Maria-Conception-Action (1969)

I'm not sure what to make of this one. It's obviously some kind of 'performance art' piece with a whacked-out, 'snuffy' aesthetic.

Some guys are gutting an animal (a goat, I think...) and piling the innards on a bound woman and stuffing them down her underwear. One guy seems to really be getting 'into' it and starts burying his face in the intestines while they continue to pour them on the woman and attempt to stuff them inside her. They then crucify the woman and feed her blood and pour said blood on her vagina before one of the guys starts fucking her while the rest of the guys casually stand around. The whole thing ends with everyone rolling in the blood and guts and swinging from the animal carcasses...

"Maria-Conception-Action" is pretty much a 'blood orgy arthouse film' with some underlying religious subtext, I presume. Not really sure what it all 'meant', but it's actually pretty perverse and a little unsettling with the ambient sounds and grainy look. Interesting and strange little film, overall.

Destricted (2006)

My only real interest in checking this out was for the contributions from Larry Clark and Gaspar Noé - two film-makers responsible for past work I hold in rather high regard. "Destricted" is a collection of 'arthouse'-porno shorts that's supposedly meant to 'blur that line' between 'art' and smut. For the most part, it's about as pretentious as it sounds. I guess I'll just give a brief run-down on each film. Note - the U.S. version I have is different (and slightly longer...) than the UK release, which contains a few films swapped from my version.

First up is "Hoist" - directed by Matthew Barney of the "Cremaster" series. You got a three-and-a-half minute close-up of a twitching, unclipped cock gradually getting hard. Cut to a work crew uprooting a tree. Then, the guy whose dick we saw earlier (listed in the credits as Blooming Greenman...) is inside some machinery with a radish up his ass, rubbing his dick on jizz-covered mechanisms until he's erect.

Next one is called "House Call". This one just looks like someone stuck a camera in front of a TV playing a '70s porno and set it to eerie music...

This is followed by "Cooking" which, like the previous film, was the work of a one-time film-maker. A chick blows a guy with a crystal dick until it turns into some kind of gelatinous mush. She then pisses into a bunch of glass vases. Afterwards, he fucks her with a new crystal dick, which she ends up pulling off and smashing. She then feeds him his crystal dick shards and her piss. Then he shits onto a plate and she eats it. It ends with her graphically shitting out a new crystal dick and it's happily ever after...

Up next is "Green Pink Caviar". A woman licks various colors and consistencies of liquid and slime off of glass as the camera is positioned under it. And this goes on for 8-minutes.

Followed up by "Scratch This" - another vintage porn exerpt that someone tampered with and tried to pass off as an 'art film'. This one shows an all girl three-way, only each frame of their faces and holes has been scratched out...

On to Larry Clark's segment, titled "Impaled". Clark holds a casting call for male porn actors. He interviews a bunch of innocuous dullards who talk about their sex lives before settling on some scrawny skater wuss who wants to pop his anal cherry with a chick. Out of the vacuous porn girls he gets to choose from, he picks an insatiably horny 40-year old and they shoot their scene.

Next is a very short animated film by Cecily Brown which features painted images of sex and 'money shots'.

Lastly, is Gaspar Noé's "We Fuck Alone" - easily the best and most harrowing of the set. The film alternates focus between a young man and woman in their separate bedrooms getting off to the same porno. She's using a teddy bear, while he uses a blow-up doll. He seems to be having a much harder time gaining any satisfaction from his masturbatory aid as he finds different positions for the doll and eventually starts 'degrading' it with a gun. A jarring strobe effect is used throughout the whole thing...

All of these films sucked except for the last two - with Noé's being the stand-out piece. But even THAT went on a bit too long, I thought. Clark's addition (the only one with any dialog...) was a disappointment and incredibly dull. The others were just pompous attempts at unarousing 'artistic/shock' material or just lazy reworkings of retro-porn. I feel like "Destricted" was a missed opportunity that could've benefited from the involvement of better film-makers.

