Manhattan Love Suicides

While most people would probably agree that suicide is no laughing matter, I think that it can be successfully made the butt of a joke if dope sick NYC hipsters, homo hustlers, and deformed drug dealers are involved, or so I learned while watching the seedy and sleazy yet equally silly and schlocky Super-8 celluloid quadriptych Manhattan Love Suicides (1985) directed by underground punk (anti)pornographer and prominent Cinema of Transgression figure Richard Kern (You Killed Me First, Fingered). A sort of absurdly tragicomedic epic short film that is made up of four different separately shot yet thematically connected works, including I Hate You Now (1985), Stray Dogs (1985), Thrust in Me (1985), and Woman at the Wheel (1985), Kern’s grotesquely goofy flick might be best described as the filmmaker’s sort of neo-bohemian bargain bin equivalent to Pasolini’s The Decameron (1971) as a perversely and sometimes perniciously playful piece made up of loosely connected petite vignettes that work as sort of nihilistic fables of the oftentimes savagely slapstick sort. In many regards a sort of who’s who of the Cinema of Transgression movement as a work that features wayward acting performances from many of the main filmmakers of the scene, including Nick Zedd (They Eat Scum, War is Menstrual Envy), David Wojnarowicz (Where Evil Dwells, A Fire in My Belly), and Tommy Turner (Simonland, Rat Trap), and seems to almost parody the more pretentious works of the NYC underground scene, Kern’s flick is literally and figuratively masturbatory celluloid trash that seems like it was directed by a brain-damaged teenage tweaker who stole his grandma’s Super-8 camera, yet at the same time it is also a distinctly fun and shockingly memorable movie that reminds the viewer that even morally retarded perverts can create marginally notable lowbrow (anti)art. While it probably seems like a strange puffery-plagued bullshit comparison to make, Manhattan Love Suicides somewhat reminded me of David Lynch’s masterful debut Eraserhead (1977) in a very particular way in that the film practically bleeds the foreboding essence of the specific zeitgeist and post-industrial hellhole that it so unflattering depicts while also focusing on the tragic young love in the big city and ultimately turning the morbid into the merry in the process. Indeed, I could not watch one second of Kern’s film without fantasizing about NYC being nuked into oblivion lest the world be contaminated by its anti-culture of rampant rudeness and infantile narcissism, as the flick makes the rotten Big Apple seem like a third world metropolis for poser poets and third generation punks who spend all day walking around and doing literally nothing but trying to give off the impression of being hopelessly hip and angsty, among various other emotional contrivances that are most typically obsessed over by hormone-imbalanced teenage girls. Despite the film’s superficially sensational porno-esque title, Manhattan Love Suicides is innately anti-erotic in tone, even though it features various unclad genitals from both genders, and contains a highly alienating post-counterculture Sodom where love is, at best, an intangible fantasy and adolescent delusion and, at worse, an all-consuming sickness the leads one to kill themselves in an incredibly stupid way that is hardly romantic. Of course, in Kern’s film it is impossible to feel empathy for a single one of the characters who have committed suicide as the depictions of self-slaughter are so absurdly amateurish and over-the-top that one can only see it as morbidly mirthful in the most keenly kitschy sort of way.  In other words, Kern's film makes Jörg Buttgereit's similarly themed work Der Todesking (1990) seem like a late era Bernardo Bertolucci flick by comparison.

 The first and arguably the best chapter of the film is Stray Dogs, which depicts a tall young street hustler who literally falls apart at the seams because a particularly pompous middle-aged artist rebuffs his love to the point of sadistically mocking him for it. At the beginning of the segment, the insufferably pretentious-looking ‘artiste’ (played by real-life artist Bill Rice of countless cult flicks, including Decoder (1984) directed by Muscha and Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)) is depicted walking around with a vaguely attractive woman with a dyke haircut, as if he hopes to obscure the fact that he has a fetish for young yet grizzled prick-peddlers (as revealed later in the film, the artist has an obsession with taking portraits of hustlers and painting hard cocks). When the woman points out a poster for a moronic looking Hollywood film and asks him, “Isn’t this that movie about a guy that marries two pregnant women at the same time?,” the revoltingly smug artist acts like a vainglorious queen and retorts, “I’m surprised at you” and then remarks regarding the lead actor of the movie, “He’s a fat pig.” After walking by a dog grooming place where the artist mundanely remarks, “I’ve got a dog like that” and his lady friend replies, “I do too,” the two seeming mismatched love birds soon part ways. Unbeknownst to the artist, a side-piping ‘stray dog’ (artist and sometimes actor/auteur David Wojnarowicz) has been following him like a lost puppy and wants him to take him home and let him sleep in his bed, which he rather reluctantly does after the lanky hustler, who walks and moves in a strange robotic fashion like a sort of autistic fag Frankenstein monster, encircles him at an ATM and puts his arm on his shoulder in a considerably awkward fashion that gives the viewer the impression that he wants to bash his brains in. On the way back to the apartment, a sort of debauched junky skinhead licks his lips at the artist, which naturally causes the hysterical lovelorn hustler to get extremely jealous to the point where he violently pushes the young baldheaded bastard out of the way. When they finally get back to the apartment, the hustler’s nose curiously begins bleeding after the artist rejects one of his various failed romantic advances. When the artist decides to work on a painting and fails to acknowledge that the stray streetwalker is still in his presence, the young man cries whilst staring out of a window and then proceeds to sit on a couch and masturbate like some cheap stripper slut. Somewhat humorously, when the artist notices the hustler choking his chicken, he merely looks disgusted like he is watching a slimy homeless man defecating on his new carpet. After another failed romantic advance, the hustler begins to lose it, starts bleeding out his neck, and then collapses, which the seemingly sadistic artist finds rather funny. Upon finding a stack of portraits with a portrait of himself located at the top of the stack, the hustler becomes momentarily happy but that soon ends when he looks at the rest of the photos and discovers images of various other young male prostitutes, thus causing him to become so distressed that his arm inexplicably falls off. Although initially shocked upon seeing the hustler lying in a pool of blood on his floor, the artist decides to stop working on his painting and begins drawing a picture of the armless prostitute while he is dying, thus his death via heartbreak is not completely in vain.  After all, countless great works of art are the product of lovelornness and romantic despair, even if Stray Dogs is not one of them.

