Cat People (1982)

When he was at the height of his fame, cocaine addiction, and flagrant homophilia, screenwriter turned auteur filmmaker Paul Schrader (American Gigolo, The Canyons)—a lapsed member of the Dutch Reformed Church who did not see his first movie until he was 17-years-old because his extremely religious Calvinist parents forbid it (notably, after the filmmaker and his brother Leonard became established in Hollywood, their mother wrote them a letter reading, “Father and I will miss you in heaven.”)—began work on what would ultimately be his biggest and most elaborate studio film, Cat People (1982), which he mainly decided to make as a means to maintain his artistically fruitful friendship with gay Italian production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, who was largely responsible for the distinct look of the director's first big success American Gigolo (1980) starring Richard Gere. Indeed, as revealed in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) by Peter Biskind, “Schrader was working hard and playing hard. He became very much a part of the gay party scene, which he had been flirting with since TAXI DRIVER days in 1975 […] People like Schrader were attracted to it because they understood there was something religious in the intertwining of sex, death, and ecstasy.”  Of course, Scarfiotti—a cultivated man with an aristocratic demeanor who treated his sets with a preternatural seriousness, like he was Michelangelo working on the Sistine Chapel—was one of these extremely chic sod party boys and Schrader gave him free reign over the Cat People set, even attempting to include an inter-title at the beginning of the flick reading “A film by Paul Schrader and Ferdinando Scarfiotti,” but ultimately being denied the request by the studio (since Scarfiotti was not part of the relevant union at the time, he had to be credited as a ‘Visual Consultant,’ even though he was in charge of every single set piece and the overall look of the entire film). Schrader had good reason to kiss Scarfiotti’s gay ass, as he was the production designer of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Il conformist (1970) aka The Conformist, which was one of the filmmaker’s favorite films and greatest influences at the time, or as he stated himself, “You looked at Bertolucci, it was just like he took Godard and Antonioni, put them in bed together, held a gun to their hads, and said, ‘You guys fuck or I’ll shoot you.’” Despite being intended as an revisionist remake of the classic 1942 Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur production of the same name and his first film that he did not actually write, Cat People would ironically eventually become a fairly personal project for Schrader for various reasons, not least of all because he was fucking star Nastassja Kinski at the time he made it. 

 Barely even qualifying as a remake of the 1942 film (in fact, Schrader later expressed regret that they did not change the title of the film, as he felt critics had judged him harshly by comparing Tourneur's film to his when they barely have anything in common), the film was heavily influenced by his philosophical propensity to put pussy on a pedestal, which was largely the result of his fear of the so-called fairer sex (indeed, the director has described the film as a “Dante and Beatrice story” in reference to Dante Alighieri's “courtly love” for a Florentine woman named Beatrice Portinari who he worshipped from afar and who became a great source of inspiration for Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy). Indeed, as is quite evident when comparing both films, Schrader did heavy uncredited reworking of Alan Ormsby's original script, thereupon ultimately siring a semi-cryptic auteur piece where the male protagonist is more or less a stand-in for the filmmaker. While Schrader was obsessed with Kinski to the point where he planned to propose marriage to her, their relationship ended badly during the production and they eventually stopped talking on the set, though the clearly unhealthily obsessed filmmaker later followed her all the way to Paris in a desperate attempt to win her back.  Of course, the young actress was not happy and when Schrader dared to corner her and some young stud that she was dating at the time, Kinski stated to the lovelorn filmmaker, “Paul, I always fuck my directors. And with you it was difficult.” Luckily, Schrader’s fetishistic Dante-esque worship of Kinski was channeled into Cat People where the actress naturally spends a good portion of the second half of the film baring all, including her dark-haired Teuton-polack beaver (notably, Kinski later attempted to get the beaver shots taken out of the film, arguing that they were being used against her wishes, even though she had long ago bared her bush at the ripe age of 14 in the Hammer horror flick To the Devil a Daughter (1976), among various other examples during her career).  Considerably pissed that Kinski both dumped him and reneged on the nudity scenes, Schrader thankfully fought tooth and nail to keep these scenes intact.  Indeed, while Cat People is not a fuck flick, it is exceptionally erotically-charged and it is hard to imagine the film without these imperative scenes where a completely unclad Kinski stalks the New Orleans bayous like a sexually insatiable beastess that is on the prowl for something to fuck and kill.

 Admittedly, my recent decision to rewatch Cat People was largely inspired by the death of David Bowie, whose theme song “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” act as sort of foreplay to the celluloid multiple orgasm that is Schrader’s succulently salacious piece of semi-sadomasochistic celluloid. Sort of like the Death in Venice of Hollywood horror (which is no surprise when one considers that Scarfiotti was the art director of Visconti’s masterful Thomas Mann adaptation), the film makes absolutely exquisite use of its truly foreboding New Orleans setting, thereupon making for a rare American film that gives the United States a truly exotic and otherworldly ancient essence that subtly underscores the fact that the largely Latin city is the culturally, racially, and spiritually mongrelized culmination of centuries of bizarre Afro-European intermingling. Indeed, the film might have a somewhat superficial and sometimes nonsensical storyline with plotholes, but that is somewhat irrelevant as the real appeal of the flick is it's sort of decidedly aesthetically decadent neo-Cocteauian phantasmagoria, or as Schrader once stated himself, “Previously, I've made films about daydreams – this is my first film about nightmares . . . It's about what goes on when the lights go out – the unconscious world inhabited by erotic fantasies, and what Cocteau calls the ‘sacred monsters’ . . . When you're dealing with the fantastic, you need a place where people would accept it (the myth) . . . New Orleans is one of those towns where you think almost anything can happen – and probably has!”  Indeed, as Cat People clearly demonstrates, if you want to make an American horror film with strong atmosphere and a foreboding spirit, there is probably no better place than ‘The City That Care Forgot.’

 While the film is ostensibly based on the same DeWitt Bodeen short story as its 1942 namesake, Cat People is less a remake than a tribute to Romanticism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau (in fact, Schrader shot a recreation of Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff’s painting “The Caress” featuring Kinski’s mother Ruth Brigitte Tocki with a leopard’s body, but opted to not use it in the film) and the films of great post-WWII guido auteurs like Visconti and Bertolucci. Additionally, aside from being a horror movie that, as Schrader described, “contains more skin than blood,” it also probably has more in common with the Southern Gothic genre than supernatural horror. In other words, Cat People clearly was not made by or for horror fanboys who diddle themselves to Friday the 13th movies while sporting hockey masks, hence why it had much more success in Europe than the United States. Aside from being arguably the ultimate film for Nastassja Kinski fetishists, Schrader’s flick is also probably the most elegant film ever made about zoophilia. The reluctantly supernatural yet unrepentantly sensual tale of an exotic yet terribly naive and seemingly borderline autistic beauteous young virgin of incestuous werecat stock who moves to New Orleans to be united with her long lost brother, only to become entrenched in a sort of seriously unwanted bizarre love triangle with her mentally sick sibling and a bookish yet extremely chivalrous zoo curator of the quasi-misanthropic sort who works with animals because he prefers them to people, Cat People is a somewhat cautionary tale about the perils of putting pussy on a pedestal, especially if said pussy is a crazy cunt of the uniquely unhinged and unpredictable sort. A horror film made for people that do not necessarily care for horror films that wallows in the dichotomous theme of the sacred and profane where Kinski does a fairly believable job portraying the ultimate archetypical virgin-whore, Schrader’s film is notable for its genre in that it dares to blur the line between myths and the archaic psycho-historical roots of said myths, hence Cocteau’s imperative influence. 

 After opening with an aesthetically pleasing ritual scene set in a fiery desert involving the ‘sacrifice’ of the lead female heroine’s ancient female ancestor to a leopard by a group of nearly naked tribesmen covered with crude body paint (rather curiously, this people are clearly non-white), Cat People then flashes forward to the present day at a New Orleans airport where the female protagonist/quasi-anti-heroine Irena Gallier (Nastassja Kinski in a role that Bo Derek was originally intended to play) is virtually stalked all the way to a payphone by her long lost brother Paul (Malcolm McDowell), who she has not seen since they were very young children after both of their parents tragically died. Unbeknownst to Irena, her long dead parents were brother and sister and died in a dubious suicide pact of sorts that the circumstances of are never fully revealed. Also, quite unlike Paul, Irena is completely unaware of the fact that she and her brother are werecats and if she has sex with a man, she will transform into a black panther and will remain in that form until she kills another person.  Of course, Paul is quite happy to see Irena, as he has big plans with her that mainly involve incestuous sex, lest they both be doomed to a life of perpetual murder and strange sexual dysfunction. As Irena learns upon arriving at her ancient family estate, the Galliers are watched over by a seemingly voodoo oriented negress servant named ‘Female’ (Ruby Dee in arguably her most unconventional and thankfully most apolitical role), who is also an orphan and who got her strange name (which is pronounced “feh-MAH-leh”) after someone wrote on her birth certificate, “Child, Female” since she had no parents. While celebrating their (un)timely reunion during a sort of homecoming dinner where they eat “Female’s special gumbo,” Paul asks his sister if she remembers him in any way and she replies in a borderline sensual fashion, “Mmm, I used to fantasize about you…when I was in the orphanage. Well, you know, about you coming to rescue me and things. Daydreams.” According to Paul, he “had the same dream,” thus underscoring their innate supernatural connection as inbred werecats. Indeed, while she is not conscious of it yet, Irena’s body is telling her to be defiled by her brother, who is determined to make his little sis his lover.  Unfortunately for Paul, who gets temporary sexual release by fucking and killing dumb whores and trashy prostitutes, his sister will ultimately fall in love with a mere human, thereupon eventually leading to quite deadly consequences.