Where Evil Dwells (1985)

Part of the whole 'Transgressive Cinema movement', "Where Evil Dwells" is the supposed "preview" of an originally 2-hour long super-8 punko-horror flick that was destroyed in a fire. It's hard to say if the full version consisted of a more intelligible narrative or was just an extended variant of what currently exists, but based on this 28-minute piece of nihilistic celluloid, I'd bet on the latter...

A series of destructive and sadistic events are introduced as seemingly random vignettes by a killer ventriloquist's dummy (who sounds like Beavis, of "Beavis and Butthead"...). Such pernicious acts involve smashing up vehicles, dangling a life-size dummy off a bridge to fuck with traffic, participating in satanic rituals and a pretty gruesome head stabbing around a bonfire. It all ends with a bizarre depiction of Hell.

So, yeah, it's alright for what it is. If you dig 'experimental' aberration set to a metal/punk soundtrack then check it out. Frankly, I have to be in the right kind of mood to get at all 'into' this kind 'transgressive' type shit, but "Where Evil Dwells" was one of the better I've seen. Again, I'm not sure what the full cut of this was intended to be, but as is, it works as far as this type of 'underground' anarchist punker-flick goes. Check it out for the face stabbing scene.

Der Todesking (1990)

Jorg Buttgereit - auteur Germain director behind the Super 8 masterpiece "Nekromantik" and the well-known 1993 serial killer study "Schramm", expressed his versatility well with his most "arthouse" release "Der Todesking". Differing from his bizarre, isolated story lines dealing with ultra-macabre subject matter such as necrophilia and vagina monsters, Buttgereit swapped out the strict "story" aspect for an episodic bit of melancholy film making that still delivers his unique brand of bizarre AND isolated indie madness...

"Der Todesking" displays different characters, places, and mental collapses throughout each day of the week - starting with a man's undisclosed reason for over-dosing on pills in the bathtub which is shown in a dishearteningly voyeuristic manner from inside his drab apartment. The next involves a new guy, picking out an "Ilsa - She-Wolf of the SS" parody from a video store, watching it and shooting his wife or girlfriend in the head as her nagging ass come walking in the door... Next is easily the most harrowing segment showing a man sitting on park bench when a woman shows up. He explains how his wife bleeds during sex and how he is depressed and confused by it. It ends with him shooting himself in front of the woman. Thursday's part is a documentary type 'tour' of a motorway bridge that includes captions of the names and ages of people who have jumped from the bridge over many years... Certainly a haunting scene. Friday is, for me, the least memorable. A woman sees a young couple in the window of a neighboring apartment having sex. She has a flashback of her parents fucking, then receives a letter telling her to kill herself. The next scene is a woman reading a philosophical passage from a book that explains the psychological reasoning behind mass murder. It cuts to a woman strapping a camera to her chest, picking up a gun, and then shooting up a rock concert before being shot and killed, herself. Sunday, the final day, shows a man sleeping on a bare mattress who wakes up in a frenzied outburst and frantically begins bashing his head against the wall until brain damage undoubtedly takes effect... The movie is interlaced with shots showing a decomposing male corpse, via stop-motion animation.

In terms of Jorg Buttgereit's lexicon of film making, "Der Todesking" is probably the one I like the least. That's not to say it is without merit when it comes to Buttgereit's style, though "Nekromatik" reigns supreme for me. "Der Todesking" is, without a doubt, an extremely personal and intimate film that is for sure something you'll remember. Buttgereit's artist influence has been there within each of his films, but this one deals with a much less "horror movie" tone and more of an intense portrait of psychological decline and the various 'drives' behind suicide. It's not an easy film to get a hold of, but if you have the chance, enjoy the experience...

Under the Skin (2013)

"Under the Skin" is a bigger budget sci-fi 'art film' with some pretty striking, phantasmagorical imagery and a hefty helping of a nude Scarlett Johansson. Oh, you heard right! You'll need a drool bib for quite a bit of this flick, guys.