 The second segment of the film, Woman at the Wheel, is arguably the weakest of the four parts and is largely the brainchild of female lead Adrienne Altenhaus and depicts how some women might be driven to suicide if they incessantly date superficially ‘misogynistic’ assholes who insist on driving their cars, especially if they are automobiles that they bought with their own money. Indeed, when Altenhaus shows up at her lover’s pad and proudly declares while sounding like a doped up 15-year-old regarding her new automobile, “Hey, man, checkout my new car. Like it? Let’s go for a drive,” she is forced to get in the passenger seat because her bastard neo-bohemian beau (Nick Zedd sporting a singularly retarded large hat that unequivocally proves that he is one of the greatest fashion victims to have ever graced the streets of NYC) insists on driving. While driving the car, the bitchy boyfriend mocks Alenhaus’ earrings and shouts naughty things at her like “Fucking bitch…Fuck off! I’ll drive the way I want to,” so the female heroine eventually gets so enraged that she repeatedly calls her gutter-hipster lover a “fuckhead” and then subsequently throws him out of her car while giving him the middle finger emoji and joyfully telling him to shove it up his ass. When Altenhaus decides to get an upgrade in terms of a boyfriend and hooks up with a generic Wall Street preppie type who looks like he regularly blows men in urine-drenched public bathrooms, the pseudo-suave gentleman proves to be just as adamant driving her car and treating her like a worthless piece of trash as Zedd's character. Of course, Altenhaus is even more vicious with her preppie beau due to her past experiences with dysfunctional romance and even has the gall to say to him, “I don’t even know why I hang around with you, you prick. You’ve got a little prick, too, you asshole,” thus revealing that the female protagonist is probably a little bit sexually repressed and would benefit from a cock being rammed down her throat. Needless to say, Altenhaus is not too happy when her boyfriend frankly says to her, “Your fucking attitude stinks […] I don’t wanna hear this fucking shit anymore about your car. I’m driving it. It’s my car when I’m driving it, so quit talking about it.” When the preppie later attempts to drive her car, Altenhaus decides to whack him on the head and leaves him for good. At this point, Altenhaus becomes so fed up with men that she begins dressing like a nun, so naturally when a gang of belligerent young men approach her car and shout obscenely crass things like “Hey baby, suck my dick” and “I got a dick to suck” she becomes murderously unhinged and decides to run them over during a moment of PMS style road rage. While one of the men is lying lifeless on her windshield, Altenhaus suffers a sort of ominous Carnival of Souls-esque orgasmic hallucination where she imagines herself in an orgy with the chaps she has just killed, suffers a sort of psychosexual panic attack, and then crashes her car into a wall.  While one can only speculate, maybe if Altenhaus had found the right cock for her cracked cunt, she would have not met such a patently pathetic end.

 The third segment of the film, Thrust in Me, is notable for being not only co-written and co-directed by the Cinema of Transgression's self-appointed  Führer Nick Zedd, but also featuring the trash auteur in dual acting roles, which include a too-cool-for-school hipster deadbeat and his morbidly depressed girlfriend.  Although I was not particularly surprised since he looks like a sort lesbo fangirl for the New York Dolls, it should be noted that Zedd seems to have a natural affinity for gender-bending. Seemingly disillusioned about her relationship with her hotheaded hobo-like hipster boyfriend, Zedd-in-drag decides to read a book entitled How to be Your Own Best Friend: A Conversation with Two Psychoanalysts (1971) by Mildred Newman, but that soon proves to be too banal for the dejected young lady, so she tosses the book aside and decides to do some less light reading and begins flipping through Hebraic frog Émile Durkheim’s classic text Le Suicide (1897). Of course, the woman opts to commit suicide, but her boyfriend has no idea as he is too busy assaulting redneck pimps and attempting to look oh-so rebellious and edgy by kicking around trash in the streets to be around to stop her. Indeed, after tearing off the cover of a kitschy looking book entitled Collection of Selected Prayers (1975) by Allan Kardec featuring an image of Jesus Christ and then taping it onto her bathroom wall, the woman undresses, gets in her bathtub, and kills herself by slitting her wrists. When the boyfriend gets back home after aimlessly strolling the streets of Manhattan like some would-be street celebrity who is a legend solely in his own mind, he immediately decides to take a shit and while doing so is completely oblivious to the fact that his girlfriend in lying dead in the bathtub right next to him. After defecating and subsequently failing to find toiler paper, the man looks around and does not think twice about wiping his ass with the Jesus book cover that his loony lover taped to the wall.  Of course, upon locating the book cover, the man soon notices his dead girlfriend and is quite startled by what he sees, though his subsequent response to seeing the corpse of his beloved is hardly predictable. In fact, the man is so excited by what he sees that he whips out his already erect member and begins mouth-fucking the cold wet corpse. After ejaculating what seems to be enough cum to fill a two liter milk carton, the man seems way more happy and fulfilled than before his girlfriend killed himself. In the end, the man stands on the roof of his apartment building while the corpse of his girlfriend lies on the ground in a black plastic bag next to him.   Notably, when Thrust in Me was screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, it was condemned as being misogynistic by various cunty carpet-munching feminist groups, so Zedd responded by writing a relatively admirable defense to his detractors entitled Dear Feminists where he argued that, by committing necrophilia with the corpse of his drama queen girlfriend (who was certainly attempting to commit emotional blackmail with her suicide), the character in his film had broken “the shackles of self-deceit which constitute the sentimentality of romantic love.” Indeed, as described in Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground (2008) by Jack Sargeant, in his decision to take pleasure in his girlfriend's death as opposed to enduring internal pain, Zedd's character was able to remain, “mental[ly] independent.”

 The fourth and final segment of the film, I Hate You Now, is notable for featuring real-life lovers, junky filmmaker Tommy Turner and his wife Amy Turner, as a degenerate dope-peddling pair that seems to have a wild sex life as demonstrated by the fierce fucking that the two do at the beginning of the piece.  Notably, it is only revealed a couple minutes into the segment that the nameless boyfriend is not your typical gutter-level drug dealer, as half of his face is terribly deformed.  Possibly due to the fact that he probably has a serious inferiority complex as a result of being teased during his entire life for having a fucked up face, the boyfriend acts somewhat cold to his girlfriend, even though she does everything for him, including cooking him fried eggs and helping him to roll joints that he sells to lowlifes on the street. When not peddling cheap weed or penetrating his girlfriend’s blonde gristle-gripper, the boyfriend practices bench-pressing an incredibly low amount of weight that could not be more than a mere 30 or 40 pounds. When her boyfriend goes out to sell some dope to some random street scavenger, the girlfriend gets depressed upon looking at a photo of her beau, thinks about what she can do to get him to show her more love and affection, and then comes up with the less than bright idea to burn her face with a iron so that she and her lover will somehow be closer due to being mutually disfigured.  Of course, being largely visual beings who consider physical attractiveness to be one of, if not the most, important attribute a woman can have, it is doubtful that the boyfriend will be pleased with his beloved's thoughtful sacrifice. Unfortunately, when the boyfriend gets home and sees that his girlfriend’s face is almost as revoltingly warped looking as his own, he pushes her and then screams in her face, “What have you done to yourself? Oh no, what the fuck!?,” thus demonstrating his decided dissatisfaction with her rather hasty and insanely irrational decision.  Upon doing a couple seconds of deep thinking, the man decides to kill himself by loading his barbell with all the weights he owns and then dropping it on his neck. Needless to say, the woman is not too happy when her boyfriend kills himself, especially after the sacrifice she has made for him, so she somehow manages to burn herself alive by lighting a small frying pan on fire and then standing over it. Certainly, in its own morally repugnant and innately illogical way, I Hate You Now is surely the most overtly ‘romantic’ segment of the entire film. 