 During their first night together, Paul gets so intolerably horny for his sister that he decides to seek the company of a hooker, thus resulting in unfortunate consequences for all involved. When a streetwalker arrives at a sleazy fleabag hotel to meet a john, she gets quite the surprise when she is brutally mauled by a black leopard that is hiding under a bed.  As the viewer somewhat suspects, the leopard is actually Paul in animal form. Although the streetwalker survives the attack, the panther if left trapped in the hotel room and is eventually captured the next day by a zoologist/zoo curator named Oliver Yates (John Heard of C.H.U.D. (1984) and the Home Alone franchise) with the help of his female assistant/fuck-buddy Alice Perrin (Annette O'Toole of Superman III (1983) and Smallville (2001)) and some cops and imprisoned at a strange borderline Fellini-esque zoo where female secretaries do office work above cages full of dangerous animals. Although a handsome, intelligent, and seemingly physically strong fellow, Oliver is an introverted dork who spends his free time reciting Dante and dreaming of an ideal woman that he can put on a pedestal and worship like a goddess.  While his co-worker Alice—a reasonably beauteous babe with a classic Nordic physique and a fairly nice set of large firm tits—is clearly in love with him, Oliver is not quite interested in making her his serious lover, as he seems to be looking for a lady that is more exotic and enigmatic. Luckily, supernatural virgin Irena is probably the closest thing to a real-life goddess and she will soon enter Oliver’s life by sheer happenstance. When Paul goes missing, Irena, who expected to be given an extensive tour of the city by her brother, goes looking for him around the French Quarter, thus eventually leading her to the zoo where she meets Oliver under awkward circumstances after running away from him after he startles her. Naturally, it is love at first sight for hopeless romantic Paul, who immediately offers Irena a job at the zoo gift shop. While everything initially goes splendid at the zoo, Irena is soon given somewhat of a shock after witnessing the black panther, who she has no clue is actually her brother, attacking and killing a fairly obnoxious zookeeper named Joe Creigh (Ed Begley, Jr. of Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter (1974)).  With a single bite, Paul-as-the-panther manages to completely dismember one of Joe's arms.  Although Oliver resolves to euthanize the killer cat, he discovers it has escaped when he goes to its cage to kill it. Of course, as result of murdering Joe, Paul was able to transform back into a human and escape. As a result of witnessing his sister’s budding romance with Oliver while imprisoned in the zoo, Paul is determined to deflower his little sis ASAP so that he can have the distinguished luxury of being the man who pops her cherry. 

 When Paul somewhat surprises Irena by randomly showing up back at the house after disappearing for days, he ignores his sister when she describes about being completely horrified as a result of witnessing Joe’s brutal death and then proceeds to accuse her of wanting to jump on Oliver's cock, stating in a somewhat hostile yet nonetheless sexually-charged fashion, “You want to fuck him, don’t you? You dream about fucking him. Your whole body burns. Burns all along your nerves. In your mouth, your breasts. You go wet between your legs.” When Paul attempts to defile her while rationalizing his violently incestuous actions by stating, “But I’m the only one who can touch you, and you’re the only one who can touch me. Don’t you see we’re saved together because we’re the same,” Irena predictably decides to flee the house and does so by instinctually doing a back-flip off a second floor building in a scene that somewhat seems like a homage to Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (1938). While a police officer finds Irena running down the street in a hysterical fashion and proceeds to question her, she opts to not tell him about her big brother’s violently incestuous outburst. When another police officer comes by the house and his K9 dog starts barking after catching a scent, the police decide to search the home and ultimately find a large animal cage and the remains of three or four dead sluts and prostitutes, or as an inordinately stoic negro cop named Detective Brandt (Frankie Faison of the Hannibal Lecter franchise) tells Oliver while showing him the grisly crime scene, “I expect Gallier killed them first, possibly as part of some ritual. Then fed ‘em to the leopard. We’ve found some others, too, over the years. Mostly prostitutes, female runaways, half-eaten, genitals torn out […] Gallier’s been in and out of psycho wards since he was 12. He’s a religious fanatic.” Needless to say, Oliver wants to know if Irena was in any way involved in the fetishistic murders and Detective Brandt calms some of his worries while stirring others by remarking, “We have no reason to suspect her. In fact, it looked as if he’d planned to kill her too.” 

 With her brother Paul a wanted fugitive on the run and her servant Female imprisoned, Irena naturally accepts Oliver’s invitation to move into his flat, thereupon accelerating the evolution of their initially fairly tame romance. Not long after she moves in, Oliver enthusiastically declares he plans to one day buy her a plantation and takes her on a sort of mini-vacation to a small red boathouse that he has on the bayou. While the two lovers have fun during the day while doing harmless things together like boating and crabbing, things get somewhat more intense later that night since both of them have become quite sexually frustrated as a result of the fact that Irena refuses to allow Oliver to deflower her. Of course, things get even more complicated when Oliver wakes up in the middle of the night and sees Irena screaming at him to not look at her since she is completely naked body and covered in blood. Indeed, as a result of her werecat instincts, Irena woke up in the middle of the night and decided to go hunting for prey in the form of a cute bunny rabbit that she sank her teeth into while it was still alive, even though she is a vegetarian. During the same night, Paul murders a dumb blonde named Billie (Tessa Richarde of Boaz Davidson’s The Last American Virgin (1982)) that he met in a graveyard earlier that day after she gives him a blowjob in a hotel room. When the two lovers get back from their trip, Irena has a slight mental breakdown and expresses her doubt about her her sanity and the future of their relationship, so Oliver states to her in an intimately impassioned fashion, “Listen, Irena, I’m 34 years old. I spent most of my life looking for somebody…I even wanted to be in love with. Now that I’ve found you, I’m not gonna let you go. I love you.” When Irena replies, “Oh, yeah? Would you love me just as much…if we, if we could never sleep together?,” Oliver attempts to console her and assure her of his love for her by stating absurdly nonsensical pseudo-poetic things like, “I loved you before you were born.” Unbeknownst to both Oliver and Irena, Paul while hiding in a tree above them the entire time and he listened to their entire conversation. Ultimately, Paul decides to surprise Irena by crashing through a window and then subsequently attempting to explain to her of the importance of them becoming lovers, stating in a violently despairing fashion, “Save me. Only you can stop this killing. You’ve got to make love with me…as brother and sister. I’ve searched for you for so long, from one foster home to another. We can live together as mates. Just as our parents did. You do know that they were brother and sister, don’t you? Oh yes. Make love with me and save both of us.”  While Paul gets a little bit rough with his sister, Irena eventually manages to escape by stabbing him in the hand with a piece of broken glass. When Oliver comes home later that night, he finds Paul there waiting for him in semi-panther form. Luckily, Alice shots and kills Paul with a shotgun just after he transforms into a panther and attempts to maul Oliver. When Oliver later does an autopsy of the werecat, he is disturbed to find a human body inside the panther corpse. Even more curiously, after cutting open Paul’s corpse, green gas oozes out and eventually evaporates both the panther and human corpse into a pool flesh and viscera, thereupon conveniently ensuring that Oliver is unable to document the supernatural creature. 

