ director Jonathan Glazer is not only Jewish, but proudly so, with him once stating in a June 7, 2001 interview for the JewishJournal.com, “Cinema, synagogue, what's the difference? […] You get fairly dominant Jewish personalities in both.” Of course, had Glazer been a goy and stated the same thing, he would probably been instantly blacklisted from Hollywood, but I digress. In addition to tribe members Johansson and Glazer, the film was co-produced by American Hebrew Nick Wechsler and the musical score was composed by English bull-dyke-like Jewess Mica Levi, thus making it a largely Semitic sci-fi creation. 

 Like the stupid male pawns featured in Under the Skin, countless culturally cuckolded males from America and Europe (and pretty much everywhere else) worship Johansson while being totally oblivious to the open secret that her tribesmen pollute peoples’ minds via Hollywood and countless media outlets, destroy their countries by de-industrializing them and flooding them with mostly hostile and uneducated aliens from the third world, and start seemingly perennial doomed-to-fail wars in the Middle East and elsewhere that are fought by mostly white males in what is ultimately a real-life dystopian scenario that is more or less reflected in John Carpenter's cult sci-fi flick They Live (1988). Indeed, Johansson’s character’s succubus-like seduction powers are so great in the film that she merely needs to strip and a character looses all capacity for rational though and conscious thinking and subsequently walks into a dark abyss to his own death. And, of course, like the wandering Jew in a foreign land, Johansson’s character only faces true conflict when she begins to empathize with humanity and attempts to live the life of a normal human being, which one can argue is an allegorical reference to Jewish assimilation (which has been described as the “Silent Holocaust” among certain hysterical Jewish groups and leaders). Either way, whatever way you approach Under the Skin, one gets the feeling that the root of all female evil is pussy, which is a message that virtually any man can relate to. With that being said, one can also argue that the film carries the message that if women actually learned to empathize with males instead of being completely self-absorbed and oftentimes scheming opportunists, they would perish just as Johansson’s character does.  Somewhat notably, Under the Skin is oftentimes compared to the films of Stanley Kubrick who, like Glazer, was a Judaic who was not big on emotional depth but was certainly keen on cultural pessimism, especially within a post-WWII Western context. While I am not exactly sure the sort of cultural pessimism, if any, that Glazer was trying to disseminate with his film aside from the obvious, Under the Skin is certainly a foreboding and apocalyptic work where, somewhat absurdly, the most stunning person is a Jewess and most of the whites seem like the distantly related kinfolk of the cast of Judaic junky auteur Harmony Korine’s cinematic debut Gummo (1997), which is also a work that makes it seem like the Occident is taking its last gasp. 

