Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), by Mike Kuchar

I love this kind of movie.

This movie is actually, in proper terms, a conglomerate of two particular types of movies I love. On one hand is highbrow psychedelic stuff from the late '60s/early '70s like Performance and...well. Performance. (If there are other movies out there like Performance please tell me.) Its more well-defined counterpart is the lowbrow psychedelia from that era. Psyched by the 4D Witch and The Love Captive are the epitomes of this end of the spectrum. Performance has Jorge Luis Borges and Mick Jagger. Psyched by the 4D Witch and The Love Captive have homophobia and vampires, respectively. Sometimes there are crossovers between these types of movies, and something magical happens. Genuine artistic soundness reigns alongside exploitative sleaze. This produces movies like Stick It In Your Ear aka Vortex--in my mind, an actually artistic movie made within the confines of a very special brand of exploitation that thrived in this age of philosophy and drugs both good and bad. Overall, the exploitation of the '60s and '70s has a feel to them that is just so entirely unique. It floats and clings to movies like I Drink Your Blood and An American Hippie in Israel. When that baseline grime mutates and grows strong with sometimes pointless musings about life, you've got yourself a giant among giants.

Sins of the Fleshapoids is thematically interesting, genuinely and subtly funny, and aesthetically pleasing. It also has robots that make Three Stooges faces while ripping girls' dresses off, Ancient Greek-style porn portraits on the wallpaper, and an excellently depressing story of infidelity. All jam-packed into a nice forty-three minutes, too. It is one of those fusion films. Deep, but also garbage.

Any longer than forty-three minutes, however, would would have been too much. Sins of the Fleshapoids is pretentious and somewhat forgettable due to the abruptness of its scenes. But it comes together, and does a good job of balancing several different plots. All the stories takes place a million years in the future, when humans are too lazy to do anything for themselves. There's the story of the two robots or "fleshapoids" who gain independence when they fall in love with each other--they also want to kill all humans. It's all very similar to the '20s play Rossum's Universal Robots, which invented the word robot. Like the fleshapoids, the robots from R.U.R. were more like clones than mechanical beings, though the fleshapoids are both (cyborgs?). In plot two, there's the cute lady who has a football player lover, who wants to get at her jewels in more ways than one. Her husband finds out and she learns that her lover just wants her mineral jewels. Stab stab, that's over--but nothing can stop the fleshapoid revolution! What is the future of the new ruling species of the Earth?

From the crayon-scrawled title cards of the opening credits to the shocking twist ending (which will make fans of Godfrey Ho's Ninja Terminator laugh), Sins is a monstrous and beautiful hybrid. Was it intended to be artsy? Was it meant to be a parody? It succeeds at both, though I don't know what it's a parody of. Perhaps itself. Whatever it is. (The more likely answer is Lang's Metropolis.)

Everything in this film works to its advantage. The griminess is complimented by the film quality, which appears to be Super 8. It gives a haunting red or pink glow to everything, making it something like a glimpse into a '60s pajama party. This light also grants the film that artistic element. I'm a sucker for weird lighting. As long as I can see what's fucking happening, a movie will always be better if the lighting is just a touch bizarre.

I could go on--this review is basically just mindless rambling. But so too is the movie. It is chaos, but it's controlled chaos. The kind of chaos unleashed by a master. That being said, I don't know if I'm going to seek out other films by Kuchar. I feel like it would burst the bubble a little bit, or scratch a little uniqueness off of this. I dunno. I mean, I am upset that Psyched's Victor Luminera never shot again, nor did Captive's Larry Crane.

Maybe the goldmine lies ahead. And even if it doesn't, I've taken some good nuggets out of Fleshapoids. Take that line how you will.

Now we just need to track down Attack of the Hideopoid, and thus shall the greatest double feature be born unto the world.