 With her only living relative now dead, Irena decides to visit Female in prison to get advice about what she should do next and is ultimately given the semi-cryptic words of wisdom by the worldly spiritual negress, “Live as he [Paul] did: hidden, in jails. Never love. Pretend the world is what men think it is.”  Hoping to figuratively and literally flee from her truly nightmarish situation, Irena decides to flee town and buys a train ticket to Richmond, Virginia, but during the train ride she has an elaborate life-changing dream involving her dead brother Paul that fully awakens her long dormant atavistic instincts and transforms her from skittish prey into a lethally lecherous predator on the prowl. Indeed, during the otherworldly dream-sequence, Irena enters a windy transcendental desert realm with a dark orange tone where she is greeted by her brother, who is topless and declares to her in a quite proud fashion in regard to the legacy of their godly werecat heritage, “Long ago our ancestors sacrificed their children to the leopards. The souls of the children grew inside the leopards…until the leopards became human. We were gods then. We are an incestuous race. We can only make love with our own, otherwise we transform. And before we can become human again, we must kill.” During the dream, Irena also meets her mother in panther form. After the dream, Irena evolves into a cruel, craven, and completely confident sexual predator and opts to travel back to New Orleans to hunt down Oliver so that she can lose her virginity and finally fully embrace her werecat birthright.  Luckily for Irena, Oliver is so obsessively in love with her that he is somewhat willing to overlook certain things about her, including her primal urge to kill, especially after they fuck.

 Before seeking out Oliver, Irena decides to crush the sexual competition by stalking and severely petrifying Alice, who is hopelessly in love with the male protagonist (notably, Alice's jealously of Irena and love of Oliver is made quite clear in a scene where she states to the latter, “Her [Irena's] type will always be all right. Look, I’m not blind, Oliver. I’ve seen you obsessed before, [but] not like this. I even thought I’d seen you in love before. I guess that was just my vanity.”).  Indeed, in one of the few scenes in the film that was also in the original 1942 Cat People, Irena scares the shit out of Alice while she is swimming in an indoor swimming pool by lurking in the shadows and making bestial sounds (notably, Schrader opted to add an extra layer to Alice’s vulnerability by having the character swim topless). When Irena eventually comes out and reveals herself to Alice after sadistically terrorizing her like a cat that is playing with a mouse that it is about to kill, her jealous rival loses all self-control and immediately accuses her of wanting to kill her. Of course, Irena just continues to play mind games with Alice by maintaining a gleefully sadistic smile and stating to her in a preposterously passive-aggressive fashion, “I’m sorry if I frightened you.” While Alice subsequently calls Oliver and tells her about Irena’s creepy behavior, the male protagonist hangs up the phone on her when his leopard lady love randomly walks in the house and begins stripping off her clothes in a provocative fashion where she more than obviously demonstrates that she is finally ready to fuck. Needless to say, Oliver experiences the erotic relief of a lifetime when he subsequently deflowers Irena after having been cock-blocked for such a long time. After the two fall asleep, Irena wakes up in the middle of the night and admires and licks blood that is dripping from her hemorrhaging de-hymened werecat cunt. Of course, not like after sampling her vaginal sanguine fluids, Irena transforms into a panther for the first time and pounces on Oliver, though her love for him stops her from slaughtering and killing him. Instead, werecat Irena flees Oliver’s home and then causes a spectacle of herself by occupying a bridge where she is ultimately trapped by police. When Oliver eventually arrives at the scene, Irena jumps off the bridge and swims to land while dodging police bullets. 

 Naturally, Oliver immediately goes looking for Irena and is disturbed when he happens upon the mangled corpse of his elderly friend Yeatman Brewer (Emery Hollier), who the heroine killed so that she could transform back into a human. Not long after finding the dead body, Oliver is approached by Irena, who unrepentantly declares she killed Yeatman and then begs the protagonist to kill her, which he naturally refuses to do. When Oliver asks her why she did not kill him, she tells him that it is because she loves him. While stripping off her clothes, Irena then declares, “Free me. Make love to me again. I want to live with my own.” Of course, Oliver enthusiastically abides, though he makes sure to tie all four of Irena's limbs to bedposts before penetrating the human pussycat’s puss in a tastefully sleazy scene that is part quasi-religious ritual and part zoophiliac S&M bondage scene. In a bizarre and totally unforgettably twist ending, it is casually revealed that Oliver has not only started a romance with Alice, but that he also has managed to keep Irena. Indeed, in the very last scene, Oliver is depicted gently stroking and hand-feeding a black panther at the zoo that the viewer presumes is Irena, who has been placed on a sort of perennial pedestal that arguably demonstrates that the curious male protagonist is more interested in romanticizing the idea of love than actually making love to women, henceforth underscoring auteur Schrader's somewhat ‘idiosyncratic’ philosophical view of love and romance. 

 Ironically, despite originally being intended as an impersonal project where the auteur wanted to have the luxury of utilizing studio resources and to experiment with adapting someone else’s work, Cat People would ultimately evolve into one of Schrader’s most embarrassingly, if not somewhat cryptically, autobiographical works, albeit with a bizarre happy ending that is in stark contrast to what he actually experienced in real-life. Indeed, instead of having the grand honor of permanently keeping Nastassja Kinski imprisoned in a cage like the male protagonist in the film, Schrader was not only pathetically dumped by the actress but also heckled by then Universal Pictures executive Ned Tanen for filming various beaver shots of the intemperate Teutonic actress (as described in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Tanen called up Schrader and said, “Listen, you fucking idiot, this girl [Kinski] is running around telling everybody you shot her crotch and you’re going to put beaver shots in the middle of this movie,what the fuck are you doing?,” to which the angry and vengeful lovelorn auteur apparently replied, “Oh man, she fucked me over and I’m going to fuck her, nobody’s going to treat me this way. . .”). Luckily, Schrader did not have to excise the beaver shots from the film but both his career and personal life was a mess, as the film was a commercial failure and he had some serious drug problems, or as he stated himself, “My life was completely fucked up by women and drugs and my career had gone dead. The Russian roulette was the event that made it clear to me it was time to leave L.A., go to New York, and start over. So I did.” Thankfully, unlike many of the other filmmakers of his generation that were associated with the New Hollywood movement, Schrader was able to get his shit together and went to Japan to direct what he has described as his masterpiece, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), which is actually alluded to in Cat People (indeed, there is a shot in the film of a Mishima biography sitting on Oliver's nightstand). As Schrader would later state of the film and its importance in the context of his entire oeuvre, “It's the one I'd stand by – as a screenwriter it's TAXI DRIVER, but as a director it's MISHIMA.”   Somewhat ironically since Schrader once declared, “STAR WARS was the film that ate the heart and the soul of Hollywood.  It created the big-budget comic book mentality,” George Lucas was one of the executive producers on his Mishima biopic.  Notably, there is actually a scene in Cat People where Schrader takes a snipe at Lucas and his commercialization of cinema where a couple little boys buy some The Empire Strikes Back (1980) chewing gum from Kinski while she is working at the zoo gift shop.  Of course, I am sure his film would have been more popular and profitable if Schrader had opted to release Cat People merchandise like Kinski sex lube and McDowell dildos, but I digress.

 Notably, in the featurette Cat People: An Intimate Portrait, Schrader would reveal in regard to Cat People and its central Beatrice complex theme that he had a personal tendency to put pussies on a pedestal as a sort of therapeutic means to deal with his “fear of women.” Of course, no matter what women say, they never truly respect a man that treats them like an immaculate goddess that is worthy of worship, hence one of various reasons as to why Kinski grew to loathe Schrader as a woman that later admitted to him, “I always fuck my directors.  And with you it was difficult.”  Despite the fact that Schrader saw her as a goddess, Kinski's quote clearly reveals that she felt that he was, at best, less than average, at least as far as fuck-buddies are concerned. Personally, one of the things I found most intriguing about the film was that Schrader attempted to do a sort of heterosexual take on Cocteau with a big budget Hollywood studio flick, which explains why it was so poorly received among filmgoers. Notably, in an interview featured in Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings (1990), the filmmaker would confess, “…on CAT PEOPLE the tapes I took along were BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and ORPHEUS, which are obviously nonpareil landmarks in the history of movies. There will never be another Cocteau.” Admittedly, when I first saw Schrader’s film over a decade ago, I was not all that impressed, but now I see it as a highly re-watched novelty of bizarre cocaine-addled cinematic experimentation where the seemingly disharmonious worlds of Hollywood horror trash and European arthouse reluctantly fucked and gave birth to an aesthetically majestic monster of a movie that is quite easy on the eyes. Additionally, I always appreciate a horror film where the archetypical roots of fear and eroticism are provocatively played with (as the filmmaker also stated in Schrader on Schrader, “The NEWSWEEK review said it was a movie for the Jung at heart, and I guess that’s pretty much what I wanted: the idea of myth and the kind of primal images that are embedded in our genes.”). Of course, Bowie’s addicting theme song and Scarfiotti’s extravagant sets alone are worth the price of admission. Indeed, as a wonderfully wanton and delightfully eclectically aesthetically decadent movie of erotic murder and mayhem that is like a popcorn flick for both Jungians and lapsed horror fiends turned arthouse fags, Cat People is the virtual definition of a cinematic guilty pleasure, at least if you’re lame and/or pretentious enough to feel guilty for liking it. 