 Notably, when interviewed by The Quietus in 2010 and told by interviewer John-Paul Pryor that, “I find STRAY DOGS the most bizarre of all your films,” Richard Kern replied in an insightful manner where he proved that there was actually a point to the degeneracy of his film, stating, “That was one of the MANHATTAN LOVE SUICIDE series, which were all about getting so hung up on your relationships that you just couldn't do anything else. When you're young you are so overwhelmed with all these emotions that are centered on your relationship – your life at that age is not about what you are doing but about who you are going out with. All the movies in that series were about people who just get so hung up on it all that they kill themselves. When you are older, it seems like the stupidest thing to be suffering so much: to feel that you have to die for love.” While I would argue that most of the segments of the film are about deleteriously deranged infatuation as opposed to actual genuine love that demonstrate the tendency of romantic relationships to be unequal and one-sided, the anti-erotic omnibus flick is arguably Kern’s most mature, sensible, and thematically eclectic cinematic work to date as a playful piece of ludicrously lo-fi slapstick cynicism that might be described as the ultimate celluloid punk (anti)romance. Indeed, the film features a message about young mad love that is not all that different from Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy (1986), albeit directed in a strikingly technically inept way that is comparable to Sid Vicious’ bass-playing or Darby Crash’s howling and growling (speaking of the suicidal Spenglerian sod, a poster of Penelope Spheeris' classic doc The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) is featured prominently in the I Hate You Now segment). In the documentary Blank City (2010) directed by Céline Danhier, musician J.G. Thirlwell, who composed most of the music for the film, stated regarding Manhattan Love Suicides,“The no-budget part of it provides the humor, but also all of the emotions that are portrayed in those films are so exaggerated and so over-the-top it’s almost Dadaist.”  Indeed, it terms of its idiosyncratic and sometimes idiotic use of largely silent humor, Kern's film is probably the closest thing to a punk L’Age d’or (1930), albeit with fittingly piss poor direction and nil production values.

 As a man that would oftentimes let other people, especially Lydia Lunch, takeover his films and do more or less whatever they wanted to, Kern may be the ultimate ‘anti-auteur’ as far as subversive underground filmmakers go and this is especially apparent in Manhattan Love Suicides. In fact, in the doc Blank City, Zedd acts as if the Thrust in Me part is completely his creation, stating like a true elementary school iconoclast, “I thought I would make this film THRUST IN ME in which I play a female as well as a male. I thought it might offend people. When I put up posters for it with pictures of myself in drag, they were defaced and I thought that’s great. That’s exactly the response I want. I want to piss off the homophobes.” Somewhat ironically, the acting performances of filmmakers like Zedd, Turner, and Wojnarowicz are actually more entertaining and unforgettable than the majority of the films they themselves directed, thus hinting that Kern’s greatest talent might be in locating the specific strengths and talents of his collaborators and getting them to expose them on film (as he has oftentimes revealed on his VBS.TV show Shot By Kern, Kern uses a similar technique when he photographs unclad girls, who he encourages to expose their true characters and emotions while exposing their tits and pussies). Indeed, Kern must certainly have some special talent if he managed to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of causing a decidedly deplorable anti-diva like Ms. Lunch to shine on the seedy silverscreen, which is especially apparent in Fingered (1986) where the perennial whore does what she does best by getting fucked by an abhorrent asshole and acting like a classless cunt who is about to blow a fuse because she has not gotten her hourly heroin fix.

 While he would later steal his art-trash-porn aesthetic for his own films and even give the Cinema of Transgression auteur a cameo role in his somewhat disappointing second feature Super 8½ (1994), Bruce LaBruce wrote an article in 1990 for the Canadian ‘cappuccino communist’ film magazine CineACTION! entitled Right Wing Chic: Adam Parfrey and R. Kern Fingered!! under his supposed real name Bryan Bruce where he accuses Kern (as well as subversive Jewish publisher Adam Parfrey of Feral House fame) of being a ‘fascist’ of sorts, as if fascists make films about loose ladies like Lunch being violently finger-fucked and a beta-male bitch being fucked both anally and orally by two chicks wearing strap-on dildos in an exceedingly emasculating threesome, among other things, but I digress. The only marginal praise that LaBruce gives to Kern in the article is for Manhattan Love Suicides, which he describes as his “best film,” but not without including the snarky little pink Gestapo remark that, “…we can’t ask for too much. We are well prepared for his later forays into misogynist and homophobic territory.”  Notably, LaBruce begins his article with a pseudo-sensational quote by Kern from Film Threat where he sensibly stated, “If you have a black guy in a movie and he does something stupid you run the risk of being called a racist. . .Due to the feminist movement any reflection on, of, or about woman is going to be judged more critically than the same reflection about men. It’s purely a matter of hypersensitivity. For example you would think everyone at the Village Voice was a black, gay, Jewish woman – such is their degree of hypersensitivity to certain subjects.”  Indeed, one of Kern's most blatant and admirable rare true strengths as a filmmaker is that he not only dares to depict the hard truth, but also portrays it in a preposterously exaggerated way, hence why Manhattan Love Suicides features a young homo hustler (as portrayed by a real-life ex-hustler!) who is looking for a ‘daddy’ figure and lethally lusts after a middle-aged man, as well as depicts a woman using suicide as a form of ruthless emotional blackmail against her beau, among other things that expose Manhattan for the socially malignant human zoo that it is.  Of course, one should not expect anything less from a man who was almost as pathetically debauched as the people he cinematically depicted, or as he  once stated regarding his films, “There were sexual elements, there were drug elements.  For some movies I paid people.  I offered them $15 cash or $15 worth of drugs.  A lot of people would do the drugs and then we'd shoot the movie.  During the shooting of the movie, I was so wasted on smack and ecstasy all the time.”  Most importantly, Manhattan Love Suicides is an unequivocal piece of true trash art because it makes no lie about the fact that NYC is a degenerate cultural wasteland where cheap heroin, diseased and festering cunts, and visceral ultra-violence are the only form of solace from living in such an uniquely ugly and culturally retarded urban sewer.

