On the Fringe: "Begotten"

On the Fringe: "A Thief in the Night"

My second attempt at doing a video film review:

On the Fringe: "Mondo Cane"

Trash Humpers

After having viewed Larry Clark's Kids about four years ago, I had hankering for more. I perused Clark's Wikipedia and IMDB pages, seeing such titles as Wassup Rockers and Bully. Strangely enough, it would be another two years before seeing another Larry Clark film. I found Bully on recorded on DVR at my parents house and I could not pass it up. Why wait two years to see another Clark porno? Because Kids writer Harmony Korine caught my eye, and I found the descriptions of his body of work (as of 2007) a bit more fascinating. His style of filmmaking blurs the lines between art and exploitation, not unlike early John Waters' films.

Korine's directorial debut, Gummo, was quite the introduction, as I had never seen anything like it. Where Kids was a portrait of teenage debauchery on overdrive, Gummo took it to a more nihilistic and bleak level, following the lives of teenagers in a small town in Ohio that was left in ruins by a tornado. Despite the fact that I find most people hating this movie, I'm not ashamed to say this film definitely makes my top 20 favorite films. His next effort, Julien Donkey-Boy, was an intriguing study of a mentally disabled man with schizophrenia, and had a macabre beauty in its ugliness. It was a Dogme95 production (some have put this up for debate), and Korine makes the film wonderfully surreal despite the limitations. Mister Lonely was a major departure from Korine's depressing realism, as it had a bigger budget and a concept that could not rely on Korine's knack for creating narratives out of barely outlined scripts. Mister Lonely is two stories; one is about a Michael Jackson impersonator that finds a home on a commune populated by other celebrity impersonators, and the other is about a priest (played by legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog) and his nuns on a mission in a Third World country. It is not his best work, but still a worthy addition to his body of work.
And in 2009, there was Trash Humpers. In what you could call a 'return to form' for Korine, the realism is accentuated by his use of a VHS camcorder. Humpers is about a gang of vandals in 'old people' masks (one of them actually looks like the bastardized version of Freddy Krueger in the recent remake) that roam the alleyways and disenfranchised streets of Nashville, busting television sets and fluorescent lightbulbs, setting off firecrackers, and yes, humping trash cans, among other things. From all this comes some what of an "accidental narrative", as the characters find a bit of redemption in the end, going from almost completely free individuals living on the fringe to finding a little bit of domestication. Not unlike the idea behind the visual style of August Underground, the film is made to look like someone's home movies that is found lying in the gutter and discovered by a curious person. It works on this level, as even the film's credits are produced by the title function on those old VHS camcorders.
With that said, I must admit that Trash Humpers was a minor disappointment. It had all the right factors going for it: realism, a gritty aesthetic, a group of people that have no boundaries, and Korine's unique direction and improvisation. But what weighs it down is its repetitiveness and lack of structure. Most of the scenes are comprised of breaking shit, high-pitched laughter, humping a stationary object or masturbating a long cylindrical object, and the camera man singing the same jingle ("Three little devils jumped over the wall, chopped off their heads and murdered them all"). Even though a lack of structure has worked for Korine's films in before, it works to both advantage and disadvantage here. It serves the aesthetic well, but this also makes scenes awkward, with the camera capturing gaps in conversations when the scene's purpose has been fulfilled and the actors don't know what else to say.


Despite its flaws, it is not a bad film. There are some amusing moments, and watching people that just don't give a fuck and enjoy mayhem always serves some degree of catharsis for the viewer. And there are moments that you don't see coming. But three-minute scenes of 'old men' humping trees and simply laughing at the camera bring it down. So much more could have been down with this premise, but it doesn't go as far as it should. Still, it has a nightmarish quality to it, with a nihilistic and foreboding undertone to it not unlike Gummo. The world these deviants live in is an American landscape that has been left in ruin and the disenfranchised live on the existing pieces. Like his other films, they are most likely only to be appreciated by his already existing fan`base, and hated by everyone else. I just hope that Korine's next film will embody his potential more than this one did.

See the trailer.

Niku Daruma

On the fringes of cinema, there have always been films that push the boundaries of what society has deemed decent and acceptable for the public to view. Such films depict graphic violence, unsimulated sex, and other taboos that regular people dare not speak of, with some movies including all of the above. Here in the United States, films like August Underground and Faces of Death gain an audience in the underground circuit and obtain recognition mainly through notoriety and word-of-mouth. But across the Pacific, Japan has its own brand of extreme cinema, with an emphasis on combining both pornography and unapologetically brutal violence. Niku Daruma (aka Tumbling Doll of Flesh or Psycho: The Snuff Reels) is such a film, even though it may seem tame to fans of extreme movies.