-Ty E

The Image (1967)

While I am typically rather repulsed by people that mourn dead celebrities that they never knew, I have encountered David Bowie some many times as a result of my cinephilia that I could not help but be somewhat startled by his death, at least to the extent that I know I will never again see a bizarre cameo performance from him in some random future cult film. Indeed, it would have been nice to have seen Bowie appear in a Nicolas Winding Refn or Edwin Brienen flick, but I guess fate had different plans. While Bowie only seemed semi-serious about his film career since it was clearly secondary to his work as a musician, he still managed to appear in more notable films than most full-time Hollywood actors do in a lifetime, hence my somewhat unlikely sense of respect for him (admittedly, I also have respect for him for collaborating with artists like Steve Strange and Klaus Nomi, but that is a different subject). After all, only Bowie could have written a song in tribute to Andy Warhol (which, in my opinion, is one of his darkest and most underrated tunes), only to later portray his quasi-autistic contemporary in a quite memorable way a quarter century later in degenerate Hebraic (con)artist Julian Schnabel’s debut feature Basquiat (1996). Additionally, only Bowie could pull off both Pontius Pilate (as he did in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)) and an aristocratic Egyptian deathrock chic vampire (as he did in Tony Scott’s debut feature The Hunger (1983)). I also admit that I do not think I have ever dated a girl that did not admit that she had the hots for Bowie as a little girl as a result of seeing him in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986), which is somewhat curious since he is also the man that managed to connect Eastern and Western queers together via his strangely iconic performance as a self-sacrificing kiwi sod soldier in Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983). Indeed, if there ever was a mensch that had an eclectic talent for seducing and molesting all sort of filmgoers—whether it be old Jap fags or little white girls—with his mere presence, it was Mr. Bowie, so it is only fitting that his very first acting role was as a handsome young ghost-like figure that literally haunts an artist who may or may not be suffering from with LGBT propagandists describe as ‘internalized homophobia.’  Shot over the course of a mere three days in the winter of 1967 only a couple months after the belated international superstar rechristened himself ‘David Bowie’ in tribute to 19th-century American frontiersman Jim Bowie (as well as the knife that the knife-fighting yank frontiersman popularized) and released his less than successful eponymous debut album, The Image (1967) directed by Michael Armstrong (Horror House aka The Haunted House of Horror, Mark of the Devil) is a little known but considerably worthwhile black-and-white avant-garde horror short that features the then-unknown rock legend when he was only 20-years-old portraying a sort phantom twink who haunts an assumed self-loathing closet queen (played by Michael Byrne of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995) in one of his very first film roles) that is curiously painting a portrait of said phantom twink. 

 Notable for being one of only a handful of British shorts films to ever receive a certified 'X' Rating, The Image might be a sensual and sensitively constructed work with a striking oneiric quality, but it also features David Bowie being brutally murdered no less than five times by a deranged young lapsed twink who seems to embody the line from Oscar Wilde's poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.” Not officially released until around two years after it had been completed, the short was somewhat bizarrely advertised alongside the Hollywood propaganda flick All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) directed by Lewis Milestone, which had recently been acquired by Border Films (which had also produced Armstrong's film), and screened sandwiched in between foreign sex films after eventually opening at the Jacey Cinema in Piccadilly Circus in 1969. According to auteur Armstrong, before ever collaborating together on The Image, he approached Bowie about writing the songs and score for an ultimately never-realized film comedy based on Greek mythology entitled A Floral Tale that would also feature the then-relatively-unknown-rocker in the role of Thracian singer Orpheus. As much as I would enjoy seeing Bowie portraying Orpheus, I think I prefer artsy fartsy horror to silly British comedic takes on ancient Grecian mythology. While Bowie had yet to have any experience doing any film acting, he did have experience studying avant-garde theatre and mime under queer actor Lindsay Kemp, whose 1967 theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise he appeared in.  Clearly his mime training with cocksucker Kemp (who notably later appeared in Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973), as well as a number of films by Ken Russell and Derek Jarman) paid off, as Bowie more or less portrays a sort of phantasmagoric gay hustler-cum-schoolboy specter of unrequited sod sensuality who never speaks but instead merely displays a sad and tragic yet sensual and seductive facial expression that reeks of hopelessly melancholic sexual desperation. Described by auteur Armstrong as, “a study of the illusionary reality world within the schizophrenic mind of the artist at his point of creativity,” The Image is like an abstract homage to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as directed by a filmmaker that seems like he was obsessed with pre-Stonewall American queer avant-garde cinema, especially works like John E. Schmitz’s The Voices (1953) and Gregory J. Markopoulos’ Twice a Man (1964), thereupon making it all the more poignant that is stars iconic gender-bender Bowie, who probably did more than any man of his generation to popularize and legitimize queer culture and male androgyny, even if he was arguably not actually on the pink team himself. Sort of like the Un Chien Andalou of late-1960s British horror, Armstrong’s short is nothing if not a welcome exception to the outmoded formulaic banality of Hammer Films horror. 

 It is fairly apparent before the nameless blond Artist is even introduced that he is not quite right in the head, as his dilapidated house is covered with so much trash that it seems like a homeless guy is camping on his floor. After all, the Artist is a handsome and carefully groomed man with a toned physique who hardly looks like a lazy slob. When we first encounter the Artist, we see he him turned around from a distance in a seemingly symbolic scene that makes it seem as if he is a deeply alienated individual that is lost in his own sad and lonely introverted world. Upon seeing a close-up shot of the Artist, the viewer realizes that he is painting a portrait on a canvas of a handsome young man with his arms raised as if he is inviting someone’s warm embrace, thus hinting that the painter longs for the warmth and touch of a healthy young twink. It is raining outside and when the Artist thinks he sees someone walking outside of his house, he naturally becomes somewhat alarmed and does not even notice when he accidentally gets paint on his sweater. Needless to say, when the Artist sees the very same young man from his painting pressing his face against his window, he becomes quite petrified, drops his paintbrush, and runs upstairs, only to find the same exact twink staring at him in an upstairs window. Of course, the Artist immediately runs back downstairs, only to get the shock of a lifetime when he sees the young man standing next to his painting and making the same exact inviting pose as the figure on the canvas. At this point, the Artist attempts to flee from his house, but the door is chained shut and he soon finds himself being cornered by the young man, who clearly wants his love and is willing to do just about anything to get it, including dying a number of violent deaths. With little time to think, the Artist picks up a small bronze bust that he has conveniently lying on his quite messy trash-covered floor and violently bashes the omnious twink over the head with it, thereupon killing him instantly. Of course, the poof phantom is far from dead, at least in the Artist’s clearly troubled mind. 

 After kicking the young man’s lifeless body to see if he is still alive, the Artist drops the bust and slowly walks up the steps where he enters a small and claustrophobic upstairs bathroom and proceeds to wash his hands, as if making a vain attempt to wash away the figurative blood from his hands. Of course, the Artist is quite startled when the young man randomly begins caressing his neck while he is washing is face in the sink. Matching ostensible like with like, the Artists opts to use his hands to strangle his ghostly caresser to death, only for the young man to subsequently awake from his slumber and once again proceed to approach his petrified ‘victim.’ Luckily for the Artist, he has a knife in his pants pocket, which he uses to stab the young man in the gut. After the Artist stabs the young man, the wounded specter falls forward and leans against his stabber in a manner that almost makes it seem as if the two men are sharing an intimate loving moment with one another, which Armstrong underscores with close-up still shots of the faggy fellows’ slightly touching faces and waists. Of course, there are also sexual overtones to the stabbings, as the Artist penetrates the young man’s flesh with a fierce yet fetishistic degree of savage sensuality, as if passionately buggering him with the blade.  Eventually, the Artist begins slowly walking down the steps backwards while waving his knife at the young man, who still has his arms wide open as if expecting the painter to finally accept his embrace, even though he is covered in blood and is suffering from seemingly fatal stab wounds. When the young man finally gets the gall to come down the stairs, the Artist wastes no time in brutally stabbing multiple times, most notably and symbolically in the back, until the twink completely collapses and does not get back up. At this point, the Artist completely mentally deteriorates and unleashes his remaining strength on his painting, which he wrestles to the ground. While lying on his painting, the Artist puts his hands over his head and sobs like a toddler suffering from a temper tantrum. Somewhat intriguingly, the film concludes with a shot of a framed photograph of the young man as a schoolboy, thus hinting that he is someone that the Artist used to know and is an unrequited love and/or someone he ultimately betrayed. 

