Disturbing Night At The Movies, Section II: Numbers 21-17 Spankwire Edition

21. Entrails Come Out At Night (1980) 6/8

Independent off-off-off Broadway icon and sleaze-meister Marty Farnezy helmed this extremely rare Canadian slasher. With a flair for the surreal and impressive insight into the dark perils of childhood few camper-gone-wrong movies can claim, this lost treasure is all the more attractive because it is nearly impossible to find on VHS (no DVD as of yet) and has been “scrubbed” from the internet by its producer Al Borschstein because of a tangle of rights and distribution disputes. Everybody remembers those ‘Outward Bound’ type obstacle courses and ‘everybody-work-together” trust games we were all unfortunately subjected to as children. Farnezy turns this nostalgia-laden rite of passage into a traumatic event that gives unholy birth to a monster. Tormented by bullies all summer at Camp Wanadouitt (I think that’s Native American), scrawny camper Jody Dupree really begins to lose it when he endures the humiliation of being purposely dropped by another camper in the “trust test’ exercise of “fall back and I’ll catch you.” When he can’t pass the ropes course, inciting vicious “they’re all gonna laugh at you” Carrie-type derision from the whole camp (including the counselors) and a chant of “Don’t slip, drip! Don’t slip, drip!” he is provoked into taking the first step of an inescapable journey toward madness.

The rest is obscure Disturbing Movie history: Jody, now a local butcher in the town of his former campground, bizarrely obsessed with intestinal tracks due to his traumatic associations with failed rope courses, returns ten years hence to wreak havoc on a new generation of campers. The climactic scene in which Jody strangles the camp director (played by Farnezy himself) with his own colon is a true show-stopper. I caught this one at a revival house in Toronto, and the audience went berserk. Plus, another great grindhouse poster tag-line: “When Jody The Butcher comes out at night, so do the entrails!”

20. Blue Velvet (1986) 6/10 (and everything since by David Lynch except The Straight Story)

David Lynch, ever since his midnight-circuit cult hit Eraserhead, has singlehandedly become a minor cottage industry of disturbance. He broke new ground for independent film and made inroads of Disturbism toward the radar of mainstream America with the high watermark of this, his finest film. Soon after, arsty disturbism made its network channel TV land debut in the form of his challenging series Twin Peaks. With the arrival of Lynch to center stage, closeted Disturbists in every corner of the USA could breathe a little easier, loosen their collars, and hold their heads a little bit higher. One of our own had hit the big time. Lynch’s aesthetic invasion on behalf of the dark side into daylight America is mirrored in the themes of the film itself: beginning with an amazing shot circling out of the depths of a severed ear laying on a suburban lawn and being devoured by ants, Blue Velvet draws back the curtain on an astounding underbelly of society lying just beyond the surface, just around a street corner, or inched behind a wall.

Basically the message is: pass the façade of any “leafy, dappled bedroom community,” and you’ll find a thriving house of horrors. Of course, this is a phenomenon that had been explored before, but Lynch blew the doors open like no one had before: secret sludge moves in obscured channels in our sewers and in our minds; and everyone is implicated in one manner or another. Once the door is ajar, it reveals both a portal to a foreign dimension and a glance into the house of a next door neighbor, and Lynch shows us these two things are one and the same. Who walks through? Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth, a beer-drinkin,’ foul-mouthed, nitrous gas sucking personification of the male sex drive in its most untamed, ferocious, sadistic, compulsive and violently distilled form. Accompanying Frank is his gang, including premo-weirdo Dean Stockwell, Cuckoo’s Nest alum Brad Dourif, and a bunch of others who are part Ghost World/Robert Crumb-type outcast geeks, part despicable criminals, and part Manson family. Not a good combo. It’s like if The Little Rascals grew up to have serious unresolved psychosexual, drug, and violence issues (which, come to think of it, the actors who played them actually did). Kyle MacLachlan plays a nosy innocent who stumbles onto Our Demented Gang when he becomes intrigued with Isabella Rossellini.

The Scene, as far as Disturbists are concerned happens when, with goody-goody Kyle watching from a closet, Frank assaults Isabella Rossellini physically and verbally, and in his mania becomes more a preternatural force of macho lust and sociopathic desire than a human being. Hopper chews up the scenery with vehemence and total dedication, and it is one of the most frightening scenes of abuse and anger in history. It singlehandedly revived Hopper’s career,(and provided a renaissance artistically for Stockwell too) who returned to the forefront of vanguard moviemaking, after he had disappeared into a haze of self-destruction and a case and a half of beer a day for most of the 70s.