Scarlett plays an extraterrestrial femme fatale who preys upon douchebag Scotsmen she finds on the street while cruising around in her van. She takes them back to her lair - which is disguised as a rundown hovel - where she draws them into an ectoplasmic fluid where their entire body is gradually dissolved except for their skin. Her routine of flesh-preserving seduction comes to a decided halt when she opts out of submerging and de-fleshing a horribly disfigured young man and sets out to explore the world. Along the way, she is pursued by a guy on a crotch rocket whose job is apparently to keep tabs on the condition of her body and it's upkeep and eventually starts up a relationship with a solitary 'bloke'...

Visually, "Under the Skin" is beautiful and uses the dreary Scotland countryside to it's utmost in ameliorating it's reposed and unsettlingly quiet atmosphere. The setting is fantastic and the more surreal scenes are pretty damn memorable and 'trippy'. There's definitely a hypnotic quality to this film that held me, despite very little "action", overall, though mood and atmosphere take center stage here and it works very well in keeping a steady pace. Along with some more nightmarish elements, there's a bizarre 'eroticism' at the forefront that grants us plenty of delectable full-frontal from Scarlett that only enriches the film's aesthetic merit further. The 'artistic' flair that carries this one may not be everyone's cup-o-tea, but if you're looking for a more ornate spin on science-fiction then give "Under the Skin" a shot.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

I guess this just wasn't my 'thing'. Seems "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" is getting quite a bit of praise for being an original take on vampire films and for being "the first Western-Iranian vampire film" - whatever that matters... In actuality, it's just a pretentious, snails-pace 'art house' vamp flick...

An Iranian "Grease" reject encounters a mysterious vampiress who strolls around at night, stalking and chomping the necks of drug dealers and vagabonds. He also has a whacked-out junkie father and a rich chick he works for... Then a she-male dances with a balloon. Then the movie pretty much just ends...

The relationship between the '50s-style kid and the vampire girl isn't explored at all and none of the characters are given any 'dimension', making them all incredibly uninteresting. The black-and-white photography and wide-angle shots may be interesting for film school dweebs, but it's hardly enough to carry a movie THIS boring and pompous. It's basically a heavy handed 'art house' rendition of "Twilight" that goes the whole 'style over substance' route in a dull and self-indulgently 'minimalistic' mien. The hipster/vampire-crowd may dig this, but I didn't get much out of it, to say the least. Check out Abel Ferrara's "The Addiction" instead.

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013, Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani)

I'll confess, I'm not the biggest 'giallo' fan as it is, so the idea of a French/Belgian 'arthouse' spin on the genre had me moderately interested for a potential change-of-pace. It turned out to be one of the worst films I've seen in quite a while.

A guy gets back from a business trip to discover his wife is missing. In his efforts to find her, he uncovers some mysteries involving other tenants in his building - things having to do with people hiding in walls and a killer who stabs people in the top of their skulls, leaving wounds that represent vaginas for some odd reason...

Nothing makes any sense, yet nothing really happens in this film. It's a drawn out, self-indulgent bore-fest that truly epitomizes the saying "all flash, no substance". They were obviously going for the heavily stylized, visually based 'art film' tenor, but the result is simply an endless marathon of repetitive kaleidoscope imagery, extreme close-ups and full scenes of this 'jerky' type of editing that became incredibly annoying. Even if there was an intelligible plot to be found in this flick, chances are you wouldn't be able to understand it purely due to the clusterfuck way in which it was shot. Needless to say, I have no idea what the point of all the apparent randomness was, given the predictably abrupt and opaque ending. So if you get off on watching redundant and arbitrary pastiches of strung together pointlessness than I'm sure you'll probably jizz your pompous shorts over "The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears". Otherwise, horror and 'gialli' fans should steer clear.