 While David Bowie obviously had a singularly successful career after The Image, the film’s relatively unknown auteur Michael Armstrong was not so successful and spent the majority of his fairly uneven filmmaking career involved with horror and exploitation oriented hack work, though with some slight notable exceptions. Indeed, while the filmmaker had some minor commercial success with his proto-slasher The Dark (1969) aka The Haunted House Of Horror aka Horror House starring gregarious guido teen idol Frankie Avalon and even more successful with the West German production Hexen bis aufs Blut gequält (1970) aka Mark of the Devil starring Udo Kier and Herbert Lom, both of these films were taken away from him and completely butchered (in fact, some argue that the producer, Austrian Heimatfilm star turned Fassbinder superstar Adrian Hoven, was the true auteur of the latter film, as he more or less treated Armstrong the same way Francis Ford Coppola treated Wim Wenders on Hammett (1982) by reshooting scenes and excising others). Aside from penning and appearing in trashy sex comedies like The Sex Thief (1973) and Eskimo Nell (1975) and writing Pete Walker’s horror-comedy House of the Long Shadows (1983) starring horror legends Vincent Price and Christopher Lee, Armstrong also did some uncredited writing on Tobe Hooper’s somewhat underrated Colin Wilson adaptation Lifeforce (1985). Arguably, most notably, at least as far as his screenwriting credits are concerned, Armstrong also penned Ian Merrick’s much reviled and maligned arthouse-ish crime-thriller The Black Panther (1977), which, despite being a delightfully dark film, was essentially consigned to the celluloid dustbin of history upon its release because it was ruthlessly attacked by the British media due to featuring a fairly historically accurate depiction of the kidnapping and murder of heiress Lesley Whittle by deranged armed robber Donald Neilson. Judging by the fact that virtually all of his projects were either butchered and/or abject commercial failures, one might argue that Armstrong was the single most accursed British auteur of his era, especially when once considers that he actually seemed to have talent as is quite apparent in The Image, which is seemingly immaculate in its stunning simplicity.  Somewhat strangely but not surprisingly, Quentin Tarantino is apparently such a huge fan of Armstrong's badly butchered feature The Haunted House of Horror that he screened his own personal print of the film in 1997 at the first semi-annual Quentin Tarantino Film Festival (aka ‘QT-Fest’) in Austin, Texas as an example of a movie that had an imperative influence on his own work.

 Somewhat ironically, Armstrong’s first film was also his most pure, unadulterated, and auteur oriented as his only cinematic work where his own personal vision was more or less left completely untainted by scheming producers and monetary-motivated studios. Indeed, despite the fact that Armstrong only got the opportunity to shoot “barely half” of his script for The Image because the producers refused to fund further shooting time (in fact, the production company, Border Films, even briefly took the project away from Armstrong and had an in-house hack editor assemble a botched 7 ½ minute cut of the film, only to beg the filmmaker to come back when they realized they had a problem), the filmmaker still managed to construct a striking work that was wholly his own, hence the relatively idiosyncratic essence of the film, which I would compare to the pre-Night Tide (1961) avant-garde shorts of Curtis Harrington (who, incidentally, also had many of his features butchered by studios and producers when he began directing semi-mainstream horror films). Notably, due to the fact that he was unable to shoot his entire screenplay, Armstrong had to get extra creative with the editing and, in the end, he ultimately “expanded the thematic line of the film even further than had existed in the original screenplay,” thus resulting in what probably turned out to be a more potent and immaculate work that feels like the cinematic equivalent of being briefly molested by death. Personally, I was quite shocked when I put two and two together and realized that The Image and Mark of the Devil were directed by the same man, as the latter is essentially folk-horror exploitation trash that was made to capitalize on the success of Witchfinder General (1968) aka The Conqueror Worm, which was especially successful in Deutschland.  Although Armstrong would jokingly refer to the short as his “art film,” I would also say that it is unequivocally his greatest and most provocative film. I also think that it was the perfect cinematic debut for David Bowie, as a short and almost sadistically bittersweet slice of foreboding psychosexual celluloid that demonstrates that Ziggy Stardust was already oozing charisma and androgynous sex appeal long before he ever became Ziggy Stardust. Of course, it is only fitting that a man that portrayed himself as gay and bisexual for decades before ‘coming out of the closest as heterosexual’ would make his filmic debut as the most ambiguously faggy yet nonetheless seductive of phantoms. Surely, Bowie’s performance in The Image also makes a nice counterpoint to his bizarre cameo in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) as a long-lost FBI Agent. 

 While he certainly had dubious taste in women (to say the least) and, in my opinion, wrote more shitty songs than good ones, Bowie unquestionably had a strikingly singular career as an actor, which might be the result of being a man that had more charm, charisma, tenacity, and lust for life than artistic prowess. Indeed, from portraying a melancholic dipsomaniac extraterrestrial in Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) to playing himself in the kraut teen junky cult flick Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981) to his somewhat fitting performance as the eponymous rebel poet in Alan Clarke’s Brecht adaptation Baal (1982) to his quirky performance as the great Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan’s otherwise banal feature The Prestige (2006), Bowie has certainly secured his place as the most eclectic part-time actor in cinema history, which is not too bad for a petite Brit with stereotypical bad teeth who got his start playing a gay ghost in an obscure avant-garde short that was only seen by a handful of people (unfortunately, aside from the fact that Armstrong's film was only briefly in British theaters, it has never been released on VHS or DVD).  Undoubtedly, watching The Image now, it is almost more hard to believe that the handsome and exceedingly youthful chap in the film is now dead than the fact that he would go on to become one of the most famous and readily identifiable figures in the entire world.  In that sense, Armstrong's film is probably more haunting today than when it was released nearly half a century ago, thus making it mandatory viewing for both cinephiles and/or anyone that is even vaguely interested in Bowie.  I also have to admit that The Image was a rather refreshing experience for me in that was it was like seeing Bowie totally stripped, as the viewer gets to see him without the makeup or one of his carefully contrived personas, which is arguably the most evocative aspect of the short, thus underscoring the completely unintended and unpredictable ways that a film can evolve over time in terms of both meaning and potency.

-Ty E

The Last Hole

Admittedly, any respect that I once had for Charlie Chaplin as both a man and comedian was virtually all but totally annihilated when I witnessed his lame ass Fremdscham-enducing speech at the conclusion of The Great Dictator (1940) where he acts like a slave-morality-ridden and Adderall-addled bleeding heart autist suffering from an acute social justice seizure. Indeed, it was no so much Chaplin’s plastic left-wing politics that I found revolting, but his pathetic pseudo-humanistic American-politican-esque pandering, as if he would eat the rotten kosher cunt of Emma Lazarus's corpse to prove that he is the kind of super duper morally righteous humanist hero that was born to wear a nice and shiny Zio-approved ‘good guy badge.’  While Chaplin might have once proudly stated, “I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician,” he certainly demonstrated with his fairly philo-Semitic Uncle Adolf satire, which was heavily influenced by his viewing of Leni Rienfenstahl's Triumph des Willens (1935) aka Triumph des Willens and unsettling personal obsession with the fact that he and the Führer has many personal similarities (aside from their superficial physical similarities and being born four days apart in April 1889, both men were self-made individuals that had risen to international fame from abject poverty), that he would have made for a most successful democratic political prostitute due to his unrivaled groveling prowess (though I must admit that both politicians and comedians need to be fairly proficient at self-degradation and self-exploitation if they hope to be even remotely successful). While anarchistic kraut clown Herbert Achternbusch (Bierkampf aka Beer Chase, Hick’s Last Stand) might have (meta)political beliefs and ideals that I find to be somewhat dubious, I have nothing but total respect for him as an artist and filmmaker, as he is a true iconoclast that would never degrade himself to the level of doing some super sentimental speech like some cheap Baptist preacher. Arguably the greatest example of both Achternbusch’s uncompromising transgressiveness and incendiary idiosyncrasy as a filmmaker is his rather grim black-and-white ‘holocaust comedy’ Das letzte Loch (1981) aka The Last Hole where the truly audacious auteur portrays a psychosis-ridden professional dipsomaniac, fiancee-killer, and private detective who incessantly drinks schnapps in the hope of forgetting about the Jews that were killed in the so-called shoah and who ultimately decides commit his own one-man-holocaust by jumping into a guido volcano after realizing that he will never be able to escape the Hebraic phantoms that haunt his malevolently morbid mind.  A killer with a curious conscience, Achternbusch's character is so horrifyingly confounded and bizarrely nihilistic that, despite the fact he kills his fiancee for showing him love, he is deeply emotionally invested with and totally traumatized by the miserable fate of millions of Jews.