19. Funny Games (Original Version) (1997) 8/6

Michael Haneke is making a run at being the foreign-soil David Lynch with a series of unnerving films that explore the relation between movie voyeurism, real-life voyeurism, and violence. This Austrian shocker about two preppy teenagers who subject a family to mind games and murder was recently remade, virtually shot for shot, with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth for American audiences, but it is the 1997 original that still retains the most power. Two clean-cut boys show up at the vacation home of a wealthy couple and their son, and slowly it becomes evident they are sociopaths bent on playing with the anxieties of the family like cats batting around mice. Haneke implicates, attempts to ridicule, and challenges the traditional disturbing crowd mindset by cheating on traditional narrative and depriving reality of cause and effect that might otherwise have brought relief and justice. Haneke is merciless; the acting is top notch, and the trademark lengthy one-shot scenes (especially an astounding sequence in which a shotgun blast is reversed) are excruciating.

As with many important directors, Haneke has managed to invent his own recognizable and unique filmmaking fingerprint: the “Haneke-style” that is now beginning to influence a whole new generation of Disturbing auteurs (see the brand new prep-school shocker Afterschool) consists of camera shots protracted way beyond what is usually cinematically acceptable or morally comfortable; still compositions hiding details right in front of our face; and the unwillingness of the artist to intercede on the audience’s behalf. For some other high-achieving disturbing Haneke moments, check out a nasty surprise halfway through his terrific puzzler “Caché (Hidden);” and a self-mutilating, incestuous Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher.

19.5 An Addendum
“The Spankwire Video” (Year Indeterminable) 10/Not applicable

Not technically a film, but included because 1) everyone interested in the disturbing subgenre needs to know about this wonderful travesty; and 2) it is an epochal representation of the technically and morally viral implications of the new Internet Age. This two and a half minute compilation of self-inflicted debauchery set to a German death metal song creates that dividing line; there is your conscious mind before watching Spankwire, and the one you are sadly left in possession of after seeing it.

Quick debriefing: as I have learned since seeing the video, the “body modification community” consists of people who like to alter their physical being, with strategies covering everything from piercings, to stretching earlobes for huge earrings, to selectively deducting limbs and make themselves permanently look like a lion (like that socialite in NY). Well, there is a popular website that goes back about ten years, called Body Modification E-zine, or BME, and it serves as one of the leading cultural bell-weathers for the modifier gang. Part of their website displays the feats of the extreme segment of their community, and based on its most daring exploits, the folks from BME started a competition that sounds like an urban legend come to life: the BME Pain Olympics. This successor of the Roman games consists of “athletes” (ouch-letes?) outdoing each other with acts of bizarre and very painful self-disfiguration. (Kind of a new take on a 60s hedonistic slogan: “if it feels horrible, do it.”) You’re probably thinking, “oh, I’ve seen those dudes hanging from hooks in their back or chest, and being lifted by a helicopter,” like Richard Harris in A Man Called Horse or your fringe David Blaine type magicians/performance artists. “Whatever. Next.” Well, you may want to reconsider; suffice it to say these guys don’t hang from their backs.

Anyhoo….a viral video of the Pain Olympics made its way onto the internet, and then some devil posted a video that topped it in terms of extremity, and that topper is now known (in informed circles) as the “most disturbing video out there” (and the web is a BIG place). It far surpasses other famous viral videos you may have heard of, i.e.” Two Girls, One Cup.” For all you smug smartasses, who think they’ve seen it all, this thing makes Two Girls look like Bambi Goes To Dairy Queen.
Named after “Spankwire,’ the You Tube-like porno site that first hosted it, The Spankwire Video lives up to its reputation. First of all, it differs from your average disturbed auteur’s entry in the field, in that everything you see is absolutely freakin’ real. And even the most brazen voyeur will invariably wince and utter non-linguistic mutterings of wonder and disgust at the goodies here on display: a man removing his own testicle with a little improv surgery; strange implementation of an angry bee colony; the tip of a finger seemingly arbitrarily cut off; machines that stretch vaginas in uncomfortable ways; innovative uses of fire, thick steel rods, and glass plates that I would venture are usually helpful in displaying flattened museum butterflies. The terrific and liberating thing about this is that it is all legal, consensual, and actually enjoyed by the participants, (and thus even more deranged). Oddly, the guy who may have undergone some form of Eastern European makeshift lobotomy dancing around a lady hanging from her indelicates at the very end of this…um, epic…may be the single most unnerving thing in it.
The Spankwire Video is so bad, there is a whole genre of You Tube videos people have made of themselves just reacting to it. I know for most of you weirdos…I mean, readers, knowing this thing is somewhere waiting to be survived is like trying not to think of a pink elephant: you can’t heIp yourselves. It’s OK. I’ll wait here while you go find it: IF YOU DARE.