-Ty E

Where Evil Dwells

With the exception of a handful of Nick Zedd flicks, the proudly amateurish aberrant-garde filmmakers of the so-called Cinema of Transgression movement were hardly responsible for producing any actual notable feature-length films, so it is somewhat ironic that one of the few features associated with the NYC underground scene, Where Evil Dwells (1985) co-directed by the seemingly mismatched duo of marginal underground auteur Tommy Turner (Simonland, The Black Knights of the Skillman) and queer anti-Renaissance man David Wojnarowicz (A Fire in My Belly, Fear of Disclosure: Psycho-Social Implications of HIV Revelation) was, somewhat fittingly destroyed in a fire, especially considering its decidedly destructive quasi-Satanic message and wickedly wayward essence, before it was ever completed (according to Wojnarowicz, about 3/4 of the film was completed before he called it quits, left the project entirely in Turner's seemingly careless hands, and went on to work on more personal projects). Luckily, a 28-minute ‘preview’ cut of the decidedly D.I.Y. art-punk-trash slasher (which was originally titled Satan Teens) that was screened at the 1985 Downtown New York Film Festival has survived and, judging by this sort of trailer on steroids, which certainly feels complete in an abstract avant-garde sort of way (indeed, the film has a beginning, end, and tons of things in between), I would not be surprised if this butchered cut is more effective than the original proposed feature-length version (which was apparently around 120 minutes in length) would have been. Indeed, seeming like the abortive celluloid miscreation of the sub-literate punk gorehound progeny of Luis Buñuel and Frans Zwartjes, the film was originally intended as a Super-8 feature with sync sound and a linear plot but now exists as a sort of sadistically spastic montage-driven (anti)tribute to slasher cinema that even features the NYC art fag equivalent of masked retards like ‘Leatherface’ of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Jason Voorhees of the dreaded Friday the 13th franchise. A sort of celluloid anti-exorcism against the mainstream media and carny-esque televangelists, the film is based on the particularly pathetic true crime story of drug-addled self-stylized teenage Satanist Ricky ‘The Acid King’ Kasso, who committed the singularly senseless act of murdering his 17-year-old friend Gary Lauwers by stabbing him in the neck and head somewhere between 17 and 36 times (on top of gouging out his eyes and burning his body) during a bonfire in Long Island in June 1984 merely because the young man allegedly stole 10 bags of cheap PCP from him. Naturally, after foolishly bragging to teens that he had murdered Lauwers in tribute to Satan and even taking unbelieving friends to the site of the decaying mutilated corpse in a fashion not unlike in River's Edge (1986) directed by Tim Hunter, Kasso was soon arrested and he apparently found jail so unpleasant that he opted to commit suicide by hanging himself in his cell only a mere two days after he was detained, thus demonstrating that the cartoon Satan hardly empowered the moronic metalheads that mindlessly worshiped him. Divided into four main segments, including a lengthy introduction, a montage depicting the murder, Kasso's failed attempt to enter heaven and eventually the teen's successful attempt to enter hell, Where Evil Dwells is ultimately a bad celluloid trip where mainstream Christian America and pop culture are heretically defiled by hopelessly amateurish subversive sod art of the largely obnoxiously unholy, superficially iconoclastic, and oftentimes absurdly fetishistic sort.  Indeed, Turner and Wojnarowicz's film is more or less as politically retarded and morally bankrupt as most of the films associated with the Cinema of Transgression movement, but luckily it at least features striking and sometimes allegorical imagery, a largely oneiric structure and atmosphere, and a fairly tolerable soundtrack that certainly sounds like the kind of music that some teenage degeneratess from the 1980s would listen to while sadistically slaughtering their friend while high on acid in retaliation for stolen angel dust.

 While Where Evil Dwells is considered a sort of landmark work of the Cinema of Transgression movement, co-auteur David Wojnarowicz—the only filmmaker associated with the scene that was already an established artist of some notability (in fact, he funded the film with money that he had made off of some of his paintings)—certainly was not completely playing by Nick Zedd’s megalomaniacal rules, or as he once stated himself, “I think maybe it’s just philosophically or something, but I thought I was pretty peripheral to that whole film scene. I participated in some of it...I always felt like I was watching from or witnessing it from the side.” Indeed, while horribly hokey and awkwardly amateurish in parts, the film oftentimes has a genuine hellishly foreboding quality about it that almost seems to mock the all-too-self-conscious crap celluloid kitsch of Mr. Zedd. As his spoken word sessions and poetry certainly demonstrate, Wojnarowicz was a perennially pissed off fag with a genuine hatred of the mainstream American evangelical right, which he would ultimately blame for his death via AIDS. Notably, both directors could relate to quasi-archetypical alienated teen Kasso, but neither could relate to his heinous crimes nor the seemingly hypocritical authoritarian structure of his (pseudo)Satanic social circle, or as Wojnarowicz once wrote as revealed in an interview featured in the book Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground (2008) by Jack Sargeant, “We were using the script to talk about relationships of power: how the leader was given power by the other kids and even though he was kind of stupid, the other kids’ adulation and respect kept him propped up there in control. It’s kind of like Ronald Reagan.” Somewhat curiously, Where Evil Dwells features a quasi-narrator in the form of a creepy old Howdy Doody ventriloquist doll with a sadistically sardonic attitude that seems to reflect not only the murderous yet childish behavior of upper-middleclass loser Kasso and his Guido metalhead comrades, but also the contrived morality of the American Pie 1950s and the death of suburbia and, in turn, the so-called American dream. At the beginning of the film, the doll is rather fittingly held by Wojnarowicz, who is seemingly dead as demonstrated by the fact that his eyes are hanging out of his eye sockets and he is covered in Buttgereit-esque guts and gore. When the doll jokes, “Hey, checkout this girl. She hung around the wrong crowd,” the film cuts to a delightfully morbid shot of a chick hanging by her neck from a noose in a post-industrial hellhole in a sardonic scene featuring girly 1950s romance music. Eventually, the film cuts to a shot of Wojnarowicz, who was also a noted street artist that would tag quotes by William S. Burroughs onto the side of buildings, spray-painting “Where Evil Dwells” over a suburban neighborhood juxtaposed with the distortion-and-drums heavy eponymous ‘theme song’ by J. G. Thirlwell's electronic noise-rock project Wiseblood in a scene that less than subtly ultimately accuses suburbia of being the true source of all-things-sinister. From there, a nihilistic montage begins featuring an old Volkswagen on fire, Kasso and his degenerate buddies destroying buses by beating them with metal rods, and various other examples of decidedly dumb teenage delinquency. To go with the film’s potent theme of moronic teenage delinquency and Kasso’s own personal taste in music, the popular song “Hell Bells” by AC/DC is blasted on the soundtrack (notably, Kasso was arrested while wearing an AC/DC shirt). 

 The second unofficial segment of the film focuses on the crimes of the main subject and fittingly begins with a vaguely dream-like scene where a priestly Devil (charismatically portrayed by lowbrow pop surrealist artist Joe Coleman, who was incidentally raised the Irish-Catholic tradition) initiates Kasso into the hermetic spiritual realm of the Dark Arts by sharing with him some blood from a goblet as a fairly poorly made inverted cross humorously hangs on the wall in the background. In his first act in tribute to Satan, Kasso goes graverobbing with some of his long-haired burnout buddies and senselessly attempts to destroy a skeleton that he has just dug up by trying in vain to decapitate it with the same shovel he used to dig it up.  Of course, fiddling with a decayed corpse is nothing compared to transforming a living human-being into worm meat, or so Kasso will eventually learn on his quest to satisfy Satan's unquenchable thirst for all-things-evil.  When the film cuts back to Howdy Doody, co-director Turner appears, knocks over Wojnarowicz with a machete, and takes over his co-director’s place as the ventriloquist. Ultimately, Howdy explains to Turner regarding the supposed objective of Where Evil Dwells that, “It explores the constructions of evil in contemporary America.” When Turner naively asks the doll “What’s evil?,” Mr. Doody states “I’ll show you” and then proceeds to repeatedly stab the filmmaker in the chest with a knife while expressing a sense of savagely sadistic glee that will ultimately characterize Kasso when he kills his comrade. While playfully succumbing to his wounds, Turner cries, “the devil got me,” in a line of dialogue that is clearly meant to mock the tendency of the mainstream media and Christian Evangelists to blame murder and various other crimes on evil forces, especially Satan, instead of the actual criminal.