Violated Angels (1967, Kōji Wakamatsu)

Though it's not my favorite of his works, pinku pioneer Koji Wakamatsu's "Violated Angels" is another example of the film-maker's groundbreaking proficiency for misogynistic sleaze. That said, this film just so happens to 'flow' with an undeniable artistry, as seen in his other earlier films, such as "The Embryo Hunts in Secret" and "Go Go Second Time Virgin".

The idea here is obviously modeled after the Richard Speck murders - a dorm full of nurses find a guy lurking around outside at night and decide to drag him in to peep on two of the lesbian girls going at it. This is a strange and implausible decision, but who am I to judge the questionable generosity of a bunch of young, naive bitches... Unfortunately for the girls, seeing sensual lesbian passion pushes him over the edge, so he snuffs off the rug-munchers and tortures the rest of the terrified girls for the rest of the night...

If you're cool with an 'arthouse' approach to violent exploitation, then I don't think you'll have any problems with this one. It's pretty damn mean for it's time - featuring some relatively 'disturbing' depictions of rape and some torture and mutilation (though mostly implied, but we're given a shot of the aftermath). The most 'graphic' moment being a scene in which a luger is jammed in a chick's ass and fired. "Violated Angels" is not Wakamatsu's best or most 'offensive' film, as far as I'm concerned, but for those into pinku cinema it definitely helped to lay the foundation for this type of genre. It's a very bleak and harsh film, especially by 60s standards.

Pray (2014, Claudio Ellovitch)

Pretty cool experimental short film out of Brazil that follows some kinda Christ-like guy as he wanders through a hellish city full of devastation and deformity. Along the way, he has a deep religious experience as he is whipped by some evil old guy (again, in a very Jesus-y kind of manner) and is approached by a loving, angelic woman before he is beheaded by the old dude...

As a 15-minute short, "Pray" is a stylishly 'trippy' film that offers up some cool, morbid visuals and some decent effects, from what I could make out. It reminded me quite a bit of the films of Andrey Iskanov and Karim Hussain. Overall, a good 'arthouse'-horror short.

The German Chainsaw Massacre (1990, Christoph Schlingensief)

"The German Chainsaw Massacre" (aka. "Blackest Heart") is a bizarre and exuberantly absurd splatter-comedy with a strong 'arthouse' tenor. In that regard, it's a bit hard to get 'into', but I found it enjoyable nonetheless...

After killing her scumbag husband (who I'm pretty sure was played by a woman in a Moe Howard wig... ), a woman flees to west Germany to meet up with her boyfriend. There, she falls prey to a psychotic family of butchers who use GDR citizens as a cheap form of bratwurst meat.

Instead of going the straight horror/splatter route, this flick plays out as more of a political satire on German government and as a mean spirited commentary on the reunification process of 1990. It's an incredibly disjointed film due to the political context expressed through over-the-top characters and general inanity, though, in that same token, it's pretty damn entertaining. Udo Kier pops up a few times - once with a weird drawn-on swastika Hitler 'stache and again as a giggling loon igniting himself with flammable alcohol - and completely steals the show. All of the characters are as memorable as they are crazy and strange and there's a fair amount of cheap, splattery gore.

It's too weird of a flick to recommend to the casual viewer, but those into truly 'offbeat' cinema will get a kick out of this, I'm sure.

Necrophile Passion (2013, Tom Heidenberg)

"Necrophile Passion" was obviously going for the ol' "extreme-arthouse" approach, but really just ends up being lame and boring. It basically just comes across as a very simplistic and amateurish necrophilia fetish film...

A guy finds the corpse of a woman in the woods. He contemplates calling 911, but ends up taking her home and boning her. He then has some flashbacks of a bitchy woman nagging him before he goes into the bathroom and slices his own shoulder with a blade. Somewhere in there, there's a long scene of a chick fucking a decomposed body (... that looked like it was coated in barbecue sauce). He then hears some voices and has some rough sex with his girlfriend, whom he wants to kill. There's also a very abrupt 'twist' ending.