 -Ty E

Ostkreuz

I have certainly seen more kraut flicks than the typical uncultivated American slob and I can say without hesitation that Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye Lenin! (2003) is one of the most revoltingly contrived, sickeningly sentimental, and just plain intolerably kitschy and phony German films that I have ever seen, as if it was made specifically for American high school cheerleaders so as to trick them into learning about the reunification while they wet their panties for swarthy Teutonic mutt Daniel Brühl. I may not be German, but I do like an unhealthy number of malignantly melancholy Deutscher flicks and I can happily report that there are more than a couple of films about the German reunification (aka ‘Die Wende’) that, unlike Becker's conspicuously crappy kraut blockbuster, wallow in Weltschmerz and bleed bleakness. Indeed, in the late great Christoph Schlingensief’s art-trash splatter flick The German Chainsaw Massacre (1990) aka Das deutsche Kettensägen Massaker, a cannibalistic family of West German kraut redneck capitalist Nazis kill, cook, and eat newly arrived krauts from the east. Additionally, in Aryan degenerate Oskar Roehler’s quasi-neo-expressionistic flick No Place to Go (2000) aka Die Unberührbare—a work based on the director’s own mother’s final days—a Leninist novelist from the West finally realizes her dream of a commie utopia is nothing more than an absurd fantasy after the fall of the Berlin Wall, so she opts for killing herself by jumping out of a window, but not before buying an exceedingly expensive Christian Dior coat, attempting to buy speed from her son, and being institutionalized. Sapphic auteur Ulrike Ottinger’s minimalistic yet nonetheless epic documentary Countdown (1990)—a work shot on both sides of the wall chronicling the weeks leading up to the reunification, hence the title—makes both sides of Berlin seem like one gigantic post-industrial cultural graveyards inhabited by scheming gypsies and haunted by the ghosts of German Jewry. Undoubtedly, the Teutonic neo-neorealist work Ostkreuz (1991) aka Westkreuz directed by Michael Klier (The Grass Is Greener Everywhere Else, Farland) also follows in the less than timeless tradition of decidedly dejecting reunification flicks. Sort of like a Germany Year Zero 2.0, albeit following a firecrotch teenage girl as opposed to a adolescent blond boy, Klier’s film—a work advertised by its German distributor Filmgalerie 451 as telling, “the episodic story of 15-year-old Elfie, who literally and metaphorically inhabits a no-man’s-land between the two Germanys during the Wende”—is just as much about the loss of ‘Heimat’ in Germany in general as it is about the oftentimes overlooked negative effects of the reunification. Directed by a Sudeten German that was born in 1943 whose family was expelled from Eastern Europe, landed in East Germany in 1947, and eventually fled to the West in 1961, Ostkreuz certainly depicts depressed and destitute Germans, but also features even more patently pathetic Slavs, especially Polacks, as if Berlin turned into a human toilet for the Slavic lands. Featuring great naturalistic performances from actors who have starred in works ranging from Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik (1987) to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing (1988) to Tom Tykwer’s obscenely overrated Teutonic celluloid turd Run Lola Run (1998), Ostkreuz is an undeniably potent and important work, but it is also gratingly sad and culturally pessimistic flick that, although in color, could not feature a more colorless and expressionless world. 

 Elfie (Laura Tonke) is a 15-year-old redheaded teenage girl who lives the undignified existence of sleeping in a ‘containerlager’ (a sort of large metal storage container) with her single mother (Suzanne von Borsody) in Potsdamer Platz. Of course, they would like to live in an actual apartment but they need at least need 3000 marks for a security deposit, so Elfie tries to do various odd jobs to obtain the money, including cleaning storefront windows for 10 marks a job and selling assumedly stolen Jap car radios to people that live in the same containerlager ghetto as she does. Of course, Elfie becomes all the more inclined to want to raise the money when she notices that her mother is screwing a scumbag slob of a neighbor named Henry (Henry Marcinkowski).  As for Elfie's father, he is never mentioned. One day, Elfie spots a blond Polack thief named Darius (Miroslaw Baka) getting in a scuffle with a store owner and she snags the con’s wallet when it falls out of his pocket. Of course, Darius catches up with Elfie and takes his money back, but their less than ideal meeting also sires a parasitic relationship between the two very desperate people. Needless to say, before she knows it, Elfie is peddling counterfeit cash for Darius (who strategically has the teen do his dirty work because she is underage and cannot get in serious trouble like an adult) and she is almost instantly caught, but she does not squeal to the pigs. Upon talking to Darius' rather bitchy (ex)girlfriend Karla (Beatrice Manowski of Buttgereit's Nekromantik), Elfie is warned, “you better be careful with Darius.”  Indeed, Darius is such a degenerate and morally vacant dude that he has no problem exploiting desperate women, even if it comes at the cost of their safety.  Elfie is also told by Karla’s younger brother Edmund (Stefan Cammann) that his sister and Darius were previously in Bulgaria but something went wrong after they committed some sort of crime, so they both landed in prison as a result. 