 After the dummy wastes Turner, Kasso and his comrades up the ante in terms of their crimes by dropping a fully dressed skeleton dummy off of a bridge on the Long Island Expressway, which smashes into pieces upon being hit by a car driven by a unsuspecting motorist played by Wojnarowicz (indeed, it seems David W. had the most eclectic ‘roles’ in the film). In what is arguably the most intricate and abstract segment of the film in a nearly 10-minute-long abstract montage that intersects a scene of a first-person-perspective rollercoaster ride (this scene recalls the ending of the No Wave ‘classic’ She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978) directed by Vivienne Dick), shots of the devil hanging out at an abandoned railroad station and eventually self-combusting (as his performance in the film Mondo New York (1988) demonstrates, Coleman used to do a performance art routine under the persona of ‘Dr. Momboozoo’ where he would shock audiences by randomly setting off fireworks that were hidden under his clothing), nighttime shots of a wooded bonfire where Kasso violently murders boyish blond Gary Lauwers by repeatedly stabbing him the eyes with a knife, and daytime shoots of the location of the crime where natural violence is depicted in the form of hundreds upon hundreds of maggots feeding on the corpse of a dead dog and a wounded bird succumbing to its wounds, among other things. After the death of Lauwers, Howdy Doody makes his final appearance in a scene where he is dragged away while screaming after showing off the bloody knife he just used to kill Turner in a scene that seems to symbolize ‘dummy’ Kasso’s ‘fall from grace’ as a moron that mindlessly killed a friend in ostensible tribute to Satan who now has to face the less than comfortable consequences of his nonsensical actions.  Somewhat unfortunately, Kasso's untimely post-arrest suicide is not depicted in the film, thus leading the viewer to suspect that the scene was destroyed in Turner's apartment fire.

 In the third and shortest segment of the film, killer Kasso, who has clearly already committed self-slaughter in his jail cell, attempts to enter ‘heaven,’ which is in the form of a decrepit and dimly lit restaurant featuring only a handful of occupants where a decidedly degenerate Jesus Christ (played by Sid Vicious’ one-time drug dealer, guido junky Rockets Redglare of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Down By Law (1986)) voraciously eats greasy chicken legs and chugs down cans of cheap beer like a gluttonous pig. Not exactly the flashiest of dressers, Kasso attempts to enter heaven while sporting nothing but a pair of jeans and is denied entry by a sort of suavely dressed blond angelic bodyguard, who does not exactly seem particularly impressed with the young killer’s pleas for perennial paradise. Notably, the scenes of the debauched Jesus taking drags of cigarettes and belligerently spitting out bits of his food are juxtaposed with degenerate jazz and audio clips of a televangelist proselytizing and stating unintentionally humorous things like, “What kind of preacher do you think Jesus was? Some of you picture him as some little sissy holding a little billy goat in his hands.” Ultimately, the heaven segment concludes with Jesus flinging his food synced with the carny Christian preacher declaring, “Why do you think the Apostle Paul had his head chopped off? They laid him on a tree and killed him. They killed him because he looked the Pharisees right in the eye. I haven’t been that brave yet. I do it through a television camera.”  Clearly, Wojnarowicz and Turner find nothing brave in what the preacher does, but I suspect they feel like they are brave for creating a film like Where Evil Dwells.

 Undoubtedly, the fourth and final segment of the film is pure post-industrial apocalyptic anarchy and depicts Kasso’s chaotic descent into hell, which is rather fittingly set to the less than soothing apocalyptic sounds of Diamanda Galás. Shot at a warehouse in lower Manhattan containing a train locomotive that the directors took full advantage of, the segment seems like what might have happened if a couple beauty-hating punks decided to remake Derek Jarman’s classic kaleidoscopic surrealist short Art of Mirrors (1973) in tribute to their favorite slasher killers and S&M bondage flicks. Completely chaotic in direction, framing, narrative, editing, and even wardrobe, the hell segment mainly seems to be a platform for the directors to depict certain sexual fetishes and fantasies they might have had at the time, hence the abundance of unclad men and women in chains and general BDSM-esque imagery that involves supposed demons punishing the damned in a variety of sexually degrading ways that ultimately seem rather tame and goofy in comparison to the torture scenes featured in Pasolini's swansong Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). In its depiction of one half-naked demon sporting both a Freddy Krueger glove and Jason Voorhees face and another half-naked masked demon resembling the more hedonistic yet less homicidal little brother of Leatherface, the segment ultimately has a sort of conspicuously kitschy low-camp character to it that makes it more than clear that the filmmakers do not believe in hell and have seen one-too-many shitty slasher flicks. In a scene that seems like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964) meets Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), a hot leather-clad blonde and two leather-fag-esque male friends sit on a large motorcycle together while joyously whipping a prisoner in bondage while Leatherface stands close by and jumps around like a jubilant retard. Baphomet also makes an appearance in the form of a man with a large goat-skull perching on a wall as if he is a bird of prey that is waiting to bite Kasso on his candy ass. Arguably, the most creepy ‘character’ featured in the segment and film in general is a sort of post-apocalyptic tribal negro with a horn on his forehead who is wearing nothing but a straw skirt and chains and who crawls across the top of the train locomotive like a gay ape that is looking for somebody or some thing to rape. Indeed, as demonstrated by a scene where a demon takes a look down the booty shorts of a slightly muscular blond twink that is lifting weights, sodomy is wholly permitted in Wojnarowicz and Turner’s wayward vision of hell. As for Kasso, he is almost wholly irrelevant to the segment and only makes fleeting appearances as a sort of cipher who has already served his purpose for the film as a whole. If there is any star of the hell segment, it is certainly Coleman as the Devil, who is depicted at one point biting off the heads of live rats that have been served to him on a silver platter by a fairly unsavory Satanic butler that is clearly modeled after Alfred Hitchock. In a scene that is obviously one of Coleman’s self-combustion performances ran in reverse, the devil manages to suck an ominous cloud of smoke and sparks back into his body, thus marking the end of the film and the beginning of Kasso's eternal internment in the hyper-hedonistic pleasure-dome known as hell. 

 If there is any film that seems to manage to depict the collective unconscious of too-stupid-to-be-tragic suicidal killer Ricky Kasso and his similarly infantile metalhead comrades, it is indubitably Where Evil Dwells, which ultimately feels like the most intricate, idiosyncratic, and aesthetically ambitious homemade horror flick ever made as a sort of crack-addled 1980s equivalent to the classic cult horror flick Equinox (1970). In fact, I would argue that the two similarly primitive horror films make for a greatly insightful double-feature, as comparing the flicks will really help the viewer to understand how drastically the morality and spiritually of American's youth has changed over the course of a mere two decade period (while released in 1970, Equinox was actually shot in 1967). While Equinox features a fairly traditional depiction of good and evil and was obviously heavily influenced by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, Where Evil Dwells depicts the suburbs as a sort of figurative hell and contains a curious moral compass that is almost as broken as that of its subject Ricky Kasso and the mediocre mainstream heavy metal bands that the killer listened to. Notably, exploitation auteur Jim Van Bebber’s undeniably hilarious short My Sweet Satan (1994) is almost as morally retarded as Wojnarowicz and Turner’s flick in terms of its cynical depiction of Kasso’s crimes, but at least it does not feature a sort of glaringly superficial pseudo-(meta)political subtext about the supposed sinister character of the suburbs. In terms of films presenting a less artsy fartsy approach to the Kasso case, Matthew Carnahan’s Black Circle Boys (1997) features a fictionalized account of the story and it is not much more than an eclectically mediocre coming-of-age melodrama that was made to wet the panties of preteen girls as demonstrated by the fact that it stars intellectually vacant pretty boys like Donnie Wahlberg, Scott Bairstow, and Eric Mabius portraying teenage Goth druggie degenerates. While certainly superior to Black Circle Boys, the unreleased feature Ricky 6 (2000) directed by Hollywood screenwriter Peter Filardi (Flatliners, The Craft) and starring Vincent Kartheiser as a fictional character based on Kasso can hardly be described as a masterpiece. Incidentally, at the end of the somewhat generic but informative Kasso documentary Satan in the Suburbs (2000), narrator Will Lyman's final three last words are, “...where evil dwells.”  Of course, judging simply by the doc's grating docudrama reenactment scenes, I doubt the makers ever bothered to watch Turner and Wojnarowicz's bizarrely kitschy Kasso piece.

