Performance (1970), by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell

200 MOVIE REVIEWS!!! We're celebrating by taking a look at my favorite movie of all time, the hyper-trippy mindbender of a crime-occult adventure known as PERFORMANCE!

You can support the A-List on Patreon at www.patreon.com/AdamMudman, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MudmansAList.

Macumba Sexual (1983), by Jess Franco

Our Pride Twentygayteen reviews come to a close with Macumba Sexual, Jess Franco's even trippier remake of his early Vampyros Lesbos.

You can support the site on Patreon and like us on Facebook to get updates.

Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things (1971), by Thomas Casey

Pride continues by asking the vital question: Stanley, why won't you just get that hair cut? Featuring drag galore!

The Ghastly Ones (1968), by Andy Milligan

LGBT PRIDE IS HERE!!! Get your gay on with Andy Milligan and his island of murder!

You can support the site on Patreon and like us on Facebook to get updates.

Sex Madness (1938), by Dwain Esper

We've probably all heard of Reefer Madness at this point. As a matter of fact a lot of you reading this site can probably cite a specific Favorite Moment from Reefer Madness, even if you've only seen it once. Reefer Madness stands relatively untouched as the exploitation movie of the 1930s, if anything because it's one of the few which is still watchable. The Cocaine Fiends, Marihuana, and all the others just don't hold up, because they lack that unique spark that made Reefer Madness fucking crazy. But, while it's still not close to Reefer Madness, Sex Madness is pretty special, if nothing else because it makes for a great riff with friends.

Sex Madness is a relatively plotless depiction of what will happen if you don't listen to your parents (or maybe listen to them too much) and spend your youth going to orgies. Okay, orgies were still off-limits in the '30s, even in exploitation films that posed as education fodder. That doesn't stop our main characters from stopping by a "guest room" party though! We follow the twin narratives of Millicent Hamilton, ambitious young typist and beauty queen, and Tom Lorenz, son of city reformer Paul Lorenz, who is on a quest to eradicate "social diseases" like syphilis. ("Social diseases"? Really? Not only does that have an edge of shaming to it, but "social" is perhaps the most unintentionally hilarious synonym for "sexual" I've heard in a while. It changes so many contexts!) Tom picks up his syphilis at said guest-room party, while Millicent, in her hunger to become a beauty queen champ, is infected via date-rape by her would-be manager. Tom struggles with whether or not to tell his dad and risk ruining his career, while Millicent seeks a cure so she can get married. Because I guess doctors in the 1930s had the authority to stop marriages if someone had syphilis. Or something. Anyway, Tom eventually learns that his dad is on his side, while Millicent is seemingly cured only to infect her husband and baby, killing the latter. I think they still swing for a happy ending, though. Yay?

This movie has all the requisite '30s exploitation tropes: poorly-integrated footage sampled from other films. Evil [minorities] (in this case lesbians). Exaggerated, lip-licking leering. Irrelevant, often nonsensical newspaper headlines ("Sex criminal jailed after baby murder" doesn't really describe any of the events of his film, even when a baby does die). Creaky stage-play cinematography. Horrible, horrible, horrible acting. Moral alarmism. Glorification of what it's ostensibly attacking. Etc., etc. Sex Madness, though, goes beyond in many ways, starting with the fact that it's a sexploitation movie about syphilis. It's the ultimate in combining lurid sexuality with shaming people for the accidental consequences of their actions. It shames people for being sexually assaulted. Every frame of this is subtitled "Ewwwww" in invisible ink. For every moment we're supposed to be aroused by the turn of a shapely gam or stock footage of dancing girls, there are characters pontificating about the horrors of one of the most gruesome diseases a human being can contract. They also feature footage of someone afflicted with the disease which may be fake, but the extra scratches on the film print suggest that perhaps this is real medical footage. I mean, it's far from ending your movie with dog surgery like Life Returns, or with live birth reels like a lot of the roadshow exploitation flicks did, but man, they really made sure you knew the word "exploitation" back then. Sometimes these 1930s films will do stuff that would shock the directors of the fucking 1970s. Someday someone is going to unearth a 1930s-era snuff film, or at least an equivalent of Faces of Death. Not only it is pretty sick to exploit people who already face heavy stigma to begin with (this movie is an entire novel on STD stigma), but to blend it in with content that's meant to turn the audience on is rather a cheap blow. More like a string of cheap blows, if we're being fair.

But there's the mundane stuff, too, which makes this stand out to me. I have to anatomize one scene in particular, because it was such a bizarre thing to witness. Was I warned of this scene in a review? Or have I seen this movie before and simply bleached it from my memory? Because there is a scene in this movie where Millicent fudges her line due to a window accidentally slamming in the background, and it came in like I was expecting it. Reshooting probably didn't even come up in discussion when this scene was filmed. The actors probably just whipped out their cigarettes (or joints) when they yelled cut and wondered if there was booze enough in the world to make them forget this mess. Seriously, this is one of the most dramatic and obvious flubs I've seen in a while. I have to wonder how fucking likely this even was. If I left my windows wide open it could be months before they slam closed by themselves. Either they were filming on a shithole location (probable) or the set was fucking haunted (equally probable).

I've been obsessed with the word synecdoche lately and I've been passing it on to my friends: and this scene, friends, is synecdoche. The statement and sum of the whole movie is held in that slamming window, that flubbed take.

Anyway, I don't want to say you should watch an entire movie just to see a window slam, but man, did I get a kick out of that. Also: all of the leering in this movie. If you make it a double feature with Reefer Madness make this the opening feature, not the follow-up. And if you value your souls, please turn your brains off before viewing.

If you want to see more reviews like this, plus get access to bonus goodies (like mini-reviews of every movie I watch), you can support the site on Patreon. And don't forget to like the A-List on Facebook to get updates!

Infrasexum (1969), by Carlos Tobalina

Carlos Tobalina was a sage. He was The Man. He was the big kahuna, the primus unus, the Alpha and the Omega. I didn't think that I could ever get enough of Flesh and Bullets, and then, when all hope was lost, I found that for once I lived in a kind world. Fifteen years or so before Flesh and Bullets, the Neil Breen of the 20th Century turned out Infrasexum, his first movie, an ostensible look into the horrors of male impotence. And yet the resultant film was more, much more. You are not ready.

Peter Allison is a man with a unique problem despite his unique situation in life. He's a very successful businessman, and he has a stunningly attractive wife, and yet for some reason, he can't, uh, prime the old motor as it were. He can't loose his juice--can't sharpen his pencil. He has trouble making his dick hard is what I'm saying. So he decides to cut himself off from his business and family and go on a road trip in search of self-discovery. He ends making a small fortune in Vegas, then returns to Los Angeles, where he meets Carlos (played by Carlos Tobalina), who "turns [him] on to marijuana, LSD, and the hippie world." But still Peter can't find relief from his limpness, even as Carlos introduces him to the world of lesbian threeways. He becomes a painter, but his world is briefly shredded when two crooks learn of his wealth and kidnap one of his hippie girlfriends to try to rob him. When he refuses to comply, one of them tries to rape the girl, and when she resists, he stabs her and starts removing her intestines. Peter is able to escape the two and kills them in self-defense. Then, he goes to a park where he watches ducks have sex. After yet another failed attempt to bang a girl, Peter attempts to bang Carlos Tobalina. This doesn't work either--he's not into men, though not for a want of trying. At the end of it all, as in Psyched by the 4D Witch and other sexploitation movies, a psychiatrist shows up and magics it all better, suggesting that Peter have sex with someone who resembles the best sex partner he ever had. He also suggests he rejects the negative standards placed on him by his father, which we didn't know he had until this point. When this happens, Peter is finally free. The end.

It took a suitably demented eye to frame and photograph Infrasexum. This relatively straightforward tale zigs and zags in ways I wasn't prepared for. When it suddenly turns into a hostage/murder movie, for example, completely H.G. Lewis-esque gore, I am never ready. And, like Ogroff, this movie is always full of stuff which I never noticed on previous viewings. For example, it wasn't until the viewing which spawned this review that I figured out that Carlos was played by the director. That makes the stunningly tender scene where male-on-male sex almost happens even better than it was before. I also didn't notice that Peter visits the bisexual couple at Apartment 420; that the hippie fest he and Carlos go to features a stoned girl with a third eye painted on her forehead; or that said hippie festival also features a guy carrying around an adorable baby fox. These are all miraculous sights to see, glimpses back into another time.