 At home, things are no better for Elfie, as she overhears her mom’s boyfriend Henry talking about kicking her out. When Elfie’s mom remarks that Henry plans to buy them a bigger container to live in, the angst-ridden teen snidely remarks, “So he can fuck you without being disturbed,” thus resulting in the mouthy little lady being slapped in the face. Meanwhile, Darius proposes a dubious black market meat scheme to Elfie with a supposed markup of 1000%. When the meat finally arrives from Poland, Darius only receives a semi-rotting pig corpse which he is too lazy to carry, so he drops the beast carcass, kicks it like a weak pansy with a bad attitude problem, and walks away like the perennial loser that he is. Naturally, Elfie becomes rather disgusted when the pathetic prole Pole degenerate attempts to make out with her in a rather aggressive fashion. Ultimately, Elfie takes advantage of Darius' innate laziness and manages to sell the pig on her own after finding an ancient wooden cart and hauling it to a prospective buyer. Of course, Elfie’s mom is somewhat creeped out when Darius shows up at her home and asks to wait for her daughter.  Despite Darius' clearly questionable intentions, Elfie's rather negligent mother lets the Pole stay. When Elfie finally arrives home to the ‘containerlager’ find delinquent Darius in her room, she is more than just a little bit irked, but he hands her a fat wad of cash and coerces her into riding all the way to the bottom of Siberia with him and his sleazy middle-aged Polack comrade Gustaw (Gustaw Barwicki) to sell a shitty old beat-up used car. Since Elfie knows Russian, Darius plans to use her as translator when they talk to the car buyers, which include a Mongol and some sleazy Turkish-looking fellow. When the buyers arrive, they notice that Darius has not brought the car he advertised and a fight breaks out, with the Mongol even threatening Elfie with a gun. Though Elfie manages to escape, weak cowards Darius and his Gustaw leave her behind, thus she must fend for herself and travel all the way back to Germany on her own, which proves to be an extra miserable experience as she has a wounded arm. 

 When Elfie arrives back at home, she becomes so agitated upon hearing her mother fucking Henry in the other room that she decides to runoff to her trashy taxi-driver grandfather’s apartment.  Rather pathetically, Elfie's grandfather is admired by the family because he at least has a job as a taxi-driver. Not exactly the most ideal granddaughter, Elfie decides to steal her opa’s entire Meißen porcelain plate set and abruptly leaves without saying so much as a goodbye. While walking around Alexanderplatz station, Elfie inevitably bumps into Darius, who absurdly remarks after noticing her valuable porcelain collection, “You’ll always be cheated if you’re alone,” as if he has not cheated her a number of times already. Deciding that she does not want to get screwed over again, Elfie calls the cops on Darius and he is soon hauled away. After selling the Meißen collection, Elfie has enough money to pay for the deposit for an apartment, but things do not exactly workout as perfectly as she planned. When Elfie shows her mother the money, she acts ungrateful and threatens to get rid of her if she continues to start quarrels. When they finally get a new apartment, Elfie decides to stay behind at the last minute, as she wants nothing to do with her mother’s boyfriend and their seemingly parasitic relationship. Ultimately, Elfie hooks up with Karla’s little brother Edmund and even buys the lad a large meal and beer at a fancy restaurant, though they are initially denied entry by the waiter due to their rather disheveled appearances. After Elfie waves around cash to prove she can pay, the waiter sets up a table for the two teens to sit at that is away from the regular customers, so as not to offend the other patron's sensitive bourgeois sensibilities. In the end, Elfie’s future looks rather bleak, but at least she now has a (boy)friend and has developed a new sense of independence. 