 In many ways, Where Evil Dwells is strikingly different from Wojnarowicz’s other films, namely in that it is almost completely devoid of homosexual content and reductionist orientated accusations against Christianity, Ronald Reagan, and the U.S. Government for supposedly being directly responsible for the fact that armies of tearoom homos were kicking the bucket as a result of gay cancer. Of course, the film is also in many ways typical of the filmmaker’s oeuvre due to its aberrant allegorical imagery and in that it features overtly hateful one-dimensional agitprop style assaults against Christianity and suburbia, thereupon oftentimes making the film seem like the lurid yet somewhat botched wet dream of some bitterly enraged and innately irrational punk rock poser who dropped out of high school and wants to take out all of his anger on his parents for not understanding him. Judging by Turner’s short Simonland (1984)—a mind-numbingly dumb and remarkably technically inept film about mind-control that, according to Nick Zedd in his work Bleed, was not surprisingly shot while all the actors and crew members were “high on dope”—one can probably assume that the more goofy and philistine oriented aspects of Where Evil Dwells can be credited to him and not Wojnarowicz, whose avant-garde queer works like Fear of Disclosure: Psycho-Social Implications of HIV Revelation (1989) co-directed Phil Zwickler and ITSOFOMO: In the Shadow of Forward Motion (1991) co-directed by Ben Neill are completely devoid of narratives and hardly feature the sort of less than half-baked stoner humor that is typical of his comrade. Indeed, the film might be not much more than a ‘glorified trailer’ that was directed by two serious fuck ups, but Where Evil Dwells is certainly one of the more idiosyncratic and inventive films of the Cinema of Transgression movement and one could fairly safely argue that this is largely the result of Wojnarowicz’s angst-ridden Weltanschauung, which was clearly more cultivated than that of one-note wonders like Zedd and Richard Kern. 

 Notably, it seems that Wojnarowicz, who funded Where Evil Dwells with money that he made from selling his paintings, decided to give up on the film before it was finished due to problems Turner and his drug addiction (it is rumored that he shot part of the film's budget into his arm), or as he said in a 1991 interview with Jeri Cain Rossi, “I mean, it just kept going and going and going […] It was fun. But it just got too scattered because of the addiction and stuff, and so finally I just said ‘Look, I’ve got to stop. I can’t go any further.’ And we shot at least three quarters of the film. I think there are still a handful of scenes. We wanted to get down but we never had a chance.” Of course, as a sometimes filmmaker who is probably better known for everything else he did aside from filmmaking (though his film work made posthumous headlines in November 2010 when his work A Fire in My Belly was removed from the Smithsonian Institution as a result of pressure from a Catholic group that felt it contained ‘hate speech’ due to a silly scene where ants crawl on a crucifix), it should be no surprise that most of Wojnarowicz's cinematic works remain unfinished and largely exists in fragmented excerpt forms. As a man that is largely (in)famous for going on heated performance art rants where it seems like his head is going to explode (notably, in the Rosa von Praunheim doc Silence = Death (1990), he states regarding his belief that the U.S. Government is responsible for homos dying of AIDS, “It’s not my sucking dick that is responsible for my death, or my getting fucked in the ass, or any of these things. These people, at this point, are responsible for my death because their inactivity and their total gesture of silence after eight years of this”), Wojnarowicz seems like a perennial angry teenage boy and Where Evil Dwells is certainly nothing if not a surprisingly potent yet pathetic piece of visceral youthful celluloid rage. Indeed, as a sometimes reluctant supporter of the auteur theory, I tend to believe that most good films can only have one god and the film certainly suffers from the masturbatory fantasies of a resentful queer in a sort of internal personal hell who hates Christianity more than homo-hating Evangelicals hate gay agitators like himself.  Undoubtedly, the best compliment I can pay Where Evil Dwells is that it almost has a mystifying essence about it to the point where one could almost believe that it was made by a cult of murderous Kasso fanboys who dug up the teenage junky killer's grave and placed the film inside his casket, only for it to be unearthed a decade or so later by another group of morbidly misguided Kasso fanboys and unleashed onto the world without warning.  Of course, I also like to think that Kasso would have loved and worshiped the film more than he purported to love and worship the devil.

-Ty E

Fingered

If assassinated Dutch auteur Theo van Gogh’s 06 (1994) aka 1-900 is the most strangely charming and cultivated phone-sex flick ever made, the quite literally titled work Fingered (1986) directed and co-written by Richard Kern (Nazi, You Killed Me First) and starring and co-written by Lydia Lunch is easily the most overtly sleazy, scummy, and stupidly sinister film on the subject. Booed off stage when it had the honor of premiering at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival, Kern’s 25-minute (anti)erotic micro-epic is pure and adulterated celluloid trash that one might describe as the hokey heterosexual hick equivalent to the avant-garde serial killer short Pig (1998) co-directed by Nico B. and Rozz Williams, as a gritty black-and-white piece of fiercely fetishistic celluloid road kill set in Death Valley not far from where Manson and his minions engaged in psychedelic orgies, siring various bastard kids, and ostensibly planning an apocalyptic race war. A sort of thematic sequel to Kern’s The Right Side of My Brain (1985) as a work where ‘co-writer’/star Lydia Lunch once again engages in sleazy but hardly steamy unsimulated sex acts with white trash dudes that like sporting sunglasses in dark and shadowy rooms, albeit more ‘hardcore’ (while Lunch sucks cock and feels up East Asian tits in the earlier film, she gets fucked in both her pussy and asshole by her ex-boyfriend Marty Nation in the later film) and slightly more artistically ambitious, the unsavory short was apparently intended to be anti-pornographic, or as the auteur said himself in the documentary Blank City (2010) directed by Celine Danhier, “The title sounds like a porno film, but the whole point was to make people feel bad about sex, so it’s supposed to be anti-pornography.” Indeed, probably the only people that would diddle themselves to Fingered are murderously misogynistic psychopaths like Edmund Kemper and Ted Bundy, and/or misandristic wenches like Lunch herself who regularly describe men as ‘pigs’ and ‘assholes’ yet get hopelessly wet at the prospect of an abusive prick violently bending her over and demonstrating who is truly the dominant sex with his hard dick (indeed, such is the overtly salacious scenario that plays out in Fingered). Admittedly, when I first saw the film about a decade ago or so, I thought it was a worthless pile of celluloid shit that senselessly wallowed in being offensive for offensiveness’s sake, but after re-watching it recently I realized it has some genuine character and charm as a wild and wanton white trash artsploitation piece where real whores portray screen whores and real working-class lowlifes portray screen working-class lowlifes. Featuring perennial dumb cunt Lunch having a revolver violently reamed up her crusty old cuntlet and dirty dimestore diva Lung Leg being violently sexually assaulted in a way that the (non)actress/sometimes filmmaker would later describe as degrading (despite her rather vocal hatred of men, Lunch is apparently no less harsh in her dealings with members of the so-called fairer sex), Fingered ultimately manages to juggle visceral hatred and decidedly dark humor in such a way that is guaranteed to leave most viewers feeling defiled, emotionally schizophrenic, and/or discombobulated.