This whole movie, in a sense, is a meditation on the hippie movement. In all likelihood, Carlos was just trying to make money off the hippies, just as many exploitation films at the time were, but that doesn't mean this film lacks time-capsule value. I'm pretty cynical about the hippies these days but little 18-year-old Mudman would have loved this. I can still feel a bit of the groove--while I no longer consider that white guys with embarrassing hair-clips bobbing their heads drunkenly with absolutely no understanding of where they are to be a symbol of freedom, it is still fascinating to watch people who have a seeming dearth of judgment for their peers acting like children and doing nothing productive in particular. In a sense I wish we still had that lack of judgment; but I also don't think that doing cartwheels through parks for hours is a particularly great use of time and energy when you're 25 years old, either. What I appreciate is that, for the most part, people are very nice in this film, and the movie tries to make a point that we--as in humanity--are not as bad as we seem. Peter is free with his money, Carlos is free with his drugs, the girls are free with their sex. And most of the judgment Peter faces for his impotence comes from himself, not from his partners. It would have been too easy to make yet another impotence-themed sexploitation movie where the person spends most of the movie being screamed at, but generally, Peter gets off pretty easy, his pain being more realistically internal than would be shown in a lot of similar films.

And I do really appreciate how the hippie free-spiritisms appear in the style of the film. Bloated with voiceovers, the movie really does play out like Peter's traveling journal, which makes it one of them road trip flicks I love so much. The light classical music sampled throughout the film gives it an artsy sentimental feel that makes me get all fuzzy inside. This really does help build the story of a man who is struggling to find freedom from a prison he's built for himself. It makes it seem tenderly psychological. I love it.

Of course, there is also the lovely trash.

Bad edits, cuts in the soundtrack, and incomprehensible dialogue all wrack the movie, pushing it straight into the Technicolor world of one of Doris Wishman's '70s movies (which I'll get to soon enough!). Peter dresses like a gay bullfighter for a startling percentage of the runtime. And, as Jess Franco will tell you, nothing says classy like a slow zoom towards the vagina of a corpse. Rest assured, we are absolutely still dealing with the director of Flesh and Bullets here. But this is him at his rawest. Gone is the drama of murdering another man's wife; instead, we are gazing into the id of a director/actor on his own personal trip into hedonism. It's almost like a documentary. Yet, still confined to the magically unrealistic world of fiction.

In case you can't tell, I really, really like this movie. Boobs and butts galore, plus a little blood, and a strange journey into a strange mind. Don't miss it.

If you want to see more reviews like this, please support the site on Patreon. And you can like the A-List on Facebook for fun news updates!

3 in a Towel (1969), by Marty Rackum

And here we have another movie which I only enjoy a small percentage of. Like, the first third or less. And I like that short selection enough to try to do a full review on it, apparently. So, without much further ado, this is 3 in a Towel.

After a psychedelic opening credits sequence that shows off the director's prowess with 15-year-old colored gels, we meet our "protagonist" Romeo Bruno. Romeo, like his namesake, dreams of love, or more properly (both here and in Shakespeare), flesh. Romeo will reference his literary counterpart throughout the movie, though he refers to him as "Romeo Lothario," which I'll abstain from commenting on for now. Anyway, Romeo seeks to make his "dream" of banging multiple women a reality. He picks up a young virgin and brings her down to his yacht, but she's turned off by the fact that there are already three girls aboard. After she leaves Romeo and his three girls set sail and have a lot of sex. Then, they return to the harbor, Romeo uses "thought-waves" to psychically seduce women (no FX utilized), and he brings them back to his apartment, where he bangs them. Indeed, as prophesied, there are three girls who get in a towel together, specifically to give Romeo a (softcore) blowjob.

Doesn't that sound great? Doesn't that sound like a fun and entertaining movie? Well, it's really not, but in the beginning, as we learn the excuse for Mr. Rackum's softcore adventures, it's pure bliss. I'll tread over everything a little bit at a time, starting with what I've already brought up: i.e. "Romeo Lothario." Let's unpack this for a second. Even ignoring the fact that linking Shakespeare's Romeo to sexual promiscuity has its own problems, Romeo's last name wasn't Lothario. It was Montague. I'd say this is fine, but surnames are kind of a huge deal in that particular play. It's sort of about, y'know, a family feud. That would be like if you wanted to compare someone to Devil Anse Hatfield, but changed his name instead to Devil Anse Ethan Edwards. The sad thing is, Lothario as a name doesn't even have a Shakespearian origin--he's a character from a story within the story of Don Quixote. Yes, Shakespeare and Cervantes lived at the same time and share nearly equal fame, but there's no need to get their characters confused.

And then there's that whole thing about how Romeo was romantically and/or sexually successful. Um, what fucking play were you reading? The story opens with him getting rejected by Rosaline, then he shares a few days with Juliet, and then he dies! I can't imagine that his lady-bedding days were great in number prior to that, given that by most accounts of my professors, Romeo is about fourteen. If it wasn't for the fact that this movie absolutely reeks of pot, I would say this was some clever irony on behalf of the cast and crew. No, this movie is Kids Goofing Off at its absolute dumbest.


Yes, this movie is dumber than The Tony Blair Witch Project. This is dumber than A Clockwork Blue. This is dumber than Five Across the Eyes, Psyched by the 4D Witch, and Nosferatu in Brazil combined. But it's pretty easy for even someone like me, Queen of Sticks Up the Ass, to discount the fluff that pads out the majority of this movie. To be honest, whenever I see sex in a movie, I zone out anyway. And usually, if the movie is mostly sex, that means I'm gonna give it a paddlin', critically speaking. But here, I knew I wasn't missing anything in the long gaps wherein I jumped around: just more fake-accented Shakespeare quotes, which appear to come from every one of the Bard's plays except Romeo and Juliet. Some of these quotes I can't even properly source, so they may be made up, for all I know.

On top of all this, all of the dub actors are in their fifties while the actual actors (who appear in sweet silent Super 8) are in their twenties. Post-loops are recorded in bathrooms, because they have to splash water to replicate the sea, you see? This means everyone in the maritime sequences has echoes on their voices as the sound bounces off the shower walls. It's a good time.

3 in a Towel is probably a grievous insult to everyone who watches it, and is usually a tremendous waste of precious celluloid. However, I think it's hilarious, at least for a little while, and when I was trapped in the dark depths of my day job little flashes of this movie kept me going for days afterward. A glimmer of hope for a fallen film? Or a plea from the proletariat? You decide.

If you like hearing me rattle on about nonsense, you can become my Patron on Patreon. Plus the A-List has a Facebook page, which you should like, both figuratively and literally.

The Love Captive (1969), by Larry Crane

I meant to do this back before I did All Women Are Bad. After all, this was my first Larry Crane movie, and All Women, my second. I mean, All Women Were Bad caught me so off-guard that I couldn't resist. And after that, I always found myself thinking that I had already done this one, just because it's so essential to me that certainly I wouldn't go on without it. But then I smartened up a bit and reminded myself that I have this thing called a search bar and I can, as it were, see what reviews I've already done. And sure enough, I haven't done The Love Captive yet. Let's just get started...we've waited long enough.

Always trust a movie that features "Night on Bald Mountain." Always double-trust a movie that opens with "Night on Bald Mountain." So does The Love Captive commence, before referring itself to our protagonist, a nameless woman who wanders around Greenwich Village. The narrator talks over her wanderings, giving us information on the weird and wild world of Greenwich entertainment, both high- and lowbrow. This narrator condemns movies like Andy Warhol's Flesh and nervously suggests the lady may be a hooker. But that doesn't stop him from creeping on her as she undresses in a hotel room. Eventually our protagonist finds herself in Manzini's Museum of the Macabre, and then the movie really gets going. A fast-paced exploration into Inquisition torture devices, Houdini memorabilia, and vampire coffins ensues, and we jump from brief glimpses of lunatic-painted portraits to extensive fire-eating shows. It's all very overwhelming and wonderful, and if you have a trace of carnival spirit in you, the ridiculous showmanship and spectacle of the whole affair will give you warm fuzzies. Then, our lead is locked inside the Museum after dark, with the intent of making off with a Houdini straitjacket, but she has a surprise in store for her. At night the Museum's werewolves come out! After experiencing a night of terror, she comes back up to her hotel room and has sex with a dude. Then, lesbianism happens. And then, another lady seduces the Museum owner to take it over from him. A dude's junk flaps around in front of the camera, and we conclude.