I'd say the only halfway 'interesting' thing about "Necrophile Passion" was how the corpse banging was actually conducted in a way that was meant to be 'erotic'. Or at least that's how it appeared. Still, that all happens early on and is pretty drawn out, which leaves the rest of the movie seeming aimless and dull. Clearly, this flick was very "Nekromantik"-influenced in it's attempts at being aesthetically distinctive, but it just ends up falling flat and being a tedious and highly pretentious piece of shit, even despite the runtime coming in at under an hour. For better necro-themed films, check out the short film,"Nekro", or Nacho Cerda's "Aftermath". Or, of course, the classic works of Jorg Buttgerreit.

Limp. (2013, Shaun Ryan)

"Limp." is definitely one of the best 'necro-art' flicks since Jörg Buttgereit's "Nekromantik". It's a beautifully shot piece of esoteric and morbid Irish cinema.

An extremely lonely man keeps the corpse of a young woman in his home for some much desired companionship. His pathetic home-life mainly consists of propping her up at the table during dinner, watching TV with her and, of course, having sex with her. His lamentable interaction with those in the outside world remains solely based in routine ass-kickings from an obnoxious prick and his bitch girlfriend who he tends to run into pretty frequently. As time goes on, he starts becoming regretful of his deceased gal pal and people begin inquiring about the girl's whereabouts which prompts him to arrange for her disposal...

While "Limp." doesn't do much new, plot wise, since it's very straightfoward, it's strengths lie in it's tactful and strikingly ambivalent reconnaissance into the main character's humiliatingly lonely existence. The style of the film clearly reflects his deteriorated mental state through slow, quiet shots often broken up by random flashes of tumult. It's never really overdone, however, so the film maintains a few nice 'flow', throughout.

I'd absolutely recommend "Limp.". Obviously, it's not for everyone, so if you're either bothered by necrophilia or happen to be looking for tons of fucked up violence and gore, you better steer clear. Personally, this is MY kinda film - artful, disturbing, well shot, while being very effective and non-pretentious in it's 'arthouse' approach. Check it out.
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The Green Elephant (1999, Svetlana Baskova)

I'm not really sure what to make of a movie like "The Green Elephant". I found it somewhat entertaining, while at the same time it was a rather tedious and boring mash-up of 'arthouse' and gore flick.

Two Russian soldiers are forced into a military prison cell together - which looks like a janitor's closet with a sewage leak. The one guy keeps babbling incessantly about fucking men and the time he was forced to eat his own feces. As the other guy gets more and more annoyed, his roomie becomes more mentally unhinged, going so far to shitting on a plate (as well as smearing it on himself) and trying to feed it to his cell mate while spouting rapid gibberish. This goes on for about the first 45-50 minutes before they're extracted from the room and basically forced to torture each other to death...

The interaction between the two guys is pretty funny at times, but just goes on for too long. By the end, it turns into a full fledged gore film with cannibalism, man-on-man buttfucking, self mutilation, disemboweling, etc. I'll admit I had no idea what the fuck was going on, but it was suitably nasty in the last 15-minutes or so. Still, there's nothing at all remarkable about "The Green Elephant" as it's pretty dull for the most part. Also, I couldn't figure out if it was suppose to be a 'fake snuff' style of film or not. It was shot like one, but the camera man is never addressed. Oh, well.

If you've seen stuff like "Psycho: The Snuff Reels" or the "August Underground" series, "The Green Elephant" is nothing new or all that 'shocking'.

The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy (2009, Peter Liechti)

I'm not sure how factual this is, although it claims to be 'based on a true story' as well as a novel by the Japanese writer, Masahiko Shimada. The source material seems to be a bit of a mystery, but however, "The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy" is a pretty powerful exploration into the depths of human suffering from a self-inflicted viewpoint.

In the beginning, it's explained that a hunter came across a small hut containing the mummified remains of a unknown man with a diary next to him. The writings detail the first hand struggle of the man who commited suicide, via self-induced starvation.