 In Fingered, Lydia Lunch more or less plays herself as a phone-sex slut that moonlights as a gutter prostitute in what is arguably the most fitting role of her entire acting career (notably, Lunch would later state in the doc Blank City regarding the importance of her quasi-pornographic performance(s), “THE RIGHT SIDE OF MY BRAIN and FINGERED were like public psychotherapy because no one else was talking about this attraction to fear.  It was about a violent expulsion bred by the riots, by Charles Manson, by the Son of Sam, and instead of turning the trauma inward, I turned it outward. You’re battered…You battered back”). At the beginning of the film, a fiercely foul fat slob (poof poet Emilio Cubeiro whose 1989 spoken word album The Death Of An Asshole was produced by Lunch) calls up Ms. Lunch while sitting pant-less in a chair in his apartment and declares to her while talking like a baby that sounds like it was raised in a 42nd Street gutter, “I want to speak to my mommy” and she replies, “I can only put mommy on, Joey, after you’ve given me the credit card number and the expiration date. You know it takes money to talk to mommy. She taught you that, didn’t she? Now, go ahead, Joey, give me the number.” Of course, the man-baby inevitably gives Lunch his credit card number (though he claims it is his “father’s” because he is “too young” to have a credit card  of his own since he is ostensibly a baby) and joyously talks about sucking his mommy’s “big brown nipples.” Of course, since Lydia is a ludicrously lazy phone-sex whore who takes a less than lackluster approach to pretending to be the man’s mommy, the obnoxiously Oedipal urban ogre soon becomes fairly hostile and angrily bitches about how his mother was a “fucking pig cunt” who ignored him as a child so she could fuck an “asshole Irish insurance guy,” “Mexican slime delivery kid,” and “fucking black janitor with a dick bigger than his brain,” among various other eclectic losers.  After declaring, “that foul cunt I came out of. It makes me, even me, cringe to even think about it,” the momma’s boy proclaims, “I don’t want to fuck your cunt. No no no no no. I want to fuck your pink republican asshole. Your sweet Avon pink Republican butthole” and soon Lunch hangs up on his sorry infantile ass. Luckily, the next man that Lydia talks to gets her so terribly turned on that she actually gives him her address so he can come by and finger-fuck and sodomize her in person. 

 Upon subsequently phone-sexing with a longhaired metalhead-looking degenerate played by Marty Nation on the phone, Lydia proudly declares, “I’m the hottest fucking slut in town…you know that” and her patron responds while masturbating, “You were born to worship my fucking cock and to slurp on my knob and tongue my fucking ballsack and just take my load of spew in your fucking face.” After the phone sex gets too hot to handle, Lydia gives Marty her address and tells him to meet her in 20 minutes. When finally Marty arrives, Lydia lies on a table while opening her legs in a spread eagle position while the ostensibly ultra-macho longhaired moron says things like, “I always get what I want because I fucking take it.” To get Lydia’s pussy all warm and wet, Marty whips out a switchblade and carefully cuts off her fishnet stockings with the knife. Despite being fairly overt in her unwavering hatred towards all thing male and masculine, Lydia sure likes her men to be almost maliciously macho and misogynistic as demonstrated by the flagrantly flirtatious fashion in which she asks Marty, “A big fucking man like you must have a lot of whores, right baby?” and is naturally quite sexually thrilled when he replies, “That’s right. I like whores. I know what they want and I give it to them.” Lydia and Marty seem like the perfect match made in hell as far as couples are concerned, as she likes a man with a “big fat cock and a pocket full of cash” and he prefers pussy-peddling sluts, or as she states, “Most fucking bitches are whores. A whore just asks for it right up front. A whore is just a little bit more honest than most bitches.” As Lydia lets Marty know regarding whores, “Not more honest, baby. They just lie better.” After the two talk dirty to one another for a couple minutes in a joyously vulgar manner that seems much more authentic than a foreplay scene from the average 1980s porno flick (apparently, Lydia and Marty began dating when the latter was only 16-years-old and the two remained friends after they broke up), Marty bends over savagely sassy slut and begins fiercely finger-fucking her while she ecstatically screams, “make me fucking cum you fucking pig. Fuck me. Fuck me.” While Marty eventually mounts and buggers the swarthy streetwalker, he seems to get a little bit excited in the process as it is not long before he expels his load and then proceeds to fist-fucking Lydia. Indeed, while Marty violently fists Lydia, who sounds like a horny hog in heat, she screams, “make me fucking cum, you filthy cock. Do it!” and then proceeds to have an orgasm. 

 After the two equally depraved strangers complete coitus and leave the apartment, Lydia is immediately approached by a sleazy middle-aged pervert on the street who grabs her arm and asks her, “Hey, baby, how much?,” to which she hostilely replies, “Get your filthy hands off me. You can’t afford it.” Needless to say, the would-be-john is pissed and retorts, “Well, fuck you. You whores coming around here ruining our neighborhoods with your goddamn faggot boyfriends.” Unfortunately for the sidewalk sex scavenger, Marty pops out immediately after he says, “goddamn faggot boyfriends,” and threatens the man by angrily stating, “Hey, you got a problem, buddy? Fat ugly motherfucker.” Although just initially threatening to kill the man due to his rather rude behavior, Marty gets a little bit too excited and stoically slits the sorry sap’s fatty throat with the ease and precision that one would expect from a barber who is giving a customer a quick shave. While Lydia seems somewhat afraid of Marty after he violently murders the stranger in cold blood, she meekly follows his orders when he demands that she “Get the fuck in the car” and then proceeds to take a little road trip with him in Death Valley that ultimately has savagely nihilistic consequences that even a morally bankrupt ghetto whore like her could not predict. While riding in his car, Lydia has the nerve to ask Marty, “What’s your goddamn problem? You didn’t have to do that, you know. What are you trying to prove, anyway?,” but he merely replies in a self-satisfied fashion, “He got in my way and had to pay.” Indeed, Marty has a malevolent plan that involves having some good clean fun with Lydia and some friends, but of course the two encounter a couple ‘detours’ on the way that somewhat predictably have rather deleterious results. 