The Love Captive functions better less as a "movie" and more like a box full of film clips of varying degrees of watchability. Like a lot of B&W sexploitation, you'll want to mosey around the general unappealing softcore fucking, skipping instead to the bizarre travelogue-style footage, and the riveting sideshow touring. The movie is less a "slice-of-life" film and more like a scrapbook laced in with odd tangential Tall Tales. Things that didn't really happen on the vacation, but would have improved it. It may actually also be a slice-of-life film, but for Greenwich Village circa 1969. Y'know, the place and time white hipsters love fetishizing? Well, I guess I can kind of get it. It's hard to resist attractions like Manzini's Museum, or a gift shop that sells a shirt that reads "GODDAMN YOU, CHARLIE BROWN."

Everything about this is so sloppy and weird that it probably is a vacation home-video edited into a sexploitation feature. The hucksters and fucksters of the '60s were desperate enough to do that--it would make them money, after all. Everything is rushed and clipped together. Plotlines vanish and are replaced with alternative circumstances. Various people all dub each other with bad impressions of each others' voices. The music is the same '60s sexploitation library cues every Something Weird fan has heard before and again. It's a marvelous headtrip that I do think only the '60s could produce. Nothing makes sense, and yet everything comes together. I watched Zardoz for the first time recently and this movie is still weirder than fucking Zardoz.

The movie shares this mutant home-video commonality not with A Clockwork Blue...more like the coy, quasi-dignified chuckles of The Hand of Pleasure. The narrator is hilarious. I love voiceovers from movies from this time. They were usually put in to help cut costs, and they really show how slack and alien the scripts for these movies were. This is the history of economics in slow motion--porn grunge seen first hand. This movie, both for its content and its context, is an anthropological dream.

Now I'm starting to get too far up my own ass--I do that when I'm happy. This movie has relieved of me, once again, the weary tensions of our plane. It is my Land of Cockaigne, my Arcadia, my Blue-Rock Candy Mountains. In more serious terms, however, it's yet another record of a crazed brain. It is another gate into the sort of madness that is sometimes necessary to crack open the ice that sheathes creativity. It is another marker by which we understand that the world we take for granted is not always what it seems, and how that's a marvelous and lovely thing. Too often are we Captives of our Hate. We should be Captives of Love instead.

And this movie is so captivating. In good ways and bad. So check it out when you can.

If you want to see more reviews like this and unlock some bonus goodies, consider becoming my Patron on Patreon! Plus, become a fan of the A-List on Facebook to get site updates!

LGBT Pride Triple-Review Special!

Happy Pride, everybody!

As fans of the site may have noticed, I'm pretty bad at theming my reviews around the holidays. And that's because, well, I don't celebrate most holidays, aside from Halloween. Next year I'll try to be better about it. But I nearly let Pride, my other holiday, slip by without a mention on the site. So in order to celebrate Pride Month, I decided to look at three different LGBT-related movies which are all appropriate to the site in some way. There's no time to waste, so let's get started!

Vampyros Lesbos (1971), by Jess Franco:

 

So we're starting with...a Jess Franco film? That may seem an odd choice, but assuredly Franco is going to do much better at delivering an artsy sexy gay vampire movie than many of his peers of trash. Vampyros Lesbos is definitely a questionable choice anyway due to the apparent conclusions reached by the film, but I have my own thoughts on how this strange, surreal piece of cinema fits together.

Linda Westinghouse is a real estate agent haunted by sexual dreams of some weird artsy floor show starring a statuesque brunette in a red scarf. When she reports these dreams to her psychiatrist, he basically says she's bored with her boyfriend and should have an affair. Of course, given what he's been doodling in his notebook in the place of notes, it seems like he wants her to have an affair with him. But this doesn't go anywhere, as Linda decides to take on a real estate case with work that will take her out to Istanbul. She's officially there on business, but the implication is that if she meets the right person on this trip, she'll go all Yellow Pages and let their fingers do the walking, if you know I mean. And for a brief while it seems like her client will be the one to do the honors. Countess Nadine Carody has just inherited an expansive estate from a Hungarian kinsman of hers...the last survivor of the House Dracula. Linda's trip has been weird so far--by the time she's met Nadine she's already had a bad run-in with a hotel employee named Memmet (played by Franco himself!) who claims to have some secret information on the Countess...before revealing that this claim was a ruse to trap and murder Linda! But it's about to get weirder, as Linda first faints at dinner with the Countess, then has sex with her upon awakening. This sex culminates in Nadine biting Linda unconscious and drinking her blood, but Linda wakes up unharmed. Nadine is not so lucky. Her dead body, lips still smeared with blood, lies afloat in her pool. The shock of all this erases Linda's memory and she finds herself in the clinic of a certain Dr. Seward...and yet, the mystery of the Countess is not over yet.

Before trying to actually analyze this, I just want to comment on how this movie is one of Jess Franco's Jess Francoiest films. The dream-like structure of the film even outside the dream sequences, the obsession with the zoom lens, the use of actress Soledad Miranda, the appearance of a character named "Morpho," the casting of himself as a sicko, the Dracula parallels and name-borrowing, and the thematic focus on the supernatural adventure of a sexually-(re)developing young woman in a foreign land are all Franco hallmarks. It even opens with a nightclub sequence, and if that wasn't enough, it's also one of the movies that Franco ripped off from himself--specifically, he would clone Vampyros Lesbos twelve years later with the similarly-entertaining Macumba Sexual. If you need to see what a "Jess Franco movie" looks like as a thing unto itself, independent of just a meaningless name on the Internet, this is a good starting point. Suffice it to say it doesn't really function in the traditional sense of a movie--it's incomparable even amongst the other dream-like films pumped out during the golden age of Eurohorror, save for perhaps the works of fellow sexual vampirism fan Jean Rollin.

So how does this movie treat homosexuality?

It soon becomes clear that the psychic hold Countess Carody has over Linda, and Linda's struggle with it, represents Linda's experience with homosexuality. As a result, the movie is ultimately about a group of people, Linda herself included, trying to cure her of her gayness, and ultimately succeeding. It's also about the homosexual urge as something predatory. But that isn't to say that Franco is being anti-gay in the movie. Indeed, there's little to suggest that a life with men is a good thing for Linda either. After all, this movie is primarily about deception, particularly deception as it comes from men. Linda's psychiatrist is a pervert who prefers to get his dick hard during their sessions rather than actually treat her. Memmet's offer of insight into the strange situation turns out to be a trick to try to rape, torture, and kill her. And Dr. Seward, the occult/psychiatric expert who is this film's seeming van Helsing (despite having the name of a different Dracula character), is revealed to actually be using Linda's connection to the Countess to try to force the Countess to make him into a vampire himself! Other than that, the other men we see in any sort of detail are the Countess' mute assassin Morpho, and Linda's boyfriend. The latter isn't a bad guy, he just seems a little boring, and she doesn't appear to be overly interested in him (notice how she basically never smiles at him). That deception theme is important in that by complicating the motivations of most of the characters, it forces us to question its lead "villainess"'s motivations as well.

It could be argued that the film is simply sexist, giving us a female protagonist who is victimized ceaselessly by men who face almost no consequences for their actions. But we are supposed to sympathize with Linda, and I think we're supposed to sympathize with Nadine, as well. In one scene she tells Morpho how she became a vampire--a few centuries ago she was in a war-wracked city, where a group of men were running around raping people. Nadine was among the victims but suddenly Dracula appeared and saved her, at first simply feeding off of her but eventually making into a vampire. As a result of her rape and her negative experiences with Dracula, Nadine is disgusted by men. Yes, this is a huge cliche, but in my mind it's valid for someone to identify as gay after such a traumatic event (the film definitely never suggests that all lesbians are rape victims, or that Nadine would be happy with men if it weren't for that darn trauma). Nadine's phrasing is particularly key: "[The rapist] was my first man. It was horrible." How are we not supposed to sympathize with her after she says that? That it's haunted her for so many decades afterward only speaks further to the fact that she's more complicated than she first appears.