"The Sound of Insects" consist of no actual characters or storyline, instead just showing quiet nature shots (trees, bugs, sky, rainfall, etc.) accompanied by voice over narration of the daily diary entries. There are also shots of people walking around a train station, an opera singer and some random "artsy" black and white segments, which all gives way to a very forlorn, disconsolate ambience. Because of this, I'd safely say this film isn't for everyone, as it is basically just a comprehensive account of what it's like to starve to death over the course of 62 days.

So, if you can appreciate hypnotic and highly depressing films, I would definitely recommend "The Sound of Insects". I found it rather fascinating and would really like to know who this was actually based on, if it was, in fact, based on an actual man. 

Defenceless: A Blood Symphony (2004, Mark Savage)

If you're looking for some sleazy 'exploitation' revenge cinema of an exceedingly offbeat distinction, than I'd say "Defenceless: A Blood Symphony" is a sufficient sampling, if there ever was one. It's a strange blend of rape/revenge and 'art film'.

Apparently, there's this gang of corporate land developers who were hoping to erect some kind of hotel within the vicinity of a family's home. It doesn't appear that the husband and wife were too willing to sign over the deed so shit gets ugly and the developers kill the husband. After that, they target wifey's lesbian lover - afterwards, sending her a snuff film and severed head. Next, she is raped and brutalized and so is her young son. After nine months, her body washes up on the beach and is, somehow, resurrected as some kind of hobbling, vengeance-fueled cannibal that sleeps under water. She ends up exacting revenge against the scummy goons that killed her family, who have seemingly moved onto violent child porn...

Like I said, "Defenceless" is an odd take on the 'rape/revenge' film. Completely dialog-free and going the total slow-burn route until the last 20 minutes or so when we get to some nicely bloody torture/murder scenes. There's a nice amount of vaginal mutilation and two exceptionally gruesome scenes of crude penis removal. So you end up getting a suitable amount of bloodshed, but, as a whole, I found "Defenceless" to be a very well made film with a pretty strong performance from the female lead and some beautiful cinematography. The entire movie seemed to have a peculiarly calming and serene element, helped along by the odd transformation of the main character and, of course, the classical score that accompanied a large portion of the film. Some parts were a little TOO drawn out and slow, I thought, but for the most part this tone worked well. So, if you happen to dig 'exploitation'-art films with sleaze AND some aesthetic substance, than you gotta check out this Australian delight.

Un Chien Andalou (1929, Luis Buñuel)

What we have here is a textbook example of "the art film" in all of it's mystifyingly unintelligible glory. From the looks of it, "Un Chien Andalou" - aka. "An Andalusian Dog" - is about a guy who wipes out on his bicycle outside of a chick's apartment building. She takes him in and he stares at a cluster of ants crawling on his hand. They then watch out the window as some dykey haired woman (could've been a little boy, maybe) pokes at a severed hand with a stick in the middle of the road while a crowd is gathered around her. A cop puts the hand in a box and the woman (or little boy) is struck by a car. Back in the apartment, the dude gets a little rapey, chases the chick around and gropes her tits until, all of a sudden, he is tied to two pianos with two dead mules laying on top of them. Then, the woman disappears and the guy dukes it out with another guy until one of them gets gunned down by some dual-pistol action...

Just weirdness. Bizarre 'arthouse' shit from the silent age of cinema, which is kinda interesting, seeing as how it's a little sleazy (by 1929 standards) and, of course, for the notorious razor blade eyeball slicing scene. There's really not a whole lot of straight-up entertainment value one could derive from "An Andalusian Dog" unless they're a major film school art-fag creep. For the average cinephile, however, it's short and worth checking out just for the sake of saying you did. And Salvador Dali is in it briefly.

Pig (1998, Nico B. & Rozz Williams)

"Pig" is a brooding, gothic experimental "arthouse" flick co-directed by and starring deathrock vocalist Rozz Williams. This film came out about a year after Williams committed suicide and, from the looks of it, this might've been more-or-less a personal "home movie" displaying some of his personal fetishist kinks...