 The first place that Marty takes Lydia is a place called ‘The Snakepit’ where the working-class antihero soon spots a redneck comrade of his lifting weights outside while listening to cheesy country music, which inspires the character to ask his friend, “What’s this cowboy shit?” Naturally, the poorly dressed desert weightlifter is quite pleased to see Lydia and immediately says to her with a sort of L.A. hillbilly twang, “Looky, looky, nice fresh nooky,” to which she whorishly replies, “If you can afford it, it’s yours.” Of course, Marty’s friend is immediately pawing at Lydia and playing with her tits, thus inciting animosity between the two sub-lumpenprole pals that eventually erupts into senseless violence. Indeed, while his friend is carrying Lydia and playing with her unclad mammary glands, Marty stabs him in the thigh and then forces the dirtbag (anti)diva to get back into his car, thus bringing a swift end to their trip to the so-called Snakepit. Not surprisingly, Lydia gets pretty angry at Marty at this point and bitches at him, “I’m sick of your macho bullshit. A real fucking hard guy. Fuck you!,” to which he characteristically replies, “You know, you talk a lot of shit, you dumb fucking cunt.” While Lydia continues to bitch incessantly in a manner that would put even a morbidly obese black ghetto welfare queen to shame in terms of sheer obscenely odious obnoxiousness and intolerability, Marty thankfully decides enough is enough, violently drags the lecherous unlady out of his car, bends her over the hood of said car, and then proceeds to ram his loaded revolver in and out of her seemingly putrid poontang, which she seems to rather enjoy despite bitching, “you stupid fucking macho pig.” After using his assumedly well greased gun as a sort of redneck dildo, Marty penetrates Lydia’s discernibly loose asshole while she shoots off rounds from the revolver in what ultimately proves to be a particularly absurdly humorous orgasm that makes it seem like lowlife criminals are masters of improvised carnal fun. 

 When Marty spots a greasy haired teenage waif (Lung Leg) with torn white clothing while driving in the desert, he gets extremely excited, announces to Lydia, “Yo, check it out! Some teenage flesh hitchhiking,” and then proceeds to coerce the seemingly petrified girl into getting into his car. It must be the worst day of the discernibly shaken teen’s life, as she has no idea that Lydia and Marty are sadomasochistic sexual outlaws and immediately tells them a sob story about how a menacing man wielding a large knife got violent with her and threatened to rape and kill her. Fairly predictably, the hot twat hitchhiker’s glaring fear and tragic story make both Lydia and Marty fairly aroused and they decide that they want to complete what the would-be-sex-killer failed to accomplish. While Lydia and Marty promise to drive the hitchhiker back to her house after she begs them to, the two scheming white trash degenerates soon begin manhandling the hysterical teen while they are driving down the road. Although the hitchhiker manages to put up a good fight against her sexually aberrant attackers, it does not take long before Lydia is sitting on top of her body in the desert and ripping off all her clothes like a Sapphic sadist who gets a kick out of raping young nubile girls that cannot fight back. Needless to say, Marty masturbates over the hitchhiker while Lydia feels up her tits and pulls down her panties and exposes her bushy beaver to the arid desert air. When the teen manages to break free from Lydia’s savagely sensual grasp, Marty chases her down and starts brutally beating her while yelling psychopathic things like, “You dumb fucking cunt…You shouldn’t have blown it. Fucking idiot, what are you fucking doing this for?! You brought it upon yourself. Goddamn fucking cunt. Why did you have to blow it? This is what you fucking get.” Indeed, while blaming his victim for the senseless brutality that he is unleashing on her, Marty angrily declares with a discernible degree of seething psychosexual hatred and frustration, “I could fucking kill you.” After brutally beating the hitchhiker within an inch of her life to the point where her skin and clothes are completely soaked in blood and dirt, Marty is rebuked by Lydia, who seems to realize she might be in some serious trouble due to her role in maliciously molesting the waif and complains to her lunatic loverboy, “Macho asshole jerk. I didn’t even want to come here to begin with, you big fucking dick.” In his defense, Marty says to Lydia in regard to beating the hitchhiker to a bloody pulp, “She fucking blew it. She had to pay.” In a twist Hollywood-esque ending that seems somewhat tacked-on and that I feel makes Fingered somewhat weaker in a sort of pseudo-moralistic sense that contradicts the film's overall aggressively nihilistic tone, an off-screen cop randomly says to Lydia and Marty while they are arguing, “Freeze! LA County Sheriff!” 

 While it is just speculation on my part, I doubt Hollywood films like Dominic Sena’s Kalifornia (1993) and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) could have ever been made without the imperative influence of Kern’s Fingered (in fact, Stone’s film seems like a sort of Hollywood postmodern pastiche of a number of Kern’s films). Indeed, while films like Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers (1969), and Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) certainly predate the epic short in terms of works about outlaw lunatic lovers, Kern’s superlatively sleazy slice of gutter grade celluloid featured a whole new dimension of grittiness, nihilism, human ugliness, and visceral sexual depravity that makes the other works seem like hopelessly contrived Hollywood romantic-comedies by comparison. Notably, the film largely owes its raw, rugged, and even psychopathic essence to the fact that virtually all of the actors more or less played themselves, or as Kern stated in an interview conducted by the insufferable left-wing hipster hacks at Vice, “Believe me, in FINGERED, Marty Nation was exactly like that, no exaggeration. The guy who's lifting weights, he was like that. Everybody was real. Lydia Lunch was like that. Lung Leg was like that. The story was based on Lydia and Marty's travels when she was 16 and they would hitchhike and get picked up by somebody, and Marty would take his knife out and start stabbing and cutting up the upholstery in the car, looking at the guy. All those guys were really scary. The guy who's lifting weights in it got killed about two years ago, somebody shot him finally.” 

 Additionally, Lung Leg would accuse Lydia Lunch of taking delight in authentically abusing her while making the film, or as she explained in an interview with Duane Davis in the book Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground (2008) by Jack Sargeant, “I played only one role as Victim…in FINGERED…I was really taken for a ride in this movie…Unfortunately there was no script, if I had seen the script I wouldn’t have had anything to do with it. Half way through the film I realized, this woman, Lunch is not making a film, Lunch is playing some kind of board game; with me and the other people involved…maneuvering…manipulating…etc…and for that reason I would never want to work with her again. She is abusing the medium. She obviously tried to make me appear ugly so I wouldn’t get her Boys, and in so doing reduced greatly the quality of the film.” While I believe that Lunch’s organic sense of sadism actually adds extra layers of psychosexual horror to the film, I can certainly understand why Ms. Lung would still be upset about the fact that crusty old cunt Lunch beat her up and pulled her panties down. More or less half anti-pornographic chamber piece and half pseudo-snuff horror road movie, Fingered is ultimately a work that has few contemporaries as a sort of poor pervert’s take on Jon Jost’s classic flick Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977) meets the fierce filmic fist-fucking of the experimental S&M porn flicks of gay pornographic auteur Fred Halsted like LA Plays Itself (1972), The Sex Garage (1972), and Sextool (1975). Indeed, if you’re interested in experiencing a sort of metaphysical death-by-sex via celluloid in post-Manson Death Valley, Kern’s film makes for a great triple-feature with Teutonic dandy Werner Schroeter’s (anti)feminist arthouse horror flick Willow Springs (1973) and Nico B. and Rozz William’s experimental S&M serial killer flick Pig (1998). Although I felt that Fingered was nothing more than frivolous fetishistic trash masquerading as art when I first saw it about a decade ago, I now must accept the fact that it is one of the very few great and memorable (anti)erotic white trash artsploitation horror flicks, even if I hate to admit it. Of course, John Waters probably gave the film its greatest accolade when he stated in Blank City that it was, “The ultimate date movie for psychos…it is. If you had your first date and took the girl to see FINGERED and afterwards she said, ‘That was really good,’ you know you were gonna get laid, but how were you gonna get laid?! That’s the problem.”  After all, if there is any female quasi-actress that is truly believable as an evil, wanton wench who gets a sick kick out of defiling little girls to impress her equally evil and classless beau, it is Lydia Lunch, who demonstrates in Kern's film that she likes to be both fingered and doing the fingering.

-Ty E