Further confounding the character of the Countess is the strange red kite that keeps following Linda. Because it's red, I suspect it's probably meant to stand in for Nadine's red scarf, which is pretty much confirmed by the film's last shot, which shows the kite crashing to the ground. But to me, that has a tragic dimension to it. The kite flies free throughout the film, and in the end, it is grounded. The woman who could have set the Countess free has gone back to her boring drip of a boyfriend, fully convinced that the world she showed her was evil, even though she's not smiling as she sails away with him. It's because Franco used a kite specifically for this imagery that I see this--or it could be I'm grasping at straws.

Maybe the appeal I get from this film is much more mundane. Maybe it's just that as a gay woman, this film lets me believe that there's a Turkish island out there where there are lesbians with the physique and charisma of Soledad Miranda just waiting for other frustrated gay women to show up and go skinny-dipping with them. Maybe.

Thematic studies aside, Vampyros Lesbos is just a really fun movie. I will probably address more of its content when I tackle its aforementioned clone, Macumba Sexual, which I think I enjoyed more than this one. If you're a Woman-Loving Woman and you want a weird, artsy vampire movie to tickle your horror bone and perhaps a few others with it, this is a pretty good way to go.

Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1982), by William Asher

Our next movie is much more transparent about how it stands on gay people...and never before have I seen LGBT themes incorporated so flawlessly into a slasher. Well, Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (aka Night Warning) is sort of a slasher...it fits in best with that genre even though its psychological ruminations are much more advanced than even the most devious slashers that have come previously. No succinct statement will summarize this movie, so it's best to crack it open and see what comes out.

Billy Lynch is three years old when his parents die in a rather visceral car crash, leaving him in the care of his aunt Cheryl. Mercifully, Billy grows up with a relatively normal life, until he begins to reach the end of his high school career. He has a lot going for him, even if there's also a lot against him as well: he's in a solid relationship with his girlfriend Julie, and he's due to pick up a full ride at the college of his choice on a sports scholarship. But a lot of people pick on him for being so close to the openly gay basketball coach, and Cheryl is rather overprotective of him, to say the least. We'll be slowly finding out that Cheryl falls into the Margaret White/Pamela Voorhees school of parenting rather quickly, beginning with the film's inciting event of her failed seduction of a serviceman who comes by--when she is rebuked she kills him, and claims that he tried to rape her. The cop assigned to the case is Detective Joe Carlson, who begins his life in this film as the stereotypical unnecessarily-skeptical movie-cop before revealing himself as something else. Carlson hates gay people, to the point where he finds it unavoidable that Billy is gay (because he's friends with a gay person) and that his homosexuality caused him to murder the serviceman. What's more is that as Detective, Carlson answers to virtually no one in the local jurisdiction, meaning that not even other cops can stand in the way of his prejudicial crusade. But even his dedication can't surpass that which Cheryl has for ensuring that her nephew stays with her forever...as her lover.

I was skeptical of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker at first, despite the extensiveness of its opening car crash sequence. Up until Cheryl's murder of the handyman, there's nothing to indicate that this movie is particularly special one way or the other. There are suggestions here and there of Cheryl's unhealthy interest in her blood relation, but it really is that first murder that causes all Hell to break loose. From there, the movie hardly lets up for a minute, bringing us new horror with every new scene. It slowly turns out that Billy's whole life has been a lie, and that no one can be trusted.

Indeed, this entire movie could be called Billy's Unending Nightmare Train. Everything in the movie is coordinated to show that the world is against Billy, even insinuating that Detective Carlson's claim that Coach Landers is sexually interested in the notably-younger boy is true. (It isn't.) But what's interesting is that the focus of the film is on Aunt Cheryl instead...Billy's story is portrayed almost incidentally to hers. It's as if director Asher is trying to get the audience to go along with the world's general dismissal of Billy's trauma, which in turn helps us recognize the horror of his experiences when we realize how the film's gaze treats him. Focusing on Cheryl gives us the added benefit of seeing how deep her madness runs.

And it runs down to her mind's Marianas Trench. Better pens than mine have sung the praises of Susan Tyrrell as Aunt Cheryl, so the only thing I'll say is that you have to see her for yourself. Similarly, rather than spoil the movie extensively in my analysis of the LGBT themes, I will simply say that this is a movie that clenches you up and lets you feel that evil will win in the end. As I mentioned above, this film wears its LGBT feelings on its sleeve, and thankfully this is one instance of an '80s horror movie where there was some progressive sense in the heads of the filmmakers. I love happy endings.

If there are any faults in this movie, it has to do with the weird sequence where Cheryl and Billy's neighbor comes over and learns about some of Cheryl's darker secrets. This neighbor lingers in the scene in a way that suggests the writers lost track of her and what she was supposed to be doing here, and she dies way later than seems logical. This scene bogged down the movie for me a bit because I had trouble following what was going on, but I may just be an unintelligent creature. You'll have to find out for yourself! If you're queer like me, the ending will probably make you stand up and cheer. So I guess you'll have to get all the way through the movie or something...

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), by Toshio Matsumoto

Sometimes, you just gotta dive deep into the artsy.

I actually have a pretty strong taste for art films. I'm finding that I really just love MOVIES and so I see as many of them as I can...not everything is the sort of stuff that washes up on this site. Admittedly, I'm pretty skeptical of art films because, as you may have surmised on your own time, a lot of them are pretentious nonsense. Jodorowsky turns me away with real animal corpses and sexist mommy issues; Godard's "style" is actually just coded sloppiness; and I'm not even going to bother with Terrence Malick. But I enjoyed David Holtzman's Diary, every Truffaut movie I've seen so far, and now, Funeral Parade of Roses. Roses is not merely a contender for placement on this site due to my liking of it, as well as its "underground" (i.e. unwatched) status...it also contains sequences of graphic violence! All of its intriguing vectors come together at the end to make an unforgettable experience that is particularly hard to classify.

I say "hard to classify" as a leading statement into this next paragraph, where I normally summarize the plot. While Funeral Parade of Roses does have a plot, there are other elements which crop up throughout the film that have to be discussed separately. Our main narrative concerns Eddie, a young trans woman who is dating their boss, the cis dude manager of the dance club they work at. Eddie is in the process of forcing their paramour to dump his other girlfriend, another trans woman named Leda. Over the course of this story we see Eddie's adventures through drug-filled queer dance clubs and incidents both tragic and comedic as their backstory unfolds, involving childhood humiliation at the hands of their mother. All of this leads to literally Oepidal aspirations and a final gory ending.

But intercut with this are scenes where the camera pulls back from the action to reveal the production in progress. During this time we have interviews with the cast, who give comments on their own experience as gay men, as trans women, and as drag queens. (Many of the queer characters describe themselves as all of these throughout the film, reflecting that '60s stances on sexuality, gender identity and transvestism were considerably more fluid than what we have today. I have described Eddie and Leda as trans women because their assumption of female identity transcends the performative nature of drag [even while not contradicting it either]. They call themselves gay even though, at least in my mind, a trans woman attracted to men would be heterosexual. But identity is the sole property of the one who has it, so my view, even as a trans woman, should not be considered universal.) Many of these sequences are beautiful and sincere glimpses into a world nearly fifty years away, so different and yet so familiar. These meta-sequences are tied in with a film club that screens the movie as it's being made, comparing it to the works of Mekas and Pasolini. It is the definition of self-aware--and the story changes completely.

So we have a gay trans adaptation of Oedipus Rex, inside a dramatization of the making of that adaptation, that comments on itself mid-production. The earliest impression you get from this combination is that it helps to provide a different context to the more problematic elements of that Oedipus narrative. Eddie's gender identity is heavily implied to be the result of their not being able to live up to the masculine example set by their late father. So this early trauma is what has made Eddie-pus the King, or more properly, the Queen--and the hubris of that leads to their awful fate. That's definitely a negative portrayal of trans life, in my mind. But we aren't watching that movie, are we? We're watching the movie about the making of that movie. The interviews with the cast reveal that a lot of them view their roles rather frivolously, and don't view it in political terms. It's a chance for them to take a classic story and adapt it in a way that's relevant to who they are as queer folk. This is the story of how queer folk choose to tell their stories.