The film begins in a dark room, with a man sitting watching the gorey aftermath of an ax homicide on a small television set (according to many other movies about psychopaths, this is shown to establish his craziness). Next, we are shown several men picking up a female porn star, and they are taking her to the set (aka some guy‘s shitty apartment). The scene they are shooting gradually becomes more extreme, as they start off with normal foreplay and move into rope-bondage. It is when they introduce her to an enema that she objects and wants to take a break. While going to the restroom, one of the men come in and beat her over the head with a baseball bat. The three men tie her to the bedposts with ropes, and proceed to perform multiple amputations and other graphic acts (which would lose their impact with curious readers if I mention them).



Niku Daruma is directed by Tamakichi Anaru (his surname actually translates to “anal”, which is very telling, considering Niku), who has made other gore-soaked fares as Suicide Dolls and Women’s Flesh: My Red Guts. He is also known for his pornographic work, with such titles as Mother and Daughter: Spit-Swapping Seduction and Near Relation Lesbian Kiss. Anaru no doubt has a peculiar taste when it comes graphic sexuality, and he incorporates this into Niku and has the narrative (or lack-there-of) take a violent turn for the worse in this respect. Although he does, in a way, cater to the wishes of gorehounds and fans of obscure extreme cinema, Anaru has clearly made this film just for the sake of being shocking and perverse.

I must admit, I expected more going into this film. Having read other reviews for Niku, I was awaiting the chance to be shocked and disturbed. However, what I got was a 69-minute film that was a 40-minute porno (a rather boring one at that) and a 20-minute faux snuff film. I probably would not have minded this, were it for how painfully long and unnecessarily tedious the snuff portion of the film was. It also did not help that there were no subtitles, which makes you care about the characters even less. Niku Daruma has a very limited release here in the United States, and can probably only be found on eBay or the darkest corners of the internet. If you are into this sort of movie and you have a morbid curiosity to see it, then go for it (if you can find it). But Niku Daruma is too painfully long considering its short running time and has incredibly sub-par effects that I cannot actually recommend it to anyone.

Movie Reviews

I've been writing film reviews for Passport Cinema (passportcinema.com) and the UWRF Student Voice newspaper here at University of Wisconsin: River Falls, where I am a full-time student. Instead of making a new post for each of them individually (like I did with the Night of the Living Dorks review), I'm providing all the links here, in order to shamelessly promote the sites and myself. Keep in mind, I never said I was good at writing reviews.

Antibodies

Friday the 13th (2009)

Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice

Hotel For Dogs

Last House on the Left (2009)

My Bloody Valentine 3-D

Night of the Living Dorks

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Slumdog Millionaire

Valkyrie

"Night of the Living Dorks" AKA "Die Nacht der lebenden Loser"

Writer and director Mathias Dinter’s Night of the Living Dorks may be a
German flick, but it may have more familiarity with the American audience
rather than its native youth. In an international boom of horror genre parodies
since the success of UK’s Shaun of the Dead, this just feels more like a teen
sex comedy than another zombie flick.

Phillip (Tino Mewes) and his two friends Wurst and Konrad (Samuel Cortez
and Thomas Schmieder) are the unpopular kids in their school, and are
constantly picked on by the elite, upper-class popular people. After
witnessing a voodoo ritual in a cemetery performed by Phillip’s next-door
neighbor Rebecca (Collien Fernandes), the trio crashes their car while
under the influence of marijuana. This of course, turns them into zombies
and they have to figure out a way to fix it while at the same time taking
revenge on those that have wronged them.

While Night of the Living Dorks is a self-proclaimed zombie spoof, it
plays as more of an American sex teen comedy than anything. The
conventional characters of the teen flick are there (the girl next door,
the popular girl that the protagonist pines after, the upper-class jock
nemesis, the wise-cracking side kick, the parents leaving the house in
their son’s care, etc.), and a Revenge of the Nerds-type influence on the
plot is more than obvious. Besides being an essentially bloodless movie,
it does little to poke fun at zombie films. In fact, the ‘zomie’ as we
know it actually very skewed here, as there is apparently an antidote to
reverse it, and those unlucky ones turned into zombies can live among
humans. All they have to do is eat a lot of raw meat, raid a blood bank,
and learn to suppress the urge to bite an ass or two.

Night of the Living Dorks isn’t all that bad, however. Even though it’s
just like every other National Lampoons teen sex romp we’ve seen before,
it’s actually funny. Instead of focusing on making as many references to
teen culture as possible, it’s just flat-out silly and entertaining, with
the dialogue being consistently perverted and goofy. The biggest flaw is
the fact that Night of the Living Dorks seems too American. A German
flick that makes references to Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson’s Thriller,
and Casablanca really doesn’t come off as too German to me.

If you’re looking for formulaic yet goofy and entertaining time, then this
is for you. But if you enjoy foreign films and/or horror genre spoofs,
this most likely won’t be your cup of tea.

2 stars/4