The premise is slim, but it involves a killer who picks up some guy wandering through the desert with a completely bandaged face. The two drive to a secluded, rundown house where the gauze-wrapped dude is subjected to various forms of torture and body modification rituals taken from some evil looking book. The guy has blood (or some kind of dark liquid which was a little hard to identify due to the black-and-white film) funneled into his mouth, the word "pig" carved into his chest, some blood catheterized from his cock, his nipples pierced, etc. Then, there's some weird, surreal shots involving sign language and more gauze wrapping and then the movie wraps up.

I'm not really sure how to rate something like "Pig". It's basically just a series of masochistic acts shown over gloomy, ambient sounds. Nothing all that "shocking" or memorable about it and I guess I'm too unfamiliar with Rozz Williams to really understand any real meaning behind any of it. Still, it's a fairly interesting oddball film.

Julien Donkey-Boy (1999, Harmony Korine)

Following his avant-garde 'white trash' art-film debut, "Gummo" (1997) - a piece of work that I personally retain an immense amplitude of reverence toward, due to it's complex undertones and wildly stark representation of hellish redneck lifestyles - Harmony Korine dabbled in similarly offbeat material. "Julien Donkey-Boy" is Korine's attempt to uphold the ridiculous Danish 'Dogme 95' movement of the organically restricting "Vow of Chastity" by abiding by their usual set of rules, including constant handheld camera work, use of natural lighting, lack of formative genre customs, etc. The film was shot on a DV cassette and transferred to 16mm THEN transferred to 35mm, which gives the look of it a distorting, worn out graininess and faded lack of color.

The plot - like "Gummo" - is a very non-linear slice-of-life that is full of ugly, mentally deranged characters, such as Julien, a retarded schizophrenic religious zealot. He lives in New York with his pregnant sister (whom we're led to believe is carrying her brother's child), their domineering German father who dedicates most of his time to whipping his other son into shape to become a "winner" he can be proud of... And also attempting to pay him ten dollars to put on his dead mother's dress at one point...

For the most part, you're just getting Korine's usual brand of seemingly senseless, yet disturbing and aesthetically striking moments involving a black albino rapping about the obviously unfortunate hand he's been dealt in life, Werner Herzog dancing around in a gas mask and drinking cough syrup out of a slipper, Julien washing a little blind girl's feet in a bathtub, being told off by a Hasidic Jew child and stealing a deceased fetus from the hospital...

This series of exceptionally odd events certainly have a hypnotically provocative magnetism, though it all tends to come across as a more 'over-blown' rendering of Harmony Korine's unique visionary auteurism; illustrated well in his previous effort, "Gummo". While that film actually maintained a palpable sense of Korine's cinematic nihilism and unconventional take on story-telling, "Julien Donkey-Boy" comes across as a much more pretentious and fairly uninvolved film. The passion that Harm clearly had for his first film isn't found in nearly the same capacity with this one and, for the most part, it really just comes across as a boisterous freak-show with a much more shallow undercurrent of interpretive nuance and memorable strangeness. I almost wanna blame it one Korine's choice to earn his "Dogme 95" certificate which might have led to the outcome muddling the director's intentions somewhat. That's probably not the case, however... I dunno.

Despite all this, the film is not without it's stand-out strong points, such as Ewen Bremner's performance as Julien, which is pretty fucking incredible and actually based off of Korine's schizoid Uncle Eddy, whom he required Bremner to study in his preparation for the role. A scene is which Julien and his sister talk on the phone from separate rooms of their house as she comfortingly speaks to him as their dead mother from beyond the grave as he fondles himself is a notably harrowing scene that is solely performance driven. Chloë Sevigny as the prego sister is very good too. Herzog, however, steals the show in every scene he's in - whether he is yelling at his son for wrestling a plastic trash receptacle or using the term "artsy-fartsy" numerous times before breaking down a scene from "Dirty Harry" and equating it to REAL poetry.