Any good art movie should look nice, and this movie is no exception. There's a lot of great stuff to look at. Take the divergences into the bizarre art gallery chamber that Eddie sometimes teleports too, full of creepy paintings of distorted faces. A narrator talks to us about the notions of "masks" and how our true selves interact with the world. This is intercut with scenes of Eddie and other trans women out shopping, completely indistinguishable from their cis counterparts. I only wish I was as pretty as them. Their shopping trip ends with a confrontation with a bunch of catty transphobic ladies, but this is played for comedy in the trans women's favor. These shifts in tone occur as often as the shifts in imagery. For all the negativity the story brings us to, there's one scene which will stand out for a lot of you: a scene where characters move in fast motion to a sped-up version of the William Tell Overture. Yeah, just like that scene in Clockwork Orange. Because Kubrick, by his own admission, stole this scene where he made Clockwork Orange two years later. What does that say about art cinema?

The last thing I'll say before shooing you off to watch this yourself is that I am obligated to explain the title somewhat. This movie contains a literal Funeral Parade of Roses, possibly even a couple of them, but in Japanese "rose" (or "bara") is a slang term with roughly the same meaning as "pansy" in English. That suggests a derogatory meaning, but the reverence the film gives to floral roses and to funerals shows that the message of the title is the same as the rest of the movie. Queer people are beautiful, and we are valid. You can call us flowers, but that's not an insult. We'll make movies that'll bowl you over.

So dive into the artsy! Dive deep; let it soak into your skin. Let your mind be blown!

And if you couldn't get enough gay from these movies--let's face it, there's never enough gay--I also recommend Ben & Arthur, Fleshpot on 42nd Street, and also future review subject Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things, a hysterical high-camp drag murderfest with some literal Killer Queens. I'm glad these movies are out there, to make me laugh, to make me cry, and to make me think. NOW GO FORTH AND BE PROUD, MY QUEERS.

You could have gotten this post a week ago! Consider becoming my Patron on Patreon to get early access to posts plus other special goodies!

Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1972), by Andy Milligan

Yet again I'm surprised by my own deplorable sloth. I've only done one Andy Milligan movie? Seriously? And it was Torture Dungeon? Why not The Ghastly Ones or Guru the Mad Monk? Surely I would start at the outset of Milligan's horror career, or with one of his more famous horror pieces. Well, I'm correcting my sin today by featuring...neither of those movies. Instead, I'm making this week into an unofficial "flesh week" by checking out a Milligan film I only recently discovered. It's not one of his horror films, to boot--it's one of his dramas, much in the same style as his early haunting LGBT short Vapors. In Fleshpot on 42nd Street, Milligan cements himself as a brilliant director and screenwriter, turning in a movie that matches the artsiness of his more respected contemporaries and tells a fascinating story of gender, sex, class, and love...while still keeping things firmly in the gutter, as he's always liked it.

Dusty is a young girl who has shacked up with Tony in his grungy, poorly-lit apartment. She plies him with sex but he keeps pressuring her to get a job. She insists that she has to like a job in order to do it, which I get, but it's pretty clear she really intends to never actually work. Eventually she walks out on him, stealing some of his stuff to sell to pawnbroker Sammy, a clearly gay actor who nonetheless requests a chance to give her really unsatisfactory cunnilingus in return for money. After robbing him, too, she meets up with Cherry, a drag queen friend of hers. This is when Andy gets to strut his stuff--the rest of the movie is nothing but queer bitching, poverty musing, and S&M hooking. And then, Dusty goes through an important moment in every woman's life: she meets Harry Reems. In the end, it wouldn't be Milligan if there wasn't a big fuck-you climax.

I'd be lying if I said this wasn't a slice-of-life film, pure and simple. Milligan channels his inner John Waters, as always, by having the life that's sliced be that of a poor person of questionable repute--a sex worker, and friends with a clique of queer folk. By escaping his normal trappings of Victorian England and high-class mansions, Milligan gets to once more mingle amidst the people he loved the most, and consequently he manages to tone down the hatred in his scripting for genuine attempts at humor and romance. The man was clearly having a rare good day when he put this together. His attempts at nastiness seem almost quota-filling--they're distant and insincere, even Dusty's creepy pro-rape bit about how men "have to stick up for their rights more often" to prevent women from becoming sexless. For once, Milligan has let himself get carried away by the pull of his comfort zone, and his rage hasn't kept him rooted as a stone against the tide this time.

And the film still turns out being well-made. The cheapness still shows: if you check out the Vinegar Syndrome release (which you should), you get to see what it's like when shitty film stock is put as close to HD as possible. You can see every hue of green in those sweet, sweet emulsion scars. But the framing and composition of the film exceeds its technical limitations. There are a lot of really nice looking shots in this movie, with emphasis on shadows and color, with lots of artistic nudity and smoking in bed--the sort of pretentious shit that pretentious people like but which is still captivating in some way. Throw in a snappy script that shoots out zingers like, "We should do it in a bed, like two civilized animals," and you've got a recipe for success.

Andy Milligan always deserves more attention than he gets, and so if you dislike horror movies while also being able to stand some sex, nudity, and crassness in your drama, this is a good entrance point. Vapors is a step to something deeper...and perhaps not as appreciable to The Straights. (The Heterosexuals, I mean.) Like a lot of great directors, there's always more to see with Milligan, more dimensions to his pain. He was famous for his anger, but here's something from when he was a little more happy. At least I think this is happy for him.

If you like the site and want to see more awesome stuff like it, consider becoming my Patron on Patreon!

Gretta (1984), by John Carr

It only struck me after the movie was over the significance of that title card: this movie is based off of a book. The snippety plot synopses I'm finding for this novel by Erskine Caldwell, an author I've never heard of before, don't match this movie at all. Maybe someday I'll read the book, but it's not high on my priority list. This is a movie which I feel operates mostly smoothly on its own, even if I hope that this book is every bit as good as the film. I've seen some really fucking strange movies this year, and it seems that each new discovery tops the last. Gretta, aka Death Wish Club, aka The Dark Side to Love, is one of those movies belonging to a genre all its own, where it is a true whirlwind, unpredictable in its motions. But like the characters in this film, the filmmakers play tricks on us--there is direction to the tornado. I'm not entirely sure if it's brilliant, but since I know the only answer is to rewatch the thing, I can't wait to find out.

Our film starts with a man named George introducing himself to us via voiceover. He explains that he's not interested in romance or sex; he just wants to love someone who doesn't love him back. To this end he goes out to the carnival and finds Gretta, a popcorn girl, whom he plies with hundred dollar bills to go back to his place and listen to him play Chopin. Not long after we jump perspectives to Glen, a man who falls in love with Gretta through the porn movies she now makes. Now keep in mind, Gretta isn't really an innocent victim here: her response to Glen stalking her through a variety of shady connections is to offer him sex. She's in the porn game because she likes to fuck. But he manages to build a romance with her all the same. Eventually she brings him to something she does on the side, a club populated by folk all around the world who have had close brushes with death. At some point Gretta was modeling for a sculptor who turned out to be a mad serial killer, and she had to kill him. Glen's had a run-in with the Reaper as well, so he's introduced to the club's latest game of Russian roulette with a killer beetle. As you may notice, this plot is kind of all over the place, but we haven't even gotten to Gretta's amnesia, where she becomes a man. Specifically, a '30s gangster type named Charlie White! I could go on from here, but what's the point? It is event after event after event, at a breakneck pace, never losing an ounce of crazy along the way, until we reach the most "hey don't forget we're still in this movie" ending ever.