 A vocal enemy of kosher commie Theodor Adorno’s famously insane statement, “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Achternbusch notably once rightly declared, “It must have been then [during the early 1960s] that a German philosopher claimed that one could not write poetry after Auschwitz—which I thought was outrageous, and I replied that after Auschwitz one could only write poetry.” Undoubtedly, The Last Hole is Achternbusch’s most blatant celluloid assault against Adorno’s patently absurd statement as an exceedingly eccentric piece of esoteric post-Nazi ethno-masochism where the auteur eventually commits suicide by throwing himself into a volcano because, to quote the character's rather preposterously poetic suicide letter, he wants to “…belong to the death mound of the victims. I do not want to belong to the death mound of the self-righteous Germans.” Like virtually all of Achternbusch’s cinematic works, the film belongs to the ‘anti-Heimat’ subgenre, which was somewhat popular during the late-1960s through late-1980s among filmmakers of the New German Cinema movement because it ruthlessly mocked the once highly popular ‘Heimatfilm’ (aka ‘homeland-film’) genre.  Since Heimat films romanticized sentimental Germanic rural living, many filmmakers of Achternbusch’s generation saw it as ‘fascistic’ and thus deconstructed and defiled the genre for there own purposes, with The Last Hole representing one of the most extreme, ruthless, and unforgiving assaults against ‘cinéma de papa.’ Of course, not unlike Volker Schlöndorff with his anti-Heimat piece Der plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach (1971) aka The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach, albeit in a more scandalous and scathing fashion, Achternbusch’s film dares to pour salt on old wounds by reintroducing the Jewish question in an obnoxiously ironic way. Needless to say, as a work that mediates on Teutonic alcoholism and the infamy of the Nazi holocaust, Achternbusch’s film is hardly endearing towards the Aryan homeland, especially the director’s southeastern German state of Bavaria, which is portrayed as a grotesquely gothic anti-fairytale realm full of boorish beer-chugging buffoons, sexually-repressed waitresses, and cheap and emotionally dead whores. 

 Following in the footsteps of the director’s first feature Das Andechser Gefühl (1974) aka The Andechs Feeling, which depicts a schoolteacher portrayed by Achternbusch who slowly drinks himself to death whilst flies drown in his mug of lager, The Last Hole is indubitably the most morbid and vulgarly melancholic comedy that I have ever seen as a seriously sick celluloid work about a perniciously passive-aggressive monster who lacks the capacity to love and instead kills his lover while obsessively dwelling on dead Jews. Rather fittingly, Achternbusch, not unlike the late great belated auteur Christoph Schlingensief, has been oftentimes described as a comedic heir to avant-garde comedian Karl Valentin—a fellow Bavarian who has been called the “Charlie Chaplin of Germany” and whose preternatural brand of humor has been loosely linked to Dadaism, social expressionism and the degenerate modern art movement known as ‘New Objectivity’ (aka Neue Sachlichkeit)—though his work is ultimately much more extreme and iconoclastic, albeit in a sort of insanely ironical fashion that will have the viewer questioning whether they should laugh or put a bullet in their brain. Indeed, despite incessantly mocking and satirizing Germany and especially Bavaria, Achternbusch’s films are shamelessly Bavarian to the core to the point where he was ridiculed by Australian novelist and sometimes filmmaker Peter Handke (Chronicle of Current Events, The Left-Handed Woman) due to the patently peasant oriented essence of his work, or as the writer wrote himself: “Achternbusch ought to know better than any other writer. Why then does he content himself with fantasies taken from the pages of the local paper? The result: slavish – or in Achternbusch’s case, simulating slavish – adherence to the culture cliché that nobody can be represented as an individual anymore, that we have all become damaged, perforated foils for anything and everything already illustrated and pictured: formless beings, ventriloquist existences. Does Achternbusch offer more than merely rhetorical, literally ‘sub’-cultural challenge to the world of the newspaper . . . ? Or are his travesties of plastic mythologies a kind of resistance?” 

 To answer Handke’s question, I would describe Achternbusch’s films as Grosz-esque anti-folk flicks directed by a man that—whether consciously or subconsciously—seems to realize that he is a very product of the culture and people that he so absurdly loathes, like a schizophrenic Jewish neo-Nazi who likes to spend his free time chowing down on lox and watching David Duke videos on YouTube while sporting a yarmulke on his freshly shaven head. Indeed, a film where Achternbusch puts on a Wehrmacht helmet only moments before committing suicide in solidarity with the Hebrews that were killed by his family members and countrymen during the Second World War, The Last Hole is arguably the most preposterously potent expression of the singularly nihilistic and self-destructive absurdity that is the post-WWII German Volksgeist. Like a putrid post-Auschwitz motion picture mockery of the pastoral Aryan utopias dreamed up by Symbolist artist Fidus in his paintings and illustrations, Achternbusch’s grotesque anti-folk gothic might technically be a comedy, but it is ultimately more haunting and disturbing than humorous, as if the auteur merely uses his keenly passive-aggressive form of comedy as a therapeutic means to attempt to expel some of the metaphysical poison from his seemingly forlorn soul. Indeed, while I would not exactly call myself a shoah movie connoisseur, I must admit that The Last Hole is easily the most disturbing, dejecting, and debasing holocaust film that I have ever seen.  In other words, I certainly experienced more pain and discomfort from 5-minutes of Achternbusch’s film than in over ten hours of Claude Lanzmann's anti-polak doc Shoah (1985). If there is any film that could make a Jew feel sorry for the German persecutor (and I doubt there is), it is most certainly Achternbusch’s film, which ultimately demonstrates that German comedy is no less ruthless than the interrogating tactics of SS-Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie. In short, if Schlingensief once candidly stated in the doc Christoph Schlingensief und seine Filme (2005) aka Christoph Schlingensief and His Films directed by Frieder Schlaich that he thought he would make a great concentration camp guard, The Last Hole demonstrates that Achternbusch is the Josef Mengele of clowns, albeit with more bizarre fetishes. 

 Beginning in just as an abrupt fashion as any Achternbusch flick, The Last Hole starts with a woman with a fairly unflattering physique named Susn (Achternbusch regular Gabi Geist) watering her attic (!) while wearing nothing but panties and a bra. Susn is terribly sexually repressed and trying in vain to appeal to her seemingly spiritually castrated fiancé ‘The Nile’ (Achternbusch), who merely stares at her in a less than admiring fashion while sitting in a chair like a tired elderly grandfather who cannot be bothered to get off of his old crusty diabetes-ridden ass. While Susn yells, “Get your clothes off, I can’t wait any longer! Always waiting…Let’s wait afterwards if we can do it a second time!,” the Nile—an emotional cripple that seems to enjoy nothing about life, including sex and romance—is hardly impressed by her salacious nagging and proceeds to ruthlessly berate his fiancée every chance he gets. Indeed, when Susn demonstrates that she is a proud peasant by bragging that she works with her hands, the Nile rather rudely replies, “Don’t talk rubbish…you’re a waitress, and you live so poorly because you drink 20 cognacs a day.” Of course, flattery also fails to work with the Nile, as he is only agitated when sex-starved Susn pseudo-seductively states to him, “Without you I live in the desert. Without you I am a desert! A piece of desert […] Flow through me.” In fact, the Nile cannot even tolerate having Susn anywhere near him as indicated by his misanthropic remark to her, “I can’t understand people who always have to be so close to one another, when there’s so much room in the world! People who have to be so close to one another remind me of car drivers.” After curiously cleaning his fingernails with a knife in a fairly menacing fashion, the Nile threatens to stab Susn if she dares to try to kiss him (according to him, “When some Jews were making drawings in Auschwitz, that is a kiss for me!”). Needless to say, the Nile eventually makes good on his perverse promise and stabs and kills Susn when she desperately attempts to kiss him. Of course, he is hardly heartbroken about his fiancée’s death because, as he states to her regarding their engagement before mindlessly killing her, “Everyone knows it’s just for show. All except the ones I am engaged with.”  Indeed, as the film eventually reveals, the Nile has started various sexless romances with a number of beat-up bar whores around Bavaria.