In all, "Julien Donkey-Boy" didn't reach the same level of cinematic rebellion that Harmony Korine displayed with his 'white trash' Vaudevillian-influenced nightmare "Gummo" (and hasn't come close to since his debut film), though this is still a worthy film for Korine fans and 'arthouse' lovers. Again, it's a little highfalutin, but worth checking out.

Wound (2010, David Blyth)

What you get from "Wound" is some highly bleak, experimentally formulated 'arthouse' horror out of New Zealand that is pleasurably laced with some nicely taboo themes and wildly weird and macabre imagery. The film had a little bit of a "Jacob's Ladder"; potential descent into madness vibe to me... Just with more cock-chopping and vaginal blood sucking...

We start off with a seemingly proper older gentleman (who sounds EXACTLY like Malcolm McDowell) visiting his adult daughter. She clocks him over the head with a bat, ties him up and murders him as revenge for raping her as a child. She buries him in the backyard, amidst a bunch of wadded up balls of aluminum foil (never understood the significance of this detail) and resumes her normal life... A life that consists of unsuccessfully soliciting printer service over the phone and allowing a whack job to act out some kind of S&M 'kink' in which she is forced to role play as a submissive housewife in front of a webcam. Eventually, her long-lost daughter - a potentially lesbonic teenage goth - comes knocking after having gotten the necessary documents from the creepy school guidance counselor. Turns out, Mama was told by her old and haggard dominatrix mother that her incest-spawned baby had died following birth and no one is willing to believe that she's now got a new, freaky house guest hanging around claiming to be her kin...

There's some other crazy, nightmarish shit thrown and you never really fully understand how it all adds up. You're led to wonder whether or not the daughter is real, if the mom is completely insane, or if the whole movie is just a bad dream. Or all-of-the-above, perhaps. There's an image thrown in showing the daughter preparing to commit suicide on the railroad tracks with her boyfriend and there's the reoccurring sound of a train thrown in at seemingly random points throughout the film... There's also a scene involving a fat rapist with a spiked dick, tattooed legs and ass and creepy pig mask as well as a big, pulsating vagina birthing a pair of doll-faced figures... Cool shit.

I'd recommend "Wound" to anyone who is craving some deranged surrealism with their horror viewing. Something... a little DIFFERENT, if you will. Haters of less-than-linear story telling should steer clear, but if you can appreciate some 'irregularity' and calculated, nightmare-like disorientation along with depraved and bizarre imagery and nastiness than you should check this out. The performances are all really good, the cinematography is slick and the creativity element is plentiful.
http://woundmovie.com

Récompence (2010, Ronny Carlsson)

"Récompence" is a bleak 25-minute 'arthouse'-horror flick, directed by Ronny Carlsson of filmbizarro.com. Like many of these types of surrealist, visionary films, the premise seems to be up for interpretation from the viewer. Or else I'm just an idiot who can't fully grasp subtext... Eh.

A woman - whom we see driving through the country with a guy (boyfriend or husband... or brother) - is crawling through the woods, covered in dirt and clearly injured. She comes across a house where she spots a ghostly blank-faced, robed figure peering out of a window. After entering, she finds the figure sitting across the room where he proceeds to disembowel himself. Our lady gets rather 'intrigued' and a bit riled up by this macabre display and peels off her top before munching on some innards. More staggering through the woods and, eventually, she happens upon another (or maybe the same) figure whom she has some kind of bizarre, intimate moment with...

I gotta say, "Récompence" is a pretty well-made short. It's got a cool, desaturated black-and-white look, no dialog and is skillfully and effectively shot. The tone of the film is gloomy and nightmarish with a visual aesthetic that reminded me of E. Elias Merhige's "Begotten". Also a decent amount of gore and some satisfying full-frontal female nudity to help it along. Recommended. And check out Carlsson's site http://filmbizarro.com.