There is a strange dissonance between the professionalism and the slackness of the script, and that is the root of this movie's disturbance. None of the plot points I summarized can come together in a rational way in 90 minutes, and as a result, Gretta ends up becoming like one of the Sandy Frank Japanese movies, sewn together from the tatters of a season of a TV show. But as far as I know, Gretta had no such origin. They made a conscious choice to use their time like this, when perhaps even just 30 more minutes of footage could have made it all make sense. Everything is edited out of order, like a dream. Take for example the scene where Glen meets with a psychiatrist to find out how to "cure" Gretta of her Charlie White persona. The psychiatrist all but encourages Glen to rape her! In fact, when he returns to where Charlie is sleeping in his apartment, Glen climbs in bed and starts going to town. It transpires that it's not Glen but some other lady, who seems fine with it! Then, when Glen asks Charlie what to do about the situation, he literally encourages him to rape...well, technically himself! But Glen is disgusted with this possibility now, when previously he had no such qualms.

One thing that does stay consistent is a running gag involving an old Swedish couple who live next to Glen's apartment who keep interrupting the movie to comment on how marvelous his sexual prowess is. Have I mentioned that trying to analyze this movie thematically is impossible? Because it's impossible to judge this movie tonally. Sleaze is cut with humor is cut with heart is cut with callousness. The hydra can't keep track of its heads. Every dramatic strike is counterbalanced with something of almost unearthly silliness. And every comedic moment is offset by something bitter or upsetting. This isn't in an attempt to keep the film a balanced breakfast, breaking up the drama with comedy while still ensuring that the drama marches forward. This is something else, something far less knowable.

I'm at a loss for words. I interrupted myself in the writing of this review to put tags on the movie and I realize that, aside from maybe just "exploitation" or "thriller," I can't place the genre of this thing. Like I said at the beginning, it really does deserve its own genre in the "you can't predict it" territory. Movies that keep piling shit up and never really resolve it in the end. These are movies like Skullduggery and Ogroff and Death Warrior. Once, I believed that these movies changed when I didn't watch them, because there always seemed to be scenes that I swear weren't in them before. I realize now that it's more just that these movies are so crammed with details that you need to come back to them again and again to see all the ways the facets glitter in the sunshine. Gretta is now among those same ranks; and I now have many adventures guaranteed in my future dedicated to the purpose of seeing just how this gem sparkles.

If you want to see something that's different from anything you've ever known, by God, watch this movie. Is that praise? Is that discouragement? I don't know! I don't care! Everything's run together muddy now, and I hope these brief and degenerate words may speed you on your way.

Glen or Glenda (1953), by Ed Wood

I think it's safe to say that by merit of the Internet alone, Edward D. Wood Jr. will never, ever be forgotten from the annals of humanity. In a hundred years time he will be remembered just as surely as Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, or Martin Scorsese. What I've been able to conclude from my short years on this Earth is that oftentimes it is the volume of one's reputation that counts, not the purity of it. We have reached a moment in history where bad is worth the same as good as long as it's in equal proportions--this has demonstrated itself in ways both good and bad. On one hand, humanity continues to prove to me on a regular basis that it is easily blindsided by cheap celebrity to the point where it is willing to encourage an avatar of the frothy, screamy discord of reality TV to attempt to fuse its ugly mass with the terminal controlling a significant number of the world's nukes. But on the other hand, there still is something special about praising and embracing the awfulness and mediocrity of our collective failures. I'm sure it's a matter of scale--Ed Wood never became President of the United States nor pioneered a depressingly hideous orange wig (even if wig-wearing is the theme for today). But there's something else going on, too. While most people are quick to call Ed Wood "the Worst Director of All Time," they seem to lump in the notion that he was an idiot.

Wood was most definitely not stupid. He worked within the confines of poverty, true, but his movies feel more like studio films than many of the flicks highlighted on this site. Perhaps he couldn't stretch his funds as far as an H.G. Lewis or a Roger Corman, but he wasn't as amateurish as many make him out to be--and arguably, the entertainment factor of his films exceeds that of Lewis' or Corman's. In addition, his legendary guile in obtaining the money he used to produce his pictures rivals that of Corman at his most infamous. He was a storied man, willing to suffer for his art. What was more confining for him was media. Studying Wood's writing, through his pulp prose and his scripting, we see ideas that exceed his budgets, yes, but which also exceed the conventions of what he's working with. He's trying to build a time machine with nothing but a screwdriver. If at some point in the future we can make movies that are telepathic and send emotions to the viewer, we should bring Ed Wood back from the grave in a computer or something so that all his films can be remade. Then we will finally glimpse the ecstasies and tortures of the soul within.

I say this because Glen or Glenda is perhaps the trippiest movie Wood ever made, barring perhaps the later Orgy of the Dead. It is also Wood's drive-in expose of transvestism and "pseudo-hermaphroditism," a bizarrely prescient docu-drama on transgender politics, decades before it was considered anywhere close to acceptable to be openly trans in the U.S.

Describing Glen or Glenda as a narrative is a little tough because of said trippiness. We open, naturally, with a dark parlor where Bela Lugosi is sitting, and where he will sit for the rest of the movie when he isn't mixing chemicals or superimposing himself over stock footage. Already I have to say that you have to watch this opening sequence for yourself to understand the full scope of it: in case you haven't seen Plan 9 from Outer Space or Bride of the Monster, Ed Wood is largely famous for the fact that his dialogue makes absolutely no fucking sense. Quoth the famous Criswell: "Future events such as these will affect us in the future!" (Plan 9 12:1). With that sort of garbage coming out of Bela Lugosi's mouth it is absolute pure entertainment. Lugosi will appear throughout the movie to do things like show us a buffalo stampede or mock us with nursery rhymes. We see the police find a dead man who is dressed as a woman--in hir suicide note ze mentions how many times ze's gone to jail for transvestism, and how ze wants to die as ze wanted to look. One of the policeman begins talking this over with a psychiatrist, who tells us two stories (one of which contains a story within the story), concerning Glen/Glenda and Alan/Anne. Glen(da) strives to hide his transvestism from his fiancee Barbara, especially when she expresses her disgust over the idea of sex changes when she reads a newspaper article about them. We learn about how Glen's transvestism comes about and what it all means: he was encouraged to wear his sister's dresses because she felt he looked better as a girl (and she only wanted daughters); and he seems to only be interested in wearing the clothing of women, insisting that he is heterosexual and does not desire a sex change. Here's where I should point out that this is a pretty strong parallel to Wood's own life as a heterosexual cis transvestite who began cross-dressing in youth (Wood also plays Glen/da in what is a legitimately good performance). He decides not to tell Barbara his secret until after the wedding, leading to a sequence where a legitimately-creepy Satan presides over the wedding and chants "Snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails" in tandem with an increasingly-spooky Bela. Along the way we learn about how Alan/Anne is a transvestite who becomes excited and enticed by the prospect of a sex change, especially after ze finds out ze's intersex, possessing female organs as well as male ones. Ze eventually undergoes gender reassignment, and we learn about hormone therapy as well as top and bottom surgery in as much detail as the '50s could allow--a surprising amount, as it happens. Both Anne and Glen get their happy endings, as Anne is able to pass and live as a cis woman to all appearances as she wanted, and Glen is accepted by his wife, who wants to let him have the things that make him happy.

As a queer person in the 21st Century you may imagine that I don't regard the 20th Century with much fondness. All the same, I am finding out that, just as there have always been people like me, there have always been cracks for us to find our homes in. There was an LGBT+ community in the 1950s, even if it wasn't something that could be out in the open. For all my research shows, Wood presents an honest view of the decade that cracks not only stereotypes about that point in history, but it also chips the very real heteronormative suppression of queer folk and experiences of the era: when he says that there are many men who aren't men or who don't shy away from "female" clothing among the American public he is not lying. As this movie was being shot and screened there were thousands of queer folk and transvestites doing their thing behind locked doors and closed curtains. That's not even getting into the fact that this a pro-intersex movie in 1953 when there is virtually no representation of intersex folk (much less positive ones) sixty-four goddamn years later. In any case: whether they were persons queer in body, sexuality, or gender, or if they were people with differing ideas on the concept of fashion, people like me existed even when we weren't "supposed" to. And that gives me hope, in the same way the final scene of Some Like It Hot does; it shows that there were spots where we weren't funny, or freakish, or mentally ill. We were people that our straight cis loved ones could accept--there was always a small chance that we could be the people we wanted to be, get the bodies we were supposed to have. In addition to embracing these images, Glen or Glenda refuses to shy away from the harsh reality that a lot of us die, and when we do, the world still insists on dragging us through the mud. Throughout the movie, the characters are haunted by that front page headline decrying sex changes, attacking dead people who underwent them. Even our criminals, many of them, get better treatment when they shuffle off the mortal coil.