 The Nile loves playing word games, especially ones involving the timeless phrase “6 million.” Indeed, when the quasi-protagonist mentions that he has “6 million” during a flashback scene, Susn assumes that he has “six million marks” and brags to a male co-worker at the bar she works at about her beloved’s imaginary wealth. While the Nile “lives on beer” and is a self-described drinker by trade, he is also a highly specialized private detective that investigates cases of treacherous Jews screwing over their Jewish friends during the holocaust, as if it is a source of solace for him to know that not all Jews killed during WWII were killed by Germans. While the Nile drinks to forget about dead Hebrews, he also believes that after having four drinks he will develop the capacity to feel some sort of sexual arousal for Susn. When Susn begs for the Nile to slit her throat in a flashback scene, he replies, “Your blood may come upon me some other time. I will retire for today. I live in the last hole with my 6 million. And I hope I will not dream of 6 million dead Jews again tonight.” Indeed, the Nile lives in an eponymous hole in the ground in the middle of a grassy hill and after emerging from said hole one morning after killing his fiancée, he is given somewhat of a shock while shaving by a lake when Susn’s ghost appears, declares she is pregnant, and then states, “I’m dead. I bequeath you my art: a bloodstained dress.” Like with the Jews, the Nile clearly does not want to remember Susn’s death, so he immediately decides to dig a hole like a dog with her bare hands and bury the bloodstained dress. Luckily for the Nile, he has more than one Susn in his life. 

 As an assumed result of the fact that he has murdered Susn, two cops that resemble burly beatnik bikers, ‘Stupid Cloud’ (Franz Baumgartner) and ‘Green Asshole,’ begin a manhunt for the Nile and opt to start a literal “scorched earth” operation to burn him out of his hole. Rather absurdly, Stupid Cloud opts to shoot and kill his comrade when they are in the middle of hatching their scorched earth campaign. Indeed, for whatever reason, Stupid Cloud has decided to betray Green Asshole and join up with the Nile.  Of course, both men, like virtually all of the characters in the film, have a tragic haunted essence about them, as if they are possessed by the accursed ghosts of their ancestors who froze to death on the Eastern Front during the Battle of Stalingrad (incidentally, in his film Heilt Hitler! (1986), Achternbusch would portray a German soldier who thinks he is still fighting in Stalingrad after randomly waking up from a long slumber 40 years after WWII has ended). While awkwardly carrying Green Asshole’s lifeless corpse, Stupid Cloud spots the Nile, so he decides to drop his friend’s body and pick up the protagonist instead, even though said protagonist has no problem walking on his own. While carrying the Nile across a field, Stupid Cloud mentions to him how his grade school teacher forced him to learn “six million foreign words.” When the Nile remarks that it is “six million Jews” and not “six million foreign words,” Stupid Cloud humorously replies, “Sure… but what’s the difference? Of those 6 million foreign words I remember only three. But I couldn’t tell you if I still know three Jews.” Stupid Cloud also informs the Nile that his teacher used to pass by Auschwitz concentration camp every single day during WWII and noticed that it was always quiet there, thus leading the educator to come to the natural conclusion that no Jews could have been killed there. Despite their minor disputes, Stupid Cloud and the Nile ultimately decide to make a “getaway” together since they are both murderers that are evading justice.  Naturally, being fugitives of the law does not stop the Nile and Stupid Cloud from hanging around Bavaria for another day while getting good and drunk at various local bars.  Of course, before leaving, the Nile must be reunited with the woman that might be described as his one true love.

 Upon going to a doctor (Wolfgang Ebert of Uwe Brandner’s Ich liebe dich, ich töte dich (1971) aka I Love You, I Kill You) with a fetish for Buddhist religious icons and being informed that he has diabetes, the Nile replies, “I need beer. With one pint of beer I forget 500,000 Jews. But at night they all come back. And when I had 12 pints then 6 million Jews come to me. But the 40 pints I have to drink each day bring me 20 million at night. And that’s not even half of those who met their death in the last war. That’s just the Russians slaughtered by the Germans.” While the Nile then proceeds to beg the doctor to kill him, the physician replies, “Drink schnapps. Beer confuses the memory. On schnapps, you can forget. I’ll prescribe schnapps for you.” Unfortunately, things get a little nasty between the protagonist and doc when the latter reveals that his father admitted to him on his deathbed that he spared a Jew during the holocaust after coercing the Hebrew into attacking his kosher comrade. Indeed, at this point, the Nile reveals that he is a private detective that looks into the “murders of Jews that had been friends.” After the Nile calls the doctor’s dead father a “German pig,” the physician tears up his prescription for schnapps and throws him out of his office. Unfortunately, it seems that the Nile will have to stick to bars if he wants to forget about kosher corpses.  Notably, before being kicked out of the doctor's office, the Nile expresses minor interest in killing a Jewish barber so that his alcohol intake will match up with the number of murdered Israelites that he has on his conscience.

 While Susn is dead, the Nile has another fiancée named ‘Last Susn’ (Annamirl Bierbichler) that works at a strip club called ‘Pee Piss’ that he can confide in. Unfortunately, when the Nile goes to see Last Susn, she is being mechanically fucked by a random guy, so the protagonist picks up the man during mid-coitus and tosses out of a window. Before defenestrating the stranger, the Nile calmly states to him, “If you can screw, you can also fly.” Naturally, the two lovers decide to catch up with each other and Last Susn reminds the Nile how he once said to her, “… I will be your Nile. The Nile that refreshes you in the middle of the wasteland.” Last Susn also describes to the Nile how her co-worker Wurmin is regularly held upside down by two men while five others “pour beer into her pussy.” Needless to say, as a man that is regularly haunted by six million dead Jews, the Nile seems hardly effected by Last Susn’s bizarre sex stories. Ultimately, Last Susn joins the Nile and Stupid Cloud for a pilgrimage to Stromboli Volcano, Italy that they take via train. During the train ride, Stupid Cloud becomes deeply offended when a waiter attempts to serve him a bowl of spaghetti, so he dumps the food on the goofy server’s head and then proceeds to trim the noodles that are lying on the man's head with scissors as if he were giving the poor fellow a haircut. While the Nile drinks shot after shot of schnapps on the train, Last Susn exposes her broken heart to him by somberly stating, “I do accept your right not to love me. It’s even my duty to accept it.” Last Susn also reveals that she does not want forgiveness from the protagonist for whatever reason, stating “Forgiveness? Why should you forgive me? I’m dead to you. But because you didn’t kill me I wished a little Hitler on you for two days, who would send you through the chimney.”  Indeed, it seems that the Nile's lack of love and incapacity for affection haunts Last Susn in a fashion not unlike how the dead Jews haunt the perennially perturbed protagonist.  Somehow, the train ends up in the ocean, thus inspiring Stupid Cloud to state, “Dammit, now the rails have ended! And what now? And what now?” 

 Upon arriving at beaches of Stromboli, the Nile states to himself, “Now I see the lily pad again and the frog on it and the water lily at it. The water lily is the Last Susn and the frog is me.” The Nile is wearing a necklace with a flesh-like medallion that looks like a mold of a rectum that he describes as a letter, which he ultimately has Last Susn read. As the viewer soon discovers, it is actually a suicide letter and the Nile has come to Stromboli to jump into the volcano to sacrifice himself to the glorious six million. While on the beach, the three friends encounter a fat elderly woman named Barbara who seems disturbed by the fact that the Nile randomly puts on a German helmet. As Last Susn tells Barbara, the Nile wears the helmet, “Because he’s afraid […] Of the Germans.” When Last Susn reads an excerpt from the Nile’s letter that reads, “Panzer after Panzer drove over my mind’s eye. Teachers and masters hated me minding my mind’s eye,” Barbara remarks that the protagonist has, “a tumor inside his head instead of brains.” Ultimately, Last Susn decides she “can’t go on” with finishing the letter after reading the Nile’s words to her, “I ate jam only out of sympathy for you. Without hope for you I wouldn’t have opened any can […] That’s why I had become a private detective after all, because I was searching for you, everywhere and in everything. Under the pretense of fornication and infidelity, which to investigate someone had give me the assignment, I snooped around in the houses that had been torn open by the war and blocked up again too quickly, or in others that regrettably had been spared by the war, or in those that were misguidedly built after the war, expecting you behind every door. In the thirty-year-long brutality of post-war Germany, I searched for you, you, the tenderness, the insight, the effortlessness, the modesty, and the pride to endure this life with dignity.”  Of course, Last Susn eventually opts to finish reading the rest of the suicide letter.