 Out of all the German filmmakers that have dealt with gritty proletarian realism, Michael Klier is probably the most pessimistic and anti-aesthetically-inclined. Indeed, the works of (Roland Klick (Bübchen, Supermarkt), Uwe Schrader (Kanakerbraut aka White Trash, Sierra Leone), Uwe Frießner (Das Ende des Regenbogens aka The End of the Rainbow, Baby), East German documentarian Jürgen Böttcher (Jahrgang '45 aka Born in '45, Martha), Canadian-born Austrian auteur John Cook (Schwitzkasten, Artischocke), and Klaus Lemke (Rocker, Paul) seem almost ‘upbeat’ and ‘optimistic’ compared to the seeming pathological filmic forlornness of Ostkreuz, which makes the future of post-Wende Germany seem even more hopelessly horrid than most works belonging to the post-WWII Trümmerfilm genre. Indeed, while she may not be hooked on junk or peddling her gash for cash, the protagonist of Klier’s film makes the eponymous anti-heroine of Christiane F. – We Children from Bahnhof Zoo (1981) seem like a decadent countess by comparison, as the thought of happiness has been totally extinguished from her forsaken soul. Needless to say, Ostkreuz is not exactly the sort of film that has great replay value unless you’re the sort of person that has a thing for semi-homely teenage train wrecks who seem somewhat asexual. Unquestionably, one of the most entertaining aspects of the film for me was seeing pathetic Polack Darius—a sort of failed male femme fatale (or ‘l'homme fatal’) who is just too plain dumb and ugly to be successful with his calculating and conniving behavior—exploit protagonist Elfie in a somewhat ‘psychopathic’ fashion. Of course, Darius is just too decidedly dumb to be an actual psychopath. Indeed, Darius fulfills any Polish stereotype a person can think of and then some, as a majorly moronic small-time conman whose rather repellant exterior is only transcended by his craven character. A work deriving its name from an S-Bahn station in East Berlin linking the north, south, east and west, Ostkreuz ultimately makes it seem like there is no future in Germany no matter what route you take, but then again, the film also reveals that no matter how bad a German’s life gets, it will always be better than that of a Pole, thus demonstrating that history has a way of repeating itself, even after nearly half of a century's worth of Soviet style repression and slavery. 

-Ty E

How Good the Whites Are

Maybe it is because of the unfortunate admixture of Sub-Saharan African blood among certain southern Goombahs or that they are unlike Nords and are less timid about saying what they think and expressing how they feel, but out of all the great European peoples, the Italians have had the most testicular fortitude when it comes to cinematically depicting the than less than good, almost always bad, and the uniquely ugly in regard to the Dark Continent. Indeed, from Mondo maestros Jacopetti and Prosperi’s singularly scathing post-colonialism-themed schockumentary Africa addio (1966) to the nasty apocalyptic artsploitation nihilism of Alberto Cavallone’s Afrika (1973), Guido filmmakers have always been at the forefront of depicting post-colonial Africa as a virtual hell-on-earth that is plagued poverty, war, starvation, rape, disease and—arguably the most ugly thing of all—European altruism. Of course, it should be no surprise that Milanese auteur Marco Ferreri (Dillinger Is Dead, La Grande Bouffe) would make a movie mocking those hopelessly neurotic and decidedly deracinated white degenerates who make it their big business to save wild starving negroes in negroland. Indeed, the Spanish-Italian-French co-production Ya bon les blancs (1988) aka How Good the Whites Are aka Come sono buoni i bianchi depicts a fiercely farcical fable-like vision from Ferreri’s typically ruthless perspective where naïve white liberals attempt to give starving African spaghetti and tomato sauce as aid, ugly Italians attempt boning bloated black native broads, a Catholic priest is gang-raped while he eats Russian chicken and stares at the starved corpse of a preteen negro boy, a deranged jigaboo wearing a white mask claims to whites that he is a real white man and that they are imposters that must leave, and a group of cannibalistic negroid nomads who eat two crackers that dare to sully their magical waterhole. Shot in Morocco, the film is clearly one of the most aesthetically flaccid and least thought out works in Ferreri's rather striking oeuvre, yet it is still a consistently hilarious little romp that completely reams the figurative rectums of ethno-masochistic whites who feel spiritually lost on their own continents and thus feel the need to put their noses in poor Africans' business. Indeed, from French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud to great miscegenation-obsessed English explorer Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, restless Europeans have always journeyed to distant lands like Africa in a desperate attempt to find solace from their forsaken souls, yet the whites of How Good the Whites Are are soft bourgeois wankers, misguided lily liberals, and miscegenation-celebrating cranks who think living in a third world country is as simple as riding in an airplane and who ultimately finds themselves to be victims of their own naivety in regard to the truly archaic way of predatorial pickaninnies who do not buy into decadent white man scams like liberalism and multiculturalism. Undoubtedly, if you're the kind of person that derives Schadenfreude from seeing white wimps getting their just deserts from patronizingly groveling to sand savages, Ferreri’s grotesque little piece of celluloid cultural sensitivity training is just for you.