I'm sorry: it's impossible for me to communicate my feelings about this movie without being political. As an apology I should also show the movie's imperfections, of which there are many. There is a weird contrasting sense throughout the film that transvestism, and possibly the state of being transgender as well, should be "cured"; at times the movie refers to both transvestites and trans folk as "mistakes of nature" and "Frankenstein's monsters." There is also a condescending tone towards women, and notably there are no trans men, nor are there women who dress or try to pass as men. Similarly there is some implicit homophobia in Glen's insistence on being straight--and nope, no gay characters appear, as Anne is apparently attracted to men. On top of this is some mercifully brief but still marring racism, wherein it straight up compares "natives" (cue dancing Africans in tribal gear) to animals in order to make some nonfunctional parallel between gendered crests and mating rituals among birds and the plumage-like masks worn among the dancing men. It could be cut from the movie and nothing of value would be lost (although these moments do serve as an unpleasant reminder that yes, even those lacking privilege in society can be bigoted towards another underprivileged group). These are the inevitable bumps of this being commissioned explicitly as an exploitation flick; Wood's insistence on a message of love and acceptance shows that he at least had his heart in the right place, and I really can't help but wonder if these more exclusive elements were additions or mandates by the studio. After all, love and acceptance do not good exploitation make, even if it involves topics taboo at the time.

Glen or Glenda does a great job of capturing its creator's eccentric mind on film, which is what trash is: a record of a mind which could never be put at the reins of a mainstream production. We can see more of Ed Wood as a person just by watching this, even if--especially if--that includes dubbing in female voices by shifting the pitch of the dub on a clumsy tape recorder. Wood's obsessive earnestness combined with shockingly empathetic material makes me seriously question anyone who would call this one of the worst films of all time. It is cheap, yes, but it is not bad. You certainly can't call terrible a movie that ends with, of all things, Bela Lugosi sighing and chuckling over the silliness of the gender binary. By the way: this is Bela's best performance ever, and that is (probably) my final answer.

Torture Dungeon (1970), by Andy Milligan

Back to basics.

Torture Dungeon is, like many of Andy Milligan's movies, best described as a "stew of images." I have now seen a good handful of his horror films (The Ghastly Ones, Seeds of Sin, Bloodthirsty Butchers, The Man With Two Heads, Blood, and possibly Guru the Mad Monk), and can confirm that there are patterns and shared themes between them. Ennui, depression, desperation, rage--incest--hatred of the mentally or physically deformed. The susceptibility of the average person to mental illness. And, of course, England-set period pieces heavily inspired by the Gothic tradition. Better scribes than I have written of Andy Milligan's personal history, and so I will briefly say that he grew up a product of abuse and hatred. Jimmy McDonough's The Ghastly One tells the full tale. Each of Milligan's films contains a bizarre melodrama that shows people at the end of several ropes, so hateful that any of them could be responsible for the gory fates of their fellows. Oftentimes a bunch of characters, usually an inbred, degenerate rich family far enough back in the English past so as to have Long Island accents, locked in a house with a murderer. Sure enough, Torture Dungeon grows along similar lines, but it is probably the sleaziest iteration of the formula I've seen yet. Milligan jumps into some deep shit here, and it's a tough sit. There's no reason for me to choose it as the first Milligan flick for the site, but it's what I've done anyway. Down, down, we must go...

In medieval England a bunch of gaudy-dressed inbred aristocrats plot to seize control of the poor kingdom. Their plan involves gutting people with pitchforks and marrying a girl to the mentally handicapped member of the family. There is a long, long "seduction" sequence whereby this girl is meant to conceive the heir of said member, and while it's ableist as fuck, it still sets off more than a few fine points of my rape trigger. This leads quickly into a long scene where two characters recant their backstories to each other, which both involve rape and eating garbage. Jesus. Despite Milligan's own homosexuality, the movies indulge in a fair share of homophobia, though it does contain the ever-infamous howler: "I'm not homosexual, I'm not bisexual, I'm not asexual. I'm trisexual. Yes...I will TRY anything for pleasure!" Anyway, you'll lose track of the characters pretty hurriedly, and there's a "you're secretly a princess" twist that's lamer than the lousiest of penny dreadfuls. Mercifully, your attention will have been held this whole way, just to see how much sleazier it can get.

If you were to trim out scenes that were clearly Andy Milligan indulging himself and his personal troubles, this movie would only be as long as Guru the Mad Monk, which clocks in at 55 minutes on my copy. But despite slight bloating, there's enough gruesomeness to satisfy anyone, and perhaps even overwhelm 'em a little. The Ghastly Ones and Seeds of Sin suddenly seem mild, and indeed, it seems as if age slowly Andy down a bit, as Bloodthirsty Butchers and Blood weren't nearly this...unfettered. Simply put, Torture Dungeon is a passionate movie. It has camp elements due to people insisting on overacting the fuck out of literally everything but camp in a Gothic setting can be kind of grotesque sometimes. Especially since it's clear that the Gothic lit Milligan was aiming for was less The Mysteries of Udolpho and more The Monk. The Monk is a novel from the early 19th Century written by a teenager that contains incest rape on top of a pile of corpses. Jesus.

Andy Milligan had, as they say, no chill. None at all. His actors and scripts and settings always spit pure bile, pure revulsion, at each other, and at life itself. It's difficult to talk about him in calm and level-headed terms, not helped by the fact that I admire his work as much as is okay to. Milligan was probably one of the people I channeled when I wrote Tail of the Lizard King, which you would probably like if you enjoyed The Ghastly Ones or any of Milligan's other comparatively tame films. (Hey, Ben Arzate of Cultured Vultures called Tail a "goofy and fun read", so it can't be that bad, right?)

Don't go into Torture Dungeon expecting either comfort or a torture dungeon--though there is a lengthy scene where one of the ladies who appears in all of Milligan's movies runs through a cave full of bloody men in chains shrieking about "revenge!" Does that count? As before, there's no rhyme or reason to a lot of this--it's just images and rage-venting for the grand Mr. Milligan. There is some comedy in store if you've seen enough mid-century exploitation movies, as once again, the stock music that's on every Something Weird release ever reappears. And hey, have you seen Lost Skeleton of Cadavra? The music from that is in this, too. Usually, whenever I hear these music cues in a movie, I get happy, because they usually appear in movies I love. Torture Dungeon is tough to love, but it's won my heart all the same. It's a good square-one restarter for the trash lover, fast-forward-needed scenes and all.

Psyched by the 4D Witch (1972), by "Victor Luminera"

Okay, I'm starting to think I just like stupid shit.

What would happen if the people who made A Clockwork Blue had even more weed but even less money? If such a thing did exist, and it was a horror film as well as a softcore porn, it would be one of the best horror porn films ever. How fortunate! Our universe also contains such a movie. No, none of the same people from A Clockwork Blue were actually involved with the creation of Psyched by the 4D Witch, but that doesn't matter. "Victor Luminera" and his band of merry persons were simultaneously dumber and more brilliant than the crew of that film. After all, one of the few of their number to get a credit is named "Esoterica," and she along with many others brings us this Tale of Demonology by way of Transetheric Vision. Transetheric Vision is extremely grainy and looks like a lot of shots of masks being waved around behind a red filter. Indeed, there are many shots of floating masks being waved around behind red filters in this film. And to think that that's just the start of it.

A girl named Cindy studies sexual witchcraft in her spooky old house, which summons her Salemite ancestress, a witch named Abigail. Abigail makes a deal Cindy can't refuse--she'll teach her the secrets of magical sex and give her orgasms, while keeping her "a virgin for [her] daddy." An increasingly disturb string of sexual escapades ensues, triggered by Abigail's magic words: "Let's fantasy fuck now." What starts out as simple things like masturbation and fucking gay guys straight leads to more terrifying reaches, like lesbianism, sexual vampirism, and the ol' snake-up-the-rectum. Toothpaste-rabies ghouls dominate the second half, after Cindy is sealed away for disobeying Abigail after the "Salem witch-bitch" tries to get her to screw not just a corpse...but a female corpse! Have I mentioned that this movie is absolutely traumatized by the existence of gay people? Anyway, in the end, straight sex in the material world is what Cindy needs to break Abigail's spell, so she's off to the races fucking her best friend's German psychiatrist dad. But can anyone truly stop a witch who lives in a dimension beyond our understanding...?