 When Stupid Cloud asks the Nile why he is carrying around two tennis rackets, the protagonist astonishes his friends by proceeding to use the preppie sports instruments to dig up a Jewish skull that is hidden under some rocks near the volcano. After the Nile unearths the Hebraic skull, Last Susn proceeds to read more of the protagonist’s suicide letter, stating out loud in a somber yet monotone fashion, “every German has his own example [of Nazism] in his family, even the still unborn. And the Jews? Everybody was against the Jews, and they’re still against them today, they just don’t dare to say it anymore, because back then they were allowed to kill the Jews. Susn, I had to find out what’s inside the Germans, and I’m telling you: Murder. Most diligent murder. But this murder made them the most famous people of all mankind.” At the very end of the Nile’s letter, Last Susn reads, “I commit suicide, for as a suicide I belong to the death mound of the victims. I do not want to belong to the death mound of the self-righteous Germans. Farewell . . . I'll jump into the volcano.”  Clearly, self-loathing kraut the Nile did not see the irony in his self-righteous declaration against “self-righteous Germans.”  As an assumed result of the flattery that she receives in part of her beau’s letter where he alludes to Romanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan's poem Todesfuge (1948) aka Death Fugue and describes her hair as being pretzel-colored, Last Susn decides to follow the Nile’s lead and jump into the volcano too.  Of course, it is rather revealing that the suicide letter alludes to Celan's anti-German poem (which notably features the line, “Death is a master from Germany, his eyes are blue”), which features the line, “you'll rise to the sky like smoke, you'll have a grave in the clouds,” and thus foretells the Nile's pathetic self-prophesying fate of self-slaughter via virtual one-mensch-holocaust.

 A sort of culturally apocalyptic Teutonic Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) where there protagonist actually goes through with his morbidly zany plan of self-obliteration via volcano, The Last Hole is the rare sort of film that offers the viewer the sort of insight as to why contemporary Germans are so gleefully suicidal and inordinately ethno-masochistic that they would actually welcome hostile towelheads from the world's worst Islamic desert shitholes to come into their country and establish Dhimmitude so that thoroughly brainwashed self-loathing and self-flagellating kraut automatons can begin paying penance for the supposed crimes of their long dead Nazi ancestors.  Considering the recent New Year's Eve untermenschen rape epidemic committed by swarthy so-called migrants that occurred in every single major German city in late 2015 (not surprisingly, the German police and media attempted to cover up what happened up), it seems that Achternbusch's dream of collective German punishment is finally well under way as it seems none of those “self-righteous Germans” that value self-preservation and self-determination that he mocked in his film are alive anymore.  Of course, the great irony behind Achternbusch’s film is that it is so thoroughly, intricately, bizarrely, and fanatically Germanophobic that it could have only been directed by an actual German, which is an identity that the auteur even attempts to reject in the film, even though his cinematic works are so radically regional in persuasion that he has had very little success outside of his native Bavaria (in fact, Achternbusch once mocked his Bavarian comrade Werner Herzog for being successful outside of Germany, stating that he is, “the best detergent salesman Germany has ever had, because he is the only one who believes in his product”). Indeed, while Achternbusch’s character even pathetically declares in his suicide letter, “Unfortunately, I am too stupid to be a Jew, but I don’t include myself among the Germans,” he practically bleeds of archetypical Bavarian buffoonery, just like Woody Allen and Todd Solondz reek of Jewish neuroticism and Spike Lee stinks of American negro resentment. Notably, Achternbusch would later wrote in his novel Hundstage (1995), “My sympathy for Jews is only sentimentality, only compassion. I don't want to be a Jew, and I have rid myself of their belief in one God without, however, being able to cope with the consequences,” thus confirming that he is thankfully not as racially schizophrenic as degenerate German artist Anselm Kiefer, who seems to have dedicated his life to shitting on German culture and transforming himself into a sort of spiritual holocaust survivor. In his later color feature Heilt Hitler! (1986) aka Heal Hitler!—a sort of anti-Heimat Back to the Future where Achternbusch portrays a German soldier who wakes up 40 years after WWII believing that he is still fighting in Stalingrad—the auteur would present a somewhat more personalized and nuanced take on his thoughts regarding the legacy of National Socialism. 

 Oftentimes feeling like a sort of ‘Southern Kraut Gothic’ as a starkly and grotesquely yet oftentimes beauteously shot feature that owes much of its strikingly look to cinematographer Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein—a man responsible for a number of Werner Herzog’s pre-Hollywood masterpieces, including The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Heart of Glass (1976), and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)—The Last Hole is probably best looked at as a piece of modernist absurdist folklore that does for Bavaria what Flannery O'Connor’s writings did for the American South. Indeed, in that sense, Achternbusch’s film, despite seeming so hopelessly bizarre and absurdly alienating, is not all that different from John Huston’s underrated O'Connor adaptation Wise Blood (1979) starring Brad Dourif, which was incidentally released in West Germany under the names Der Ketzer and Die Weisheit des Blutes.  As someone that has suffered more holocaust-themed films than I care to admit, the Achternbuschian cinematic realm strangely seems to be the most fitting setting for six million Ashkenazi phantoms.  Quite unlike Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), which more or less uses black-and-white cinematography as a cheap pseudo-poetic gimmick to remind stupid Americans of vintage American WWII propaganda newsreels in the hope that they will eventually not be able to differentiate between Hollywood fiction and carefully contrived wartime nonfiction, the lack of color in The Last Hole ultimately compliments the film's unwavering doom and gloom as a cinematic work with a protagonist that is so terminally lifeless that he could only be properly portrayed in a completely colorless world.

 I have to admit that, for at least partially personal reasons, The Last Hole probably had a bigger impact on me than it would probably have on most American cinephiles, who would probably find it totally inexplicable and hopelessly arcane for more than just a couple reasons. For instance, one of my ex-girlfriend’s had two paternal grandparents that had emigrated from Germany to the United States and both of them were horrible alcoholics that sired a number of equally self-destructive alcoholic children and grandchildren. While my ex-girlfriend’s dipsomaniac German grandfather resembled a sort of alcoholic troll when I first met him, I once received the shock of a lifetime when I encountered an old black-and-white photograph of him from when he was in his 20s and discovered that he used to be a strikingly handsome Aryan man with sharp features that clearly totally destroyed his looks and health as a result of his undying weakness for cheap beer. Aside from my ex-girlfriend’s family, I know no less than two other German-American families, including a friend whose Danube Swabian grandfather was killed on the Eastern Front during WWII, that are accursed with cross-generational alcoholism, which is clearly a direct result of World War II.  Of course, my own Dutch grandfather, whose country was at least partially destroyed by Germany during the war, also succumbed to alcoholism as a result of his decidedly dejecting wartime experiences, thus I think the collective dipsomania among Germans has less to do with the dead Jews than the misery of WWII in general.  While The Last Hole engages in shameless heeb humoring and shoah-saluting, it is also ultimately a film that appeals to people like myself who enjoy tasteless holocaust jokes.  In other words, for a completely humorless and obnoxiously anally retentive Judaic culture-distorter like Mark Potok or Barbara Lerner Spectre, viewing Achternbusch’s film would probably be like attending a screening of Kurt Gerron's The Führer Gives the Jews a City (1944) at Auschwitz with Herr Döktor Mengele behind the projector.  Indeed, after watching The Last Hole, I could not help but feel that the collective plague of Bavarian alcoholism was much more tragic than the holocaust.  After all, six million dead Jews seems like nothing more than the faint ghost of an abstract idea in the film, yet Bavarian dipsomania, lechery, and ethno-masochism seem like a very real nightmare that become all the more perturbing and penetrating as a result of Achternbusch’s uniquely unnerving passive-aggressive approach to angst and Weltschmerz.  While The Last Hole might be an exceedingly eccentrically esoteric cinematic work that takes provincial filmmaking to ungodly extremes, no one can watch it without feeling like they have been imprisoned in some sort of highly personal pandemonium where all hope for the future has been squashed under the heel of Sturmabteilung jackboots. In Achternbusch’s singularly morbid mind, there is not chance for Vergangenheitsbewältigung, thus one must accept death and self-destruction lest they belong to the ostensible “death mound of the self-righteous Germans.”  Of course, what Achternbusch and many other white people fail to realize due to decades of brainwashing is that empathy only works when it is mutual and reciprocal and that it is insane and self-destructive to invest emotions in people that are hostile to you, hence the steady moral, cultural, and economic decline of the Occidental as a result of so-called multiculturalism where groups of hostile aliens (e.g. ‘Syrian migrants’) that lack empathy for their hosts strategically use emotional blackmail as a parasitic means to get infidels to subsidize their pathetic existences and primitive vices (e.g. rape).  Indeed, the protagonist of The Last Hole should have been more dejected with the fact that he was so obsessed with dead Jews than the dead Jews themselves.  If Achternbusch actually cared to understand Jews, he would realize that they owe their survival and perseverance to the fact they have nil empathy for their enemies to the point where they literally celebrate the destruction of said enemies via holidays, but I digress.  In the end, The Last Hole ultimately demonstrates that there are few things that are more humorous in the contemporary Occidental world than the phrase “six million” being repeated over and over again in a deadpan fashion by an artsy fartsy kraut who seems so emotionally comatose that one might suspect he was the victim of a multicultural gang-rape.

-Ty E