The crackers of How Good the Whites Are are not really good at anything, not even when it comes to simply transferring food to starving sand spades via large trucks, or so one quickly learns while watching Ferreri’s fiercely facetious film. Although initially rather idealistic about the prospect of deriving self-satisfaction from feeding dying illiterate jigaboos in North Africa's Sahel region, the ethnically eclectic group of white do-gooders of 'Operation Blue Angel' (they described themselves as, “the women and children of Bergamo, Italy, Ropesa, Spain, Villeneuve, France”) will be asking themselves: “Why didn’t we stay in Europe?,” by the end of the film.  Led be a particularly pompous pansy Spaniard named Diego Ramirez (Juan Diego) who acts like an anally retentive French fairy and does not like getting his hands dirty yet thinks it will be a good idea to travel through unpredictable African war-zones to deliver spaghetti, tomato sauce, and powdered milk to negroes in need, Operation Blue Angel is unquestionably made up of the European bourgeois’ most weak and neurotic rabble, with every member suffering some sort of repellant quirk that is even instantly spotted by the sand negroes. Almost immediately upon arriving in Africa, the group is swindled out of most of their foreign aid by a goofy black brother named Vincent Dupont de Protocol (Ben Taleb Moha) who, among other things, likes showing off his European language skills and hustling naive crackers. Indeed, Vincent takes the group to a fancy motel where his entire family has been staying and gives the white suckers the bill (which Diego hilariously describes as being “barbaric”) as he knows the white altruists are big enough bitches that they will pay it, but they don’t have any money so they have to give up a large fraction of their spaghetti to pay off the dubious debt. Of course, this incident of Afro-hustling is nothing compared to the true savagery the group will ultimately face at the hands black tribesmen who do not take too kindly to white devils in their sacred savage lands. As one of the characters remarks regarding the murder trends in Africa, “Last year almost 10,000 [died]. Africa is dangerous.” 

 While featuring a dozen or so characters, the film many revolves around a decidedly dumb Dutch single mother named Nadia (Maruschka Detmers) and a sleazy middle-aged Guido named Michel (Michele Placido) who immediately attempts to get in young girl's pants by discussing how he would like to get involved in a “good intellectual rapport” with her.  Pseudo-macho horn-dog Michel also has a thing for dark meat and does not minding getting inside the toga of an overweight negress tribeswoman every once in a while. Although the Blue Angels decide to hire an adventurer that sort of looks like a chubby version of Adolf Eichmann named Peter (Jean-François Stévenin) to help guide them to Sahel, he ultimately takes them through war-zones occupied by less than gregarious guerillas who he is friends with. At one of these particular guerilla camps, the group meets a French priest who has lost the faith and meekly states, “I am Father Jean-Marie. I don’t want to save anyone. I’m going back to Europe. Please give me permission to spend the night here.” As Father Jean-Marie has concluded regarding black Africans, “They prefer the Koran to the Gospel. And they are not completely wrong.” During one of the most hilarious scenes of the film the Priest is gang-raped by some militia men while eating Russian chicken and starring at the corpse of a negro boy. Despite being in the middle of nowhere and only running into archaic hunter-gatherer tribes, Nadia runs into a black chick named ‘Katiuscia’ she once met in Paris who is now the Princess of a tribe and who Michel assumedly bones.  Of course, the interactions between the deracinated whites and the deeply rooted blacks only get more hostile and absurd as the film progress.

 In one of the more jovial scenes of the film, the group bumps into a tribe of severely spastic spades who wear poorly made ‘whiteface’ masks and vintage colonial adventurer hats and hostilely declare to the Europeans, “no whites” because “the whites are us!” Indeed, somehow these poor Africans believe that the Europeans are imposters and that they are the true Europids. Of course, on the way, the Europeans have various things stolen from them from the more violent tribes, including barrels of oil. By the end of the film, all of the whites are ready to give up, but a watering hole that initially seems like a mirage gives them enough hope to tread on. When Nadia and Michel decide to stay at the scenic water holing, they find themselves to be the prey of a group of pissed tribesmen with voracious appetites. Indeed, when the tribe arrives there, a seemingly nice French-speaking tribesman—a smiley sort of guy who lived in France for a while but eventually got fired from his job and had to go back to his humble tribe—approaches the two bourgeois crackers and asks them, “The chief wants to know why you have polluted the water?” Needless to say, Nadia and Michel never make it back to Europa. Indeed, when Operation Blue Angel leader Diego and adventurer Peter fly back to the watering hole to pick up Nadia and Michel, they only thing they find is a camcorder and some burnt bones. As the two learn while playing back footage from the camcorder, Nadia and Michel where eaten by the tribesman during a fireside cannibal ritual. Of course, if these obnoxiously altruistic crackers had minded their own business and never left Europe, they would have never been the dinner and, in turn, excrement of some starving Africans.  Ironically, as victims of cannibalism, Nadia and Michel did manage to accomplish their original mission of providing starving negroes with some pure white meat from Europe.

Undoubtedly, the final scene of How Good the Whites Are featuring camcorder footage of two of the characters being eaten certainly resembles Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980), as if Ferreri was attempting to lampoon the unkosher cannibal classic. While far from Ferreri’s greatest work, the film certainly has a great message: Europeans need to stay the hell out of Africa! Indeed, despite their ostensibly good intentions, the characters in Ferreri's film only bring cultural contamination, unconscious arrogance, resentment, and superlatively shitty food to the Dark Continent. Aside from making a major mockery of would-be-well-meaning white altruists, the film also depicts the glaring absurdity of multiculturalism and globalization in a variety of ways, with a cannibal who once worked in France being one of the more obvious examples. As the timeless European colonialist saying goes: “You can take the Negro out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the Negro.”  Indeed, How Good the Whites Are is a work that wallows in sardonic culture shock and demonstrates that virtually all European xenophiles are degenerates, neurotics, and/or perverts who fail to fit in their own society, hence their dubious fetishism for dark meat. Ironically, it is only when the characters in Ferreri’s film are fully exposed to the ‘other’ that they began to appreciate their own indigenous culture and develop a sense of national identity. Indeed, while loony leftist believes that the best way to solve the race problem is by absurdly mixing people into a so-called ‘melting pot,’ race hate is really a direct result of multiculturalism and that the melting pot will never melt (not that it would be a good thing if it did, as demonstrated by the mystery meat that make up the populous of Brazil!). In the documentary Marco Ferreri: The Director Who Came from the Future (2007), Ferreri prophesied that there would be a great showdown between the Occident and the the third world, remarking: “We think we know everything thanks to the airplane. Instead we don’t know…We don’t know anything. We think we know it all. We arrive by plane somewhere with lovely hotels…and we think we’ve know that place. Now we’re entering a period of religious wars. The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam…are coming to the fore. It’s a more political voice than Catholicism.” Most importantly, Ferreri revealed that Europa is on its way to a cultural apocalypse of sorts, stating regarding the continent's precarious future: “Geographically, Europe is very small. It’s a fortress that thinks it’s…It thinks it’s invincible, but it isn’t. It’s surrounded and under siege by peoples who are less technologically advanced but more motivated than we are.” I don’t know ‘How Good the Whites Are’ nowadays, but if they think it is a good idea to leave their abstract bourgeois world of Starbucks and Barnes & Nobles to feed hostile savages then they deserve to be eaten.   Of course, since the barbarians are already inside the gates thanks to American hegemony and globalization, whites no longer need to leave their countries to become victims of ‘cultural enrichment.’

-Ty E