I can't entirely do this movie justice, and I already expended my use of the word "psychedelic" in the review for The Witches' Mountain. Which is sad, and a grievous error on my behalf, because this movie stops at nothing to bring us a full rainbow of colors. Beyond the trippy visuals (and audio, and plot, and...), there is much on display here. Particularly, I want to point out that this movie probably has the most stereotypical and awful piece of "Chinatown" stock music ever. It comes out of nowhere and is, like many things in the movie, hilarious, but also offensive. Many things as weird and unnecessary as this occur, and these "things" are surrounded by a story that sound like a pulp written jointly by Anton LaVey and Kenneth Anger. It is miraculous.

I should also talk about the soundtrack of this movie (outside of the racist Chinese music). It's one of many '60s/'70s exploitation movies that have made to the A-List that heavily samples "A Night on Bald Mountain." Bald Mountain is played almost as much as the lyrical theme music that recurs throughout, which repeatedly warns us that the 4D witch is "born from the belly of the devil's bitch." You will hear this song so much that you will begin to love it, even though it is Stockholm Syndrome. It's great to have an ineptly written and performed song play so many times in such an ineptly written and performed movie.

Psyched by the 4D Witch is unlike The Witches' Mountain in that it condemns rather than condones intellectual analysis. It is pure fluff, it is comfort, and it is thus probably bad for you. Mountain may be psychedelia's intuitive processes laid bare, but Psyched is its mindless bubbly idiot joy. In its stupidity it really is something to gawk at rather than truly entertain. But I'm entertained by gawking, and perhaps I make true the old principle that you are what you eat. For I "eat" stupid shit like this, down to the bone. I have now seen this movie probably as many times as I've seen Manos: The Hands of Fate or Don't Go in the Woods, and I have seen those movies probably about thirty times each. I feel like that makes me a bad person.

I suspect you are a good person, and so I want to do you some good. It's with that in mind that I will say that if you tend to adore exclusively "normal" movies, this one may make you puke. But I'm sure someone somewhere has said that the goal of cinema is to evoke a reaction. Puking is a reaction.

If you have to puke, puke to this movie.

Ben & Arthur (2002), by Sam Mraovich

Sigh.

Ben. &. Fucking. Arthur.

I've been...putting off this review for a little while. The thing is, I want to encourage every living being to watch this film. It is on YouTube. Here. Watch it. When you are done there, come back to this review.

Or read this first, I don't care. Just know that this movie really should be watched without any sort of warning or filter. I did not know a single thing about this movie before I saw it, and I got an early alert for what to expect in The Tony Blair Witch Project. I just knew that it seemed to be a permanent resident of the IMDB Bottom 100, and was apparently about a gay couple. That was all. Ben & Arthur is indeed about a gay couple, but it is about the meaning of life. Though not deliberately. It will reveal to you the secrets of the cosmos through the act of watching, but only as an incidental side-effect. It is a trainwreck of a film, in ways that defy the customs and regulations of all humanity, and all of its glory is the product of the most supreme accident. My review of it is regrettably forced to simply be a description of select vignettes of the film, which is rather appropos: Ben & Arthur is little more than a string of vignettes that vaguely tie together. Often in self-contradictory ways. Let's dive in.

The movie, as you can see from that title card, opens with what appears to be a clip of the inside of someone's bowel. The background music is a slowed-down version of Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer." We then see that our eponymous couple, Ben and Arthur, can finally get married, when Hawaii legalized same-sex marriage. Not more than two minutes after they discover this, however, the decision is overturned! Arthur screams "THIS FUCKING SUCKS." This entire sequence involves a musical number as well, the only track on the score to contain lyrics. The suddenness of this describes the entire movie. Before the twenty minute mark, subplot after subplot unfolds upon our eyes. Arthur tries to find a job, but ends up facing an alcoholic producer who says, "Now show me your penis." Ben tries to divorce his wife, Tami, who he never mentioned to Arthur at any point in their three-year relationship. Arthur quits his cafe job after encountering the most realistic portrayal of a bitchy, passive-aggressive white retail customer ever, so that he can open a porno shop. These things all have legitimate conclusions, such as gun violence. But there is a main plot, of course.

In order to get money to go to college (apparently?), Arthur visits his ultra-religious brother Victor, who, natch, hates The Gay. Despite the fact that he has bleach blond hair and lives in an apartment that resembles a candlelit Olive Garden. Victor becomes so desperate to break up his brother's relationship that he tries to join forces with his church. But he is excommunicated because he is the brother of a gay man (?), which might bring "bad karma" to the congregation (???). However, that priest then immediately welcomes him back to the church, almost as if that scene had never happened. He then reveals that he can get Victor a hitman to kill Arthur--he injures Ben instead. Eventually, Arthur gets revenge, burning Victor's priest sponsor alive. Things get convincingly disturbing from here on out, and everyone gets the bad ending. There's incest involved. Finis.

Ben & Arthur is a living paradox. It is equal parts hilarious and visceral, clumsy but charming, heartwarming yet isolating. There are plenty of truly gruesome parts, like unrelenting madness of every character save the two protagonists. Who, incidentally, aren't perfect. Arthur does kill that old guy. And Ben fucking punches Arthur in the face, backing it up with, "That'll teach you not to say stupid things!" Actually, now that I think about it, no one is this movie is likable--they all have at least one moment that reveals them to be a revolting asshole. So why do I like this movie so much...?

"My heart, my stomach, my liver, my everything! It just spilled out onto the floor!"

That is an actual line in this movie. It is not supposed to be funny, but it inherently is. With few exceptions, everything is just done so poorly, so incorrectly, that it is inherently amusing. Humor, as I may have already said somewhere on this blog, is based on an automatic response to logical gaps. We just happen to find pauses in rationality to be...funny, for some reason. And everything in this movie is based on illogic. Here, lemme show you...

There is a scene where Victor and his cohort sprinkle salt into boiling water, to create their secret "holy water recipe." I'm going to be honest, I am not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to Christianity but I do not believe that holy water has a "recipe." But, in case it was not clear, this scene is just one of many that reveals that the Christianity shown in this film has to be some sort of weird cult, in-universe. There's no way that director Mraovich was so ill-informed about the customs of Christianity--the aforementioned reference to karma (which doesn't exist in Christianity), and the fact that Victor is excommunicated for being a gay man's relative, are contrary to any version of Christian belief, except maybe that of the Westboro Baptist Church (who, obviously enough, are not Christians). If "the Church" of this film is supposed to be Westboro, or even just another faux-Christian cult, it's not precisely stated. If it wasn't for the fact that Victor gets his church's support in the murder plot, it would be easy to believe that he just represents someone who abuses religion to do terrible things. But instead, the movie implicitly says that somehow all Christians are like this.

Changing topics somewhat, I do want to actually praise this movie for featuring a handful of clever moments. There are some nice exchanges like this:

Victor: "Do you know why they threw me out of the church?"
Arthur: "Probably because you're a psychotic raving fuck!"

Then, moments later, Arthur produces a dildo, proclaiming, "See this? Take some lube, and shove it up your ass."

The acting of these scenes is surprisingly fitting. The amateurishness works for it here, because it makes the dialogue sound authentic. Almost like we're watching the "real events" of the story. The realism the amateur nature of the dialogue provides, though, makes all of the "dramatic sequences" (including a sex scene!) seem...odd, to say the least. If I did have to compare it to another film in the modern public consciousness, I would have to choose The Room. It is an "alien movie." As in, it is made by beings who did not come from this Earth.

Perhaps celestial beings.

Ben & Arthur may offend a good deal of people. I am probably a terrible person for liking it. As a non-Christian I believe there's a chance it would upset Christians; but as a queer person I can affirm that it will offend queer folk! Film fans will be also feel some sense of anger. That is. If all parties in question leave their brains on. Leave the logic parts on so you can see how crazy it really is. But if you can take being significantly unflattered, and you can have fun with that--do it. Unleash the power and dive deep.