….Back? In one piece? I am happy to relate that The Spankwire Video can also be responsible for sparking my curiosity about other disturbing fetishes. You start to get the feeling that if it can be done, some sicko in the world is doing it. In my educational pursuits, other fetishes – painless, harmless – have come to light internet –style in the wake of Spankwire: something called ‘stuffies,’ in which people dress up like stuffed animals and frolic awkwardly with each other. Absolutely revolting. And then there is “objectum sexualis,” in which people fall in love with inanimate objects like bridges and Ferris wheels: for example, a British documentary on the disorder features the woman who married the Eiffel Tower (and perhaps put feminism a step back by taking “Eiffel” as her last name), and another sufferer who says one of the most impossibly absurd things (but beautiful, I guess, in some human way) a person has ever uttered; “I’d really like to get to know this fence better.” I swear I’m not making this stuff up.

17. Bad Lieutenant (1994) 9/6

In Abel Ferrara’s serious, sobering and spiritual Bad Lieutenant a nun is raped during a vicious attack in the sanctuary of the church. She knows the two teenagers who committed the act, but in an almost transcendent act of forgiveness, in imitation of Christ, she refuses to give their identities to the police. Determined to show her attackers the compassion they denied her, she wants to, “turn bitter semen into fertile sperm.” Enter the title character, a cop who gives new meaning to the word corrupt, portrayed by Harvey Keitel in a boundary-shattering performance. The Lieutenant is on a fierce and frightening fast track of self-destruction, and Keitel revived his career by playing the character with amazing commitment and abandon. The Lieutenant indulges a crack and heroin habit, steals from the criminals he should be capturing, and, perhaps most dangerously to his welfare, is on an escalating losing streak of reckless bets placed on Mets/Dodgers playoff games with a mobster bookie.

Ferrara captures the heightened pulse and tension of a hot summer in New York, tracking The Lieutenant in his growing desperation, as he hangs out with drug dealers who look like vampiric ex-models, stumbles through the vacant halls of tenements and dark passages of dance clubs, and drives in his car screaming at Daryl Strawberry for ruining his latest wager. Keitel brings to life a man so tortured, so bent on self-annihilation, that some scenes nearly verge on black humor in their wild nihilism. Nearly, but not quite. In a memorable moment, Keitel – like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet – distills male libido into a numb, automated force of lust that is scary to behold: the Lieutenant makes two teenage girls goad him on as he masturbates in front of them, and they comply for fear of being caught taking a joy ride in Daddy’s car. Another scene has a thickly-muscled Keitel standing naked in a stupor, high on crack and swigging down a bottle of liquor; one minute he prances grotesquely in a mock child’s dance, and in the next wails with an animal moan of existential exasperation. It is a performance of primal urges and frustrations, difficult to watch. If this movie has a signature sound, it is that wail.

The Lieutenant’s swath of destruction is interrupted only by the case of the raped nun, to which he is assigned. He questions her about the crime, and is befuddled and disturbed by her resistance to take revenge, but also affected by the purity and religious devotion of her refusal. This encounter with purer motives is the only thing seemingly able to penetrate the Lieutenant’s journey of hedonistic emptiness: it sparks a vision of Christ he has while slumped at the front of the church in which the nun was violated. The brief, surreal scene of the crucifixion that Ferrara inserts at this point is startling in its contrast to the urban realism otherwise dominant throughout. This is the rare Disturbing movie that ostensibly offers cheap thrills and vicarious hellraising, but does a neat switcheroo in the final minutes: The Lieutenant finds one last desperate chance at forgiveness and redemption before fate finally closes in. He takes it. And the audience is somehow left with a story that is actually about the ability of the spiritual and The Good to penetrate even the darkest souls.

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Posted by Lights! Editorial Staff on Mar 7 2010 Filed under Our Feature Presentation, The Bloody Axe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry